Paladino, Carl
he's baaaaaccck trumpista
michael caputo pow stone mentored,
VILE ISLAMOPHOBE CONCL
Vickie Paladino's father was a World War II veteran who passed away when she was only six years old. Following his early death, she was raised by her single mother alongside her three sisters and one brother in Whitestone, Queens.
an 8 22
New York Republican Carl Paladino, running for a U.S. House seat, said Attorney General Merrick Garland should probably be “executed” in a radio interview this past weekend, and later when pressed backtracked, claiming he was just being “facetious,” as The Buffalo News first reported.
“So we have a couple of unelected people who are running our government with an administration of people like Garland,” Paladino said in an attack on President Joe Biden in a Saturday interview with the far-right wing Breitbart media site.
Garland “should be not only impeached he should probably, should be executed, the guy is just lost,” Paladino said.
Paladino called Garland, a former U.S. Supreme Court nominee and former Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a “lost soul” who is “trying to get an image and his image, his methodology is just terrible.”
“To raid the home of a former president is just, people are scratching their heads and they’re saying, ‘What is wrong with this guy?’ ”
Later in the interview Breitbart Radio host Matthew Boyle asked Paladino, “Carl, what you just said about Garland, you said you think ‘he should be impeached and probably executed.’ Can you explain that? What do you mean by that?”
“I’m just being facetious,” Paladino replied. “The man should be removed from office. He’s shows his incompetence. He wants to get his face in front of the people. And in short, he’s got some mettle to him, but his choice of issues and his choice of methodology is is is very sad. And then he wants to take full blame for it, you know he’ll he’ll stand there.”
Paladino, who is strongly endorsed by U.S. Rep. **Elise Stefanik** (R-NY), the Chair of the House Republican Conference, has a long history of controversial remarks and actions.
Just last month the New York Post reported he “has a convicted sex offender on his company payroll who also now works as ‘assistant treasurer’ of his campaign.”
“Joel Sartori was controller of Ellicott Development when he was busted in 2013 for accessing child porn on a company computer,” The Post adds. “Sartori was convicted of two felonies — possessing and promoting kiddie porn — and sentenced to 10 years’ probation in 2017, court records show.”
As CNN has reported, Paladino has called Black people “dumb and hungry,” claimed they are “conditioned” to only vote for Democrats, while insisting he’s not “a racist.” He also said a woman who had accused Donald Trump of sexual assault “probably enjoyed” it.
Stefanik, the third most powerful House Republican, on June 3 praised Paladino as an “inspirational” leader, a “doer,” and “the kind of leader we need today.” That endorsement came just days before it was revealedPaladino in 2021 had called Adolf Hitler “inspirational,” and “the kind of leader we need today” (audio.)
Stefanik later doubled down on her endorsement despite Paladino’s praise for Hitler, a genocidal fascist responsible for the murders of approximately 17 million people.
As CNN also reported, in 2016, “Paladino had said he would like to see Michelle Obama ‘return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla,’ and that he hoped Barack Obama would die of Mad Cow Disease after having sex with a cow.”
Listen to Paladino’s remarks about Attorney General Garland below or at this link:
For many years, journalist/political science professor Tom Nichols, now 61, was a staunch and self-described “New England Republican.” But that was before Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Nichols sent shock waves through the conservative movement when, in 2016, he announced that he would be voting for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — and in October 2018, the Never Trump conservative expressed his disdain for the MAGA movement by leaving the Republican Party.
Nichols hasn’t grown any less disdainful of Trumpism since then. In an article published by The Atlantic on July 6, Nichols applauds Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois for being “reasonable Republicans” but laments that they are atypical of 2022’s GOP — which he believes is beyond salvation. Nichols even compares the state of the GOP in 2022 to the state of the Soviet Communist Party in 1991.
“In 1991, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was briefly deposed in a coup by hardline members of the Soviet Communist Party,” Nichols recalls. “Gorbachev, upon his return to Moscow, tried to differentiate between the plotters and the Party itself. One of his closest advisers, Aleksandr Yakovlev, told him that this effort was pointless, akin to ‘serving tea to a corpse.’”
Nichols continues, “Republicans such as Sen. Mitt Romney — an honorable man for whom I voted in 2012 — and a handful of others in the GOP, including Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, should take note of Yakovlev’s phrase…. Romney, Cheney and Kinzinger cannot rescue their party, either — at least not in its current form. In fact, I wonder if the Republicans can ever return to being the kind of party that once nominated someone like Mitt Romney for the American presidency.”
Describing some of the far-right MAGA Republicans running for office in the 2022 midterms, Nichols warns that extremists and “conspiracy theorists” are now the norm in his former party.
“The Republican candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, for example, believes that people can transmit demonic possession through ‘intimate relations,’ according to CNN,” Nichols observes. “Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Republicans have nominated a candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, who has implied that he might invalidate any election result he doesn’t like in 2024 — and that’s probably the least disturbing thing about him. As Jonathan Last put it recently, the Democratic nominee, Josh Shapiro, is an ordinary politician, while Mastriano ‘is an insane person, a seditionist, a Christian nationalist, a conspiracy nut.”
Nichols adds, “Almost every other national Republican is either silent or on board with the dark fantasies and deepening paranoia that now rule the GOP. For example, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the relentlessly ambitious third-ranking House Republican, endorsed the developer Carl Paladino for a newly redistricted House seat in the state; in 2021, Paladino said that Adolf Hitler was ‘the kind of leader we need.’ Some House Republicans are frustrated that Stefanik went rogue by endorsing Paladino, meaning only that they are embarrassed but not ashamed.”
