Only a skull and a pair of trousers remained after a suspected rhino poacher was killed by an elephant and then eaten by lions in Kruger National Park, South African National Parks said.
The incident happened after the man entered the park Monday with four others to target rhinos, according to a parks service statement.
An elephant “suddenly” attacked the alleged poacher, killing him, and “his accomplices claimed to have carried his body to the road so that passersby could find it in the morning. They then vanished from the Park,” police said.
His family were notified of his death late Tuesday by his fellow poachers, and a search party set out to recover the body. Rangers scoured on foot and police flew over the area, but because of failing light it could not be found.
The search resumed Thursday morning and, with the help of added field rangers, police discovered what was left of his body.
Police say they arrested three men and seized guns following the alleged poacher’s death.
“Indications found at the scene suggested that a pride of lions had devoured the remains leaving only a human skull and a pair of pants,” the statement said.
I’m sorry for the man’s family and I’m sure he needed the money. But poaching protected wild animals is a terrible crime. There is some justice in this I’m sorry to say.
I think something even worse should happen to people who do this:
A trophy hunter seen sneaking up on a sleeping lion and killing it in a viral video has been identified as 64-year-old Illinois man.
The video, purportedly filmed during a guided hunt in Zimbabwe in 2011, has been widely shared after the Twitter account @Protect_Wildlife posted it Monday. It shows a bearded man pumping three shots into an unsuspecting male lion before being congratulated by his gushing guide.
The Daily Mail identified the hunter as Guy Gorney of Manhattan, Ill. Gorney is not exactly a stranger to hunting controversy. In 2015, he boasted to CBS of killing at least 70 big game animals, including elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, buffalos and leopards.
In the interview, Gorney expressed no remorse for his bloodthirsty hobby.
“I have a hard time understanding, if you have a picture of somebody with a deer, nobody seems to care. But if it’s an elephant, it’s a big problem. If it’s a lion – especially now – it’s a huge problem,” he told CBS. “But to me, either way, I’ve stopped a beating heart.”
Predictably, the video was greeted with outrage and disgust. One Twitter user suggested that boiling water be poured over the hunter while he’s sleeping; another proposed that he be fed alive to a pride of lions. Yet another person sarcastically commented, “A sleeping lion, wow what a big man!”
“To see such a magnificent beast lying fast asleep in its natural habitat as it was shot dead has reduced many who’ve seen it to tears of shock and anger.
“But Gorney, a 64-year-old from Manhattan, Illinois, doesn’t give a damn what we think.
“The scumbag’s Facebook page depicts him proudly posing with a dead lion.”
However, the only Guy Gorney page we could find on Facebook showed no photos of animal trophies and just a single post — a notice that his profile picture picture was updated Wednesday morning. The page appeared to have been scrubbed of all other content.
But the page’s “likes” indicated Gorney is a fan of hunting outfitters and safaris, TV shows and videos about hunting, and Ted Nugent.
I’m not embedding the video. You don’t want to see it. This man is a grotesque psychopath as far as I’m concerned.
Last week, Buzzfeed released part of a package of materials that Michael Cohen’s lawyers provided to Congress in what appears a last minute bid to stay out of prison. While it still represents just Cohen’s self-interested view (and not any of the corroborating information that Mueller’s team surely has), it makes it clear why Buzzfeed felt justified in claiming that Trump “directed” Cohen to lie. The most shocking new detail is that after Cohen testified, Trump’s lawyer (this package doesn’t reveal whether it was Jay Sekulow or someone else) called Cohen to congratulate him.
Trump knew with certainty that Cohen continued to discuss the Moscow Trump Tower project well beyond January 31, 2016. Yet after the testimony, Cohen received a call from Trump’s attorney, who congratulated him on the testimony – and said his “client” was happy with Cohen’s testimony.
Still, a call from one lawyer in a joint defense agreement to someone else in the JDA — a call that by description Cohen didn’t record — is not sufficient evidence to charge someone with suborning perjury.
Nevertheless, this new evidence may explain why Buzzfeed remains confident in its characterization that Trump directed Cohen to lie.
More importantly, it raises even more questions about why Peter Carr corrected the Buzzfeed characterization. As I noted at the time, someone from Rod Rosenstein’s office called Mueller’s office before they did make a correction. And the next day, Rudy Giuliani claimed credit for getting Mueller to correct the story.
