Posted November 20, 2017 12:02 am By BOB TIS Smooth Sailin’ SMOOTH SAILIN’: Pin the tail of this problem on your landlord
I will say this for our City Manager, he is a diplomat. We have been hearing a lot of talk lately about the homeless people in St. Augustine and panhandlers disturbing the ambiance of the downtown. Like many of us, John Regan probably knows exactly what the cause of any homeless problem is. He was too polite to come out and say it out loud in City Hall chambers recently, but he did give everyone a hint. Mr. Regan, who works for the city commission for six figures a year, suggested that affordable housing would alleviate some of the problems with the rising homeless population in our Ancient City. I concur and applaud his forthrightness and clear ability to master the obvious.
I believe if we want to be truly honest with ourselves we have to put the blame for any homeless problem we have in St. Augustine squarely in the lap of the greedy landlords who have been taking advantage of the renters in the city for too long.
We all watched while the fearless fat-walleted entrepreneurs among us took it upon themselves to make residential real estate their sole occupation. We all watched when folks scooped up bank foreclosures and began flipping them to feather their own nests. The gentrification of Linconville took place right before our eyes. Nocatee seems like the moon to me but it is making some developers very happy.
So I don’t think any of us were too surprised when we watched our neighbors who invested in extra homes and apartments as side projects try to get rich quick by charging young families anywhere from $1,200 to $2,500 a month to live in and maintain their often subpar units. We really should line some of these landlords up on St. George Street and spit on them. There just are not jobs in St. Johns County that allow a parent to pay $2,000 a month in rent.
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POPE’S VIEW: Panhandling on St. George Street is no accident City of St. Augustine unveils broad effort to address panhandling, homelessness
When residential real estate became the business of America, some smart folks created companies like Airbnb and Vacation Rentals by Owner. Now, everyone with a shack in their backyard is a hotel owner. I am as guilty as anyone. And the demand for these $50 to $200 nightly rentals seems endless. And it doesn’t even seem to bother the real hotels that charge way more per night and are booked solid this week. My spies on St. Augustine Beach tell me that when they open the new hotel on the beach late in the spring of next year the 175 rooms they are molding in that beachside behemoth will rent for around $250 a night. I must be running in the wrong circles because I don’t know who can drop that kind of cabbage to sleep near the beach.
Unfortunately, we created this problem. We allow people to take perfectly good cottages and apartments out of the rental market and sell them nightly. We encourage developers to clear cut hundreds of acres of land and build new houses with coriander countertops that no one living here currently can afford. We salute the neighbor who rents out his second home to the surfer with a trust fund. Not only do we allow everyone in residential real estate to make a killing we don’t even really attempt to tax them. We celebrate greed.
The homeless problem is on us. It could be partially alleviated with rent control, but you won’t hear that word bandied about City Hall too much. Private residence hotel taxes and realistic taxes on large developers might help the homeless problem, but it won’t go away because the people who set the policy in this city are the same people who are expanding their portfolios.
If we made new laws that discouraged landlords from exploiting low-income residents and bilking tourists, everyone in the real estate business would have to get a real job.
Rampant sexual harassment at restaurants and bars? What is to be done?
Rape in the storage room. Groping at the bar. Why is the restaurant industry so terrible for women? By Maura Judkis and Emily Heil The Washington Post November 17
If you’re a woman, what makes a restaurant dangerous isn’t the sharp knives or the hot griddle: It’s an isolated area of the kitchen, like the dry storage pantry.
That’s where Miranda Rosenfelt, 31, then a cook at Jackie’s restaurant in Silver Spring, was headed one day seven years ago to help out with inventory, at the request of one of her direct supervisors, who she says had been harassing her for months. When she walked into the narrow basement room, far from the bustle of the kitchen, she turned around to find him “standing there with his pants on the floor, and his penis in his hands,” blocking her exit from the basement, she said.
“I felt cornered, and trapped, and scared, and what ended up happening was that he got me to perform oral sex, and it was horrible. And the whole time he was saying things like, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to do this.’ ” Her instinct was “not to do anything, and wait for it to be over. Because that’s what will make me the safest.”
Or maybe the dangerous place is the walk-in cooler. That’s where chef Maya Rotman-Zaid, 36, says she was cornered once about 12 years ago, by a co-worker who tried to grope her. But after years of working in kitchens with handsy, misbehaving men, she had remembered an anecdote from Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential,” in which the famous chef struck back after being grabbed repeatedly by a colleague.
“The guy tried to feel me up, and I stuck a fork in his leg,” she said. A friend she had confided in confirmed details of this story to The Washington Post. Although she doesn’t think she broke his skin, he “screamed and ran out of there like it never happened. I mean, talk about embarrassing. But he never tried to touch me again.”
Women are vulnerable in just about every inch of a restaurant. Behind the bar. The hostess stands where patrons are greeted. Behind stoves and in front of dishwashers. From lewd comments to rape, sexual misconduct is, for many, simply part of the job.
After the public toppling of Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein, it seems every industry is looking to identify its bad actors. In New Orleans, a blockbuster report by the Times-Picayune felled uber-restaurateur John Besh, who resigned after two dozen women said they had been subjected to sexual harassment within his empire — some of it by Besh himself.
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'The only way I knew how to deal with it ... was to completely shut down'
Miranda Rosenfelt describes how restaurant culture led to her alleged assault when she was a line cook in Maryland.(Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)
But the culture of widespread sexual harassment and abuse in kitchens and dining rooms from Washington, D.C., to Portland, Ore., can’t be pinned solely on a few celebrity chefs or the rare, singularly powerful gatekeeper. It takes place in suburban chains and in dazzling three-star Michelin restaurants, and its perpetrators might just as easily be owners as lowly barbacks. The reasons are many, and they’re complicated: Many kitchens are boys’ clubs, dominated by machismo and flashing knives; many women rely on pleasing their male customers and managers for tips or good shifts; human resources departments might be nonexistent or toothless; and restaurant staffs are often hard-partying posses that blur professional lines.
The Post interviewed more than 60 people around the country who either claimed they experienced such treatment while working in restaurants or witnessed it. Men are not immune from abuse, but the vast majority of victims we spoke to are women. Their stories show that how women experience sexual harassment depends on their place in the restaurant ecosystem. Cooks are harassed by other cooks, servers are harassed by everyone. And immigrants and young people — who make up a large percentage of the workforce — are particularly vulnerable.
Maria Vazquez, at her home in Los Angeles, alleges that in 2005, the owner of the restaurant where she worked raped her. (David Walter Banks/For The Washington Post)
‘I couldn’t find who to tell’
Maria Vazquez, 52, is a monolingual Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant mother of six, so her job as a cook and dishwasher at Art’s Wings and Things in South Los Angeles was a lifeline. But one day in 2005, she alleges, restaurant owner Arthur Boone cornered her in the back of the warehouse where she was doing inventory and raped her.
“He came downstairs and attacked me. I remember I was defending myself as much as I could,” Vazquez said through a translator, as she cried. “I couldn’t do anything else.”
Afterward, she said, he took her to a store for supplies, and everyone treated him like a king. Vazquez said she confided in her priest, but he “told me that I was to blame, and that I shouldn’t be talking about that.” Because she couldn’t afford to be out of work, she kept the job — and, she alleges, Boone kept taking her into the warehouse. She alleges that when she transferred to a different location of the restaurant — one that did not have a warehouse — Boone assaulted her in the bathroom there, and that the rapes continued over a period of eight years. Vazquez sued Boone in June 2014 seeking damages based on 10 allegations detailed in her lawsuit. Boone, who denied the allegations in a court-filed response, could not be reached for comment.