Nichols concludes his article by warning that extremists are no longer a minority in the GOP — they now dominate it.
“In the end, despite the efforts of Sen. Romney and other reasonable Republicans, the fringe is now the base,” the Never Trumper laments. “The last rational members of the GOP — both elected and among the rank and file — need to speak even harsher truths to their own people, as Liz Cheney did last week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Otherwise, the madness will spread, and our institutions will continue an accelerating slide into a nightmare that will engulf all Americans, regardless of party.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/carl-paladino-adolf-hitler-leader/
Star Parker, an African-American Republican with Tea Party ties and killer cheekbones that serve her well on frequent Fox News appearances, looks younger than the fiftysomething she is. In her run for a congressional seat in California, Parker has been known to show up at campaign events with a flower tucked behind one ear. There’s nothing of that softness, though, in the titles of her three books, White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay (2006), Uncle Sam’s**Plantation:** How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can Do About It (2003), and Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats: From Welfare Cheat to Conservative Messenger (1998).
:{
}:
As the last title indicates, Parker also happens to be a former welfare recipient and single mother who has talked publicly about her four abortions, all of which occurred before she became a born-again Christian and subsequently attended college for a degree in marketing. Since then, she has further remade herself as a far-right commentator and founded the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education, meant to combat poverty by encouraging private ownership and personal responsibility. She’s been on The View, Oprah, and, according to her bio, spoke at the 1996 RNC (though her name doesn’t appear on the official docket of floor speeches). Parker not only blames welfare for the**financial crisis** but cites it as a major reason for her decision to run for office.
To the constituents in her own district—which includes Compton, Long Beach, parts of Watts, and Signal Hill—she is a radical departure from the district’s traditionally liberal candidates. But Parker may be aiming for a national platform. She represents a type that often pops up as companion to right-wing movements fixated on personal responsibility: The welfare mother turned bootstrap success, come to tell all others dependent on government how they should free themselves. Democratic incumbentLaura Richardson, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, won the seat by a comfortable margin in a 2007 special election. But recently she’s been plagued by a personal financial scandal—Richardson defaulted on a subprime mortgage and has been accused of receiving preferential treatment from her lender—the perfect foil for someone who wants to trumpet that message of personal responsibility.
In addition to her books and television appearances, Parker regularly writes a syndicated column forScripps Howard News Service, which runs on the prominent conservative Web site Townhall. * She recently held a “campaign” event in Wichita, Kan., a location that seems slightly inconvenient for the good people of Compton. Still, she’s raised $318,930, an impressive amount for someone without a shot in hell. (By way of comparison, former Slateblogger Mickey Kaus raised $54,936 in his recent, similarly quixotic California Senate primary bid, and Richardson’s raised $369,449.) Parker’s top donors include several Orange County real estate investors, a prominent Tea Party activist, the Susan B. Anthony List, Huck PAC, and SarahPAC. As befits a brand-building vanity candidacy, there are precious few local luminaries who’ve endorsed her, but her campaign site boasts that she’s backed by figures like Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist.
Most prominently, Sarah Palin has officially endorsed Parker as one of her Mama Grizzlies.To date, Palin has endorsed four African-American candidates, all with Tea Party ties—Parker, Allen West, Tim Scott, and Angela McGlowan, who, like Parker, is a Fox News favorite and had little chance of winning (though her résumé is far less flimsy than Parker’s). All four endorsements came in either April or June, which also happened to be when accusations of Tea Party racism were bubbling up most ferociously (and in advance of Palin’s “don’t retreat … reload” exhortation to Dr. Laura Schlessinger after the radio host came under fire for using the N-word).
In some ways, the Tea Party needs Parker more than she needs them. Backing candidates of color is at least partly a way for Palin, and the Tea Party generally, to get some plausible deniability on those charges. And, of course, it’s not remotely the first time the GOP has fetishized a black candidate to overcompensate for the fact that its platform has traditionally been so unappealing to African-Americans. But Parker’s image as an ex-welfare mother turned anti-welfare/immigration activist is particularly resonant—an update on an old trope, adapted to respond to new conservative anxieties about work, government assistance, and race.” for her personal history and her hard-line stances on welfare as director of social services in both Wisconsin and California. There are also women on the left, like Theresa Funicello, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (both white), and (African-American) Rep. Gwen Moore, who drew upon their experience and cred as welfare mothers to advocate for the continuation or expansion of government help.>Critiques like Anderson’s and Parker’s are embraced joyously by the right: If even former welfare mothers know the system is terrible, it must be really terrible. “I lived the lie of the left,” Parker tells an interviewer, detailing “sexual promiscuity” and her decade in the welfare system. “I lived the culture that the administration … wants the rest of the country to live.” And if those women themselves are black, it’s harder to accuse them of wrapping racial prejudice up in that critique.
Since 1996, the battle over welfare reform had largely faded out, but lately the Tea Party has put its own bizarre twist on it, and revived welfare as loaded shorthand for government handouts. Carl Paladino (he of the racist e-mail forwarding), said he wanted to convert some of the state’s prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they would work for the military or the parks or other public services. “Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we’ll teach people how to earn their check. We’ll teach them personal hygiene … the personal things they don’t get when they come from dysfunctional homes,” he said, but also emphasized his plan would help people who’d recently been forced into asking for handouts, not just the long-term recipients (presumably the people whose toothbrushing technique he’s so concerned about).Paladino also stressed that his plan was based off the 1930s Civilian Conservancy Corps—never mind the socialist tinges of that program; it’s the last time the face of government assistance was white. It’s a scrambled message: Welfare recipients need to be punished, hence the prisons, but there’s also an odd strand of sympathy, a realization that jobs don’t fall from trees.
