History > 2008 > USA > Politics > Governors (II)

Steve Breen

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The San Diego Union-Tribune

Cagle

16 December 2008

Legal Fight Planned

Over Ill. Governor Wiretaps

December 19, 2008
Filed at 4:30 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) -- Gov. Rod Blagojevich's attorney is offering a glimpse of his client's unfolding legal strategy, saying he'll challenge the lawfulness of court-ordered wiretaps at the heart of federal corruption allegations against the Democrat. But the two-term governor may go public to defend himself first.

With Blagojevich saying he's itching to talk, perhaps as early as Friday, Chicago attorney Ed Genson continued bashing what's gotten his client in a legal bind: FBI wiretaps that prosecutors say catch Blagojevich scheming to deal President-elect Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat for campaign cash or a plum job.

Genson told an Illinois House panel considering whether to impeach Blagojevich that its consideration of the recorded excerpts he cast as meaningless ''jabbering'' was inappropriate, if not illegal. ''I think you're using evidence that was illegally obtained,'' he said Thursday.

After the committee recessed its hearing until next week, Genson told reporters he planned to go after the taped conversations in court at some point.

Members of the House panel pledged Thursday to do nothing that would interfere with the investigation by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. If Fitzgerald asks lawmakers not to interview certain witnesses, the panelists will abide by that, they said.

''The fact that no one has denied that the governor has said those things (on tape) is relevant. That evidence already is on our record,'' said state Rep. Lou Lang, a suburban Chicago Democrat.

While hopeful that Fitzgerald lets the panel ''go in some directions'' with some potential witnesses in the criminal case, ''if he shuts us down completely, this committee will deal with it,'' Lang said.

Blagojevich's first substantial public comments -- other than snippets shouted to reporters camped outside his Chicago home since his arrest last week -- could come as early as Friday, Genson said. The attorney didn't sound keen on the prospect.

''I'm a lawyer by trade -- I don't like my clients to talk to anybody,'' he said.

Genson said he expected federal grand jurors to eventually indict his client, which would likely unseal many of the documents in support of the charges, perhaps marking the point where his legal attack may truly begin.

''I'm talking that within the next few months the air will clear a little bit and we'll be able to get access to all the things that we need to get access to,'' he said. ''And I'll be able to look at those things.''

The impeachment process appears certain to grind on until then, possibly into next year, with or without Fitzgerald's help. Without it, the committee probably will emphasize some lower-profile allegations of misconduct against Blagojevich: defying the Legislature, failing to honor reporters' Freedom of Information requests, and trading state jobs and contracts for campaign contributions.

On Wednesday, the Illinois Supreme Court rejected a request to declare him unfit to serve, and Genson made it clear that the governor is not going down without a fight.

Federal prosecutors' case could be undermined -- or at least greatly complicated -- if Illinois lawmakers compel certain witnesses to testify. Following the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, the convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter were thrown out after the courts determined that the cases against them were built too much on testimony they gave to Congress under a promise of immunity.

The impeachment committee sent Fitzgerald a letter Thursday formally asking for information about people mentioned by pseudonyms in the criminal complaint, and requesting his guidance on who can be called to testify. Fitzgerald refused to comment.

When the panel returns Monday, its members hope to discuss any guidelines or restrictions Fitzgerald may place on them.

Committee chairwoman Barbara Flynn Currie, a Chicago Democrat like the governor, noted that even before Blagojevich's arrest last week, some lawmakers were calling for his impeachment.

''We've got plenty of evidence out there of questionable activity on the part of the governor,'' she said.

Besides the Senate-seat-for-sale allegations, the governor was accused of trying to strong-arm the Chicago Tribune into firing editorial writers who criticized him and pressuring a hospital executive for campaign donations.

Outraged lawmakers appointed a committee to investigate Blagojevich and issue a recommendation on whether he should be impeached.

Genson had no comment on what restrictions Fitzgerald should place on the committee. ''They do what they got to do and I do what I've got to do, and then what happens is what we've got to do,'' Genson said.

Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which allows impeachment in cases of ''high crimes and misdemeanors,'' the Illinois Constitution does not define an impeachable offense. No Illinois governor has ever been impeached, so lawmakers have little to go on.

Genson has complained about the lack of a clear standard and suggested he might raise the issue in court if the governor is impeached.

''I don't know what the line is,'' he told the committee. ''The line should be based on evidence, should be based on due process, should be based on confrontation.''

Legal Fight Planned Over Ill. Governor Wiretaps, NYT, 19.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2008/12/19/us/AP-Illinois-Governor.html

Impeachment Inquiry Hits Bumps in Illinois

December 17, 2008
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and MALCOLM GAY

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — An inquiry here into the impeachment of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich met resistance on Tuesday, with federal prosecutors indicating that it might interfere with the criminal case against him and a lawyer for Mr. Blagojevich requesting that the proceedings not move forward without the lawyer in attendance.

Members of the newly appointed House impeachment committee met for less than two hours before adjourning until Wednesday so the lawyer, Ed Genson, could arrive from Chicago and an agreement with prosecutors could be considered about how to proceed.

“We’re prepared, we’re here,” said Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, a Chicago Democrat who is the chairwoman of the committee. “We’ll be ready to have at it all the way through, but whether as a matter of practical logistics — whether we can — depends very much on when we hear from the United States attorney.”

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney who a week ago charged Mr. Blagojevich with conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and bribery, has expressed reservations about the prospect that lawmakers may hear testimony from witnesses in the criminal case before a jury does, Ms. Currie said.

At Mr. Fitzgerald’s request, Ms. Currie prepared a letter detailing what information her committee hoped to learn from federal prosecutors and which sorts of witnesses might be called. It was uncertain when Mr. Fitzgerald would answer; his spokesman declined to comment.

Lawmakers were scheduled to continue their hearing on Wednesday morning, when Mr. Genson arrives, and could choose to focus their inquiry exclusively on matters related to Mr. Blagojevich’s governing to avoid clashing with the criminal case.

Mr. Blagojevich, committee members said, was also invited to attend, but declined, remaining in Chicago. His spokesman, Lucio Guerrero, said the governor, a two-term Democrat, was looking at bills and clemency cases.

Before adjourning, committee members one by one expressed their sadness over the scandal and their discomfort with the state’s finding itself in such a dismal circumstance.

No Illinois governor has been impeached, but State Representative Monique D. Davis, a Chicago Democrat, said the impeachment inquiry needed to move forward to remove the cloud over the state.

“It’s the Land of Lincoln,” Ms. Davis said. “It’s the land of Barack Obama.”

Still, Republicans here said that despite all the calls for reform, the Democratic-controlled House and Senate were showing few signs that Illinois politics would change. The new impeachment committee includes more Democrats than Republicans (12 to 9), a circumstance that might allow Democrats to control what evidence was examined and what witnesses were called.

And legislation to hold a special election to fill President-elect Obama’s now-empty Senate seat (rather than have that person picked by the governor, who, prosecutors say, was seeking money or a job in exchange for his selection) was never brought to a vote in the Senate on Tuesday. The House also did not take up the proposal before it adjourned on Monday night.

Though some Democrats had joined Republicans last week in calling for a special election to remove all taint from the Senate succession, Democratic lawmakers grew leery of the idea because it raised the possibility that a Republican could win the seat.

“It’s another shameful display that we’ve seen down here,” said Senator Matt Murphy, a Palatine Republican. “The question that voters have to ask — that the people of Illinois have to ask — is, ‘Do the guys running this state ever tire of disillusioning and disappointing them?’ ”

Democrats said they were still trying to sort out how best to select a new senator. They complained that a special election would be expensive. Many seemed hopeful that Pat Quinn, the lieutenant governor and a Democrat, would soon become governor — through Mr. Blagojevich’s impeachment, resignation, criminal conviction or removal by the State Supreme Court — and could make the Senate appointment.
 

Susan Saulny contributed reporting from Chicago.

    Impeachment Inquiry Hits Bumps in Illinois, NYT, 17.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/us/17illinois.html

In Georgia,

Push to End Unanimity for Execution

December 17, 2008
The New York Times
By ROBBIE BROWN

ATLANTA — For three and a half years, prosecutors in Georgia carefully built their argument for sentencing Brian G. Nichols to death for a rash of murders in downtown Atlanta in 2005. With Mr. Nichols admitting to killing four government employees, it seemed like an open-and-shut case in a state where the death penalty remains common.

But on Friday, three jurors shocked the legal community here by failing to agree with nine others on a death sentence and therefore, under Georgia law, sparing Mr. Nichols from execution. Without a unanimous sentence from the jury, a judge instead gave him 11 life sentences, plus 485 years in prison without parole.

Now, just days after the decision, Georgia legislators have began lining up to introduce bills eliminating the requirement that juries be unanimous for a death sentence. Hard-on-crime lawmakers have long favored easier rules on death sentencing, but the Nichols sentence has given new urgency to their cause.

“Unfortunately, you have people who say they’re willing to consider the death penalty, but when they get on a jury, it becomes clear that they’re actually death penalty opponents,” said Representative Barry A. Fleming, a Harlem Republican who twice sponsored efforts to revoke the unanimity requirement. Most recently, the proposal died in the State Senate in March.

Jurors in the Nichols trial reported that one juror was so opposed to the death penalty that she plugged her ears with earphones and solved a crossword puzzle during the sentencing phase, said Paul Howard, the district attorney of Fulton County.

Representative David Ralston, a Blue Ridge Republican who is chairman of the House Non-Civil Judiciary Committee, said, “The Nichols case, because it’s so recent and so high profile and the guilt of the defendant is so clear, has provided a great deal of momentum to the supporters of a change.”

Legislators have not decided who will introduce the proposal to end unanimity or how many jurors’ votes it will require for a death sentence, Mr. Ralston said. But if the proposal passes, Georgia will become the only state to allow non-unanimous juries to sentence defendants to death.

The federal government also requires a jury to be unanimous to impose death. (In Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Montana and Nebraska, judges can impose death sentences after a jury issues its recommendation.)

It is not clear, however, that a Georgia proposal can withstand a constitutional challenge. Carol Steiker, a death penalty expert at Harvard Law School, said it could violate the 14th Amendment guarantee of due process and the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Although the Supreme Court allows non-unanimous juries in many cases, Ms. Steiker said, death sentences require the highest standards.

“As the Supreme Court tends to say, ‘Death is different,’ ” she said. “It’s different in severity and it’s different in finality. This case really illustrates one of the problems with states trying to maintain thoughtful and circumscribed death penalty rules. There’s incredible pressure on these legislatures to change the laws at critical moments after high-profile cases.”

Even critics of the death penalty worried about the message sent by Mr. Nichols’s sentence.

“This case shows how arbitrary and irrational the death penalty can be,” said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “People shake their heads when they hear that someone got the death penalty for robbing a 7-Eleven, and Brian Nichols got life in prison for his heinous crimes.”

There may be another opportunity for prosecutors to sentence Mr. Nichols to death. District Attorney Howard has suggested that federal prosecutors could try him for one of the killings because a victim, David Wilhelm, was a United States customs agent. The Justice Department will review the evidence before making any decisions, said Patrick Crosby, a spokesman for the department.

Ever since Mr. Nichols shot four people and led the police on a daylong chase across Atlanta on March 11, 2005, his case has generated tremendous attention, for both the brutality of his crimes and the exhaustiveness of his trial.