“Because of the excess of work that I had, I didn’t have time to talk to anybody. It was only work, watch over my kids, go back to work,” she said. “I didn’t have anyone to give me a hand. I couldn’t find who to tell about what was happening to me.” She left the job, she says, when Boone threatened to cut her pay.
Nearly a quarter of restaurant employees are foreign-born vs. 19 percent for the overall economy, according to the National Restaurant Association. And many are undocumented: Ten percent of the workforce in “eating and drinking places” in 2014 lacked U.S. work authorization, according the Pew Research Center. Fear of deportation may make undocumented immigrant restaurant workers who are abused less likely to report that abuse to authorities.
Vazquez is one of the rare immigrants who were able to sue their employers, and win. In her lawsuit against Boone and his restaurant corporation, a court awarded her a judgment of more than $1 million. But she hasn’t received a cent from Boone.
His restaurant business has closed, and Vazquez has not been able to collect.
Sola Pyne says that when she worked at a Washington sports bar, a group of patrons quizzed her about her underwear. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
‘This is just our industry’
In 2015, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 5,431 complaints of sexual harassment from women. Of the 2,036 claims that listed an industry, 12.5 percent came from the hotel and food industry, more than any other category, according to the National Women’s Law Center. The Restaurant Opportunities Center United, which advocates for higher wages, found in a 2014 study that two-thirds of female restaurant workers were sexually harassed by restaurant management, 80 percent by their co-workers and 78 percent by customers. A third of women reported that unwanted touching was routine, the survey found.
But those numbers may not provide the full picture. Harassment is so routine that many restaurant employees say they do not consider sexual comments or touching to be worth reporting.
“I have spoken in a number of industry settings where people say, ‘Why are you talking about this as if it’s so outrageous? This is just our industry,’” said Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of ROC United.
When workers do speak up, it does not always end well.
“This one particular busser . . . had asked me out a couple of times, and I had always said no,” said one former server from Seattle, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she still works in the industry. “He came up behind me, and I had really long hair, and he held a lighter underneath my hair like he was going to set my hair on fire.” The general manager saw him do it, made him stop and reprimanded him, but afterward, “We were all supposed to go back to work like everything was normal.” The busser was not fired, she said. The incident took place about 15 years ago, and she didn’t tell anyone else at the time.
When employees are punished for their misconduct, it often does end with firing — but no other consequences. Rosenfelt, the cook who says she was coerced into oral sex in the restaurant basement, told a co-worker what happened, and that colleague went to her boss, Jackie Greenbaum, who says she “was brought to my knees” by the allegations. “I cried.” She fired the supervisor swiftly. “We encouraged her to go to the police and report it,” Greenbaum said.
That is where Rosenfelt hit a roadblock.
“What I was told was that because there was no physical evidence, I wasn’t bruised or injured in any sort of way, that it would be a ‘he said, she said,’ and that it would be long and drawn out and it could be costly for me and that it could take months, possibly years for anything to happen,” Rosenfelt said. She dropped it.
Stefanie Williams, shown in Garden City, N.Y., says that when she was a cocktail waitress at a New York City steakhouse, a customer grabbed her under her skirt. (Jennifer S. Altman/For The Washington Post)
‘Your breasts had to be out’
In some of Vaiva Labukaite’s early jobs as a Las Vegas cocktail waitress and bartender, “You had to wear something really sexy. The shorts had to be super short, and your breasts had to be out,” she said. “It was more like sex work than the restaurant business.”
When Labukaite, now 38, got a bartending job at celebrity chef Rick Moonen’s restaurant, RM Seafood, seven years ago, she thought it was a step up. But soon enough, she alleged in a lawsuit, her manager, Paul Fisichella, started to harass her verbally. She brushed it off and reminded him that he was married. One time, he grabbed her hand and put it on his crotch to make her feel his penis, she alleged in the lawsuit. She told The Post that the incident took place while they were in the restaurant having a glass of wine after her shift. “I was kind of in shock for a little bit. I told him that this cannot happen again.” Fisichella “adamantly disputed the claims,” according to one of his attorneys.
Labukaite said Fisichella kept dangling the possibility of a promotion for her.
One night, she alleged, Fisichella told her she needed to go with him and Moonen to dinner to “talk about my advancement in the company.” She got in the car with Fisichella, “and that’s when he started groping me and putting his hands up my skirt. And again I was in shock.”
She later complained about the sexual harassment to the restaurant’s management, and “the next thing you know, my shifts were going down from five days a week to two days a week.” She filed suit against Fisichella and RM Seafood, and eventually the parties settled, with the restaurant settling on Fisichella’s behalf, according to his attorney. Both Moonen and RM Seafood declined to comment.
Servers and bartenders worry about harassment not only from colleagues, but also from their customers. And because of a “customer is always right” mentality and the pressure of working for tips, they often feel compelled to accept it. The “front of the house” is mostly made up of women: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, 56 percent of bartenders, 70 percent of servers and 80 percent of hosts are female.
When Sola Pyne, 33, was a waitress at a Washington sports bar from 2006 to 2009, she once served a table of half-drunk off-duty police officers, whom she identified by the T-shirts and hats they sported for the city’s annual National Police Week. “They kept asking what kind of underwear I had on: Was it a thong? A bikini?’ I told my manager, and at first he giggled, but he said if they took it any further to let him know,” she said. “I just let it slide. I didn’t need any drama.”
Stefanie Williams, 31, said that four years ago, when she worked at an upscale New York steakhouse as a cocktail waitress, she was groped by one of her regulars, an investment banker who spent lots of money entertaining clients there. At a Christmas party, he “put his hand up my dress, and he put his hand under my underwear and asked if I was wearing any underwear,” she said. She said she told the story to two colleagues at the time, and they confirmed that account to The Post. Later, he “put his groin against my butt and pushed really hard,” she said. “ I said, ‘Don’t f---ing touch me.’ He was like, ‘Oh, I’m the bad guy now?’ ” She told her manager that either the customer had to leave or she would, and he was escorted out. But before long, he was back.
“One of the managers was very into what the guys with money were into. He knew that I was upset that night, but he let him come back in, and I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘Are you f---ing kidding me?’ ”
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'He had abused me as many times as he had wanted'
Immigrant Maria Vazquez describes being sexually assaulted by her boss while working at a Los Angeles restaurant.(Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)
A recipe for a toxic culture
Restaurant kitchens are a man’s world. The Brigade de Cuisine, the division of kitchen labor famously developed by chef Auguste Escoffier in the late 19th century, was based on the French military structure he observed while in the army. Home cooking has historically come from women, while high-status restaurant work was until a few decades ago the domain of men.
As French chefs began to rise in stature in the late 1800s, “a lot of work was done to sort of denigrate women’s cooking and uphold and elevate men’s cooking,” said Deborah Harris, co-author of “Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen.” “The women were kept out, and over the years that kind of crystallized in these very hypermasculine work cultures.”
Some women view sexual harassment as an outgrowth of Escoffier’s system. When Liz Vaknin graduated from culinary school and went to work in a fine-dining restaurant in Manhattan in 2012, she came to see the kitchen as a place where higher-ups bullied underlings, no matter their gender, and sexual harassment was an expedient form of abuse. “It’s easier to make a woman feel bad about herself by touching her than just yelling that you’re not cutting your parsley right,” Vaknin, now 28, said.
The rough talk so common in kitchens is a result of those jobs being historically blue-collar. But that does not mean elite restaurants are immune.
Two women who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still work in the industry said a male manager at the Alinea restaurant group, which includes the Michelin three-star restaurant of the same name in Chicago, harassed them in 2013 and 2016. “He would kiss me on the face, or hold my arm back,” one of the women said. He would frequently touch her when no one was looking, “around the waist, hips, that sort of thing.” The other woman said the manager falsely told other employees that he had sex with her. Two other former female employees of the restaurant group confirmed that the women spoke of harassment at the time.