And here we are, not three months later, learning new details of how closely involved Trump’s lawyers were in orchestrating Cohen’s testimony while Attorney General Bill Barr (who had been appointed but not confirmed at the time of the story) withholds Mueller’s own view of those documents, and just weeks after Barr and Rosenstein usurped the role of Congress to declare that the President’s behavior — including efforts, however inadequately supported by admissible evidence, to suborn perjury — does not amount to criminal obstruction of justice.
The details behind Rosenstein’s call and Rudy’s victory lap are not yet public; they’re certainly something the House Judiciary Committee should pursue.
But we can see how important that correction, unique in the history of the Mueller investigation, was to what has come since. The Buzzfeed story elicited the kinds of response that the long trajectory of seeing Trump direct lies should have, the recognition that that such actions might amount to impeachable offenses (which is different than Barr’s judgment about obstruction of justice, even assuming many things didn’t make that judgment suspect). By “correcting” a statement that seems utterly reasonable now, DOJ preserved the opportunity for Rosenstein and Barr to weigh in, however inappropriately.
Even at the time, it appeared that Rosenstein’s (office’s) intervention and Rudy’s victory lap (to say nothing of the campaign rolled out against Buzzfeed, including CNN doing a hit piece against Jason Leopold) should have gotten more attention than the hyperparsing of a word that was readily explainable on its face. That’s all the more clear now.
Had Buzzfeed not been corrected for what now seems an even more defensible word choice, Barr would not have had the opportunity to put his thumb on the scale of injustice.
There is much more to the Rosenstein side of this whole thing than we know yet.
Natasha Bertrand has been noting for some time that He is implicated in the Comey firing — and hence the obstruction case — and probably shouldn’t have ever been involved in the Special Counsel investigation in the first place, much less this decision by Barr to clear Trump.
“Shit happens” is perhaps one of the most profound claims you’ll ever see on a bumper. It is an acknowledgement the universe is as random as it is ordered. Humans don’t like to admit that. A random asteroid didn’t do the dinosaurs any favors either. Perhaps sudden extinction was the product of a personality defect?
We prefer to believe the world rewards effort, that success follows hard work as surely as the dawn follows the night, even if its arrival is not as predictable. We believe in a world guided by meritocracy.
David Brooks has a moralistic reverie on transcending the trap of living by a meritocratic faith. But it is principally a personal transformation Brooks recommends. Clifton Mark’s Aeon piece (reproduced at The Week) speaks to ditching the broader cultural trap that perpetuates the personal one.
“The most self-congratulatory of distribution principles,” belief in meritocracy creates the false impression that the world is just, that one deserves what one gets, that hard work and playing by the rules counts for something, or should. Randomness, luck, does not exist in that world. Howard Schultz and his fellow billionaires live there. Democratic politicians speak as if that world actually existed once and, through hard work and more progressive policies, they will restore it if we’ll just hand them back the White House and Congress.
Belief in meritocracy sustains the status quo, teaches tolerance for inequity, and convinces the Haves their fortune is theirs and theirs alone. “Winners” stand on no one’s shoulders.
By contrast, research on gratitude indicates that remembering the role of luck increases generosity. [U.S. economist Robert] Frank cites a study in which simply asking subjects to recall the external factors (luck, help from others) that had contributed to their successes in life made them much more likely to give to charity than those who were asked to remember the internal factors (effort, skill).
Perhaps more disturbing: Simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behavior. Management scholar Emilio Castilla at MIT and sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value.
This is surprising because impartiality is the core of meritocracy’s moral appeal. The “even playing field” is intended to avoid unfair inequalities based on gender, race, and the like. Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this “paradox of meritocracy” occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice.
It is why debates about who is “self-made” get so acrid, Marks explains. We are not talking about merit or work ethic. We’re talking about identity. To challenge the meritocratic faith is to suggest luck has something to do with success. That is insulting to those dedicated to the proposition that shit does not happen and that all men are not created equal. Their wealth is proof some are more equal than others as much as a megachurch preacher’s is proof God has rewarded his faithfulness. The prosperity gospel is meritocracy clothed in ecclesiastical robes. Wall Street is the megachurch without Sunday services.
Loud love: Thoughts on Cobain, aging and a top 10 list
By Dennis Hartley
In my 2007 review of A.J. Schnack’s documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son, I wrote:
It’s virtually impossible to live here in Seattle and not be constantly reminded of Kurt Cobain’s profound impact on the music world. Every April, around the anniversary of his suicide, wreaths of flowers and hand taped notes begin to cover a lone bench in a tiny park sandwiched between the lakefront mansions I pass on my way to work every morning. Inevitably, I will see small gatherings of young people with multi-colored hair and torn jeans holding silent vigil around this makeshift shrine, located a block or two from the home where he took his life.