The county spent more than $3 million on a 54-count trial featuring 144 witnesses and 1,200 pieces of evidence, and much of that money could have been saved had the prosecution accepted Mr. Nichols’s offer to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life without parole. Mr. Howard scored a victory by convicting Mr. Nichols on all counts, but his primary goal was always a death sentence.

For years, the case’s length and cost have fueled criticisms of Georgia’s public defender system. State Senator Preston W. Smith, a Rome Republican, accused defense lawyers of spending like “drunken sailors on shore leave” to provide an “O. J. Simpson-style defense, all on the taxpayer’s dime.”

And frustration over the trial’s handling intensified after the sentencing.

Mr. Dieter, of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the case’s outcome demonstrated the growing difficulty of achieving a death sentence, even in the South. Across the country, death sentences have declined steadily over the past decade, to 115 in 2007 from 306 in 1998.

This downward trend reflects the public’s distrust of the death penalty and the increased reliance on the life-without-parole sentencing option, said Stephen B. Bright, a lecturer at Yale Law School and director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who opposes the death penalty.

“To get 12 people to decide to kill somebody is a difficult undertaking,” Mr. Bright said. “People are overwhelmingly in favor of the death penalty when the Gallup poll calls. But when you ask them in a courtroom to actually impose the death penalty, a lot of people feel very uncomfortable.”

Adam Liptak contributed reporting from Washington.

    In Georgia, Push to End Unanimity for Execution, NYT, 17.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/us/17death.html

Op-Ed Contributor

State of Shame

December 10, 2008
The New York Times
By SCOTT TUROW

Chicago

HERE in Chicago, where we are accustomed to news that challenges the thresholds of belief, we awoke Tuesday to find that our governor, Rod Blagojevich, had become the second Illinois chief executive in a row to be subjected to criminal charges.

The 76-page criminal complaint implies that Mr. Blagojevich was such an inveterate schemer that despite being the obvious target of a three-year federal grand jury investigation into trading state jobs and contracts for campaign contributions, he had to be taken out of his house in handcuffs to prevent him from selling off the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

Even by Chicago’s picaresque standards, Tuesday’s developments are mind-boggling, even more so to a former federal prosecutor like me with an understanding of some of the nuances of the federal criminal justice system. The most worrisome element is that Mr. Blagojevich’s shameless behavior seems to have put Chicago’s United States attorney, the estimable Patrick Fitzgerald, into the unenviable position of having to bring a case before he was ready.

Mr. Fitzgerald has lived by the Machiavellian motto that if you shoot at the king, you had better kill the king. Mr. Fitzgerald’s highest-profile prosecutions — like those of I. Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and of Mr. Blagojevich’s predecessor as governor, George Ryan — have been assembled methodically, with an almost obsessive desire to tie down evidentiary details before charges are returned.

Furthermore, Mr. Fitzgerald has a history of trying not to use the justice system to pre-empt the operation of other democratic institutions. Thus, despite a more than five-year investigation, the Ryan indictment was withheld until after the governor left office in 2003, and Mr. Fitzgerald did not oppose a defense request to schedule Mr. Libby’s perjury and obstruction justice trial after the 2006 midterm elections.

Undoubtedly one of the events Patrick Fitzgerald has no desire to influence is his own possible reappointment as United States attorney for four more years (all United States attorneys can be replaced by the incoming administration). Mr. Fitzgerald’s effectiveness as a prosecutor is unquestioned, and the state’s senior senator, the Democrat Dick Durbin, has said Mr. Fitzgerald can stay in the job if he wants to.

But the Justice Department may have other thoughts. Mr. Fitzgerald has held the job since October 2001, some may argue that a position with such extraordinary discretionary powers should not lay in the same hands for 12 years.

Moreover, Mr. Fitzgerald’s bare-knuckle methods have rankled many in the Chicago bar. For example, he got George Ryan’s chief of staff, Scott Fawell, to testify against his former boss by threatening to imprison Mr. Fawell’s girlfriend for perjury.

In his news conference Tuesday, Mr. Fitzgerald indicated that he hadn’t planned to indict Governor Blagojevich until next spring, meaning that the prosecutor was going to wait until his own fate was decided. Instead, with wiretap evidence piling up that showed that Mr. Blagojevich was intent on selling the Obama seat in exchange for a substantial personal benefit, like a high-paying job for himself or his wife, Mr. Fitzgerald was forced to make the arrest. He decided that he could not even wait for the grand jury investigating Mr. Blagojevich to meet on Thursday and indict him.

Bypassing the grand jury and proceeding through a criminal complaint instead effectively puts the case against Mr. Blagojevich on the express route. Mr. Fitzgerald will now have only 20 days to either give the governor a preliminary hearing — which would amount to free discovery for his defense lawyer — or return an indictment. Given Mr. Fitzgerald’s frank appeal for information from the public at his news conference, it’s obvious that his case is not fully buttoned up, and that Mr. Blagojevich forced the prosecutor’s hand.

All of this news comes with personal chagrin for me because I was Governor Blagojevich’s first appointment to the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission, a body created his first year in office. (For the record, I have never made a campaign donation to him.) The commission judges ethics complaints against state officials, supervises ethics instruction, and tries to carry out an overall mandate to improve the ethical climate in Illinois.

Ethics reform in Illinois is often regarded as an oxymoron, and I admit that the commission’s arduous efforts to strengthen our ethics laws have met with little success. Speaking solely for myself, I hope the governor’s arrest galvanizes public outrage and at last speeds reform.

One change that is obviously indispensable is overhauling the campaign contribution laws in Illinois, where there are literally no limits on political donations — neither how big they can be or who can give them. The lone exception is a law, passed over a Blagojevich veto, that takes effect Jan. 1, prohibiting large state contractors from donating to the executive officer who gave them the business. Otherwise, anybody — union officials, regulated industries, corporations, lobbyists — can throw as much money as they like at Illinois politicians.

This astonishing state of affairs persists 32 years after the Supreme Court, in Buckley v. Valeo, recognized “the actuality and appearance of corruption resulting from large individual financial contributions” in approving limits on such donations to candidates for federal office. One can only hope that even in Illinois we are too ashamed now to tolerate business as usual.
 

Scott Turow is writing a sequel to his novel “Presumed Innocent.”

    State of Shame, NYT, 10.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10turow.html

A Portrait of a Politician:

Vengeful and Profane

December 10, 2008
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

CHICAGO — Little in Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich’s background prepared the people of Illinois for the man who was revealed in the criminal complaint that dropped like a bombshell here on Tuesday. Delusional, narcissistic, vengeful and profane, Mr. Blagojevich as portrayed by federal prosecutors shocked even his most ardent detractors.

“I almost fell over,” said Cindi Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform and a frequent critic of the governor. “I was speechless and sickened. In all of the millions of indictments I’ve read over the last years, I can’t remember anything as vile as this.”

Mike Jacobs, a Democratic state senator and former friend of the governor, suggested that Mr. Blagojevich may have lost his grip on reality.

“I’m not sure he’s playing with a full deck anymore,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I think he brought a lot of this on himself. He’s so gifted, but so flawed in a number of fundamental areas. It’s like he dared the feds to come get him.”

Drama and suspicion have long surrounded Mr. Blagojevich, a 51-year-old Democrat known locally for his quirky love of Elvis and a big black signature hairstyle of his own. Though he ran for office as a reformer, he has been embroiled for years in a federal investigation into hiring fraud that included multiple departments under his purview.

More recently, his reputation was left badly damaged after the corruption trial of the political fund-raiser Antoin Rezko, who was convicted in June of fraud and bribery among other charges. Mr. Blagojevich’s name and administration surfaced again and again during Mr. Rezko’s highly publicized trial in Chicago. The governor’s approval rating, according to The Chicago Tribune, had sunk to 13 percent.

Yet, despite what looked like his lead role over many years in a political theater of the absurdly corrupt, Mr. Blagojevich, the seemingly earnest son of a Serbian steelworker, was not charged with any wrongdoing. Rumors swirled, and denials were issued.

Tuesday changed all that. It was not simply the extortion and venality with which he was charged that left mouths gaping, but the ruthlessness and grandiosity revealed in the federal wiretap transcripts, even as he knew he was being investigated.

“You might have thought in that environment that pay to play would slow down,” the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said at a news conference announcing the charges. “The opposite happened: it sped up. Governor Blagojevich and others were working furiously to get as much money from contractors, shaking them down, pay to play, before the end of the year.”

In the words of Dick W. Simpson, head of the political science department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a former city alderman: “It’s over the top, even for the governor.”

Ms. Canary, the reform advocate, said she was trying to figure out the pathology that might explain such actions because they are not part of the classic style of Chicago corruption.

“He was raised in the old Chicago ward system where the most important principle is loyalty,” she said. “It’s about protecting one another, spreading perks, and earning personal power. It’s not about huge personal enrichment.”

But that, according to the 76-page criminal complaint, seems to be exactly what Mr. Blagojevich, who cast himself as a man of the people, was after.

Whatever his current motivation, he came into office with a very different persona. As a young congressman representing the North Side of Chicago, Mr. Blagojevich was pegged as a rising star with a populist touch. Undistinguished as a lawmaker but with proven likability in and out of Chicago, he seemed hellbent on pushing reform and cleaning house in a state with an embarrassingly overt culture of political corruption.

Running on a do-good theme as a candidate of change, he swept into the governor’s office earlier this decade mainly on promises that he would be different, that he would restore integrity to the governor’s office after the previous chief executive, George Ryan, was sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison for racketeering and fraud.

“Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Illinois has voted for change,” he told a crowd at his victory party on election night in 2002.

Back then, it was not a secret that Mr. Blagojevich had big dreams for himself that included the White House. The federal complaint suggested that he was disenchanted with being “stuck” as governor, and had his eyes still trained on the presidency — in 2016, since 2008 was a lost cause.

Kent Redfield, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said Mr. Blagojevich had clearly come into office believing he was destined for bigger things, and may have been tripped up by that ambition.

“The combination of arrogance and stupidity that would prompt him to continue in these types of behaviors is just stunning,” Dr. Redfield said. “There’s no feedback loop or reality check.”

Mr. Blagojevich had grown increasingly isolated in recent years, particularly from his own state’s Legislature and even from his father-in-law, Dick Mell, a powerful longtime Chicago alderman who showed him the political ropes as a younger man.

The governor was rarely seen around his offices in Chicago and Springfield, preferring instead to spend time at home on the North Side.

“I believe he became a prisoner of his own home,” Mr. Jacobs said.

Dr. Redfield said he had little sympathy for a man who regarded “the state of Illinois like it’s a big Chicago ward, where a U.S. Senate seat is like granting a zoning variance or liquor license.”

He added: “The damage to the state, it’s going to take a long time to dig out.”

    A Portrait of a Politician: Vengeful and Profane, NYT, 10.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/us/10blago.html

Governor Is Held

in Inquiry Into Filling Obama’s Seat

December 9, 2008
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was arrested by federal authorities on Tuesday morning and charged with corruption, including an allegation that he conspired to profit from his authority to appoint President-elect Barack Obama’s successor in the United States Senate, prosecutors said.

As Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat, mulled the Senate appointment, prosecutors say, he discussed gaining “a substantial salary” at a nonprofit foundation or organization connected to labor unions, placing his wife on corporate boards where she might earn as much as $150,000 a year and trying to gain promises of campaign money, or even a cabinet post or ambassadorship, for himself.

A 76-page affidavit from the United States Attorney’s office in the Northern District of Illinois says Mr. Blagojevich (pronounced bluh-GOY-uh-vich) was heard on wiretaps over the last month planning to “sell or trade Illinois’ United States Senate seat vacated by Pres-elect Barack Obama for financial and personal benefits for himself and his wife.”

The charges are part of a five-year investigation into public corruption and allegations of “pay to play” deals in the clubby world of Illinois politics. Federal authorities said Mr. Blagojevich’s chief of staff, John Harris, was also indicted on Tuesday. Both men are expected to appear in federal court for the first time later Tuesday.

Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat in his second term who came into office in 2002, portrayed himself as a reformer after the one-term of the former governor, George Ryan, who was convicted of racketeering and fraud in 2006.

For more than a year, members of Mr. Blagojevich’s administration have been under investigation. But few here have imagined that the decision on replacing Mr. Obama might have resulted in criminal charges.

In addition to the charges related to Mr. Obama’s Senate seat, Mr. Blagojevich is accused of crimes related to past behavior. As part of the charges, he is accused, prosecutors say, of working to gain benefits for himself, his family and his campaign fund in exchange for appointments to state boards and commissions.

Under Illinois law, Mr. Blagojevich has sole authority to fill the seat being vacated by Mr. Obama, who was elected to the Senate in 2004.

According to the indictment, while talking on the telephone about the Senate seat replacement with his chief of staff and an adviser, Mr. Blagojevich said he needed to consider his family and their financial struggles. “I want to make money,” he said, according to prosecutors. He then added, they allege, that he wanted to make $250,000 to $300,000 a year.

In a release, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, said Mr. Blagojevich “put a for sale sign on the naming of a United States Senator.”

Mr. Blagojevich even contemplated stepping into the Senate himself, prosecutors said.

“I’m going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain,” Mr. Blagojevich said in a recorded conversation with an adviser, according to the affidavit. “You hear what I’m saying. And if I don’t get what I want and I’m not satisfied with it, then I’ll just take the Senate seat myself.”

According to the affidavit from prosecutors, Mr. Blagojevich told an adviser last week that he might “get some (money) upfront, maybe” from one of the candidates hoping to replace Mr. Obama. That person was identified only as “Candidate 5.”

In an earlier recorded conversation, prosecutors say, Mr. Blagojevich said he was approached by an associate of “Candidate 5” with an offer of $500,000 in exchange for the Senate seat.

The authorities also say Mr. Blagojevich threatened to withhold state assistance from the Tribune Company, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, which filed for bankruptcy on Monday. According to the authorities, Mr. Blagojevich wanted members of the Tribune’s editorial board, who had criticized him, to be fired before he extended any state assistance.

An official at the governor’s office had no immediate comment on Tuesday. A telephone message left at Mr. Obama’s transition office was not immediately returned.
 

Jack Healy contributed from New York.

    Governor Is Held in Inquiry Into Filling Obama’s Seat, NYT, 9.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/us/politics/10Illinois.html?hp

Governors Urge Obama to Help The Poor, Boost Economy

December 2, 2008
Filed at 1:03 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - U.S. state governors urged President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday to pump money into infrastructure and help support the poor as a sinking economy hits state budgets hard.

Obama, who takes over from President George W. Bush on January 20, pledged to involve states in his plans to tackle the U.S. recession and create or save 2.5 million jobs.

The president-elect has spent much of the time since his November 4 victory over Republican John McCain forming his economic team and advocating a massive new stimulus package.

"I'm not simply asking the nation's governors to help implement our economic recovery plan, I'm going to be interested in having you help draft and shape that economic plan," Obama told a meeting that included Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate.

"I'm going to listen to you, especially when we disagree because one of the things that has served me well in my career is discovering that I don't know everything," Obama said.

The meeting came the day after the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed that the United States had entered recession in December 2007. The downturn, which many economists expect to persist through the middle of the next year, is already third-longest since the Great Depression.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, touted as a possible energy secretary in the Obama administration, opened the meeting by pressing for Congress to extend unemployment benefits and increase food stamp availability.

"Those are things that don't go to us as governors, don't go to our budgets but help our citizens," he said.

Rendell said on Monday governors would ask for $136 billion in infrastructure funds to stimulate the economy immediately and cover health care for the poor.

Obama acknowledged that, unlike the federal government, U.S. states had to balance their budgets. He said immediate measures were needed to help deal with the crisis.

"Forty-one of the states that are represented here are likely to face budget shortfalls this year or next, forcing you to choose between reining in spending and raising taxes," Obama said. "To solve this crisis and to ease the burden on our states, we need action and we need action swiftly."

Nearly all 50 governors attended, including California's Arnold Schwarzenegger, who on Monday declared a fiscal emergency and called lawmakers into a special session to tackle a widening budget gap.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)

(additional reporting by Deborah Charles and Lisa Lambert)

    Governors Urge Obama to Help The Poor, Boost Economy, NYT, 2.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/washington/politics-us-usa-obama.html

Some See Big Problem in Wisconsin Drinking

November 16, 2008
The New York Times
By DIRK JOHNSON

EDGERTON, Wis. — When a 15-year-old comes into Wile-e’s bar looking for a cold beer, the bartender, Mike Whaley, is happy to serve it up — as long as a parent is there to give permission.

“If they’re 15, 16, 17, it’s fine if they want to sit down and have a few beers,” said Mr. Whaley, who owns the tavern in this small town in southern Wisconsin.

While it might raise some eyebrows in most of America, it is perfectly legal in Wisconsin. Minors can drink alcohol in a bar or restaurant in Wisconsin if they are accompanied by a parent or legal guardian who gives consent. While there is no state law setting a minimum age, bartenders can use their discretion in deciding whom to serve.

When it comes to drinking, it seems, no state keeps pace with Wisconsin. This state, long famous for its breweries, has led the nation in binge drinking in every year since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began its surveys on the problem more than a decade ago. Binge drinking is defined as five drinks in a sitting for a man, four for a woman.

People in Wisconsin are more likely than anywhere else to drive drunk, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The state has among the highest incidence of drunken driving deaths in the United States.

Now some Wisconsin health officials and civic leaders are calling for the state to sober up. A coalition called All-Wisconsin Alcohol Risk Education started a campaign last week to push for tougher drunken driving laws, an increase in screening for alcohol abuse at health clinics and a greater awareness of drinking problems generally.

The group, led by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, criticized the state as having lenient alcohol laws and assailed a mindset that accepts, even celebrates, getting drunk.

“Our goal is to dramatically change the laws, culture and behaviors in Wisconsin,” said Dr. Robert N. Golden, the dean of the medical school, calling the state “an island of excessive consumption.” He said state agencies would use a $12.6 million federal grant to step up screening, intervention and referral services at 20 locations around Wisconsin.

The campaign comes after a series in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel titled “Wasted in Wisconsin,” which chronicled the prodigious imbibing among residents of the state, as well as the state’s reluctance to crack down on alcohol abuse.

Drunken drivers in Wisconsin are not charged with a felony until they have been arrested a fifth time. Wisconsin law prohibits sobriety checks by the police, a common practice in other states.

“People are dying,” the newspaper exclaimed in an editorial, “and alcohol is the cause.”

Wisconsin has long been famous for making and drinking beer. Going back to the 1800s, almost every town in the state had its own brewery. Milwaukee was the home of Miller, Pabst and Schlitz. Now Miller is the only big brewery in the city.

Most people in Wisconsin say the beer-drinking traditions reflect the customs of German immigrants, passed down generations. More than 40 percent of Wisconsin residents can trace their ancestry to Germany. Some experts, though, are skeptical of the ethnic explanation. It has been a very long time, after all, since German was spoken in the beer halls of Wisconsin.

Whatever the reason, plenty of Wisconsin people say they need to make no apologies for their fondness for drinking.

“I work 70, 80 hours a week, and sometimes I just want to relax,” said Luke Gersich, 31, an engineering technician, who drank a Miller as he watched the Monday Night Football game at Wile-e’s tavern. On a weeknight, he said he might drink seven or eight beers. On a weekend, it might be closer to 12.

In Wisconsin, people often say, there is always a bar around the next corner. But drinking is scarcely limited to taverns. A Friday fish fry at a Wisconsin church will almost surely include beer. The state counts some 5,000 holders of liquor licenses, the most per capita of any state, said Peter Madland, the executive director of the Tavern League of Wisconsin.

“We’re not ashamed of it,” Mr. Madland said. He said anti-alcohol campaigns were efforts to “demonize” people who simply liked to kick back and relax with some drinks.

“It’s gotten to the point where people are afraid to have a couple of beers after work and drive home, for fear they’ll be labeled a criminal,” he said. “At lunch, people are afraid if they order a beer someone will think they have a drinking problem.”

But the drinkers have typically had plenty of advocates in the State Legislature. State Representative Marlin Schneider, for example, sees sobriety checkpoints as an intrusion on Constitutional rights of due process.

As for allowing minors to drink in bars with their parents, Mr. Schneider said the law simply allowed for parents to educate and supervise the youthful drinking. “If they’re going to drink anyhow,” said Mr. Schneider, Democrat of Wisconsin Rapids, “it’s better to do it with the parents than to sneak around.”

Technically speaking, the sale is between the bartender and the parent or legal guardian, who then gives the drink to the minor. The bartender has the discretion to decide whether the minor can drink in the establishment.

Before he owned Wile-e’s, Mr. Whaley said there were some cases where he had to say no to a parent. “I’ve had situations where a parent was going to buy drinks for a kid who looked 8 or 10 years old,” he said, “and I had to say, ‘That’s a no-go.’ ”

He also has a rule in his tavern that under-age drinkers must leave by 9 p.m. “When it gets later in the night, people don’t want a bunch of kids running around,” he said.

One recent night, a lanky, blond-haired 17-year-old boy shot pool at the bar with his dad. Both were drinking soda.

In Mr. Whaley’s view, the bar can be a suitable place for families to gather, especially when the beloved Green Bay Packers are on the television. “On game days, a buddy of mine will come to the bar with his 2-year-old, his 8-year-old and his 10-year-old,” Mr. Whaley said. “He might get a little drunk. But his wife just has a few cocktails. It’s no big deal. Everybody has a good time.”

    Some See Big Problem in Wisconsin Drinking, NYT, 16.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/us/16wisconsin.html?hp

Economy Is Only Issue for Michigan Governor

November 15, 2008
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and SUSAN SAULNY

LANSING, Mich. — This is what a day looks like for Jennifer M. Granholm, the governor of Michigan, the state that sits, miserably, at the leading edge of the nation’s economic crisis.

Morning: Rev up government workers and ministers at a huge conference in Detroit to cope with expanding signs of poverty. Afternoon: Tell a room crushed with reporters here, in the state capital, why a federal bailout is essential for the Big Three automakers, who are also, of course, residents of her state. Evening: Pack for Israel and Jordan, where Ms. Granholm hopes to persuade companies that work with wireless electricity, solar energy and electric cars to bring their jobs to Michigan.