The first woman says that she complained to management and that “they, over and over, asked if I had anyone that witnessed it, and I didn’t,” she said. “So they wanted me to get other girls to come forward to talk about their experiences with him, which I didn’t feel like should have been my job.”
Nick Kokonas, one of the owners of Alinea, says that accusations of verbal improprieties but not physical contact were brought to him — the female employee disputes this — and that he spoke with the male employee, who denied wrongdoing. He put the man on paid administrative leave while he investigated. Eventually, the man was fired when another employee provided some inappropriate text messages. But the woman who says she reported the abuse had already decided to leave. The investigation had left her with the impression that the company was more concerned with a wrongful-termination lawsuit than with the sexual harassment.
“I can’t fire somebody unless I know it’s real. You can’t fire someone legally with no basis,” said Kokonas, who said he was “really proud of the way that we handled it.”
Marisa Licandro, at her home in Brooklyn, alleges that a fellow student who worked with her at a campus-run restaurant attempted to rape her. (Jennifer S. Altman/For The Washington Post)
‘You take on the identity of the survivor’
Women in the kitchen say they feel pressure to just take harassment in stride.
Ulzii Hoyle, 20, a recent culinary school graduate, says the “masculine ideology” she was taught in school meant not complaining about the way she was treated so that others wouldn’t perceive her as weak. She knew she had to look after herself. So one day two years ago, at her off-campus job at a pizza restaurant in Boulder, “a male colleague came up, and he grabbed my butt” and aggressively poked her in her genitals, “and I elbowed him.”
A manager heard the man cry out in surprise. Later, Hoyle says, the manager pulled her aside and asked her whether she planned to report the incident, and Hoyle said no. At the time, she confided in her sister, who confirmed to The Post that Hoyle told her the details of this story.
“And [the manager] was like, ‘I think it would be best for everybody if you just left,’ ” allegedly explaining that Hoyle was fired for being “too big of a liability.”
Rotman-Zaid, the chef who jabbed a groper with a fork, said female chefs have learned to “just go with it” when men harass them, to fit in and gain the trust of male colleagues. If you are a “prude and don’t want to be in that situation, you won’t last very long in the restaurant world in general.”
It quickly hardens women who just want to cook.
“In the beginning, you try to ignore it, or you try to deflect it, to be both funny and defensive, and know how to put them in their place,” said Heather Carlucci, 50, who describes herself as “a kitchen rat” now working as a restaurant consultant. “It’s an enormous amount of energy to do it.”
Harris, the “Taking the Heat” co-author, said that in her book research, she noticed a contradiction among the female chefs she interviewed. They often expressed hope that the industry would change but pushed back at the notion that kitchens needed more oversight, which they told her would interfere with the unique culture of the job.
“I think about women in the military, any sort of hazing or group like that, where if you make it through, you take on the identity of the survivor,” Harris said. “And ‘I’m tough and I was able to do this and other people should too.’ . . . If you take a step back, you realize that you’re also perpetuating this system that’s really unfair.”
The just-deal-with it mentality that female chefs talk about is inculcated at the industry’s earliest levels.
Marisa Licandro, 22, was a student at the Culinary Institute of America, with a full course load and a server job at a campus-run teaching restaurant. At an on-campus party last fall, she alleges, a fellow student who worked with her at the restaurant locked her in a room, pinned her down and tried to rape her. She escaped. The next morning, she filed a report with the campus safety department, and a few days later, she tearfully told her manager at the restaurant that she could not be scheduled to work with the other student, because he had traumatized her. Nevertheless, she showed up to work on a subsequent Saturday and found herself staring down her alleged attacker.
“It made me very nervous, obviously, to be placed in a situation where I unwillingly was face to face with this guy that tried to hurt me,” Licandro said. She said her boss told her, “ ‘We’ll keep you on different sides of the restaurant,’ which is a Band-Aid on an amputated leg.”
When her manager scheduled her with him yet again, Licandro quit. Meanwhile, she was growing disheartened by the school’s response: In emails Licandro provided to The Post, one dean told her that the school had dismissed her complaint because the student about whom she complained did not violate the school’s harassment, sexual misconduct and discrimination policy. Licandro said she asked for an explanation and said the school’s response indicated that because she had escaped, a violation did not take place. The school gave her the opportunity to put a “no contact” rule in place with the student, but she declined out of fear that it would provoke him.
The school confirmed that Licandro filed a campus safety report last September but declined to disclose its contents or provide a copy to The Post or to Licandro. Joseph Morano, the school’s Title IX officer, declined to speak about Licandro’s case, citing student privacy. “The [Culinary Institute of America] is committed to providing a safe campus environment for all of its students and prohibits any form of harassment or discrimination based upon sex, including sexual violence,” Morano said in an email. “All reported incidents are thoroughly reviewed.”
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'I need this money, but I also do not want you to disrespect me'
Former bartender Sola Pyne talks about how working for tips caused her to put up with harassment without reporting it.(Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)
Drinking blurs the lines
Unlike traditional offices, with their coffee-pod machines, booze is a part of restaurant life, even for employees. Drinking during shifts is common, if not explicitly condoned by management. There’s often partying after the dining room empties, and hookups among staff members are frequent. And alcohol and drug abuse is a big problem in the industry: According to a survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, about 17 percent of employees in the “accommodations and food services” category, more than any other category of worker, report having a substance use disorder.
One woman who worked for a restaurant in New Orleans said her boss knew she struggled with alcohol abuse. But three years ago, she said, he befriended her, telling her he would help her move up in the company. He began to offer her rides home and, knowing she had trouble saying no, would persuade her to stop at a bar for one drink, which would turn into several.
“He started taking me home to his apartment when I was blackout drunk, barely conscious,” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she still fears the man. “I would wake up at his apartment on a semiregular basis and have no memory of the previous night whatsoever.”
At work, she said, he would send her inappropriate text messages, including a video of himself masturbating, despite her protestations. Eventually, she told one of her co-workers, who told the owner of the restaurant, who fired the man. The owner of the restaurant independently confirmed the details of the woman’s account to The Post.
“I’ve thought about the fact that he’s a predator,” she said. “He put himself in this position to leverage power over me, and coerce me using his position and alcohol.”
Bosses sometimes foster a boozy atmosphere during work hours. Arielle Mullen, now a 32-year-old marketing consultant in Sacramento, worked in restaurants for 15 years, including at a college-town bar when she was in her early 20s. Her manager, she said, encouraged the young female servers and bartenders to drink shots with customers who wanted to buy them drinks. “I still remember it verbatim. He said, ‘As long as you can still hold a tray, I don’t f---ing care. Just do it.’ ” For her boss, it meant more liquor sales, and for Mullen it meant finding a workaround. She found a friendly bartender who would pour water in place of vodka into her shot glass.
Miranda Rosenfelt says that after being assaulted, she transferred to a sister restaurant, where one of her new colleagues exposed himself to her. (Essdras M Suarez/For The Washington Post)
The moment for a culture change?
Since the Weinstein and Besh scandals broke, the restaurant community has been in an unusually introspective mode. Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who personified the swaggering alpha dog of kitchen lore, in recent interviews has publicly copped to perpetuating the “meathead bro culture” that allows sexual harassment to go unchecked. And “Top Chef” host Tom Colicchio posted an open letter to male chefs on Medium noting that Besh was hardly one of a few “bad eggs” and that men needed to “acknowledge the larger culture that hatched all these crummy eggs, and have some hard conversations among ourselves that are long overdue.”
While industry leaders talk about their culpability, some women are taking small steps.