It’s harder to villainize anyone who receives government handouts in an era when, for instance, an estimated one in eight Americans are on food stamps. So for the Tea Party, immigrants are the new welfare queens. Paladino’s campaign site says that “many [immigrants] jumped on New York’s Medicaid and social welfare systems the day they arrived.” Parker, for her part, is rerouting some of her welfare obsession to drive home a similar message. She trumpets that her district is home to the third-largest Cambodian population in the world—hard-working escapees of communism, she emphasizes—but she wants to shut the border to Mexican immigrants and build a wall. (Meanwhile, her district is currently about half Hispanic.) On Parker’s campaign Web site, under the heading “job and the economy,” she lumps “Amnesty for illegal immigrants” under other “government takeover” programs.
In a video featured prominently on her site, she goes a step further than Paladino. She still rails against Americans who are lazy and unwilling to work—a classic critique of subsidized poverty—but also implies that it’s harder to get a job because immigrants have taken them over: “We created this dilemma in Southern California, everything we should have been training our 12-year-olds to do, whether it was training our boys to cut the grass or girls to do the housekeeping, we put it off on someone else.” Parker adds that immigrants then “perhaps take advantage of our welfare state” after “birthing children”—implying that children are the collateral that immigrants, like welfare moms before them, are using to coerce money out of the government. Parker’s not the only prominent African-American woman who’s now employing her cachet as an ex-welfare recipient to try to shape the debate about immigration and work: Carol Swain, who also underwent an evangelical conversion, is now a Vanderbilt law professor who’s become an outspoken, conservative critic of immigration.
It’s impossible to plumb Parker’s psychology and deepest-held beliefs and know what exactly has made her so fervent on the issue—black women in the public eye still have to fight pervasive, terrible stereotypes, of course, and perhaps this is a way of getting as far as possible from the one she most fears. It’s clear, though, that she’s willing to use that stereotype of a lazy welfare mother—as personified by her own past self, as presented by her—to suit her own present-day purposes. Parker might have a problem with what she sees as the ugly consequences of welfare, but she certainly doesn’t object to the ugly stereotypes that have grown out of those experiences—in fact, she might be out of business without them. And unlike Eloise Anderson, who was willing to work within the system for specific reforms in the ‘90s, Parker seems more interested in getting an ever bigger bullhorn to broadcast increasingly angry views. That willingness to Frankenstein-ize old conservative tropes means that even if Parker’s congressional future is unlikely, her Tea Party future is probably bright.
==
https://www.alternet.org/documentaries/how-town-took-racist-billionaire-politician-and-won
==
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/27/nyregion/carl-paladino-michelle-obama.html?_r=0
Carl Paladino said on Tuesday that he had not intended to send racist remarks about President and Michelle Obama, which were roundly denounced as viciously offensive, to a Buffalo newspaper for publication.
Mr. Paladino, a former candidate for governor of New York and a political ally of President-elect Donald J. Trump, said in a statement that he had meant to email his remarks to friends.
Instead, he said, he inadvertently sent them to Artvoice, a Buffalo weekly, which published them last week.
In the statement, Mr. Paladino, a western New York builder and a member of the Buffalo Board of Education, said that he would not heed calls for his resignation, “not when it’s time to help implement the real choice elements of Trump’s plan for education reform.”
Mr. Paladino’s remarks last week were in response to a light survey about 2017 circulated by Artvoice to figures in the Buffalo community.
Asked what he wanted to see “go away in 2017,” Mr. Paladino answered, Michelle Obama, “I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”
He also wrote that he hoped President Obama would[HAVE SEX W] die of mad cow disease. His comments were published with those of three dozen other survey respondents.
In his statement on Tuesday, Mr. Paladino apologized to the “minority community,” and said he received the survey at an emotional moment, after listening to Mr. Obama speak about the humanitarian disaster in Aleppo, Syria, which “resulted from his failed and cowardly foreign policy.”
Mr. Paladino added: “I did not mean to send those answers to Artvoice. Not that it makes any difference because what I wrote was inappropriate under any circumstance. I filled out the survey to send to a couple friends and forwarded it to them not realizing that I didn’t hit ‘forward’ I hit ‘reply.' All men make mistakes.”
In the days since his original comments were published, Mr. Paladino’s words have been condemned by a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, and by public figures around the state, including Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, and the state’s highest ranking education official, Betty A. Rosa, the chancellor of the Board of Regents. Local politicians, including the Erie County executive, have called for Mr. Paladino’s resignation, and The Buffalo News reported that the Buffalo school board planned a special meeting for Thursday to address “board member conduct.”
After his statement was published by WBEN, a Buffalo radio station, on its website, The New York Times contacted Mr. Paladino, who said he would send a reporter the statement. Instead, he forwarded what appeared to be part of a different statement. It picked up in the middle of a thought, and took to task the “pathetic heathens” it said had criticized him, including Mr. Cuomo and the president of the Buffalo school board, Barbara Seals Nevergold.
Mr. Paladino said that statement was a draft written by his brother-in-law, which he did not intend to send.
==
trump threat frech nat rev links to:
Chris Collins is a mainstream, blue-state Republican whose first choice in this year’s primary was Jeb Bush. He represents upstate New York and has voted to the left of his party on issues of immigration. But when Bush bowed out of the race last month, Collins became the first member of Congress to endorse Donald Trump.