Whatever else Ms. Granholm, a Democrat in her second term, might once have dreamed of tackling as a governor (she barely seems to recall other realms of aspiration now), the economy is nearly all she has found herself thinking about, talking about, fighting about over the last six years. And Michigan, which has been hemorrhaging jobs since before 2001 and was once mainly derided in the rest of the nation as a “single-state recession,” now looks like an ominous sketch of just how bad things may get.

“This has been six straight years of jobs, jobs, jobs,” Ms. Granholm said, punctuating the word with three somber claps at her office table. Despite scathing critiques from some here who say she has failed to turn around Michigan’s woes, Ms. Granholm said in an interview that she still believed that her efforts to remake the state’s economy — in part by luring jobs that make something other than cars — would eventually overcome the steady stream of vanishing jobs.

“We were hoping it was going to be in 2009 where we’d see the balance tip, but with this financial meltdown and the challenges now in the auto industry obviously, I’m not sure whether that’s going to happen,” she said. “Probably not. But we’re going to still hammer away at it.”

She finds herself in the national spotlight more than ever. She is loudly pushing for the auto industry rescue while Michigan’s Congressional delegation works votes on Capitol Hill. President-elect Barack Obama has put her on his transition economic advisory board (an appointment her strongest critics here deride as ludicrous, akin to putting a tobacco executive on a health board).

Ms. Granholm, who played Sarah Palin in Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s warm-ups for the vice-presidential debate and who is barred by term limits from seeking re-election in 2010, has been mentioned as someone Mr. Obama may appoint to his cabinet. It is a notion Ms. Granholm — long a Bush administration critic for what she describes as inconsistent enforcement of trade pacts and a lack of manufacturing policy — gently dismisses: “I really want to be governor when I have a partner in the White House.”

Her critics seem dismayed by the speculation. They blame her and the state’s business regulations and taxes, at least partly, for Michigan’s long list of dismal rankings among the states (No. 2 in unemployment; No. 5 in foreclosure starts; No. 51, including the District of Columbia, in attracting new residents). The governor’s approval ratings dropped to slightly less than 50 percent favorable last month from a high of near 70 percent in 2003.

“I fear if she has the president’s ear,” said Michael D. LaFaive, director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research group in Midland, Mich., that advocates a free market. “There’s a reason people are fleeing the state, and it has much to do with the bad public policies this state has embraced over the last 6 to 12 years.”

But Ms. Granholm’s supporters say she has done all she could, given gloomy times brought on long before she arrived by monumental changes in the nation’s manufacturing, and, most of all, in the auto industry. As Ms. Granholm sees it, the state has responded by revamping just about everything — taxes, education, even the sorts of businesses it is seeking.

In her constant courting of companies in the United States and overseas, Ms. Granholm said she had focused on bringing home businesses that work with alternative energy (like wind turbines), domestic security (a field auto suppliers might easily move into), advanced manufacturing (like robotics) and life sciences.

The state has recently enacted a tougher, college-preparatory-style curriculum in its high schools. Its “No Worker Left Behind” retraining program depends on what jobs local employers say they actually need to fill. And this year, it began offering incentives to moviemakers in the hopes of building a “creative economy,” a concept, Ms. Granholm says, “we haven’t necessarily had since Motown days.”

In all of this, her efforts have brought more than 120,800 new jobs to the state since she took office in 2003, her office says. (Her staff noted those “direct” jobs were estimated to have brought two to three times as many new “indirect” jobs that cropped up around the others, and said state efforts had helped “retain” 233,000 jobs from companies that had hinted of leaving Michigan.)

Still, net losses since mid-2000 (and just for manufacturing jobs, since 1999) swamp the picture. Since June 2000, the state’s net job loss was more than 500,000; since Ms. Granholm took office, the net loss was 281,500.

“Sometimes leadership is planting trees under whose shade you’ll never sit,” she said. “It may not happen fully till after I’m gone. But I know that the steps we’re taking are the right steps.”

Jennifer Mulhern Granholm (she took the last name of her husband, Daniel, as her middle name and he did the same with her last name), 49, was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. She briefly considered an acting career and was once a contestant on “The Dating Game,” and graduated from University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Law School. Eventually, she moved to Michigan. A former prosecutor, she was elected Michigan’s attorney general in 1998, then became the state’s first woman to be elected governor four years later. She has three children.

Even her critics praise Ms. Granholm’s political skills, her engaging speaking style, her ability to make even her most vocal opponents in the Legislature admit that they like her. But they say she started off as a nearly untested policy maker trying to solve an economic problem that would have challenged someone with far more experience.

“I think she’s a good politician, but at the same time, she’s not necessarily a great decision maker,” said Saul Anuzis, the state Republican Party chairman.

But Mark Schauer, the State Senate’s Democratic leader who was elected this month to Congress, pointed to a “hostile” Legislature — both chambers were controlled by Republicans until 2006 (and the Senate still is) — for a “lack of urgency” despite Ms. Granholm’s “focus and tenacity” on the economy.

In 2007, a contentious standoff over how to solve a more than $1.5 billion deficit in the state budget dragged on for months, finally ending in the face of a government shutdown and with tax increases — deeply difficult, Ms. Granholm said, but unavoidable.

This year, there were more distractions: For months, a scandal enveloped Kwame M. Kilpatrick, then the mayor of Detroit. Eventually, as Ms. Granholm began proceedings to determine if he should be removed, Mr. Kilpatrick resigned and pleaded guilty to felony charges — but not, she said, before more economic damage had been done, with conventions canceled and businesses not wanting to move to Detroit. “One crisis at a time,” she said in the interview.

For now, all eyes here are on whether Congress will provide $25 billion in emergency aid to the automakers, and whether lawmakers will do it soon enough, before some industry experts fear one of the Big Three may collapse. The mere possibility makes Ms. Granholm wince. The likely result, she said, would be catastrophic on residents, so many of whom work in the industry and all its offshoots.

“It would be such a huge, huge strain on our safety net,” she said. “It would be of double Katrina-like proportions. We would absolutely need assistance.”

But she said she felt confident that the aid would be granted. Still, she said, Michigan is a cautionary tale against putting a state’s entire hopes in a single industry.

“Now, we love our auto industry,” she said. “But if we had worked harder on diversifying this economy long ago, then if one of the legs of the stool starts to get wobbly, at least you’ve got three other legs to stand on.”

Monica Davey reported from Lansing, and Susan Saulny from Detroit.

    Economy Is Only Issue for Michigan Governor, NYT, 15.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/15granholm.html?hp

No U.S. Prostitution Charges for Spitzer

November 7, 2008
The New York Times
By DANNY HAKIM and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer will not face criminal charges for patronizing a high-priced prostitution ring, federal prosecutors announced on Thursday.

The announcement, a five-paragraph statement from Michael J. Garcia, the United States attorney in Manhattan, ended almost eight months of uncertainty for the disgraced governor, whose lawyers had been quietly making their case to the country’s most prominent prosecutor’s office that he ought not be charged. And it ended the possibility that Mr. Spitzer, once an aggressive prosecutor himself, would have his private life explored in a public criminal case.

Mr. Spitzer resigned as governor in March, two days after The New York Times reported that he had been a customer of the Emperor’s Club V.I.P., a prostitution service that charged as much as $5,500 an hour.

Mr. Garcia said in the statement that his office had found that “on multiple occasions, Mr. Spitzer arranged for women to travel from one state to another state to engage in prostitution.” But the prosecutors found no evidence that Mr. Spitzer had used public money or campaign funds to pay for his encounters with prostitutes, he said.

“We have determined that there is insufficient evidence to bring charges against Mr. Spitzer,” Mr. Garcia said in the statement. “In light of the policy of the Department of Justice with respect to prostitution offenses and the longstanding practice of this office, as well as Mr. Spitzer’s acceptance of responsibility for his conduct, we have concluded that the public interest would not be further advanced by filing criminal charges in this matter.”

The policy, detailed in the Justice Department’s manual for United States attorneys on how to carry out their duties, advises that unless minors are victims, prosecutions “should generally be limited to persons engaged in commercial prostitution activities.”

While Mr. Spitzer has now been cleared, Yusill Scribner, a spokeswoman for Mr. Garcia’s office, would not say whether the decision not to bring charges signaled an end to the overall investigation, which began late last year and was conducted by the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service.

In a statement released minutes after the United States attorney’s announcement, Mr. Spitzer said: “I appreciate the impartiality and thoroughness of the investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office, and I acknowledge and accept responsibility for the conduct it disclosed.

“I resigned my position as governor because I recognized that conduct was unworthy of an elected official.”

“I once again apologize for my actions,” he said in the statement, “and for the pain and disappointment those actions caused my family and the many people who supported me during my career in public life.”

Mr. Spitzer, reached later on his cellphone, said that he would have no comment beyond the statement. Michele Hirshman, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison who is Mr. Spitzer’s lead counsel, declined comment on Mr. Garcia’s decision through a spokeswoman.

The announcement by Mr. Garcia, a Republican who has served as the United States attorney for the Southern District for three years, comes as he prepares to leave the post for private work.

An announcement in the case, which earlier in the year had drawn criticism from some Democrats who suggested that it was politically motivated, was expected to follow the election, although perhaps not so rapidly.

Several people briefed on the case said that in recent months, Mr. Spitzer’s team of lawyers made several presentations to prosecutors from the Public Corruption unit in Mr. Garcia’s office and their superiors to argue against charges.

The presentations, they said, focused on the defense team’s argument that no campaign money or state funds were involved, that Mr. Spitzer did not illegally structure the transactions to pay the prostitutes, and that charges were not warranted under the Mann Act, which prohibits transporting people across state lines for the purpose of prostitution.

Mr. Spitzer, the square-jawed crusader who promised to bring ethics to Albany, was elected governor in 2006 by a wide margin after eight years as state attorney general. A Democrat, he made his reputation as a prosecutor who tackled white-collar corruption so single-mindedly that people nicknamed him “the sheriff of Wall Street,” and his admirers hoped the State Capitol would be a steppingstone to national office.

But then, after he had been governor for little more than a year, a federal affidavit surfaced that said Mr. Spitzer, identified only as Client 9, had arranged for a rendezvous with a high-priced prostitute in Washington on the night before Valentine’s Day.

The allegation rocked the political world. Mr. Spitzer, a product of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, had seemed so strait-laced. As attorney general, he had overseen a task force that prosecuted a prostitution ring that operated behind corporate fronts and escort services.

Mr. Spitzer, who had reinvented the office of attorney general, struggled to adjust to being governor, frequently warring with members of the Legislature.

“Obviously, he’s yesterday’s news,” Senator George H. Winner Jr., an upstate Republican, said on Thursday. “Perhaps now we don’t have to hear about him in the news anymore.” Mr. Winner added, “He disillusioned an awful lot of people.”

It remains unclear why it took Mr. Garcia’s office nearly eight months to come to its decision, and a spokeswoman for the office would not go beyond the statement released Thursday afternoon.

A lawyer for a woman who booked clients for the prostitution ring said he believed the decision not to charge Mr. Spitzer meant that the government would not press for prison time for his client, Temeka Rachelle Lewis, 32. “It would be plainly inconsistent with the government’s decision today to do otherwise,” said the lawyer, Marc Agnifilo.

Under an agreement with the government that obligated her to testify if prosecutors called her before a federal grand jury, Ms. Lewis pleaded guilty in May to charges of promoting prostitution and money laundering. Her sentencing was scheduled for December, but the government’s lawyers recently said that they wanted to postpone it. No new date has been set.