Caroline Richter, a New Orleans waitress who described being assaulted by a customer, founded a group called Medusa — named after the mythical maiden turned into a Gorgon as punishment by Athena for being raped by the god Poseidon in Athena’s temple — with a goal of creating best practices for bars and restaurants regarding sexual harassment.
Many of the women who spoke to The Post for this story said they were hopeful the Weinstein and Besh sagas would trigger a change in the industry. But many noted that the roots of the problem run deep and will not be easily dug up.
One factor is the relative dearth of women at the top of the food chain, as chef-owners, award winners — or even as general managers. While the ratio of male to female culinary students is close to even at many schools, only 21 percent of chefs and head cooks are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many women are discouraged by the constant harassment as well as by the lack of health-care and regular hours, which can make it difficult to have a family.
And while some say more women in management could be a solution, the harsh kitchen culture is so pervasive that even high-profile female chefs are among those accused of harassment. Celebrity chef Anne Burrell was sued in 2008 for allegedly harassing several employees at Centro Vinoteca, the restaurant where she worked at the time. According to the complaint, Burrell commented on employees’ cleavages and the shape of their breasts, and called female employees “sluts” and one employee “a whore.” The suit was settled. “The case was resolved,” said Burrell’s publicist, who declined to comment on the substance of the allegations.
Training and strong HR departments are not a panacea, either: Even big chain restaurants that have both have been the subject of sexual harassment lawsuits.
Advocates including ROC say the tipped minimum wage — which is several dollars lower than the standard minimum wage — is a primary driver of harassment.
But few of the suggested solutions seem that they would have helped Rosenfelt, the woman who alleges she was coerced into performing oral sex in the storage pantry at Jackie’s.
Rosenfelt knew she would never again be able to set foot in the restaurant where it happened. She was offered a new job at a sister restaurant. And for a while, things seemed to be going well — she worked with friends, she let her guard down. She felt safe.
But she said that her colleagues there, too, began to exhibit alarming behavior. One man repeatedly tricked her into looking at pictures of his genitals on his phone, she said, and talked constantly about sex workers. And she said that one day, when staffers were drinking together after hours in a small back hallway, another man — whom Rosenfelt had trusted enough to confide in about her assault — exposed himself to her and told her he wanted to have sex with her. She got away. And she couldn’t believe that the same thing had nearly happened to her twice.
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This time, she said nothing.
“I was worried about them thinking that I was being dramatic,” Rosenfelt said. “Because how could these two awful things happen so quickly, back to back?”
Tortfeasors and insurance companies have too much power in Florida. This situation stinks.
Report: Florida rarely punishes doctors sued for malpractice Associated Press Published: November 19, 2017
FORT LAUDERDALE — Florida doctors are rarely punished by state regulators even after they are sued for malpractice, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported Sunday.
The Florida Department of Health reviewed nearly 24,000 resolved state and federal lawsuits against doctors over the past decade, the Sun Sentinel reported. But out of those reviews regulators filed disciplinary charges just 128 times.
The state Department of Health is required to review every malpractice lawsuit filed against Florida doctors to identify and punish problem doctors.
Health department spokesman Brad Dalton told the newspaper that officials don't take action against doctors in cases too old to prosecute or with payouts of less than $50,000. That minimum payout amount would rule out roughly 70 percent of the malpractice cases filed.
The newspaper reported that Dr. Pachavit Kasemsap faced payouts of nearly $3 million in five medical malpractice lawsuits over five years. Patients accused him of slicing an aorta while trying to remove a gallbladder, cutting an artery to a liver, and connecting a woman's rectum to her vagina. State officials never took action against Kasemsap.
A jury in 2012 ordered Kasemsap to pay Christine Murray $600,000 after ruling the doctor was negligent when he cut an artery to her liver. Murray told the Sun Sentinel she was puzzled by the lack of state disciplinary action against Kasemsap.
"They are obviously tracking (malpractice cases) for a reason," she said. "If they're not doing anything about it, what's the point of that?"
Kasemsap declined to comment for the story. He is currently working as a medical director for WellMed Medical Group in Texas, but can return to Florida and practice anytime.
Lawyers who have represented patients across Florida say they rarely hear from the health department after cases close. Some of the dozen attorneys interviewed said they'd given up expecting the state to take any action.
The Florida Constitution is far from most people’s minds most of the time, but it deserves everyone’s close attention for the next 12 months.
Every 20 years, a Constitution Revision Commission is convened to review the state’s founding charter and send proposed amendments to voters. That commission is meeting now and proposing changes that could impact everyone’s lives. Voters will have the final say in November 2018.
Some of the questions so far:
Will it be easier or harder for people to vote?
Will gerrymandering be given new life?
Will restrictions be placed on the right to privacy to undermine abortion rights?
Will public schools be drained of resources to benefit private and religious schools?
Will the courts be insulated from partisan politics?
Will hospitals be allowed to conceal malpractice evidence under the guise of “attorney-client communications?”
These are among the questions framed within the 103 proposals that survived the commission’s first cut, which eliminated all but six of the more than 2,000 proposals from the public. The proposals touch on every plausible subject except improving the regulation of public utilities — a huge oversight.
Florida’s Public Service Commission habitually rubber-stamps rate increases for the electric power industry. Commission members who do otherwise may be shown the door, as happened not so long ago after four commissioners rejected a Florida Power & Light rate increase. That’s because commission membership is tied to the Legislature and state lawmakers count on lavish campaign contributions from the power companies.
The commission should propose an independent Public Service Commission that puts the public first. It’s not too late. Copying a dubious legislative tactic, members have included some blank amendments among the 103. These could morph into almost anything, another reason to pay close attention.
Stepping back a moment, the purpose of the Constitution is to provide for an efficient, responsive and accountable government and assure the people’s rights — most importantly, a meaningful right to vote. We plan to hold the commission to that standard and will encourage the public to do the same.
Here are some of the major issues we’ll be following:
Meaningful Elections
Gerrymandering: The process of allowing politicians to draw political maps that favor incumbents and political parties was dealt an historic blow in 2010 when Florida voters passed the Fair Districts amendments. These amendments require state and congressional districts to be compact, contiguous and drawn to reflect existing boundaries (like city limits) or natural borders (like roads and waterways.) Still, the Legislature’s fingers remain on the computers and taxpayers have had to spend millions of dollars to defend some indefensible back-room shenanigans.
Proposal 80 calls for districts to instead be drawn by an independent commission appointed by the governor, plus the Legislature’s presiding officers and minority leaders. This is a praiseworthy approach, but has three problems. First, as many as five of the 11 seats could go to each of the two major parties. With independents and minor parties now accounting for a third of the electorate, they deserve proportional representation. Second, it would be up to the Florida Supreme Court Nominating Commission to recommend lists of people for appointment to the panel. That’s unacceptable so long as the governor continues to appoint all nine members of the nominating commission. And third, the anti-gerrymandering language is different from what the voters approved in 2010 and the courts enforced. It’s better to stick with what works.
The right to vote: Florida disenfranchises people for life if they’ve ever been convicted of a felony, no matter how nonviolent or long ago. People can have their rights restored by the governor and Cabinet, but they’ve been content to leave more than 1.6 million people in second-class citizenship. Proposals 2, 7 and 21 would make restoration of rights automatic for people who have paid their debt to society, except for those convicted of homicide or sexual felonies. These proposals deserve support.
Closed primaries: An amendment proposed by the 1978 commission — and approved by nearly two-thirds of voters — said a party’s primary should be open to all voters if the winner faces no general election opposition. Since then, the Republican and Democratic parties have foiled its intent by drafting general election write-in opponents who don’t even campaign. Proposal 11 would rid Florida of this dodge. Proposal 62, similar to a North Carolina law, also would allow no-party voters to select a Republican or Democratic primary in which to vote. The two proposals should be merged.
