Nehring Completion
by digby
In doing some research on the US Attorney scandal this morning I came across this interesting diary from DKos that sparked my interest. It’s about a guy named Ron Nehring, the new head of the California Republican Party:
The architect of the plan to fire Carol Lam is Ron Nehring.
“Ron Nehring …is an important piece on Norquist’s chessboard,” states a report titled Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Government. Prepared for the Center on Policy Initiatives, a progressive think tank, the report reveals how the National GOP has targeted San Diego as a “battleground” and model for an alleged agenda of radically cutting government funding, permanently weakening organized labor, and aggressively moving to privatize public services.
[…]
Nehring once served as director of development and public affairs for Ridenour’s Scaife and Bradley funded National Center for Public Policy,[Abramoff used the center to channel money to Delay] and worked for its Project 21, an initiative to find right-wing African American voices to criticize the leadership of civil rights organizations. According to Ridenour, Nehring was “the guy who put the African-American leadership group Project 21 on the map.
One of Project 21’s leading voices is the controversial Ohio Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, under whose election oversight many allege the African American community was largely disenfranchised and unable to cast their vote in the 2004 election cycle.
Nehring, as a past president of the College Republicans is in a very special club of GOP operators who specialize in corruption, election stealing and dirty tricks.
Here’s a prescient post by San Diego blogger, Words Have Power:
Nehring was a staunch supporter of Randy “Duke” Cunningham right up to the Duke’s guilty plea…It is interesting that not a single local reporter is questioning Nehring’s connections with Norquist, ATR and, ultimately, Jack Abramoff. Maybe it is time to connect one more dot in the mess that is the Republican congress of corruption.
No kidding.
The report by CPI indicates that San Diego was a petri dish for the next generation of crooked GOP political dominance and that it was of special interest to Rove and other DC strategists. I don’t know that “localizing” in and of itself is particularly wrong — the Dems have their 50 state strategy, after all — but if there was a concerted federal prosecutorial effort to target local Democrats to that end then there is a big problem. And it’s hard to read those prosecution statistics any other way. (The Kos diarist says, by the way, that Carol Lam played ball on the prosecution of Democrats front but was ousted because she failed to prove her bonafides with Cunningham.)
San Diego does seem to be the nexus of a lot of very high level GOP interest and influence. It is the home of massive defense spending and the corruption that goes with it. Very important GOP appropriations poohbahs hail from there and close environs. And it turns out that a member of the college Republican mafia led by Rove, Norquist, Reed and Abramoff, was running the party down there — and he’s just been elevated to an extremely important party post prior to a presidential election.
There are dots lying around all over the place looking for connection. If the state were run by something other than a cartoon robot, it might even be possible to go at this from that direction, but I doubt we’ll see it.
For those of you who are interested in getting into the weeds on this one, these two diaries may be good places to start.
*On an interesting sidenote, one of Nehring’s first moves (read: Rove’s) was to refuse to open the California GOP primary to independents which is something that McCain was lobbying for intensively.
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