Ill-Tempered Bob Schaffer

All the buzz has been about the temper tantrum Bob Schaffer threw in his interview with journalistic neophyte Jeremy Pelzer at PolitickerCO, posted yesterday.

Pelzer tried to get a question in about Bob's forced abortion problem, and Bob went completely nuts. Read it. It's a fascinating window on the world of Bob Schaffer, who lacked the temperament to be an effective Congressman, and whose ill temper is not going to allow him to get anything done in the U.S. Senate.

Pelzer should post the audio of his interview with Schaffer. It's not that we don't trust Pelzer's transcription skills, just that we believe the medium of print doesn't fully capture the essence of Schaffer's reactions.

Blame the Victim, Kill the Messenger

That was Jack Abramoff's strategy on behalf of his sweatshop owner clients in the Northern Mariana Islands. After taking his $13,000 Jack Abramoff-financed parasailing junket to Saipan, the capital, Bob Schaffer gleefully implemented that strategy in Congress, going so far as to engage in witness intimidation the night before he was to testify at a Sept. 16, 1999 hearing, held in Washington even as most of the city had evacuated as a result of Hurricane Floyd. The witness was an indentured servant who had been rescued from his servitude by a human-rights organization and flown to Washington to share the plight of his fellow guest workers before Congress in hopes that people like Bob Schaffer would have a heart and actually do something. How naive he was, because Shaffer opened fire on him with both barrels.

Today, Schaffer is continuing to read from Jack Abramoff's playbook, attacking human rights champion Wendy Doromal. Today's story, an improvement over past articles in the Rocky Mountain News in that they actually spoke with people other than Dick Wadhams of the Schaffer campaign and Taylor west of the Udall campaign, fails to break much new ground in terms of information, but shines a bright light on Schaffer's strategy and intentions.

Schaffer's orders as a Congressman were to discredit the human rights workers, destroy the credibility of the victims of human rights abuse, and blame the whole thing on Bill Clinton. Today, the strategy is the same--discredit Wendy Doromal, cast aspersion on the victims of forced abortion, and blame the "left wing." Even today, Bob Schaffer continues to carry water for his sweatshop-baron benefactors--the ones who have given Schaffer over $30,000 either directly or via an Abramoff conduit such as the Traditional Values Coalition or disgraced former Rep. Tom DeLay.

Read the Fine Print

We'll reprint the only factual information contained within the hackery spewed forth by Bob Schaffer via his mouthpiece Dick Wadhams as channeled through Rocky Mountain News stenographer Lynn Bartels:

U.S. Senate candidate Mark Udall took $1,500 in contributions from two firms that once employed disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

[skip to the bottom]

In fact, the money came from Abramoff's employers' PACs.

That's right. Nothing to do with Abramoff, Abramoff's lobbying, his clients, his schemes to defraud Indian tribes, or his support for the sweatshops and their associated "free-market" forced abortions.

Two of the largest lawfirms in the world have PACs, and those PACs gave Udall a total of $1,500 during the time that Abramoff was in the employ of the companies associates with the PACs.

Meanwhile, Schaffer accepted thousands in tainted money from the likes of Tom DeLay, to say nothing of the thousands more he took directly from the sweatshop moguls themselves, and then to say nothing of the $13,000 parasailing junket he took on Abramoff's dime. All of this is documented fact. Let's review:



There's nothing in this story that should ever have been reported by Lynn Bartels. Shame on her for not checking her facts.

Fundraising Numbers are In

Mark Udall continues to trounce Bob Schaffer in the fundraising numbers:

Both U.S. Senate candidates surpassed $1 million in donations during the first three months with Udall collecting $1.46 million and Schaffer taking in $1.02 million, the filings said.

Udall got about $250,000 from political action committees, while Schaffer reported almost $400,000 from his part of the joint fundraiser with President Bush in January.

So Udall shows a healthy amount of business support, while almost half of Bob Schaffer's money came from George W. Bush's fundraiser for him.