Elected Secretary of State: Today, the secretary of state, who serves as the chief elections officer, is appointed by the governor. Election officials shouldn’t serve partisan ends for the governor or anyone else. But to again elect the secretary of state, as Proposal 14 intends, assures neither competence nor independence. Katherine Harris, the last elected secretary, was no paragon of either virtue. Remember the 2000 presidential contest? Florida would be better served with an independent election commission.
A Fair, Independent Judiciary
Judicial vacancies: In 1972, Gov. Reubin Askew established a model system for appointing people to fill judicial vacancies. The governor and the Florida Bar each appointed three members to each of 26 nominating commissions — one for each of 20 judicial circuits, one for the Florida Supreme Court and one for each of five district courts of appeal. Those six members then appointed three more from the public. The system was corrupted in 2001, however, when the Legislature allowed the governor to appoint all nine members of each commission. Some now act more like political patronage committees than components of an independent judiciary. Proposal 42 would restore the original balance. If the revision commission does nothing else, it should approve this.
Senate confirmation of judges: Proposal 8 is one of several (see also 1, 35 and 41) that would raise the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 75, which makes sense given that life expectancies and vitality are increasing and this cap was set decades ago. But Proposal 8 would unwisely require Florida Senate confirmation of Supreme Court judges and justices of the district courts of appeal. This proposal would make the courts more political, not less. Voters rejected something similar in 2012, preferring today’s merit-retention system. The commission should abide by that recent lesson.
Appoint or elect judges: In 2002, voters were asked whether they wanted all trial judges to be appointed like appellate judges, and similarly run for new terms on their records, rather than against opponents. The vote was a resounding “No!” Proposals 58 and 101 ask the question again. It’s a good one: of all the ways to choose judges, election is usually the worst. Politics, with its hot-button issues and campaign contributions, is incompatible with a fair judiciary. Plus the process prevents candidates from saying much about their views or their opponents. But so is the process of appointing judges flawed, given the one-sided makeup of today’s nominating commissions, which often pick political friends and often dismiss highly qualified Democrats. If the appoint-or-elect issue goes to the voters again, it should stand on its own and not be coupled with other proposals.
There’s much more to say about the commission’s proposals to change the Florida Constitution, but that’s enough for today. Please watch this space in the months ahead. And keep up with the action at www.flcrc.gov.
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O'Hara, Elana Simms, Andy Reid, Deborah Ramirez and Editor-in-Chief Howard Saltz.
Happy Thanksgiving! Lots to be thankful for -- read this! -- Ed
AS THE F.B.I. CLOSES IN, TRUMP’S LAWYERS ARE SCRAMBLING TO KEEP HIM CALM The White House is projecting optimism that the investigation will soon conclude, but experts think it’s “just getting started.”
BY ABIGAIL TRACY NOVEMBER 20, 2017 11:38 AM
Trump leaves a meeting with House Republicans on November 16th.
By Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images.
By Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images.
With Donald Trump predisposed to self-sabotage in what may ultimately become an obstruction of justice case, the president’s lawyers have assured him that he has nothing to fear from Robert Mueller. It’s a tricky balancing act, given Trump’s past history of criticism for the special counsel. The president’s natural impulse for obstructive, combative behavior is also, in this case, a potential legal risk. So while F.B.I. investigators appear to have zeroed in on critical events that transpired before and after the real-estate mogul’s unexpected victory last fall, including Jeff Sessions’s recusal and the ouster of James Comey, Trump’s lawyers are taking pains to project calm, telling the president that he has nothing to fear and that the investigation, which some posit is just getting started, will wind down soon.
“The people who have been interviewed generally feel they were treated fairly by the special counsel, and adequately prepared to assist them in understanding the relevant material,” White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who has urged the president to cooperate with Mueller and his team, told The Washington Post. “They came back feeling relieved that it was over, but nobody I know of was shaken or scared.” Cobb added that the idea that Mueller was looking beyond the election into Trump’s personal finances and business dealings—something Trump has said would be “out of bounds”—was incorrect.
One of the goals of this effort, it appears, is to prevent Trump from flying into a rage and firing Mueller, as several of his allies have suggested he do if it appears Mueller is expanding the scope of his investigation into the president’s finances. “I’ve done my best, without overstepping, to share my view that the perception of the inquiry—that it involved a decade or more of financial transactions and other alleged issues that were mistakenly reported—just wasn’t true, and that the issues were narrower and wholly consistent with the mandate provided by the Justice Department to the Office of the Special Counsel,” he said, adding that he believes the investigation will be wrapped up by the end of the year, or shortly thereafter. As for further revelations regarding foreign contacts that are reportedly on the horizon, Cobb said he does not expect them to “unduly extend the inquiry.”
One White House official expressed similar confidence to Axios, telling Mike Allen, “The only people focused on or consumed by this are the press. The White House staff are working to carry out the president's agenda on behalf of the American people.” And according to the Post, “many aides describe an atmosphere of relative calm against the backdrop of the investigation, with staffers mindful but not necessarily worried about the probe.” Some have turned to gallows humor: “When the staff gather in the morning at the White House now, they jokingly say: ‘Good morning. Are you wired?’ ” one source close to the administration told the Post.
But that optimism is not universal. And while Trump’s lawyers and spokespeople had previously said they believe the investigation will be over by Thanksgiving, that timeframe was probably always fantastical. Allen notes, “I’m told that Mueller's team is rooting around inside Trumpworld more deeply than is publicly known. Outside West Wing advisers tell me that may create a showdown.” One G.O.P. operative in close contact with the Trump White House characterized Mueller’s approach as “working through the staff like Pac-Man” and dismissed the idea that Trumpworld is undaunted. “Of course they are worried,” the Republican said. “Anybody that ever had the words ‘Russia’ come out of their lips or in an e-mail, they’re going to get talked to. These things are thorough and deep. It’s going to be a long winter.”
One source told the Post that Mueller is executing a “a classic Gambino-style roll-up” that “will reach everyone in this administration.” It is telling that the first indictment Mueller secured was against the lower-level Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty this summer to lying to the F.B.I. The documents in his case were only unsealed in early October, months after it appears he turned state’s witness. In the weeks since issuing indictments against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy and longtime business associate Rick Gates, Mueller has proceeded at an aggressive clip, interviewing a growing pool of individuals previously counted among the president’s inner circle, including former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and erstwhile Press Secretary Sean Spicer. The former F.B.I. director plans to sit down with Trump’s communications director and close confidant Hope Hicks and White House general counsel Donald McGahn in the coming weeks, and on Monday, citing a source familiar with the matter, ABC News reported that Mueller recently issued a subpoena directing the Justice Department to produce a wide array of documents related to attorney general Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia probe, as well as Comey’s firing, for which he and Rosenstein both issued controversial recommendations.
Former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, too, remains in Mueller’s crosshairs; both his lobbying work for the Turkish government—for which he belatedly registered as a foreign agent—and his Russian contacts are reportedly of interest to the special counsel. Earlier this month—citing multiple sources—NBC News reported that Mueller’s team has enough evidence to indict Flynn and his son, Michael Flynn Jr.
With the Post reporting that at least nine Trump associates had contacts with Russians during the campaign or transition, legal experts have disputed Cobb’s estimation that Mueller’s investigation is mere months away from its conclusion. “I don’t think there’s any reason to believe this is almost over,” Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at George Washington University, told the Post. “Based not just on what we’ve seen but also what we know about white-collar investigations generally, this seems to me like it is just getting started.”
ABIGAIL TRACY Abigail Tracy is a staff news writer for the Hive covering Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington.
St. Johns County Republican Executive Committee Vice Chair DIANE SCHARFF signed and/or wrote a semi-literate hate message to "celebrate" Thanksgiving and pay homage to President DONALD JOHN TRUMP. Sick. Pitiful.