Michael C. Farkas, who represents Tania Hollander, who worked part time as a booker for the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. and pleaded guilty to a federal prostitution conspiracy charge in August, suggested it was unfair that Mr. Spitzer would face no charges while his client faced possible jail time. Mr. Farkas said Ms. Hollander had played the smallest role of the four people charged.

“Tania Hollander has also ‘accepted responsibility’ for and ‘acknowledged’ her very minor role in this enterprise to the U.S. attorney’s office since the earliest stages of this case,” Mr. Farkas said in an e-mail message. “She has offered her full cooperation as well. Despite these facts, she still faces a jail sentence, while some other more infamous actors in this matter do not. It would be a sad injustice if that were to occur.”

But Murray Richman, the lawyer for Mark Brener, who ran the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. and pleaded guilty in June to prostitution and money laundering charges, took a different view. “I believe that the U.S. attorney’s office acted correctly in the assessment in the facts in the case,” he said.

Don D. Buchwald, a partner in the firm of Kelley Drye & Warren who is the court-appointed lawyer for Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a prostitute Mr. Spitzer met in Washington on Feb. 13, said, “Ashley is pleased that this matter is behind her.”

The former governor has been avoiding publicity while awaiting Mr. Garcia’s decision. There have been few glimpses of Mr. Spitzer and his wife, Silda; a Daily News reporter spotted them recently having breakfast on their wedding anniversary.

He has helped oversee the Manhattan real estate empire of his ailing father, Bernard Spitzer. In mid-September, when he was approached by a reporter outside his father’s Fifth Avenue office, he lamented the federal rescue of the American International Group, the giant insurer, and defended the aggressive steps he had taken to force the ouster of its chairman, Maurice R. Greenberg, in 2005 amid an accounting scandal.

He said the circumstances of his own fall should not diminish his achievements. “I committed my sins, and I’ve paid for them,” he said. Then, referring to A.I.G., he added, “But I was right.”

Friends of the governor say that he has discussed whether to do charity, environmental or free legal work as he rebuilds his life.

“I think this gives him an opportunity to re-sort his public life and to move on,” said Alan Dershowitz, a friend and former law professor of Mr. Spitzer’s. “He was a great political figure who made one mistake and we’re a forgiving country, and the mistake he made was a private mistake.”
 

James Barron, Ralph Blumenthal and Ian Urbina contributed reporting.

    No U.S. Prostitution Charges for Spitzer, NYT, 7.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/nyregion/07spitzer.html?hp

Bans in 3 States on Gay Marriage

November 6, 2008
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY and LAURIE GOODSTEIN

SAN FRANCISCO — A giant rainbow-colored flag in the gay-friendly Castro neighborhood of San Francisco was flying at half-staff on Wednesday as social and religious conservatives celebrated the passage of measures that ban same-sex marriage in California, Florida and Arizona.

In California, where same-sex marriage had been performed since June, the ban had more than 52 percent of the vote, according to figures by the secretary of state, and was projected to win by several Californian news media outlets. Opponents of same-sex marriage won by even bigger margins in Arizona and Florida. Just two years ago, Arizona rejected a similar ban.

The across-the-board sweep, coupled with passage of a measure in Arkansas intended to bar gay men and lesbians from adopting children, was a stunning victory for religious conservatives, who had little else to celebrate on an Election Day that saw Senator John McCain lose and other ballot measures, like efforts to restrict abortion in South Dakota, California and Colorado, rejected.

“It was a great victory,” said the Rev. James Garlow, senior pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego County and a leader of the campaign to pass the California measure, Proposition 8. “We saw the people just rise up.”

The losses devastated supporters of same-sex marriage and ignited a debate about whether the movement to expand the rights of same-sex couples had hit a cultural brick wall, even at a time of another civil rights success, the election of a black president.

Thirty states have now passed bans on same-sex marriage.

Supporters of same-sex marriage in California, where the fight on Tuesday was fiercest, appeared to have been outflanked by the measure’s highly organized backers and, exit polls indicated, hurt by the large turnout among black and Hispanic voters drawn to Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy. Mr. Obama opposes same-sex marriage.

California will still allow same-sex civil unions, but that is not an option in Arizona and Florida. Exit polls in California found that 70 percent of black voters backed the ban. Slightly more than half of Latino voters, who made up almost 20 percent of voters, favored the ban, while 53 percent of whites opposed it.

Julius Turman, a chairman of the Alice B. Toklas L.G.B.T. Democratic Club, a gay political group here, said he called his mother in tears when Mr. Obama won the presidency, only to be crying over the same-sex marriage vote in a different way not much later.

“It is the definition of bittersweet,” Mr. Turman said. “As an African-American, I rejoiced in the symbolism of yesterday. As a gay man, I thought, ‘How can this be happening?’ ”

Proposition 8’s passage left only Massachusetts and Connecticut as states where same-sex marriages are legal, though both Rhode Island and New York will continue to recognize such ceremonies performed elsewhere. Civil unions or domestic partnerships, which carry many of the same rights as marriage, are allowed in a handful of states. More than 40 states now have constitutional bans or laws against same-sex marriages.

On Wednesday, five months of same-sex marriages in California — declared legal by the State Supreme Court in May — appeared to have come to a halt. “This city is no longer marrying people” of the same sex, Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, announced at a grim news conference at City Hall, where hundreds of same-sex couples had rushed to marry in the days and hours leading up to Tuesday’s vote.

The status of those marriages, among 17,000 same-sex unions performed in the state, was left in doubt by the vote. The state’s attorney general, Jerry Brown, reiterated Wednesday that he believed that those marriages would remain valid, but legal skirmishes were expected.

The cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Santa Clara County, as well as several civil rights and gay rights groups, said on Wednesday that they would sue to block the ban.

Some opponents of the proposition were also still holding out slim hopes that a batch of perhaps as many as four million provisional and vote-by-mail ballots would somehow turn the tide.

The victory of the social and religious conservatives came on a core issue that has defined their engagement in politics over the past decade.

The Rev. Joel Hunter, an evangelical pastor in Florida, said many religious conservatives felt more urgency about stopping same-sex marriage than about abortion, another hotly contested issue long locked in a stalemate.

“There is enough of the population that is alarmed at the general breakdown of the family, that has been so inundated with images of homosexual relationships in all of the media,” said Mr. Hunter, who gave the benediction at the Democratic National Convention this year, yet supported the same-sex marriage ban in his state. “It’s almost like it’s obligatory these days to have a homosexual couple in every TV show or every movie.”

Supporters of the bans in California, Arizona and Florida benefited from the donations and volunteers mobilized by a broad array of churches and religious groups from across the ethnic spectrum.

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor in Sacramento and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said the campaign to pass Proposition 8 had begun with white evangelical churches but had spread to more than 1,130 Hispanic churches whose pastors convinced their members that same-sex marriage threatened the traditional family.

“Without the Latino vote,” Mr. Rodriguez said, “Proposition 8 would never have succeeded.”

Frank Schubert, the campaign manager for Protect Marriage, the leading group behind Proposition 8, agreed that minority votes had put the measure over the top, saying that a strategy of working with conservative black pastors and community leaders had paid off.

“It’s a big reason why we won, no doubt about it,” he said.

Proposition 8 was one of the most expensive ballot measures ever waged, with combined spending of more than $75 million. Focus on the Family and other religious conservative groups contributed money to help pass the same-sex marriage measures in all three states.

Forces on both sides viewed California as a critical test of the nation’s acceptance of gay people, who have made remarkable strides in the decades since the 1969 riots in New York at the Stonewall Inn, considered the beginning of the gay rights movement.

Scholars were divided on how large a setback Tuesday’s votes would be for that movement. Andrew Koppelman, a professor of law at Northwestern University and the author of “Same Sex, Different States,” a study of same-sex marriage, said the outcome had a silver lining, namely that it was closer than in previous statewide measures.

A 2000 ballot measure establishing a California state law against same-sex marriage passed with 61 percent of the vote. That law was overturned in May by the State Supreme Court.

In Arizona, where same-sex marriage was already against the law, the victory for Proposition 102, which amends the State Constitution, was met with a shrug by some.

“I think the country was like, ‘Look, you get Obama, call it a day and go home,’ ” said Kyrsten Sinema, a Democratic state representative who led opponents against Proposition 102. “And frankly, I’ll take it.”

Jesse McKinley reported from San Francisco, and Laurie Goodstein from New York.

    Bans in 3 States on Gay Marriage, NYT, 6.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/us/politics/06marriage.html?ref=opinion

California Voters Approve Gay-Marriage Ban

November 5, 2008
Filed at 2:04 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Voters put a stop to same-sex marriage in California, dealing a crushing defeat to gay-rights activists in a state they hoped would be a vanguard, and putting in doubt as many as 18,000 same-sex marriages conducted since a court ruling made them legal this year.

The gay-rights movement had a rough election elsewhere as well Tuesday. Ban-gay-marriage amendments were approved in Arizona and Florida, and Arkansas voters approved a measure banning unmarried couples from serving as adoptive or foster parents. Supporters made clear that gays and lesbians were their main target.

But California, the nation's most populous state, had been the big prize. Spending for and against Proposition 8 reached $74 million, the most expensive social-issues campaign in U.S. history and the most expensive campaign this year outside the race for the White House. Activists on both sides of the issue saw the measure as critical to building momentum for their causes.

''People believe in the institution of marriage,'' Frank Schubert, co-manager of the Yes on 8 campaign said after declaring victory early Wednesday. ''It's one institution that crosses ethnic divides, that crosses partisan divides. ... People have stood up because they care about marriage and they care a great deal.''

With almost all precincts reporting, election returns showed the measure winning with 52 percent. Some provisional and absentee ballots remained to be tallied, but based on trends and the locations of the votes still outstanding, the margin of support in favor of the initiative was secure.

Californians overwhelmingly passed a same-sex marriage ban in 2000, but gay-rights supporters had hoped public opinion on the issue had shifted enough for this year's measure to be rejected.

''We pick ourselves up and trudge on,'' said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. ''There has been enormous movement in favor of full equality in eight short years. That is the direction this is heading, and if it's not today or it's not tomorrow, it will be soon.''

The constitutional amendment limits marriage to heterosexual couples, nullifying the California Supreme Court decision that had made same-sex marriages legal in the state since June.

Similar bans had prevailed in 27 states before Tuesday's elections, but none were in California's situation -- with about 18,000 gay couples already married. The state attorney general, Jerry Brown, has said those marriages will remain valid, although legal challenges are possible.

Elsewhere, voters in Colorado and South Dakota rejected measures that could have led to sweeping bans of abortion, and Washington became only the second state -- after Oregon -- to offer terminally ill people the option of physician-assisted suicide.

A first-of-its-kind measure in Colorado, which was defeated soundly, would have defined life as beginning at conception. Its opponents said the proposal could lead to the outlawing of some types of birth control as well as abortion.

The South Dakota measure would have banned abortions except in cases of rape, incest and serious health threat to the mother. A tougher version, without the rape and incest exceptions, lost in 2006. Anti-abortion activists thought the modifications would win approval, but the margin of defeat was similar, about 55 percent to 45 percent of the vote.