Collins’s decision to board the Trump train befuddled most observers. As a moderate back-bencher looking to move up in the world, why would you endorse an authoritarian demagogue over the strenuous objections of your party's leadership? A recent report from Syracuse.com suggests a two-word answer: Carl Paladino.
Paladino is a Buffalo businessman and former GOP nominee for New York governor who enjoys threatening abstract entities with a baseball bat. Earlier this month, Paladino sent an open letter to New York’s top Republicans, giving them one last chance to endorse Trump before the state’s April primary.
"This is our last request that you join 'Trump for President' and try to preserve what's left of your pathetic careers in government," Paladino wrote in the letter, which was forwarded to his 50,000-member email list. "Whatever you do, staying neutral is not an option. Pick a horse in the race, and you may salvage some of your constituents' respect for you.”
Since then, Paladino has been targeting Trump skeptics personally. Last week, he sent an email blast to supporters titled “Anyone interested in running in a primary to defeat Elise Stefanik?” Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman representing New York’s 21st District, was not persuaded by that implicit threat. But shortly after Paladino sent the email, another member of the Empire State’s congressional delegation, Republican representative Tom Reed, decided he wanted to make America great again.
It’s possible that Collins’s Trump endorsement is entirely unrelated to Paladino’s muscular advocacy. After all, who cares what some failed gubernatorial candidate says to his email list?
According to the Huffington Post, a certain New York congressman seems to care quite a bit about about such things. On Thursday, the site published this text message that Collins sent to his colleagues:
“I know Carl Paladino has been aggressively pushing all of you to endorse Trump. And I know he has indicated he will start ‘attacking’ NYers who don’t endorse Trump. You may or may not care, but he does have a formidable email list.”
Collins told the Post that he'd endorsed Trump without speaking to Paladino about it. But when pressed about whether the two had everdiscussed the endorsement before it was made, Collins said, “Uh, so — I mean, Carl and I know each other.”
==
stone hell
Whether because of his passion for the ironic, or the combination of tax liens and halting of revenue from ponzi scheming lawyers and future casino projects, Roger Stone then got involved in one of the more ridiculous and vile episodes of his life, the 2010 New York gubernatorial election. “I have to admit that this Stone saga even shocks me, as familiar as I am with his four-decade career,” wrote Wayne Barrett in “The (Roger) Stone Around Carl Paladino’s Neck” 132(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote132). Stone would run former madame Kristin Davis’s candidacy for the Libertarian party ticket; many of his associates, however, would be working on the Republican party ticket of Carl Paladino. Dianne Thorne, who worked as the treasurer for the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary, the Florida committee fronted by Mary McCarty and formed to pressure the Florida Supreme Court to vote in favor of Bush, worked as Paladino’s scheduler. Thorne is an enigmatic and interesting character who was involved in a number of Stone ventures. She is a raven haired former model from Australia, often mentioned as Stone’s assistant, though in Dana Milbank’s book on the 2000 campaigns, *Smash Mouth: Two Years In The Gutter With Al Gore And George W. Bush*, she is also mentioned as Trump’s advance woman – the person in charge of wrangling and prepping journalists133(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote133).
In the Labash piece, Stone is chauffeured around by A-Mill, a “23-year-old driver/computer whiz/all-around Boy Friday.” As usual, with Stone, we get the color that keep bringing reporters back to him: A-Mill looks like he’d fight as a featherweight, but Stone says looks can be deceiving. One late night, when they were walking across a strip-club parking lot together, two large gentlemen tried to mug them. A-Mill reached into his boot, pulled out a blade, and slashed one of them across the face, causing both assailants to run. ‘Watch this guy,’ says Stone. ‘He’s a killer.’” A-Mill is most likely Andrew Miller, Dianne Thorne’s stepson, who would work as Kristin Davis’s campaign manager, for free, while he was also paid $17,000 by the Paladino campaign, for “advance work and logistics.” Also with Paladino was Dianne Thorne’s husband, Tim Suereth, who had also worked on a number of Stone projects. There was Michael Johns, a speechwriter for Paladino who also had worked at the Heritage Institute praising Jonas Savimbi and criticizing Nelson Mandela as a communist. The incident involving BMS&K client Savimbi, where chemical weapons were supposedly discovered in Angola, has already been mentioned. It was Johns who brought Andries Holst, the film-maker who’d supposedly filmed evidence of chemical weapons use, to Washington to meet various officials such as Jesse Helms134(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote134).
Paladino’s campaign manager wasn’t Stone, but Michael Caputo, Stone’s former driver and another all-round occasional Stone associate. It was Caputo who handled the press for Stone when the National Enquirer swinger story broke. Stone was second only to Caputo’s father on his speed dial. Caputo was a military veteran who’d been a speechwriter for Jack Kemp, and the Communications Director for the Council for Inter-American Security in Washington, which meant that he was involved in civic and military public affairs programs in Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in support of Reagan foreign policy initiatives, which was either sinister or nebulous, depending on how you read it. “Publicists of the Damned” which detailed BMS&K’s work for Savimbi, Mobutu, Ferdinand Marcos, and others, would also describe the difficulties of one lobbyist trying to refurbish the image of El Salvador’s Alfredo Cristiani (specific page 58). “All we heard over and over was that he was a puppet of the death squads, a creature of millionaire coffee growers,” the lobbyist complains. The article mentions why Cristiani carried this around: “That unfortunate reputation is due in part to the fact that Cristiani was the candidate of the right-wing ARENA party, which was founded by death-squad mastermind Roberto D’Aubisson and supported by millionaire coffee growers.” Caputo would help to run the 1989 campaign for Cristiani to give him the semblance of an actual election. Three journalists were killed during this election, one of them when a military helicopter strafed a car clearly marked with a PRESS sign. After the election, there was an incident where six Jesuit priests, suspected of collusion with the country’s rebels, were killed. High level members of the military were blamed by Cristiani for the killings. Twenty years later, two human rights organizations, The Association for Human Rights in Spain (APDHE) and the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), would file suit, charging Cristiani with responsibility for the murders135(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote135).