St. Johns County Republican Executive Committee Vice Chair DIANE SCHERFF
St. Johns County Republican Executive Committee Vice Chair DIANE SCHERFF
St. Johns County Republican Executive Committee Vice Chair DIANE SCHERFF
Need a good laugh?
Happy Thanksgiving 2017!
Count the lies, bad grammar, bad taste, and delusional thinking in DIANE SCHARF's Thanksgiving wishes and peckerwood paen to President* Astersisk DONALD JOHN TRUMP.
Don't think I've ever had to "(sic)" anything so much in my life.
My late mentor, KKK-buster Stetson Kennedy, said every single KKK member in St. Johns County became a Republican.
Corrupt St. Johns County Republicans mostly support rebarbative reprobate reptilian Sheriff DAVID BERNARD SHOAR, whose coverup of the September 2, 2010 shooting of Michelle O'Connell in the home of Deputy JEREMY BANKS has not yet been taken to any Grand Jury. The Record ignored the story, but The New York Times and PBS Frontline have exposed SHOAR to the world.
Watching ethically-challenged St. Johns County Republicans try to "communicate" their "values" is like watching a duck trying to make love to a football. Pitiful.
Why I am thankful for President Trump this Thanksgiving
By Diane Scherff
November 2017
This Thanksgiving I am truly grateful for my President for the first time in a decade. We are finally blessed (sic) with a strong (sic), independent (sic), compassionate (sic), business-savvy (sic), Christian (sic) Leader in the United States of America! One that (sic) speaks his mind, albeit a bit bluntly, but none the less (sic), truthfully (sic) and passionately about his (sic) country. But of course, you won’t hear that in the news…only how bad it is right now and that President Trump is a horrible creature who probably influenced the serial killer Charles Mansion (yes, the NYT ran an op-ed with this theme). Most liberals truly believe that he is a racist, fascist, Nazi, white supremacist, murderer (sic) out to kill all people of color. Really?
So how do you face your ignorant (sic), self-serving (sic) liberal relatives this Thanksgiving? How do you reason with their illogical (sic), warped (sic) sense of perception? Here are a few accomplishments that may help.
Even though Congress let us down (sic) on the appeal (sic) and replace of Obamacare, the Nation’s Tax Reform should pass, which will be a major (sic) accomplishment for Republicans and the President. Besides reducing the corporate tax making it more affordable (sic) for companies to exist (sic) in the U.S., the tax bill would also limit the deductibility of mortgage interest to the first $500,000 in debt. So a guy with a $3 million mansion (say Al Franken) would get the same deduction, dollar-wise, under this plan as the person with the $600,000 home. The mortgage-interest deduction is primarily a subsidy for real estate agents (sic) who use the deduction to talk buyers into buying more house than they could otherwise afford. Mortgage bankers and homebuilders also love the mortgage deduction. So Trump is curbing a special-interest tax break for the wealthy.
You could also make the point that we finally have a President who is taking on (sic) Pharma! The FDA has spent more time and effort getting more generic drugs on the market in many categories and in October, we saw more generic drug approvals than any month in history. This means those expensive name-brand drugs now see low-cost generic competition sooner.
Under President Trump, the DOJ and Dept of Homeland Security have made a commitment to taking down the MS-13 Gang across the country. Just today they reported that hundreds of gang members were arrested in a crackdown of the MS-13 gang nationwide.
So besides, the economy boost, wall-street (sic) up at record (sic) numbers, the opioid crisis crackdown, illegal immigration talks, the wall, bringing jobs back to our country, striking a deal with China on N Korea and new business developments in the U.S., we finally have a president that is trying to MAKE OUR COUNTRY GREAT AGAIN…even though Liberals want to keep us dependent (sic) on government, redistribute the wealth, make everyone the same (sic) and let (sic) the NFL and academia continue to show disrespect (sic) for those who served our country.
Just a few things President trump (sic) has accomplished so far:
1) He got conservative judge Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.
2) The stock market is at an all-time high.
3) Consumer confidence is at an all-time high.
4) He has created (sic) millions of jobs by undoing (sic) Obama’s regulations.
5) Mortgage applications for new homes is (sic) at a 7 year high.
6) The unemployment rate is at a 16 year low.
7) Signed the promoting women in entrepreneurship act (sic).
8) Gutted 800+ (sic) Obama era regulations thus freeing (sic) up companies to hire again (sic) and get the economy moving once again(sic).
9) Ended the war (sic) on coal and caused (sic) a new mine for coal mining to open that will mine clean coal. He also put the miners back (sic) to work.
10) Weakened Dodd-Frank regulations.
11) Promotes buying (sic) and hiring (sic) American.
12) Investments from major businesses such as Foxconn, Ford ,Toyota, Intel and others will build here now.
13) Reduced (sic) illegal immigration by over 70%.
14) Bids for the border wall are underway.
15) He’s fighting back against sanctuary cities.
16) Changed the rules of engagement against ISIS.
17) Drafted a plan to defeat ISIS and is working.
18) Worked to reduce the cost of the F-35 fighter jets.
19) Imposed a five-year lobbying plan (sic).
20) Sanctioned Iran over its’ (sic) missile program.
21) Responded to Syria’s use of chemical weapons.
22) Reduced tax reform plan.
23) He renegotiated (sic) NAFTA.
24) He withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership thus keeping jobs here.
25) He pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accords thus saving (sic) us millions of dollars every year.
26) Created a task force to reduce crime.
27) The DOJ is targeting dangerous gangs like MS-13.
28) Signed independence and economic growth law.
29) Signed an executive order to protect (sic) police officers and target drug cartels.
30) Signed an executive order for religious freedom.
31) His administration is working on sending education back to the states.
32) He’s fixing the dept. (sic) of Veterans affairs so now vets can choose their own doctors and be covered. This also protects whistleblowers and allows VA to terminate bad employees..
33) Authorized (sic) construction of the Keystone and Dakota pipelines. The Dakota pipeline is up and running without (sic) harming the environment.
34) Created commissions on election fraud and opioid addiction.
35) Food stamp use is the lowest level in seven years.
36) Reduced the White House payroll saving taxpayers millions of dollars.
37) He’s donating his salary to various causes.
38) Signed 52 (sic) pieces of legislation.
39) Cut 600 billion from UN peacekeeping mission.
Again, you won’t hear any of this in the mainstream media. All (sic) they know is destroy (sic), distract (sic) and damage (sic). That shows that they (sic) don’t (sic) care about the people they claim to care about because if they did they would work with Trump and make the country better.
Trump accomplished all of this on his own without (sic) the help of Congress who are useless (sic) at this point. All (sic) the media cares about is how they can destroy (sic) him today. They have no (sic) solutions of their own.
In the areas of economics and national security, Trump is in the midst of healing (sic) this country’s true woes even against all odds.
"Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country." -- John F. Kennedy, January 20, 1961
JFK's spirit lives on. I was only 6.5 years old when JFK was murdered, having worn a prepackaged JFK constume trick-or-treating on Halloween 1964, only 22 days earlier.
I was 11 years old when RFK was murdered.
And at age 17.5 I went to work -- as a freshman and sophomore intern and staff assistant -- for their brother, Sen. Ted Kennedy, best U.S. Senator ever.
After the Warren Commission report, my dad did not believe it, and raised concerns about it in public fora for the next four decades, until he died. A World War II combat veteran, dad knew ballistics. He read and he asked questions and demanded answers. At an 82nd Airborne Division convention, my dad asked eight expert marksmen, the eight top master sergeants in the 82nd Division if they could have "made that shot" -- all eight said "NO! HELL NO!" We're still waiting on full disclosure of long-concealed FBI and CIA documents. Most Americans -- and the House Select Committee on Assassinations -- agree there was more than one gunman, and hence a conspiracy to murder JFK.
