Archive for category: emptywheel

Cliff Stearns (left) in happier days, when he could play dress-up to visit Gitmo and strike his best Abu Ghraib pose.

There is a convoluted series of allegations and counterclaims between Representative Cliff Stearns (R-FL) and Clay County Clerk of Court James Jett, his Republican opponent in the Third Congressional District in Northern Florida created by the latest redistricting.  The FBI appears to have gotten involved, going so far as to record phone calls and to be aware Stearns’ opponent would wear a wire. Stunningly, both the Florida Times Union and Gainesville Sun are reporting that the FBI warned Jett not to record House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) either on the phone or at the meeting in which Jett was wired. Boehner had been expected to attend the Stearns fundraiser where Jett wore the wire, but appears to have not shown up.

The prospect of John Boehner appearing in a clandestinely recorded conversation in North Florida brings back memories of the fateful recording of then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich directly breaking his agreement with the House Ethics Committee and coordinating the Republican response to his ethics charges. In December, 1996, a couple in North Florida were listening to their police scanner and picked up the call in which Gingrich coordinated the response to the ethics charges to which he had admitted guilt on that same day. John Boehner was on that call. The couple recorded the call and handed the recording off to Representative Karen Thurman (D-FL) who forwarded it to the Ethics Committee. The legality of recording the call and handing the recording over was a point of dispute.

In the current dispute, Jett claims that Stearns initially had planned to support him as a Congressional candidate, but when Stearns’ current residence was put into a new district where he would face Rich Nugent (R-FL), who was elected for the first time in 2010, Stearns decided that he would relocated to Orange Park in the new third district and run from there.

From the Times Union:

Jett accused former state Education Commissioner Jim Horne and Orange Park Republican Jud Sapp of being middlemen and offering everything from money to appointed political positions.

/snip/

Federal law prohibits candidates from promising job appointments in return for campaign support.

Jett said one offer included a job on Stearns’ campaign staff that would pay him to cover the approximately $25,000 he had spent on his congressional run. He also said he was told there could be a job heading the Florida Department of Law Enforcement or a U.S. marshal position once there are vacancies.

From the Sun:

Horne reportedly said Stearns and House Speaker John Boehner were prepared to finalize the deal with Jett at a Stearns fundraiser on March 2 at the home of Jud Sapp, a prominent GOP donor from Orange Park.

/snip/

Jett, a former police officer, said he and his brother Joey, a Clay County sheriff’s deputy, then visited Sheriff Rick Beseler and a state prosecutor.

/snip/

Jett said the FBI subsequently contacted him about investigating the allegations. The agency reportedly planned to wire-tap his phone to record conversations with the pitchmen acting on Stearns’ behalf.

There was one caveat, however. The FBI agents were directed by their supervisors not to record Boehner, Jett claims. Jett said he did not know why, but he didn’t mind. He said he could not be sure Boehner knew what was being done in his name anyway.

Last Thursday, at the FBI’s request, Jett said he called Horne and Sapp and agreed to give up his bid and that he would accept the offers. The FBI recorded both conversations, Jett said. Read more →

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

We’ve been remiss in covering the SOPA/PIPA fight. So in honor of today’s SOPA/PIPA strike, we will be on strike from 6AM to 6PM today.

In the meantime, here are some links:

Julian Sanchez, SOPA: An Architecture for Censorship

Dan Gillmor, Stop SOPA or the Net Really Will Go Dark

And for a stomach-churning “where are they now” experience, here is former Senator Chris Dodd, now MPAA President’s statement calling the decision to go on strike today an “abuse of power.”

If that doesn’t keep you busy, you can write your members of Congress via this link. Or call them directly!

I, for one, will still be on Twitter. So will #SOPAStrike, tracking how things go tomorrow.

The Crystal River nuclear plant, seen from across adjacent wetlands, back in 2007 when it was actually functional. (Wikimedia Commons)

Almost single-handedly, reporter Ivan Penn at the Tampa Bay Times (formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times) has been informing the world of the disgusting spectacle taking place only sixty miles southwest of my home at the Crystal River nuclear power plant in Florida. The plant has been shut down since Progress Energy decided in 2009 that they could save $15 million in the costs of managing the replacement of the plant’s steam generators by managing the project itself. The ongoing mismanagement of the project has resulted in at least three major cracks in the containment building for the reactor and a projected cost of at least $2.5 billion to repair a plant that was designed to operate only through 2016. The second crack came when repairs were attempted on the first crack. And yes, these crackers just couldn’t learn, and the third crack came while they were contemplating how to repair the second crack instead of bringing in experts who actually knew what they were doing.

In a November 6 article from this year, Penn describes many of the details above about how Progress Energy chose not to use one of the two experienced engineering firms to manage the project in order to save $15 million in management fees. But because representatives of one of those firms, Bechtel, were present as part of the construction phase of the project, Progress still received warnings about the strategy they had chosen:

One warning:

Charles Hovey was an experienced construction foreman who had worked on similar projects at other nuclear plants. Progress, he observed, planned to use a different procedure to cut into its containment building.

“I have never heard of it being done like this before and I just want to express my concerns to you one last time.”

Another warning:

“Why are we doing tendons different here than all other jobs?” site supervisor John Marshall asked in an e-mail sent to Sam Franks, another Bechtel supervisor. Read more →