''The lesson here is that Americans, in states across the country, clearly support women's ability to access abortion care without government interference,'' said Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation.

In Washington, voters gave solid approval to an initiative modeled after Oregon's ''Death with Dignity'' law, which allows a terminally ill person to be prescribed lethal medication they can administer to themselves. Since Oregon's law took effect in 1997, more than 340 people -- mostly ailing with cancer -- have used it to end their lives.

The marijuana reform movement won two prized victories, with Massachusetts voters decriminalizing possession of small amounts of the drug and Michigan joining 12 other states in allowing use of pot for medical purposes.

Henceforth, people caught in Massachusetts with an ounce or less of pot will no longer face criminal penalties. Instead, they'll forfeit the marijuana and pay a $100 civil fine.

The Michigan measure will allow severely ill patients to register with the state and legally buy, grow and use small amounts of marijuana to relieve pain, nausea, appetite loss and other symptoms.

Nebraska voters, meanwhile, approved a ban on race- and gender-based affirmative action, similar to measures previously approved in California, Michigan and Washington. Returns in Colorado on a similar measure were too close to call.

Ward Connerly, the California activist-businessman who has led the crusade against affirmative action, said Obama's victory proved his point. ''We have overcome the scourge of race,'' Connerly said.

Energy measures met a mixed fate. In Missouri, voters approved a measure requiring the state's three investor-owned electric utilities to get 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2021. But California voters defeated an even more ambitious measure that would have required the state's utilities to generate half their electricity from windmills, solar systems, geothermal reserves and other renewable sources by 2025.

Two animal-welfare measures passed -- a ban on dog racing in Massachusetts, and a proposition in California that outlaws cramped cages for egg-laying chickens.

Amid deep economic uncertainty, proposals to cut state income taxes were defeated decisively in North Dakota and Massachusetts.

In San Francisco, an eye-catching local measure -- to bar arrests for prostitution -- was soundly rejected. Police and political leaders said it would hamper the fight against sex trafficking. And in San Diego, voters decided to make permanent a ban on alcohol consumption on city beaches.

--------

Associated Press writer Paul Elias in San Francisco contributed to this report.

    California Voters Approve Gay-Marriage Ban, NYT, 5.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Ballot-Measures.html

State Ballots Feature Hot-Button Social Issues

November 5, 2008
Filed at 5:13 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Voters in Colorado and South Dakota rejected ballot measures Tuesday that could have led to sweeping bans of abortion, and Washington became only the second state -- after Oregon -- to offer terminally ill people the option of physician-assisted suicide.

In California, exit polls and partial returns suggested a close race on a high-profile measure that would ban gay marriage -- the first time such a vote has taken place in state where such unions are legal. Three other states seemed headed toward enacting measures that would curtail the rights of same-sex couples.

For the abortion rights movement, it was a day of relief and celebration.

A first-of-its-kind measure in Colorado, which was defeated soundly, would have defined life as beginning at conception. Its opponents said the proposal could lead to the outlawing of some types of birth control as well as abortion.

The South Dakota measure would have banned abortions except in cases of rape, incest and serious health threat to the mother. A tougher version, without the rape and incest exceptions, lost in 2006. Anti-abortion activists thought the modifications would win approval, but the margin of defeat was similar, about 55 percent to 45 percent of the vote.

''The lesson here is that Americans, in states across the country, clearly support women's ability to access abortion care without government interference,'' said Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation.

In Washington, voters gave solid approval to an initiative modeled after Oregon's ''Death with Dignity'' law, which allows a terminally ill person to be prescribed lethal medication they can administer to themselves. Since Oregon's law took effect in 1997, more than 340 people -- mostly ailing with cancer -- have used it to end their lives.

Elsewhere, the marijuana reform movement won two prized victories, with Massachusetts voters decriminalizing possession of small amounts of the drug and Michigan joining 12 other states in allowing use of pot for medical purposes.

Henceforth, people caught in Massachusetts with an ounce or less of pot will no longer face criminal penalties. Instead, they'll forfeit the marijuana and pay a $100 civil fine.

The Michigan measure will allow severely ill patients to register with the state and legally buy, grow and use small amounts of marijuana to relieve pain, nausea, appetite loss and other symptoms.

Of the 153 measures at stake nationwide, the most momentous was the proposed constitutional amendment in California that would limit marriage to heterosexual couples.

Similar measures had prevailed in 27 states before Tuesday's elections, but none were in California's situation -- with thousands of gay couples already married following a state Supreme Court ruling in May.

The opposing sides together raised about $70 million, much of it from out of state, to wage their campaigns. The outcome, either way, will have a huge impact on prospects for spreading same-sex marriage to the 47 states that do not allow it.

Though Democrat Barack Obama won the presidential race in California on his way to wrapping up the White House, the vote on same-sex marriage leaned toward instituting the ban in early returns. A crucial question was how churchgoing black and Hispanic voters -- presumably a pro-Obama constituency -- would vote on the ballot measure.

According to exit polls, blacks were far more likely than whites or Hispanics to support the ban. Age also was a key factor -- the exit polls showed voters under 30 opposing the ban by a 2-to-1 ratio, while most voters 60 and older supported the ban.

Obama opposed the California amendment and endorses the concept of broader rights for same-sex couples. A ban-gay-marriage amendment was approved in Arizona; a similar measure appeared headed for passage in Florida.

Gay rights forces also suffered a loss in Arkansas, where voters approved a measure banning unmarried couples from serving as adoptive or foster parents. Supporters made clear that gays and lesbians were their main target.

Nebraska voters, meanwhile, approved a ban on race- and gender-based affirmative action, similar to measures previously approved in California, Michigan and Washington. Returns in Colorado on a similar measure were too close to call.

Ward Connerly, the California activist-businessman who has led the crusade against affirmative action, said Obama's victory proved his point. ''We have overcome the scourge of race,'' Connerly said.

Energy measures met a mixed fate. In Missouri, voters approved a measure requiring the state's three investor-owned electric utilities to get 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2021. But California voters defeated an even more ambitious measure that would have required the state's utilities to generate half their electricity from windmills, solar systems, geothermal reserves and other renewable sources by 2025.

Two animal-welfare measures passed -- a ban on dog racing in Massachusetts, and a proposition in California that outlaws cramped cages for egg-laying chickens.

Amid deep economic uncertainty, proposals to cut state income taxes were defeated decisively in North Dakota and Massachusetts.

In San Francisco, an eye-catching local measure -- to decriminalize prostitution -- was soundly rejected. Police and political leaders said it would hamper the fight against sex trafficking.

    State Ballots Feature Hot-Button Social Issues, NYT, 5.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Ballot-Measures.html

California Same-Sex Couples Race to Beat Ballot

November 4, 2008
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO — Sharna Fey and Kim Broadbeck have married three times. In 2004, they married in a daze. In 2005, they married on an island. And on Monday, when it really counted under the law, they married in a hurry.

“We’re doing this while we still can,” said Ms. Fey, 44, a life coach who has been with Ms. Broadbeck for 11 years and through two previous same-sex marriage ceremonies, neither recognized as legal. “I mean, trust me, we feel married. But this is a legal response.”

With polls showing the outcome of a ballot measure on Tuesday on outlawing same-sex marriage in California a tossup, couples were not taking any chances on Monday. They showed up early here at City Hall, wearing boutonnieres and blouses and holding hands — and their collective breath.

In West Hollywood, a gay-friendly city in Los Angeles County, John Duran, a city councilman, said he had performed 25 ceremonies since Friday, driving all over Los Angeles County to officiate.

“This is the modern-day version of a shotgun wedding,” he said. “We’re doing as many as we can before tomorrow.”

The rush to the altar was in anticipation of Proposition 8, which would amend the State Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman and end nearly five months of legalized same-sex marriages in the state. The ban, if approved, would take effect Wednesday.

“We’re here in case of what happens tomorrow,” said Michael Levy, who married his partner, Michael Golden, here on Monday. They wore identical tuxedo jackets, ties and beards.

“I’m scared,” Mr. Levy said. “It’s really close.”

Same-sex couples filled the hallway in front of the county clerk’s office here as weddings started at 9 a.m., with dozens of ceremonies scheduled throughout the day and dozens more already booked for Election Day.

Clerks in several other California counties reported a surge in the number of marriage licenses issued, with some offices booked to capacity. San Francisco has issued more than 800 marriage licenses to same-sex couples since Oct. 20 and nearly 5,000 since mid-June.

Elsewhere, couples held ceremonies on beachfronts and in backyards and living rooms.

“We kind of said Proposition 8 was like our version of getting knocked up,” said Benjamin Pither, 28, who married his high school sweetheart, Joseph Greaves, on Sunday at Mr. Greaves’s parents’ house in Santa Rosa. “We both liked the idea of marriage, but we wanted to do it in our own time. But when it looked like Proposition 8 might pass, we realized that we would regret it if we didn’t take the opportunity.”

Some couples traveled from afar to make Monday the big day. Allison and Rose, a lesbian couple from Tampa, Fla., said they had come to San Francisco to marry on the advice of friends who suspect that Florida will pass its own constitutional ban on Tuesday on same-sex marriage. The couple, who said they might relocate if Florida passed its ban, did not want their last names used because of fears that they would face discrimination at home.

“It isn’t like San Francisco,” Rose said.

While defeat of the California ballot measure would probably quell debate — at least for a time — over allowing same-sex unions in the state, it is expected that a victory would lead to a second round of legal wrangling over the validity of the thousands of marriages performed since June, when a State Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriages took effect.

California’s attorney general, Jerry Brown, has said he believes that the marriages will remain valid, but Geoff Kors, the executive director of Equality California, a gay rights group that opposes Proposition 8, said he expected challenges.

“It wouldn’t surprise me that people trying to eliminate constitutional rights would try to annul or divorce people that are married,” said Mr. Kors, who expressed optimism that the ballot measure would fail.

Supporters of the ban say no rights would be infringed by its passage but suggest that the California Supreme Court will “have to deal with the mess that it made” by allowing the marriages in the first place, said Sonja Eddings Brown, a spokeswoman for Protect Marriage, the leading group behind Proposition 8.

In the spring, opponents of same-sex marriage asked the court to stay its decision until the election, but the request was turned down. “They knew Proposition 8 was going to be on the ballot,” Ms. Brown said, “and they decided not to listen to the voice of the people.”

Each side has poured more than $25 million into the fight over Proposition 8, making it one of the most expensive ballot measures ever in a state known for its proclivities for direct democracy. Airwaves across the state have been blanketed in recent weeks with increasingly overheated advertisements, with opponents likening the measure to the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II and supporters suggesting that same-sex marriage would be taught to young schoolchildren.

The most recent Field Poll showed a five-point advantage for opponents of the measure, but backers of Proposition 8 say support for bans on same-sex marriage across the country has been traditionally understated in polls.

In 2000, when California voters approved a law defining marriage as between a man and a woman, a Field Poll just before the election showed that 53 percent of those polled approved the measure. The final tally in favor of the law was 61 percent.

The 2000 law was overturned in May by the State Supreme Court. Hundreds of joyous couples were married on balconies and in atriums throughout San Francisco’s soaring City Hall after the court’s ruling took effect on June 16.