As Albert Gore, Sr. said on Election Night 1970, "The truth shall rise again!"
My 2015 Thanksgiving column, in happier days in our country.
Posted November 22, 2015 12:07 am By ED SLAVIN St. Augustine Guest Column - Ed Slavin: Thankful for the past, hopeful for the future
In 1565, St. Augustine’s diverse, polyglot Spanish colonial residents had already enjoyed America’s first Thanksgiving, feted by the Temucuan residents of Seloy village, and long before Plymouth was founded (when UF’s Dr. Michael Gannon writes that St. Augustine was “already up for urban renewal”).
We’re thankful that our 450th anniversary celebration helped spread greater understanding, and promoted healing. Our Spanish, English, French, Native American, African-American, Menorcan, Greek, Italian, Jewish, gay, Civil War and civil rights histories must be told better, with National Park Service interpretation. We will be thankful when Congress enacts the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore, first proposed by Mayor Walter Fraser in 1939.
Some 238 years ago, in 1777, 700 surviving Menorcan settlers of the British New Smyrna colony “voted with their feet,” walking 60 miles to St. Augustine. We’re thankful for their courage and persistence in keeping their history, culture and cuisine alive.
Some 150 years ago, in 1865, freed African-American slaves were establishing Lincolnville (Little Africa), the first community established by freed slaves. We’re thankful for the African-Americans here and looking forward to their full integration into our economy and political life.
Nearly 100 years ago, in 1916, Congress created the National Park Service. We’re thankful for some 400 National Parks (“America’s Best Idea”), and for the National Park Service presence in our community: which we look forward to expanding, protecting what we love for our grandchildren and their grandchildren, and protecting our communities, wetlands, beaches, forests and you from climate change calamity.
Some 51 years ago, in 1964, St. Augustine residents and visitors helped expose the truth of Jim Crow segregation, not resting until President Lyndon Johnson broke a U.S. Senate filibuster and won adoption of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was a model for laws passed around the nation and the globe, expanded to cover new protected classes including Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) people, as well as employee “whistleblowers,” or “ethical resisters.”
We’re thankful for all who have stood up for truth, justice and equality.
Many, like Dr. Robert S. Hayling, the St. Augustine Four, the St. Augustine Movement, Dr. Franklin Kameny and U.S. Reps. Don Edwards and Fr. Robert Drinan are not yet household words, but may be when NPS co-sponsors a National Civil Rights Museum here.
We’re thankful that civil rights laws inexorably led to the Supreme Court’s landmark Gay marriage decision in June 2015.
I am thankful I can now legally marry. We’re thankful for all the whistleblowers who report wrongdoing, starting with A. Ernest Fitzgerald, the Pentagon cost analyst who testified truthfully about C-5A airplane cost overruns, leading to his landmark Supreme Court victory after Richard Nixon fired him for not being a “team player,” management argot for someone considered too honest. As African-American poet Langston Hughes wrote, “Let America be America again.”
A year ago, in 2014, we elected Mayor Nancy Shaver. Yes, we did! We’re thankful for her triumph over mendacity and mediocrity. We’re thankful for her listening to people and neighborhoods, and for her wit, energy and spirit. We need more can-do government officials.
We’ll be thankful next year, when elections bring us more reformers, including candidates for city and county commissioners, sheriff, state’s attorney, congress and U.S. Senate.
JFK said, “sometimes party labels demand too much.” This is not about elephants or donkeys or shibboleths: we must crush corruption.
As Rev. John Winthrop preached on board the Mayflower in 1630, let’s be a “shining city on a hill.”
New York Times article quoting my friend Peter Montgomery of People for the American Way:
Fighting Gay Rights and Abortion With the First Amendment
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Jack Phillips, center, a baker, with supporters this month in Lakewood, Colo. Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Mr. Phillips, who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, in his case before the Supreme Court next month.CreditDavid Zalubowski/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The details were spare when the event appeared this summer on Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s public schedule. He would speak on religious liberty to a group called Alliance Defending Freedom. No exact location was specified. No news media would be allowed in.
Only after an outcry over such secrecy — and the anti-gay rights positions of its sponsor — did a transcript of Mr. Sessions’s remarks emerge on a conservative website. “Many Americans have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack,” he told the gathering in Orange County, Calif. “The challenges our nation faces today concerning our historic First Amendment right to the ‘free exercise’ of our faith have become acute.”
Mr. Sessions’s focus was not an accident. The First Amendment has become the most powerful weapon of social conservatives fighting to limit the separation of church and state and to roll back laws on same-sex marriage and abortion rights.
Few groups have done more to advance this body of legal thinking than the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has more than 3,000 lawyers working on behalf of its causes around the world and brought in $51.5 million in revenue for the 2015-16 tax year, more than the American Civil Liberties Union.
But it hopes to carve out an even wider sphere of protected religious expression this term when the justices are to hear two more of its cases, one a challenge to a California law that requires “crisis pregnancy centers,” which are run by abortion opponents, to provide women with information on how to obtain an abortion, and another in which it represents a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a gay couple’s wedding.
While the abortion case is the latest legal volley in a generation-long battle by social conservatives to limit the effect of Roe v. Wade, the Colorado baker’s case, which the court will hear next month, will test whether groups like the alliance can persuade the court to similarly blunt the sweep of Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that enshrined same-sex marriage into law, as well as the anti-discrimination laws protecting gay men and lesbians.
If there is a battle somewhere to restrict protections for gay men, lesbians or transgender people, chances are the alliance is there fighting it. The alliance has defended the owners of a wedding chapel in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, who did not want to perform same-sex ceremonies. It has tried to stop a Charlotte, N.C., law that gave transgender people the right to use the bathroom of their choice. It backed the failed attempt by the Arizona legislature in 2014 to allow businesses to cite religious freedom in turning away same-sex couples.
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Alan Sears in 2014. He is one of the founders of Alliance Defending Freedom and was its longtime president until recently.CreditSamantha Sais for The New York Times
“We think that in a free society people who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman shouldn’t be coerced by the government to promote a different view of marriage,” said Jeremy Tedesco, a senior counsel and vice president of United States advocacy for the group, which is based in Scottsdale, Ariz. “We have to figure out how to live in a society with pluralistic and diverse views.”
But civil liberties groups and gay rights advocates say that Alliance Defending Freedom’s arguments about religious liberty and free expression mask another motivation: a deep-seated belief that gay people are immoral and that no one should be forced to recognize them as ordinary members of society.
“They are a very powerful part of this broader movement, which is trying to bring a very particular biblical worldview into dominance at all levels of government and society,” said Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group.
“They’ve got some very big, very clear goals,” said Mr. Montgomery, who has studied Alliance Defending Freedom since the group’s founding in 1994.
One of those goals was to defend laws that criminalized gay and lesbian sexual conduct.
In a brief the alliance filed urging the Supreme Court not to overturn a Texas law that made homosexual activity illegal, its lawyers described gay men as diseased and as public health risks. The court decided 6 to 3 that the law was unconstitutional.
The United States is not the only place the group has been active. Before Belize’s highest court struck down a law last year that banned “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” the group sent activists there to work with local lawyers who were trying to keep the prohibition in place. In India, an Alliance Defending Freedom-affiliated lawyer was part of the legal team that has defended a similar law in the country’s Supreme Court. That law remains in place, though the Indian court recently signaled that it may revisit the issue.
And when Russia approved a law in 2013 that imposed a fine for what it called propagandizing “nontraditional” sexual relationships among minors — a move that led for calls to boycott the 2014 Olympics there — Alliance Defending Freedom produced a nine-page memo in support of the law, saying its aim was to safeguard “the psychological or physical well-being of minors.”