This past Friday marked the 25th anniversary of Cobain’s passing. It’s funny how your perception of time recalibrates as you get older. My memory of attending a spontaneous memorial at the Seattle Center along with thousands of others on the day the news broke in April 1994 makes it seem like relatively “recent” history to me. However, when I stop to consider I was 38 then-and that I’ve just turned 63 (not to mention that Cobain has been dead nearly as many years he was alive) …25 years is a generation ago. Even on a good day, Time is cruel. From my piece on Kerri O’Kane’s 2008 documentary, The Gits:
In the fall of 1992, I moved to Seattle with no particular action plan, and stumbled into a job hosting the Monday-Friday morning drive show on KCMU (now KEXP), a mostly volunteer, low-wattage, listener supported FM station broadcasting from the UW campus with the hopeful slogan: “Where the music matters.” I remember joking to my friends that my career was going in reverse order, because after 18 years of commercial radio experience, here I was at age 36, finally getting my first part-time college radio gig. I loved it.
I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to cue up whatever I felt like playing, as opposed to kowtowing to the rigid, market-tested “safe song” play lists at the Top 40, Oldies and A/C formats I had worked with previously. A little Yellowman, Fugazi, Cypress Hill, Liz Phair, maybe a bit o’ Mudhoney with your Danish? Followed by a track from Ali Faka Toure, some Throwing Muses, topping the set with an oldie like the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” to take you up to your first coffee break? Sure, why not? I was happier than a pig in shit.
What I didn’t realize until several years following my 7-month stint there, is that KCMU was semi-legendary in college/alt-underground circles; not only was it literally the first station in the country to “break” Nirvana but counted members of Mudhoney and Pearl Jam among former DJ staff. I was just a music geek, enthusiastically exploring somebody else’s incredibly cool record collection, whilst taking my listeners along for the ride; in the meantime, I obliviously became a peripheral participant in Seattle’s early 90’s “scene”.
Reminds me of a funny story. Within a few weeks of moving to Seattle, I went to see Cameron Crowe’s Singles, which had just recently opened. If you’re familiar with the film, you are of course aware that it is a romantic comedy about a group of (wait for it) young singles living in Seattle, incorporating the city’s contemporaneous music milieu as a backdrop. At one random point during the film’s opening sequence (a flash-cut montage of various Seattle neighborhoods and landmarks) the audience literally exploded into cheers and applause. I felt sheepish…I didn’t “get” it. What did I miss, I wondered?
Years later, I happened to watch the film again on cable…and that’s when I caught it. Only then I noticed that during that montage, there’s a momentary shot of a movie marquee. It was the Neptune, the very theater I’d been in when the audience freaked out. I suppose that my point is…sometimes, you can’t see the forest for the Screaming Trees.
In retrospect, I feel blessed to have moved to Seattle at that point in time, as the city was the nexus for a paradigm shift in rock. As Hua Hsu wrote in The New Yorker this week
The success of Nirvana and other Seattle bands, including Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains, changed the music industry. The breakout rise of “Nevermind” suggested that so-called alternative bands and niches could be commercially viable—not just as steady, low-risk earners but as the proverbial next big thing. Major labels began showering loads of money on tiny, Nirvana-esque bands that played a similar kind of “grunge” rock. The “grunge gold rush,” as the journalist Steve Knopper termed it, created boom-or-bust trajectories for bands that might have once settled for modest regional fame. It was no longer hard to find alternative sounds; major labels were desperate to pitch everyone as the next Nirvana.
[…]
After his death, there were articles and nightly-news segments about Cobain’s nihilism, and what his choice suggested about the younger generation. Mostly, I remember listening to “Nevermind” over and over—not as a search for clues (for that, you’d listen to Nirvana’s last studio album, “In Utero,” and its many references to despair and illness), but as a reminder of how unlikely his trajectory had been. It was the first time I’d wondered how you could work both inside and outside the system—whether you could be critical of, say, the corporations underwriting your art while making art that aspired for worlds beyond those realities.
There’s a sort of bittersweet aftermath to this story. “Nevermind” has since been absorbed into the rock canon. Just as kids a couple of years younger and older than me at school had wildly different opinions about whether Cobain was a saint or a sellout, every generation has their own version of the Nirvana legend. Nowadays, Cobain has become a fashionable reference point for musicians across genres, from pop to hip-hop, who want their music to seem brooding and emotional. Dr. Dre and Jay-Z today express admiration for the cultural rebellion that Cobain represented, describing his music as powerful enough to have briefly “stopped” hip-hop’s ascendancy.