The mood was more subdued Monday, with bureaucracy — “Next, please!” — replacing much of the ebullience of that day. Ms. Fey and Ms. Broadbeck seemed almost to have a touch of same-sex-marriage fatigue. They were among the 4,000 couples that married in San Francisco in 2004, after Mayor Gavin Newsom suddenly ordered the city clerk to marry same-sex couples.

Those marriages were later invalidated by the courts. A year later, Ms. Fey and Ms. Broadbeck married again, in Hawaii, with friends and family in attendance, and “fully seen by those closest to us,” Ms. Fey said. But it was an unofficial ceremony in a state that does not allow same-sex marriage.

So it was that this time around, they had almost forgotten to tie the knot.

“All summer long we were like, ‘Oh yeah, we should do that,’ ” Ms. Fey said. “And then all of the sudden, it was like, ‘Uh oh.’ ”

Paul Ellis, 51, a retail manager in San Francisco, was at City Hall on Monday to witness Mr. Golden and Mr. Levy’s wedding. It was Mr. Ellis’s seventh same-sex marriage in the last five months, he said, attending most of them in the tartan kilt he wore on a muggy Monday, which he regretted.

“You wouldn’t want to wrap six yards of cloth around your hips on a day like this,” he said.

Mr. Ellis had also taken matters into his own hands, getting an online certification as a marriage officiate and presiding over two ceremonies for other gay friends — all ahead of Tuesday’s election.

“At this point,” he said of the ballot measure’s fate, “I think it’s a complete crapshoot.”

Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting from West Hollywood.

    California Same-Sex Couples Race to Beat Ballot, NYT, 4.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/us/04marriage.html?hp

G.O.P. Forced to Defend State Senate After 70 Years of Dominance

November 2, 2008
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

ALBANY — They have sent microfilm clerks and security guards from their desks in the Capitol to the hustings of eastern Long Island and the Buffalo suburbs. They have brought in a dozen outside consultants, including a firm that produced the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry, to cut advertisements and raise money. They have spent millions of dollars to fight for seats that were once safely Republican.

No effort is being spared by New York Republicans in the final days of this election season, which will determine whether they continue to control the State Senate, their only outpost of power in an increasingly Democratic state. Even veterans like Senator Caesar Trunzo — 82 years old and running against the son of a candidate he beat a quarter-century ago — are making eight appearances a day to shake hands and ask for votes.

“We just keep going along, doing what we have to do, and then hope for the best,” Mr. Trunzo said recently as he rushed off to a campaign rally in Patchogue, on Long Island. “It’s so important that we control the New York State Senate.”

Republicans have held a majority in the Senate for all but one of the last 70 years, outlasting governors and presidents, Watergate and Jack Abramoff, seemingly immune to the ebb and flow of national politics. The Senate majority has helped Republicans garner millions of dollars for their campaigns and 10 times that in state aid for their mostly suburban or rural districts. It has been the party’s storehouse of institutional knowledge, the career springboard for generations of politicians and operatives, and the lifeblood of some of Albany’s most powerful lobbyists.

But now the Republican majority is down to a single seat, provoking the most intense, expensive and sweeping campaign in years. Eight Republican seats are being seriously contested, double the number in most recent election years.

“It’s different, because they’re fighting for their survival,” said Michael D. Dawidziak, a Republican consultant. “They haven’t fought for survival in any of their lifetimes.”

The potential loss of the Senate majority is usually mentioned only glancingly on the campaign trail, in veiled references to the need for “balanced government.” But it is the urgent undercurrent to conversations in campaign offices, in the hallways of the Capitol and among Republican activists.

“Our troops, the committeemen, the volunteers — they are very aware of the Albany piece, where they usually are not,” said James P. Domagalski, the Republican chairman of Erie County. “They understand what would happen if we lose the Senate.”

The long tenures of many Republican senators fighting to survive — some came into office in 1972 during President Richard Nixon’s landslide re-election — is a testament to the Senate Republicans’ endurance and agility. But facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a party name damaged by an unpopular administration in Washington, and the chance that Senator Barack Obama’s presidential bid will bring a surge of Democratic voters to the polls, the challenge has never seemed so great.

“This is a national tide,” said Alfonse M. D’Amato, a lobbyist and a former United States senator, who has been a major fund-raiser and booster for State Senate Republicans. “Sometimes the tide comes in.”

Mr. D’Amato said he was convinced that Senate Republicans would hold on this year. And publicly and privately, Republican senators and aides scoff at the suggestion that this will be the year the majority cracks.

“I’m confident we’re going to be victorious, and I’m not thinking about ‘what if,’ ” said Senator Charles J. Fuschillo Jr., of Long Island. “Because we’re not going to have to deal with the ‘what if.’ ”

On the trail, Republicans have used their fund-raising advantage to expand the playing field, devoting hundreds of thousands of dollars to races in which Democrats have shown unexpected weakness, to offset possible Republican losses. On Friday, they sent Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a key ally, to campaign with Senator Serphin R. Maltese of Queens, who is the Democrats’ top target.

In recent weeks, Republicans have aggressively stoked fears that communities upstate and on Long Island would suffer from a Democratic takeover of the Senate, which would leave the governor’s office and both legislative leadership posts in the hands of Democrats from the five boroughs. They are blunt about what is at stake.

“The biggest fear is that if we lose the majority, all funding goes to New York City,” said Mr. Fuschillo.

After a surprising loss in February in an upstate special election, Republicans revamped their campaign committee, bringing on new senior staff members, several with experience on presidential campaigns. Since that race — where much of the television advertising was handled by a firm linked to a former party chairman — the committee has broadly expanded its roster of campaign and advertising consultants, bringing in highly regarded talent from the Beltway.

“We learned from the special that the TV in particular has to be top-notch. It can’t be the same old, same old. You can’t use the same old political tactics,” said Senator Thomas W. Libous, an upstate Republican and a leader of the party’s campaign effort.

Facing an unprecedented number of races, Senate Republicans have devised a buddy system, as it is known internally, to send senators from safe districts to campaign for and advise incumbents in tight races. Party officials say they have also gotten safe incumbents to contribute more money than in the past to their more vulnerable colleagues.

“They now say, ‘Instead of trying to drive up my margins in my district, I should spend that time trying to help one of the weaker guys win his race,’ ” Mr. D’Amato said.

Republicans are also preparing to unveil the kind of technology more familiar from presidential campaigns that have hundred-million-dollar budgets. In several key races on Tuesday — party officials would not say which ones — workers will use BlackBerrys to check off Republican voters as they arrive at polling places and send the lists to a central database, making the party’s turnout operation far more efficient.

In some races, the Republicans have resorted to methods that are lower-tech but no less intensive. In Westchester County, where Republicans are hoping for an upset victory, the Republican candidate, Liz Feld, has been sending handwritten notes to voters to ask for their support.

The loss of the majority, Republicans say, would not only put their districts at a disadvantage in Albany. It could also cripple the party itself. The majority, after all, comes with roughly $85 million in earmark spending and hundreds of extra staff jobs in Albany and in district offices. In most areas of the state, Republican senators sit atop a well-established political food chain, providing patronage jobs, smoothing disputes and running local party organizations.

Vincent F. Liguori, who is active with the Republican committee in Islip, on Long Island, said that having Mr. Trunzo as his senator was “like having my father looking out for me.”

“It’s like they say: To the victor belong the spoils,” he added. “There’s going to be a lot of people looking for work if he loses.”

    G.O.P. Forced to Defend State Senate After 70 Years of Dominance, NYT, 2.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/nyregion/02senate.html

6 Governors Ask Feds for Help for US Automakers

October 30, 2008
Filed at 2:08 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- The governors of six states have sent a letter to federal officials asking that they take ''immediate action'' to help the troubled domestic automakers.

In their letter, the governors of Michigan, Delaware, Kentucky, New York, Ohio and South Dakota remind Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that the domestic automakers are ''particularly challenged'' in the down economy.

They warn that the financial well-being of other major industries and millions of American citizens are ''at risk.''

General Motors Corp. and the owner of Chrysler LLC are in talks to combine the automakers in order to survive, but financing is one of the biggest obstacles. GM has been lobbying in Washington for the federal government to put money into the deal.

    6 Governors Ask Feds for Help for US Automakers, NYT, 30.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-GM-Chrysler-Letter.html

States forced to cut health coverage for poor

28.10.2008
USA Today
By Julie Appleby

Economic troubles are forcing states to scale back safety-net health-coverage programs — even as they brace for more residents who will need help paying for care.

Many cuts affect Medicaid, which pays for health coverage for 50 million low-income adults and children nationwide, including nearly half of all nursing home care. The joint federal-state program is a target because it consumes an average 17% of state budgets — the second-biggest chunk of spending in most states, right behind education.

"Medicaid programs across the U.S. are going to be severely damaged," says Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association. He expects some hospitals nationwide may drop services and some hospitals and nursing homes may lay off employees.

Among the cuts:

• Hawaii this month halted funding for a 7-month-old program aimed at covering all the state's uninsured children.

• South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford must decide by Thursday whether to sign a budget that would slash $160 million in health care, including an 8.1% cut to Medicaid and a 10.8% cut to the Department of Mental Health. Programs to help autistic children, the elderly who need prescription drugs and low-income workers may be hit.

• California in July cut payments to hospitals 10% under its Medicaid program, Medi-Cal. It had planned to restore 5% in March, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called an emergency legislative session Nov. 5 to deal with lower-than-expected revenues.

Health care is a likely target, says Jan Emerson of the California Hospital Association, who expects more hospitals to drop out of Medi-Cal if extra cuts occur. Less than half the state's hospitals currently contract with Medi-Cal. They treat Medi-Cal patients in their ERs, but then transfer them to other hospitals.

• Massachusetts this month cut $293 million from its Medicaid budget, including $40 million from the Cambridge Health Alliance for care it already provided to low-income residents. The alliance, which runs three hospitals and dozens of clinics, says that cut plus other state cuts could total an amount equal to the cost of 650 full-time employees — or 20% of its workforce. "We can't absorb that without some serious re-evaluation of what we do," spokesman Doug Bailey says. "Everything is on the table."

The cuts follow several years of strong budgets and state efforts to bring health coverage to more low-income adults and children.

"When the economy goes down, states have increased pressure (from more uninsured), yet have to curtail plans to broaden coverage," says Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-partisan think tank.

For every 1% jump in unemployment, about 1 million more people enroll in Medicaid, the group found in September.

Lawmakers in at least 27 states are facing budget gaps just months after dealing with some of the largest shortfalls since the recession in 2001, reports the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank. States can only make Medicaid cuts that affect people covered under optional state programs, such as children whose families earn slightly more than federal guidelines require.

"We're expecting budget gaps for the rest of this year and into fiscal 2010 to be about $100 billion," says Elizabeth McNichol, a senior fellow at the center. "Health care gets hit hard when states have to cut back."

    States forced to cut health coverage for poor, UT, 28.10.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-10-28-health-cuts_N.htm

More governments coming to evicted renters' rescue

26 October 2008
USA Today
By Alan Gomez

Governments from California to Ohio are beginning to pass new laws to protect a quiet victim of the nationwide economic slide: renters getting blindsided by foreclosures against their landlords.

The issue made international news this month when a Chicago sheriff temporarily halted all evictions in Cook County to draw attention to the problem.

Governments have been taking notice and are starting to pass and consider laws to protect renters who have no idea their landlords have defaulted on their mortgages until they receive an eviction notice.