Sounds about right. Schaffer is more Bush than Bush, which delights only the 1/4 of people who still support Bush, and the business community showed by its pretty overwhelming support of Referendum C in 2005 that the extreme anti-tax agenda of Bob Schaffer and Doug Bruce is bad for business.

Of course all of this money was raised before the news hit about Bob Schaffer's support for forced abortions and preventing people from going to church in one part of America, and his professed support for taking the system that gave rise to those abuses nationwide. It will be interesting to see if the far right of the far right keeps supporting Schaffer now that these facts have come to light.

Schaffer Shocker: New Revelations in Bob Schaffer/Jack Abramoff Scandal Story

And we thought investigative journalism was dead.

Intrepid Denver Post reporter Mike Riley has apparently been a busy bee. He snagged this picture of Schaffer parasailingfact-finding in Saipan. He's managed to blow open Bob Schaffer's ties to Jack Abramoff, and Schaffer has essentially no defense other than to claim what will very likely be disproven, and may have been already:

Opponents "are trying to leave the impression that Bob went gallivanting off to the Mariana Islands with Jack Abramoff, who Bob has never met, never talked to and wasn't even aware was around back then," [Schaffer Campaign Manager] Wadhams said.

But just below that in the article:

At the time, Schaffer's staff also flagged the role of Abramoff's firm in the Marianas trip. In an August 1999 memo, Schaffer was told that travel arrangements to the Mariana Islands had been made by Preston-Gates. Handwritten notes on the agenda point out that a lunch meeting was with several current or former clients of the firm, including the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association and the Western Pacific Economic Council.

How long do you suppose it is before Riley or another intrepid reporter or blogger turns up evidence to refute Wadhams' claims?

But let's keep our eyes on the meaning of this story. As commenter JohnSmith noted on the story:

Schaffer was there, the abuses were well-documented before he went and in the ten years since, and he still thinks it's a "model" system. Either he's still on the take from sweatshop owners in Saipan or he's completely in denial.

This is not a "Big Labor" dispute, this is an ongoing investigation by the federal government under both the Clinton and Bush administrations spanning over ten years, with mountains of documentary evidence. Ignorance is no excuse, so Schaffer's position must either be genuine or paid for. Either way, this story deserves further scrutiny.

Schaffer Schuffle on Immigration

Mike Riley has an interesting piece today's Denver Post further teasing out the phony triangulation on immigration that Schaffer is trying to pull, likely just so he can hang on to what little business support he has.

A couple of weeks ago, Schaffer was unwilling to talk about immigration because he was not ready to stake out a position. Now he's billing himself as to the left of Mark Udall and John McCain on immigration. That may help him with the business community, but it's certainly not going to help him with the base.

The model he says he wants to follow is that of the Northern Mariana Islands. You'll remember that's the place where convicted felon Jack Abramoff, et. al., lobbied to quash an investigation in to the horrible conditions there, to prevent the islands from gaining a Congressional delegate, and to exempt the islands from federal minimum wage laws and workplace safety standards. Says Congressman George Miller:

Let’s remember what they paid for: a protection racket that sheltered a sweatshop industry that systematically exploited tens of thousands of impoverished foreign workers -- mostly Asian women -- who were little better than indentured servants; a sweatshop industry that earned some of the heaviest fines in U.S. history for violating labor laws; an industry repeatedly cited by the Departments of Justice, Interior and other federal agencies. They were defending a corrupt immigration system that regularly approved visas for non-existent jobs, resulting in hundreds of women being forced into the sex trade, including prostitution. [emphasis supplied]

Bob Schaffer in the Post article above:

"The concept of prequalifying foreign workers in their home country under private-sector management is a system that works very well in one place in America," he said of the islands' program. "I think members of Congress ought to be looking at that model and be considering it as a possible basis for a nationwide program."

Some of the reported consequences of the program that Bob Schaffer thinks works so well are sweatshops, virtual slavery, human trafficking, child labor, prostitution, and forced abortion. And now he wants to bring that kind of program here.