Maybe that’s the paradox of alternative culture that’s always been true, only it was our turn to realize it: pop culture is born anew each time an outlaw is discovered. Your pose lives on, even if the seeds of your own rebellion are forgotten
Saint or sell-out, I don’t care…it’s the music that matters. Nirvana was but one fraction of the “Seattle Sound”, and I think a lot of it has held up rather well. With that in mind, I’ve selected my top 10 grunge-era songs by Seattle-based bands. In alphabetical order…
“Come As You Are” (Nirvana) – Yes, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is iconic, and a fantastic song, but this has always been the most compelling track from Nevermind for me. I find the band’s “MTV Unplugged” performance of the song particularly haunting.
“Hunger Strike” (Temple of the Dog) – Sadly, the history of Seattle’s grunge scene is full of heartbreak and shooting stars. Such was the impetus for this “one-off” supergroup, formed by Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell as a tribute to Andrew Wood. Wood, lead singer of early Seattle grunge outfits Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone (the latter band featuring future Pearl Jam members Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament) OD’d on heroin in 1990. Cornell recruited Gossard, Ament, their Pearl Jam bandmate Mike McReady, plus Soundgarden/future Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron. Eddie Vedder added vocals on some tracks, including this gem. Vedder and Cornell singing together is beyond sublime.
“Jeremy” (Pearl Jam) – Still one of the most powerful and moving songs of the era.
“Loud Love” (Soundgarden) – The late Chris Cornell had one of “those” voices; a force of nature. There was a raw immediacy in the band’s early recordings, nicely encapsulated by this standout track (and single) from their 1989 sophomore album Louder Than Love.
“Man in the Box” (Alice In Chains) – While this ominous yet compelling dirge has become a classic rock staple, it still doesn’t sound quite “right” coming out of your car radio…as in “how in the fuck did they ever sneak this one into the Top 40?” All I can say is, whatever dark regions of the human soul this tune sprang from, I daren’t even go there to snap a quick picture. Weirdly enough, lead singer Layne Staley tragically died of a drug overdose on April 5th, the same date as Kurt Cobain (but a different year…in 2002).
“Nearly Lost You” (The Screaming Trees) – Another early grunge outfit (formed in the mid-80s) the Screaming Trees got their first major national exposure in 1992 when this catchy number was featured on the soundtrack for Cameron Crowe’s hit movie Singles.
“99 Girls” (Young Fresh Fellows) – OK, they are not super well-known outside of Seattle, but I have a soft spot for the album this cut is taken from, because it was the Fellows’ “latest” when I worked at KCMU in 1992, and my introduction to the band’s quirky goodness. Originally formed in the early 80s, they had a college radio hit with their tune “Amy Grant”, which was a parody of Contemporary Christian Music. Their “sound” is sort of a mix of garage and punky power pop, frequently with cheeky lyrics. This song is a bit of clever wordplay referring to a stretch of Highway 99 (AKA Aurora Avenue where it runs through Seattle city limits) that is infamous as a sex worker haunt.
“Second Skin” (The Gits) – One of the Seattle scene’s greatest tragedies was the loss of this band’s dynamic and talented lead singer Mia Zapata, who was raped and murdered in 1993 at the age of 27 (thanks to the advent of DNA technology, her killer was eventually arrested, convicted and jailed 10 years later). This song was released as a single in 1991.
“Touch Me I’m Sick” (Mudhoney) – I love the amplifier buzz in the intro. Says it all.
“Tribe” (Gruntruck) – This band, which featured members of seminal Seattle grunge outfit Skin Yard leans closer to hard rock, but sometimes…I just wanna fly my freak flag.
Sen. Marco Rubio stopped in Ybor City on Friday for a hearing on the premium cigar industry.
While there, he spoke with reporters on a variety of topics. He was asked about two recent falsehoods by President Donald Trump getting a lot of attention: That his father was born in Germany (he was born in New York) and a conspiracy that wind turbines can cause cancer.
Rubio said he hadn’t heard Trump’s comments about his father (though the president has said it before), but here’s his response to the turbine falsity.