Caputo would also work in Russia in 1996 for the election of Boris Yeltsin. He would show up in The Exile, the infamous Russian paper co-founded by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, under “Who Tolls The Bell?”, a list of journalists the paper especially despised. “Any way you look at it,” wrote “Field Marshal von Paulus” (I have no idea who’s behind the pseudonym) about the 1996 Russian election, “the campaign was totally illegal and anti-democratic, and Caputo played a huge role in it.” The heart of the animus is Caputo’s involvement in this political race: “This guy was the spin doctor behind Yeltsin’s reelection campaign in 96. As if subjecting Russia to the horror of that post-quadruple bypass pig shaking it with a Rostov pop band wasn’t bad enough, greaseball Caputo gets to brag at Beltway cocktail parties that Jeff Goldblum played him in *Spinning Boris*.” But Goldblum didn’t play him in Boris, Caputo isn’t even a character in the movie, Goldblum plays Caputo’s boss, a go for the jugular political consultant named George Gorton.
Like Roger Stone,Gortonwas a veteran of CREEP, who would go on to work as a top consultant, helping Pete Wilson, governor of California, win re-election by pushing Proposition 187, the ballot initiative that prohibited illegal aliens from using education, health and social services in the state. Stone had paid for Sedan Chair II to infiltrate various Democratic campaigns, and Stone had recommended that CREEP hire Theodore Brill to spy on various student groups. Gorton oversaw Brill, and paid him from his own pocket, so that his compensation wouldn’t come from campaign expenses. When Watergate broke, the revelation of student spying came out as well. “GW Student Spied for GOP,” was the Woodward-Bernstein headline (I cannot find this piece on-line; however, the excerpt from All the President’s Men, “The Quaker Plot” focuses on Brill). “Spying is a funny way to describe” what Brill did, Gorton said at the time. What exactly was it Brill was paid for, then? “It was a part of my job to know what all of youth was thinking,” Gorton explained. Gorton’s fellow CREEP staffers would hand him pages that were folded in half that he would give his signature to. Because they were folded in half, he couldn’t see what he was signing off on, and thereby could admit to no knowledge in court or elsewhere of what he’d just authorized. After a short exile after Watergate, Gorton would become a very successful political consultant136(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote136). Time magazine would put Gorton and others on the cover for their work in Yeltsin’s election (“Yanks to the Rescue” is the cover,“Rescuing Boris” by Michael Kramer is the story inside), but perhaps the Time writer was being spun more than the Russians. Yeltsin’s Russian consultants ridiculed the way that American consultants, who they felt had played a marginal role, placed themselves at the center of everything 137(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote137). “Russia needs democracy…. I would be remiss in my duty to mankind if I didn’t use every political consulting trick I could think of to keep what I felt was a great evil from returning to mankind,” Gorton would say at the time to the Sacramento Bee. His hindsight view was more brutally realistic. “My guy was drunk, corrupt. It was bad vs. evil,” he’d say138(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote138). “von Paulus” also has Michael Caputo’s company reaping a fortune in the millions through a deal with GazProm media in 2001. This is either very wrong, or he blew through the money quickly. A piece run during the Paladino campaign has him grateful for Roger Stone giving him some work and a place to sleep after a nasty divorce and a financial meltdown in 2003139(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote139). So, in 2010, Michael Caputo was Carl Paladino’s campaign manager.
...
the candidacy of Kristin Davis was perceived as one more salvo in Roger Stone’s vendetta against former governor Eliot Spitzer. Stone had been working, in 2007, for New York Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno on a $20,000 a month contract. Bruno was in a long, poisonous fight with Spitzer, and the dirty trickster had been brought in to help. The dirty trick he came up with was cruel, stupid, obvious. To harass Spitzer’s father, an elderly man with Parkinson’s, with a threatening message left on his answering machine:
This is a message for Bernard Spitzer. You will be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate committee on investigation on your shady campaign loans. You will be compelled by the Senate sergeant at arms, if you resist, you will be arrested and brought to Albany – and there’s not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho piece of shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth. The fact that your son is a pathological liar will be known to all.
(A clip which compares the audio on the call to Bernard Spitzer, and the audio of Roger Stone o
“I have been accused of a lot of things but being dumb is not one of them,” said Stone in response to the allegation that he made the phone call. “I don’t deny that the phone number is mine but fabricating my voice would be exceedingly easy. Give me a fucking break. This is the ultimate dirty trick and the kind of terror tactic Spitzer used in the Attorney General’s Office.” He would say that he was at the play Frost/Nixon the night the call was made, though there was no performance that evening. Again, this is Stone: “I have been accused of a lot of things but being dumb is not one of them.” Here is one of Stone’s clients, on the affair: “They caught Roger red-handed lying,” said Donald Trump. “What he did was ridiculous and stupid.” Stone would be fired by Bruno140(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote140). When the scandal broke that Eliot Spitzer had paid money for escort services, Stone would allege that he played a key role in the scandal by sending a letter to the FBI after speaking to an escort in a Miami club who’d had Spitzer as a client. The FBI would explicitly state that they never received any such letter. Kristin Davis was a convicted madam who alleged she had provided escorts for Spitzer, dozens maybe hundreds of times, and that Spitzer was abusive to women – but the New York Attorney General had confiscated her records when she was charged, and they showed no evidence of Spitzer ever having been one of her clients. When Alex Gibney dispassionately presented all this in Client 9, his documentary based on the well-researched book of Peter Elkind, *Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer*, Stone would refer to Gibney as “Leni Riefenstahl” on TV141(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote141). It didn’t matter that there was nothing connecting Spitzer to Kristin Davis; the evidence didn’t matter. By running Davis, Stone had a means to throw slimy allegations throughout the election season.