"These are the folks who are innocent victims," said Ohio state Rep. Mike Foley, a Cleveland Democrat who is co-sponsoring a bill to help renters. "They're the ones who are paying their rent and the first they hear about the foreclosure is when the sheriff is at the door."

Foreclosures remain a problem around the country.

According to RealtyTrac, a real estate database website, there were 53% more foreclosures in the first eight months of the year than there were over the same period in 2007. At least 589,190 properties were in some stage of foreclosure proceedings as of last week. Of those, about 31% — or 181,569 — were not occupied by the owner, indicating that they are investment properties or rentals.

When Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart halted all evictions this month, he said banks were foreclosing on property owners and obtaining eviction orders for the owners. However, when deputies showed up, they found that renters were living there instead.

Dart resumed evictions last week after meeting with judges to ensure that renters are given the 120-day grace period before moving required under state law.

Others are taking action:

The California Legislature passed a law this summer giving renters 60 days' notice prior to being evicted from their foreclosed property.

In Chicago, an ordinance will go into effect Nov. 5 that requires all tenants to be informed within seven days of the beginning of foreclosure proceedings — a process that can take months and gives renters time to look for a new place.

Groups working outside of government are also helping.

The Cleveland Tenants Organization began sending letters last month to renters once their building was foreclosed, executive director Mike Piepsny said.

Some saw problems with Dart's move. The Illinois Mortgage Bankers Association has said lenders may be unwilling to give out new loans if they aren't certain they can reclaim the property if it goes into foreclosure.

Dustin Hobbs of the California Mortgage Bankers Association said that the group's members have worked with notification requirements for years and that the laws have not stopped banks from giving loans. "The sky hasn't fallen here," Hobbs said.

    More governments coming to evicted renters' rescue, UT, 26.10.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2008-10-26-Evictions_N.htm

Schwarzenegger to Veto Budget and Other Bills

September 17, 2008
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Tuesday that he would veto a long-overdue state budget, and he threatened also to veto hundreds of other pieces of legislation, as the state’s 78-day budget crisis dragged on.

The California Legislature finally passed a $104 billion general fund budget by potentially veto-proof two-thirds majorities early Tuesday morning, after setting a record for tardiness.

But Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said he would not sign it, or very little else, until a “good budget” was passed.

“I say enough is enough,” he said at a news conference in Sacramento. “Californians have been put through this rollercoaster ride too many times.”

In particular, the governor asked for guarantees regarding contributions to a so-called rainy day fund, something he regards as critical to budget reform, which has become central to his second term in office.

Mr. Schwarzenegger said he expected the Legislature to override his veto, but promised to return the favor by sending back most of the laws it passed in the last legislative session. “Every bill will be carefully evaluated, and hundreds of bills will be vetoed,” he said.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said they were prepared to override any budget veto.

“Not getting your way is no reason to veto the state budget,” said Mike Villines, a Republican. “It is disappointing that he would take this unnecessary step that will only prolong our budget stalemate and cause more pain for many Californians.”

Karen Bass, a Democrat and speaker of the state’s Assembly, said a vote to override the governor’s veto could come as early as Wednesday.

Leaders on both sides admitted that the budget that was passed was a disappointment and that lawmakers were likely to face similar problems next year.

“We tried,” Ms. Bass said. “But we weren’t able to do anything better.”

Under the bill, the state would close a $15 billion budget gap with about $9 billion in cuts and additional revenue essentially borrowed from future tax payments. Some tax exemptions, including business losses, would be temporarily suspended, and some loopholes would be closed.

Republicans in the Legislature had refused to consider new taxes desired by Democrats. And because California law requires two-thirds majorities for tax increases, several proposals, including a one-cent increase in the sales tax, were nonstarters.

All of which led to more than a little frustration.

“This is not a budget the Democrats or the governor wanted,” said Don Perata, a Democrat and Senate president pro tem. “It’s a failure. But Republicans had the final say — and they said no.”

Tens of thousands of businesses, from child care to nursing homes, have been missing payments from the state as the crisis dragged on. Mike Danneker, executive director of the Westside Regional Center, a state-financed medical services organization in Culver City, said that his center ran out of money last Friday.

“These guys have been playing with this stuff for 77 days,” Mr. Danneker said. “They should have done this in May.”

While Mr. Schwarzenegger’s veto announcement set the stage for a showdown with the Legislature, some experts said it was likely to be a lonely fight.

“Everybody has the votes to override him, so he doesn’t really matter anymore,” said John Ellwood, professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, “If I was a Democrat or Republican leader, I would say, “What has this guy given me?’ ”

On Tuesday, at least, the governor seemed to be asking the same thing. “They are three months late with the budget” he said. “And this is what we get on the desk.”
 

Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

    Schwarzenegger to Veto Budget and Other Bills, NYT, 17.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/us/17calif.html?hp

States Restore Voting Rights for Ex-Convicts,
but Issue Remains Politically Sensitive

September 14, 2008
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE

Striding across a sweltering strip-mall parking lot with her clipboard in hand, Monica Bell, a community field organizer in Orlando, Fla., was looking for former convicts to add to the state’s voter rolls.

Antonious Benton, a gold-toothed 22-year-old with a silver skull-shaped belt buckle, a laconic smile and a criminal record, was the first person she approached.

“I can’t vote because I got three felonies,” Mr. Benton told Ms. Bell. He had finished a six-month sentence for possession of $600 worth of crack cocaine, he said. But Ms. Bell had good news for him: The Florida Legislature and Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican, changed the rules last year to restore the voting rights of about 112,000 former convicts.

“After you go to prison — you do your time and they still take all your rights away,” Mr. Benton said as he filled out a form to register. “You can’t get a job. You can’t vote. You can’t do nothing even 10 or 20 years later. You don’t feel like a citizen. You don’t even feel human.”

Felony disenfranchisement — often a holdover from exclusionary Jim Crow-era laws like poll taxes and ballot box literacy tests — affects about 5.3 million former and current felons in the United States, according to voting rights groups. But voter registration and advocacy groups say that recent overhauls of these Reconstruction-era laws have loosened enough in some states to make it worth the time to lobby statehouses for more liberal voting restoration processes, and to try to track down former felons in indigent neighborhoods.

“You’re talking about incredible numbers of people out there who now may have had their right to vote restored and don’t even know it,” said Reggie Mitchell, a former voter-registration worker for People for the American Way. In Florida, “we’re talking tens of thousands of people,” he said. “And in the 2000 election, in the state of Florida, 300 people made the difference.”

A loose-knit group of national organizations working to restore voting rights includes the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn (Ms. Bell’s employer); the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and the Brennan Center for Justice.

Two other groups, the Sentencing Project and the American Civil Liberties Union, said they had given briefings to officials for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign about how to register former felons. But the Obama campaign has been reluctant to acknowledge any concerted effort.

An Obama spokesman, Bill Burton, said via e-mail, “We are trying to register voters across the country and follow the state laws wherever we are.”

Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard law professor and senior adviser to the Obama campaign on criminal justice issues, said he had briefed campaign officials about felony disenfranchisement issues and the various and often-confusing state requirements to restore voting rights to former convicts.

Campaign volunteers get briefed on specific state laws governing voting rights restoration in case they come across former felons during general voter registration drives, Mr. Ogletree said, “but it’s not as if the Obama campaign said, ‘Here’s a plan for felony disenfranchisement.’ ”

None of the felony voter registration organizations contacted for this article could recall hearing from Senator John McCain’s campaign. And a campaign spokesman said there had been no effort to reach out to former prisoners specifically.

Last month, Obama campaign workers took down a sign at their headquarters in Pottstown, Pa., that said “Felons can vote,” because it might have sent the wrong message.

“The fear is that it might cost them more votes to be portrayed as the candidate of the felons than it could gain them,” said Anthony C. Thompson, a New York University law professor and Obama campaign adviser. “This is a mistaken belief, in my view, when there are tens of millions of citizens with criminal records.”

In fact, felony voter restoration efforts have received bipartisan support in many states including Alabama, Florida, Indiana and Maryland. Still, surveys have shown that about 70 percent of former convicts lean Democratic, according to Christopher Uggen, a University of Minnesota criminologist who said that had led some to believe that Democrats benefited from felony voter restoration more than did Republicans.

“That’s because of the high rate of incarceration among African-Americans, who have strong Democratic preferences,” Mr. Uggen said, “and because many people who have committed felonies are working class, relatively young, unmarried and in particular individuals with less than a high school education. These are all demographics that traditionally align themselves with the Democrats.”

Muslima Lewis, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida, said: “Really, you’re not having a full participatory democracy if you disenfranchise so many people. It weakens the whole system and, in particular, communities of color.”

All of Us or None, a prisoner-advocacy organization in San Francisco, held a rally last month about restoration of voting rights in California. Also last month, the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition successfully lobbied the Denver County jail system to begin registering felons upon their release.

The A.C.L.U. is also advising lawyers’ groups planning to deploy to polling places in November to enforce the rights of former convicts who have restored their voting privileges.

According to the A.C.L.U. only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners, parolees and probationers to vote. Thirteen states allow parolees and probationers to vote, eight states reinstate probationer voting rights, and 20 states restore voting rights to people who have completed their sentences, although each state has different processes, exceptions and limits on eligibility requirements. Kentucky and Virginia permanently disenfranchise nearly all felons.

Florida’s felony voter registration law divides applicants into three categories based on the seriousness of their crimes: nonviolent criminals, the biggest group, need not apply for restoration of voting rights and just need to re-register. Violent criminals, but not murderers or rapists, must apply to the clemency board. The board either grants those rights immediately or investigates on a case-by-case basis. The most violent criminals are subjected to a more rigorous investigation and must attend a hearing of the clemency board, which meets only four times a year, before their rights can be reinstated.

Despite the state’s liberalization of felony voter procedures, only 9,000 out of a potential 112,000 former convicts in Florida registered to vote in the last year, according to a report last month in The Orlando Sentinel. Part of the reason is that thousands of notifications sent by the state went to the wrong addresses because of poor data and former prisoners’ high mobility.

Fred Schuknecht, the director of administration for the Florida Clemency Board, acknowledged in an interview that there was a backlog of 60,000 former felons who could potentially have their rights restored, but must first be reviewed by the agency. Despite the fact that 3,500 newly released prisoners are added to the caseload every month, the Legislature cut 20 percent of the staff devoted to felony voter restoration cases, Mr. Schuknecht said.

Further, Ms. Bell said that many former convicts shun attention, even if that means abdicating their voting rights.

“You might want them to fill out the registration form, but they have an outstanding warrant,” she said. “And in order to help them, I need to ask what their crimes are, but they might not want to say.”

Cheria Murray, 24, of Orlando, regained voting rights this year, after serving a two-day jail sentence with two years’ probation for grand theft in 2003. Ms. Murray lives in a housing project where, she said, many people had been stripped of their rights because of their records.

Her companion, Duane Miller, 28, recently returned from serving a sentence for illegal firearm possession, and has not applied to reinstate his voting rights.

Ms. Murray said she thought about restoring her voting rights only recently, inspired by the presidential campaign.

“When I saw Barack Obama, that’s when I got excited to get my rights back,” she said. “I wanted to vote for history.”

States Restore Voting Rights for Ex-Convicts, but Issue Remains Politically Sensitive, NYT, 14.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14felony.html