“I don’t know if he misspoke. I think my colleague from Iowa (Sen.) Chuck Grassley, they have a lot of wind turbines in Iowa, was pretty exercised about it. I didn’t see where he said, it I just read something where he said it, so I don’t know if he misspoke or the context of it. Do I have concerns about it? I just get up every day and do my job and kind of focus on things that really matter. I understand it’s sort of a funny thing that people point at and write about or cover but we have such huge issues confronting this country: this trade deal with China, as an example, some of the national security threats we face around the world, and obviously even here locally with an industry that’s about to go out of business, so that’s where I try to put most of my energy and time and just recognize the president is a very unorthodox political leader, he’s not a professional politician.
I think it’s one of the reasons why he won and one of the reasons why I believe he’ll be re-elected. And when you have someone who is unorthodox they say things that presidents before have never said and act in ways that presidents they never have before and there’s good things about it and there’s some things about it you wish would change and were different. By and large, I can tell you one thing, there’s never a boring day.”
President Trump took a jab at California politicians on Friday for “complaining” about wildfires, less than a year after dozens were killed in a massive blaze. “California’s always the first one to complain. And I don’t mean the people of California. They’re fantastic. I’m talking about the politicians in California. They complain,” he said, according to CNN. “When their forests go up, they complain. They gotta take care of their forests a lot better.
But when the wall—they want the wall in San Diego and they’re always the first one. They were the first one to pull the National Guard. And they need the National Guard,” he said during a visit to the border in Calexico.
California had the largest and deadliest wildfire in the state’s history last year, destroying homes and killing more than 75 people. The state is also one of 16 states to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s national emergency declaration to fund the wall along the southern border.
San Diego did NOT ask for his fucking wall.
Friday was his third visit to the state since becoming president. It was three times too many.
A 55-year-old New York man was arrested Friday for allegedly threatening to kill freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the Elmira Star-Gazette reports. The man, identified as Patrick W. Carlineo, is said to have called the Democratic lawmaker’s office on March 21 and made threatening comments, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Western District of New York. “Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are you working for her, she’s a fucking terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her fucking skull,” Carlineo allegedly said.
Omar’s office reportedly immediately reported the call to the United States Capitol Police, Threat Assessment Section, which in turn got the FBI involved. While questioned by FBI agents over the call late last month, Carlineo reportedly described himself as a patriot who loves President Trump and hates radical Muslims in public office. Investigators also reportedly found a shotgun and a .22-caliber rifle at his home.
The arrest comes just a few weeks after Fox News host Jeanine Pirro suggested on-air that Omar’s wearing of a hijab might be “indicative” of loyalty to Sharia law, a claim which quickly sparked backlash and saw her show temporarily bumped from the air.
On the same day that one of his fans was charged with plotting to murder her, President Trump gratuitously attacks Ilhan Omar pic.twitter.com/rPbC7BYNnu— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2019
I don’t know about you but, this doesn’t sound like a confident person:
I have not read the Mueller Report yet, even though I have every right to do so. Only know the conclusions, and on the big one, No Collusion. Likewise, recommendations made to our great A.G. who found No Obstruction. 13 Angry Trump hating Dems (later brought to 18) given two…..— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 6, 2019
…..years and $30 million, and they found No Collusion, No Obstruction. But the Democrats, no matter what we give them, will NEVER be satisfied. A total waste of time. As @FrankLuntz has just stated, “Enough, America has had enough. What have you accomplished. Public is fed up.”— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 6, 2019
So, let’s get this straight! There was No Collusion and in fact the Phony Dossier was a Con Job that was paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC. So the 13 Angry Democrats were investigating an event that never happened and that was in fact a made up Fraud. I just fought back….— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 6, 2019
…. against something I knew never existed, Collusion with Russia (so ridiculous!) – No Obstruction. This Russia Hoax must never happen to another President, and Law Enforcement must find out, HOW DID IT START?— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 6, 2019
NEW: Pres. Trump says he will hold a rally at an undetermined location rather than attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which he called "so boring and so negative."
Late Friday afternoon, Donald Trump landed in Los Angeles for a re-election fundraiser. The event was organized by Trump Victory, a fundraising partnership between the Republican National Convention and Trump’s campaign, and aimed to raise an estimated $5 million for the party. It was the president’s third visit to the celebrity-hub city and, by all accounts, not a star-studded one.
“Celebrities? No celebrities,” Rabbi Marvin Hier said of the event. Hier is the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and gave the prayer at Trump’s inauguration. Multiple valets in royal blue jackets, who declined to give their names because of their job, echoed his sentiment.
“No celebrities,” said one valet, driving past in a golf cart.
“Yeah, no celebrities,” claimed a second.