As said, Paladino was running for the Republican nomination, and Kristin Davis was running for the libertarian ticket.According to Stone, he had no connection to the Paladino campaign, though his close associate, Michael Caputo was running it, his assistant Dianne Thorne was on it, as was Michael Johns, the man who’d played a role in the Angolan chemical weapons incident involving BMS&K, as well as Tim Suereth, Thorne’s husband, who’d work alongside Stone before and after this campaign. Thorne’s stepson, Andrew Miller, would get paid for work on the Paladino campaign before shifting over to Kristin Davis. Stone would say that Paladino came to him for campaign advice on the outset, and that he’d help pick out his campaign staff. There were other intersections. When Paladino’s campaign kicked off at the Elliott Square Building in Buffalo, New York, Stone was there on the scene. A month before the election, attorney Lora Como, a campaign aide of Paladino’s , would allege that she’d been assaulted by Stone while they were at his Chelsea apartment. “He threw me to the ground and bruised my ribs. He was hostile and menacing and I wanted him arrested for assault and I went to the police,” alleged Como. Stone would acknowledge a disagreement with Como and that they were together at his apartment, but had a different version of events. He’d asked her to leave, and she’d gotten upset, he said. “I completely reject her assertion that I ever hit her or abused her in any physical way,” he said. In the article reporting the incident,“Assault claim vs. Carl’s aide Stone” by Fred Dicker, Stone was now referred to as a key campaign adviser of Paladino142(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote142). “The Kristin Davis Post-Election Party: Pretty Much What You’d Expect” by Brianna Strange, reported that Stone was at Davis’s election night party, along with Miller, still her campaign manager143(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote143).
Davis was running for the Libertarian ticket against Warren Redlich, a town board member and traffic lawyer. In April, at the beginning of the campaign, Stone would exchange a series of emails with Redlich. Much of the emails consist of Stone trying to pressure Redlich to step aside, so that Davis could be on the ticket for governor. If Redlich didn’t step aside, Davis wouldn’t attend the party convention, and they might set up their own party, filing suit over Redlich’s use of the Libertarian Party name. A few representative emails are below; paragraph spacing has been added for improved readability, but no other alterations have been made. The full emails are available at Capitol Confidential‘s “E-mails show Stone strategizing for Paladino” (archived) by Jimmy Vielkind:
Me [Warren Redlich], 10:31 am:
Can we just talk at the LPNY convention? We can talk Friday evening or Saturday morning, before anything of substance happens at the convention.
My schedule this week is pretty crazy. Had a trial yesterday, going to court near Binghamton tomorrow, etc.
W
Stone, 10:43 am: Warren
No- that is too late- unless we can reach some accomodation [sic] Kristin wont be attending the convention. A convention where a candidate isnt given a list of eleigible [sic] voters and where a poll tax of $25 is paid to vote isnt very legitimate.
In that case we’d prefer to petition on our own party onto the ballot [sic]- litigate over the word LIBERTARIAN- plenty of case-law.
Sure u can win the nomination on Saturday. How will you get 50,000 votes without money or publicity. I suggest a broader effort.
I too am busy. Let me know if you are available to talk by phone.
R
Me [Warren Redlich], 4:05 pm:
I’m a trial lawyer. When people threaten to sue me I find it amusing.
My impression is that you want Kristin to have the LP nomination for Governor and you may want me on the slate, perhaps LG or AG.
I don’t think the LPNY is willing to have Kristin in the Governor slot but I don’t speak for them – you’re wasting your time talking to me. If you can get the LPNY to go along with Kristin as the Governor candidate, and you want me on the ticket, I’m willing to consider that.
I do think I’m the better candidate for Governor, and I’m not going to step aside. But if you persuade them, and you still want me on board, I’m open to it.
On the other hand, if Kristin wants to be on the slate with me as the Governor candidate and her as LG or Comptroller, I think they’re more likely to go along with that. But again, I don’t speak for the LPNY. You should talk to them.
My cell is [omitted] if you want to talk.
Warren
The next email, from Stone, is the most interesting. He is a campaign manager for Davis, yet he now offers a deal where if Redlich runs for the Attorney General spot (rather than the governor spot), he can get Redlich to be on Paladino’s petitions and run in the GOP primary. How is it that Stone, who supposedly has no connection with the Paladino campaign, except for giving them advice, is able to offer such a deal?
Stone, 4:48: Because of her tangential connection to spitzer no other race makes sense for her. She, unlike you, has a shelf life. The further from Spitzer downfall the less her ability to command coverage. No other race has any logic for her.
Were you to support her actively you could help win her the votes to be nominated. If you ran for AG I could get Paladino to let you ride on both his GOP ( you are a registered R) and Tea Party petitions- and thus get in the GOP primary for real and get a second line. I can have Paladino himself confirm this if you like.
Donovan [Daniel M. Donovan, the eventual Republican candidate for Attorney General] is not a certain candidate for AG. You could end up the nominee.
In a 3 way race for Governor a woman candidate running on marijuana legalization gets 50,000+ votes and takes votes from Cuomo- not a Paladino. Prostitution would be de-emphasized in a fall campaign.
From my point of view you would help KD more as a candidate for LG making a nice balance M-F,downstate-upstate, non-lawyer, lawyer etc.
From your point of view a race for AG would be better for you if you would consider it.
R
Redlich would then contact Paladino, asking about the offer that Stone had made, and how it was that Stone, a campaign manager for an entirely separate campaign, on an entirely separate party ticket, had the authority to speak for Paladino:
Me [Warren Redlich] (to Paladino), 6:01 pm: Carl,
When we met last week, I did not have the impression that Roger Stone was on your campaign team. As you can see by the exchange below, he is speaking to me as if he has some sway over you – “I could get Paladino to let you ride on…”
It was my impression that you were campaigning as someone different from the usual politicians. If you’re working with Roger Stone, in the way he describes, then you don’t seem that different to me.
I’m big on hunches. My hunch is that he does not speak for you. Some of the things he says here do not fit with things you said to me when we met.
Mainly, I thought you should know that Stone was throwing your name around like he has some control over you. You don’t strike me as someone who is so easily controlled.
My cell is [omitted] if you want to talk. I have a town board meeting tonight at 7:30 pm and it might go long, so tomorrow might be better.
I cc’d Jim, Rus, and Allen on this message because I’ve had some interaction with them over the course of the campaign and I thought they should know what’s going on.
Warren
Stone would hear of this email to Paladino, and his reply would be curt:
Stone, 9:05 pm: Warren- do you really think this is clever ?…you’re out your league- and gentlemen don’t share personal correspondence. You sir, are no gentleman-
R
Redlich would forward the correspondence between himself and Stone to Eric Dondero, a libertarian blogger (his blog was Libertrarian Republican and he gained some prominence due to his attempt to boycott liberals after the Obama re-election, which resulted in interviews such as, “Democrat-Boycotting Libertarian Eric Dondero on Whether He Would Let a Democrat Drown” by Dan Amira), who contacted Stone, who sent another curt email to Redlich:
Stone, 4/21, 5:03 pm: Dondero wont print your leaked correspondence
rookie move asshole
guess CP [Conservative Party] shoved it up your ass, too.
LOSER……..
Redlich would reply:
Me [Warren Redlich], 5:58 pm:
We both know I’m a rookie. What I don’t get is why you’re wasting your time with me.
You are celebrating a tiny victory over a nobody.
If we played basketball, I’d clobber you. But it wouldn’t mean anything because I’m taller, younger and more experienced.
For some reason you’re trying to rub it in. I have no expectation of beating you. You’re supposed to be better at this.
W
However, the supposed master tactician Roger Stone and his candidate, Kristin Davis, would lose to the rookie.Redlich would be on the Libertarian Party ticket, and Kristin Davis would run instead on her own newly created ticket, The Anti-Prohibition Party. During the general race, with Paladino on the Republican ticket, Cuomo on the Democratic, Davis with Anti-Prohibition, and Redlich on the Libertarian, Stone was involved in one of the more vile acts of his life. Redlich had written a blog post on a semi-nude picture of Miley Cyrus that had appeared in Vanity Fair (which was only four years ago, but now feels like an eternity), an intelligent analysis arguing that much of the furor around the picture lay with a contemporary American sensibility, that viewed teenagers as either entirely sexual, or entirely non-sexual. We assume this sensibility to be universal and eternal, when it isn’t – Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet is written about lovers that were the same age as Miley Cyrus. One could disagree with the argument Redlich made, but it was ultimately an argument, not a predatory fantasy, or justification for rape. On October 29th, Capitol Confidential’s Jimmy Vieklind published “I pushed for the Redlich mailer”, about the appearance of a mailer, featuring a photo of Redlich as well as his phone number and home address, which warned that he was a public danger and for people to call the police when they see him:
“Everyone who has contacted me about the flyer has been disgusted by it,” wrote Vieklind, “and one reader noted it landed in his mail box the same day as a flyer supporting Kristen Davis, the Anti-Prohibition Party candidate.” Both mailers shared the same postal permit. “It’s an absolute disgrace,” Redlich would say. “Nothing I’ve ever written would qualify me as a sexual predator more than it would qualify William Shakespeare as a sexual predator…I think discussing what I wrote is attacking the victim. The fact that I think the Miley Cyrus story was overblown does not make me a predator, and it’s not even close.” The flier was put out by another mysterious group, People for a Safer New York, of which there was no record144(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote144).
Vieklind would contact Roger Stone about the mailer, and though Stone would not take credit for it, he did say he was in contact with People for a Safer New York, that the mailers were accurate, they were legal, he not only supported the mailers, he urged them to do it. “I’ve seen both mailers, I think that they’re both accurate. People for a Safer New York is called a first amendment group,” Stone told Velkind by phone. “I’m in touch with them. Who are they? They’re a first amendment organization I urged them to do this, this is a first amendment issue.”145(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote145)
“I don’t want this story spread because I have children,” Redlich would say of the mailers. “Let’s be clear about my sick alternative lifestyle: I’ve been married for 15 years, I have two children, I live in suburbia on a cul de sac and my kids go to public school.” Stone to Velkind: “Let’s be very clear: everything here is 100 percent legal, everything here is 100 percent accurate,” he said. “As somebody who has two granddaughters, I really find Redlich’s advocacy and defense of sex with underrate girls disgusting and repugnant, and voters need to know about it prior to voting on Tuesday.”146(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote146)
Heather Redlich, the candidate’s wife, would write a letter to Capitol Confidential expressing her anguish over the mailer. Capitol Confidential would publish the letter, “Redlich’s wife’s letter to Stone on ‘horrific smear’”. The text of the letter follows:
You have told terrible lies about my husband. You have hurt me and my family. I have suffered anxiety and heartache.