The event was held in the 22,000-square-foot Beverly Hills home of health-care executive and GOP donor Lee Samson. The 15-bathroom “Italian-style limestone villa” runs about $10 million, according to Zillow, and was named Robb Report’s Ultimate Home of the Year in 2012. Tickets started at $15,000 for dinner, $50,000 for a photo op with Trump, and $150,000 to join his roundtable discussion, according to an invitation obtained by the City News Service.
Rabbi Marvin Hier and his wife Marlene outside Trump’s Beverly Hills fundraiser
Fundraisers had estimated that some 90 donors would be in attendance, but did not disclose the invite list. Security guards posted around the house could not estimate who or how many people attended, and the drivers of several tinted black cars around the neighborhood declined to identify their clients. One claimed he had signed a non-disclosure agreement in advance of the event. Even Rabbi Hier and his wife, Marlene, who spoke with The Daily Beast while leaving the fundraiser in a golf cart, could not agree on crowd size.
“Hundreds of people came,” Hier said. “Probably 400 people.”
“200,” Marlene corrected.
“No, 200 couples,” he said.
“Don’t quote him on that. It wasn’t 400.”
According to the Washington Post, 170 people attended the event at Samson’s home.
I’ll just point out that there are a LOT of very rich people in LA. It wasn’t the ridiculous cost of the meet and greet that kept them away.
Maybe Trump should stop threatening the state every chance he gets. Even rich Republican Californians might not care for that.
Before money laundering was presidential
by Tom Sullivan
Like David Byrne, I ask myself, “Well…How did I get here?” Here is pretty messed up.
Federal prosecutors this week indicted former North Carolina congressman Robin Hayes, now chairman of the state’s Republican Party, on charges of bribery and other crimes.
The charges come weeks after Republicans saw last fall’s apparent congressional victory in NC-9 evaporate because their candidate “had financed an illicit voter-turnout effort.” Mark Harris’ son, a federal attorney, testified under oath his father had ignored his repeated warnings about McCrae Dowless, the field operative behind the scheme.
I train counties in get-out-the vote operations myself. How did I get here?
A job as a western North Carolina field organizer dropped into my lap, unasked, in the fall of 2006. It was a “blue moon” election. That is, there were no statewide races on the ballot. The district congressional race was the top of the ticket. The top of the ticket candidate was an ex-football player. His name was Heath Shuler. Which meant while the state Democratic Party had hired me, effectively I was working for Shuler’s campaign.
The former congressman is widely reviled in progressive circles as a blue dog. So much so that I don’t bring up my involvement in the campaign much here, even though we turned out an 8-term incumbent, Republican Charles H. Taylor. Local environmentalists know the wealthy banker as “Chainsaw Charlie” for his ownership of tree farms and authorship of an infamous federal timber salvage rider that passed during the Clinton years.
It may not looks so from a distance, but Shuler was an improvement. In discussions, political friends are much more theoretical and black-and-white about what they will accept in politicians and policies. But a friend with a Washington insider’s view noted the other day his first thought tends to be, “compared to what?”
A regional Russian bank owned by a former U.S. congressman had its license revoked Friday for violations that included breaking rules against money laundering.
Commercial Bank of Ivanovo, in which Republican former North Carolina Representative Charles Taylor owns an 80 percent stake, regularly broke anti-money laundering regulations, misrepresented the size of its provisions and used “schemes” to artificially inflate its capital, according to a central bank statement.
Taylor’s bank violated so many anti-money laundering regulations, it had its license revoked. By Russia. Or maybe it just failed to pay its kickbacks.
Taylor bought CBI in 2003 alongside his business partner Boris Bolshakov, a former KGB agent and Supreme Soviet deputy who is listed as the bank’s second-largest shareholder.
In 2003, two of Taylor’s political associates testified that the congressman knew about fraudulent loans made by Asheville-based Blue Ridge Savings Bank, which he owned at the time, to a political supporter. Taylor denied any knowledge of the loans.
“Chainsaw” Charlie’s bank was into fraud, conspiracy, and shady Russian deals before that was presidential.
So go easy on me for helping elect Shuler. I’d do it again.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard North Carolina’s partisan gerrymandering case on March 26th. If things go Democrats’ way, North Carolina could have new congressional maps – fair maps – for the next general election. Eleventh District Democrats sent “Chainsaw Charlie” packing in 2006. In 2020, they’re positioned to do the same thing for your favorite Freedom Caucus Chair, Mark Meadows. If districts change, the candidate who faces Meadows could be another centrist Democrat.
As with Democratic candidates in the 2020 presidential contest, progressive voters may need to remember “compared to what?”