You have made me fear for the safety of my children in our own home. I am the type of person that avoids the limelight. I don’t like when people talk about me but I feel I can be silent no more. So, I will dry my tears and write my own message to New Yorkers:
I have known Warren Redlich for 19 years and have been married to him for 15 years. We have two school-age children. We met in law school, got married shortly after graduation and built a home together. Warren supported me when I decided to pursue a career as a librarian. When I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer during my first pregnancy, he took care of me and our newborn child.
In the years since, we have started a law practice together. We have joined a local Congregation. Warren has volunteered with our Congregation’s Brotherhood. He has given his time to talk to high school students about politics and the law. He has welcomed interns into our law practice and enjoyed being a mentor. He has counseled our clients with mental health problems and assisted those with physical disabilities. I am a member of the Junior League of Albany and have volunteered with our Congregation’s Sisterhood.
Our daily lives involve running a business, driving our kids to after-school activities, going on family outings and eating dinner together. We teach our children to be kind to others. We try to make the world a better place by volunteering and getting involved with our community.
Our friends and neighbors have received these lies in the mail. They know the truth. But for those who do not, I will tell you. Warren has never committed a crime. We do not have a deviant lifestyle. Warren is not perfect but he is a good person, a loyal friend, and a loving husband and father. You do not need to fear Warren.
You should fear those that tell such lies and sling mud. Be leery of those that are afraid of open political debate. Fear those that have trounced the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As for Mr. Stone and the others behind this horrific smear who speak these evil words, I hope the people of New York will reject your lies and will vote for principled men and women in the election.
I think it is so very easy to fill space when something like this makes you angry, and you must resist this most of all for aesthetic reasons, that nothing is so ugly and dull as a screech, however righteous. My anger has none of the comfort or certainty of an ideological target; I think libertarianism has done great damage to the United States, I want Warren Redlich’s ideology to fail – and yet I am still disgusted that this was done to him. With regard to this vile act, I will only say that there are great artists who can work on an extraordinary variety of canvases, the most vast and the smallest miniatures. Roger Stone, I think, is something like a great artist. He could cause horrific suffering among millions by working with a firm that prolonged a cruel, merciless war in Africa, and he could visit horror on a single family, falsely accusing a father of being a pedophile out of spite that this political rookie had just soundly beaten him in an election. “Color me contrarian, but I will say something I don’t believe another Washington reporter has ever admitted publicly: I like Roger Stone,” writes Matt Labash. “Stone is like a U.S. Army of treachery: He screws more people before 9 A.M. than most people do in a whole day,” writes Matt Labash, admiringly. And when one of those people is Warren Redlich, and the way Roger Stone screws him is to make his life a miserable hell by putting out fliers that he’s a sexual predator, does that fill you with gleeful laughter, Mr. Labash, or does it make you want to throw up?
Paladino’s campaign would be an endless joke. A mass of repellent emails that he forwarded out of amusement, such as an “Obama Inauguration Ceremony” featuring a group of African tribesmen as well as a bestiality video, would show up early on in the race. “With those emails out there, he’s clearly unelectable,” said a veteran political consultant. After stories were published about Paladino’s out of wedlock daughter, the candidate got into a screaming match with veteran political reporter Fred Dicker. “You send another goon to my daughter’s house and I’ll take you out, buddy!” Paladino would deliver a speech where he condemned homosexuality. “I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option – it isn’t,” he said. “You’re not an illegal immigrant, are you?” he’d ask during an interview with Fox reporter Ti Hua Chang.Caputo had Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic candidate, followed around by two people in duck costumes, sounding duck calls, as a way of taunting Cuomo for not agreeing to a debate. Caputo alleged that Cuomo aides had warned the ducks, “if you girls don’t get out of here I’m going to shove those duck calls down your throats.” Caputo alleged the encounter was “likely a hate crime since the Cuomo staffer clearly referenced their sexuality in his threat.” Cuomo won an overwhelming win over Paladino, who got 34% of the vote. “Madam Kristin Goes to Albany” by Molly Young describes a press conference held by Davis when she was running on the Anti-Prohibition Party. Seven people showed up, four of them from her campaign. Another was a heckler. “You don’t really think you have a chance, do you?,” he asked147(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote147). Neither Redlich nor Davis garnered enough votes for their parties to be placed on future ballots, but once again, the rookie had outdone the veteran strategist. Redlich pulled in 44,761 votes. Davis pulled in 22,000 votes. In a piece on the election, Stone wrote, without irony, that “Davis ran a positive campaign.”148(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote148)He took space in this post-election piece to defend the Redlich mailer:
In the closing days of the race a First Amendment group People for Safer New York exposed Redlich’s weird writing defending sex with under aged girls in a carefully lawyered piece of literature that exposed Redlich as Sexual predator in his attitude. Redich can huff and puff all he wants but the claims fall squarely within the bounds of the First Amendment. Liberal reporters found Redlich’s writing acceptable as they saw it a sophisticated, erudite and cosmopolitan. It wasn’t. It was vile. I’m a libertine but I limit myself to consenting adults.
For whatever reason, Stone would eventually take this page down from his site – this content is pulled from the wayback machine archives.