Mr. Tedesco said the group had never supported the criminalization of homosexual activity. In Belize and India, he noted, the laws the group supported applied to heterosexual sodomy as well. He described the alliance’s involvement in both countries as “a small group of attorneys” who wanted “to resist the foreign activists that were trying to challenge their public health law.”
Asked if he and other alliance lawyers believed gay men and lesbians were immoral, Mr. Tedesco said, “I’m not going to get into what the Bible says or teaches about homosexuality.”
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Attorney General Jeff Sessions in September. He spoke to Alliance Defending Freedom this past summer at a summit meeting on religious liberty.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times
Alliance leaders have not always been so reticent.
Alan Sears, one of the founders of the group and its longtime president until recently, wrote a book in 2003 with Craig Osten titled “The Homosexual Agenda” in which they described possible consequences of same-sex marriage. “Why not two men and three women, or two men, one woman, and a dog and a chimpanzee?” the book said. “This means marriage will be no better than anonymous sodomy in a bathhouse.”
How the alliance is approaching the case of the Colorado baker, Jack Phillips, is an illustration of its evolving public relations strategy. Gone are the fiery denunciations of gay men and lesbians as sinners and reprobates.
A sophisticated multimedia campaign, called “Justice for Jack,” portrays Mr. Phillips as the victim of heavy-handed state bureaucrats. Set to soft piano music, one video describes how Mr. Phillips has received death threats, hateful phone calls and lost 40 percent of his business.
“It’s not about refusing business,” Mr. Phillips’s daughter says to the camera. “It’s about having the freedom for him to artistically create something that allows him to honor Christ.”
Donald Knapp, the Coeur d’Alene chapel owner who sued the city because he worried a new nondiscrimination ordinance would force him to marry same-sex couples, said the alliance not only took up his case but also provided him with media training and flew him to Scottsdale to meet with other Christian business owners in similar positions.
“The A.D.F. was just trying to help us know what to say, how to state our position, what we believe in,” Mr. Knapp said in an interview. “They spent a great deal of time with us.”
Gay rights advocates acknowledge what they are up against. “They know those are messages that work better, and they are no longer leading with the messages they used to, which are ‘gay people are pedophiles and we need to keep them away from our kids,’” said James Esseks, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who focuses on gender identity and sexual orientation issues. “It’s a very intentional shift, a very strategic shift.”
Back in Washington, the alliance’s close connections with Mr. Sessions’s Justice Department seem to be deepening. In September, the department filed a brief arguing that Mr. Phillips should not be forced to violate his faith.
“There is no clear line between his speech and his clients,’” it said. “He is giving effect to their message by crafting a unique product with his own two hands.”
Correction: November 22, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a capsule summary for this article misstated the name of a group that uses the First Amendment to challenge gay rights and abortion laws. It is the Alliance Defending Freedom, not the Alliance Defending Justice.
DONALD JOHN TRUMP's UnAmerican activities leading to impeachment? Happy Thanksgiving, 2017.
A Split From Trump Indicates That Flynn Is Moving to Cooperate With Mueller
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Lawyers for Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, are said to have terminated an information-sharing agreement with the president’s legal team.CreditCarlos Barria/Reuters
WASHINGTON — Lawyers for Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, notified the president’s legal team in recent days that they could no longer discuss the special counsel’s investigation, according to four people involved in the case — an indication that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with prosecutors or negotiating a deal.
Mr. Flynn’s lawyers had been sharing information with Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is examining whether anyone around Mr. Trump was involved in Russian efforts to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
That agreement has been terminated, the four people said. Defense lawyers frequently share information during investigations, but they must stop when doing so would pose a conflict of interest. It is unethical for lawyers to work together when one client is cooperating with prosecutors and another is still under investigation.
The notification alone does not prove that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with Mr. Mueller. Some lawyers withdraw from information-sharing arrangements as soon as they begin negotiating with prosecutors. And such negotiations sometimes fall apart.
Still, the notification led Mr. Trump’s lawyers to believe that Mr. Flynn — who, along with his son, is seen as having significant criminal exposure — has, at the least, begun discussions with Mr. Mueller about cooperating.
Lawyers for Mr. Flynn and Mr. Trump declined to comment. The four people briefed on the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
A deal with Mr. Flynn would give Mr. Mueller a behind-the-scenes look at the Trump campaign and the early tumultuous weeks of the administration. Mr. Flynn was an early and important adviser to Mr. Trump, an architect of Mr. Trump’s populist “America first” platform and an advocate of closer ties with Russia.
His ties to Russia predated the campaign — he sat with President Vladimir V. Putin at a 2015 event in Moscow — and he was a point person on the transition team for dealing with Russia.
The White House had been bracing for charges against Mr. Flynn in recent weeks, particularly after charges were filed against three other former Trump associates: Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman; Rick Gates, a campaign aide; and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser.
But none of those men match Mr. Flynn in stature, or in his significance to Mr. Trump. A retired three-star general, Mr. Flynn was an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s and a valued surrogate for a candidate who had no foreign policy experience. Mr. Trump named him national security adviser, he said, to help “restore America’s leadership position in the world.”
Among the interactions that Mr. Mueller is investigating is a private meeting that Mr. Flynn had with the Russian ambassador and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, during the presidential transition. In the past year, it has been revealed that people with ties to Russia repeatedly sought to meet with Trump campaign officials, sometimes dangling the promise of compromising information on Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Flynn is regarded as loyal to Mr. Trump, but he has in recent weeks expressed serious concerns to friends that prosecutors will bring charges against his son, Michael Flynn Jr., who served as his father’s chief of staff and was a part of several financial deals involving the elder Mr. Flynn that Mr. Mueller is scrutinizing.
The White House has said that neither Mr. Flynn nor other former aides have incriminating information to provide about Mr. Trump. “He likes General Flynn personally, but understands that they have their own path with the special counsel,” a White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, said in an interview last month with The New York Times. “I think he would be sad for them, as a friend and a former colleague, if the process results in punishment or indictments. But to the extent that that happens, that’s beyond his control.”
Mr. Flynn was supposed to have been the cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s national security team. Instead, he was forced out after a month in office over his conversations with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak. Mr. Flynn’s handling of those conversations fueled suspicion that people around Mr. Trump had concealed their dealings with Russians, worsening a controversy that has hung over the president’s first year in office.
Four days after Mr. Trump was sworn in, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Flynn at the White House about his calls with the ambassador. American intelligence and law enforcement agencies became so concerned about Mr. Flynn’s conversations and false statements about them to Vice President Mike Pence that the acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, warned the White House that Mr. Flynn might be compromised.
The conversations with the Russian ambassador that led to Mr. Flynn’s undoing took place during the presidential transition. When questions about them surfaced, Mr. Flynn told Mr. Pence that they had exchanged only holiday greetings — the conversations happened in late December, around the time that the Obama administration was announcing sanctions against Russia.
While Mr. Pence and White House press officers repeated the holiday-greetings claim publicly, Mr. Flynn and the ambassador had in fact discussed the sanctions. That invited the idea that the incoming administration was trying to undermine the departing president and curry favor with Moscow.
Mr. Trump sought Mr. Flynn’s resignation only after news broke that Mr. Flynn had been interviewed by F.B.I. agents and that Ms. Yates had warned the White House that his false statements could make him vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
Since then, Mr. Flynn’s legal problems have grown. It was revealed that he failed to list payments from Russia-linked entities on financial disclosure forms. He did not mention a paid speech he gave in Moscow, as well as other payments from companies linked to Russia.
The former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, has testified before Congress that Mr. Trump asked him to end the government’s investigation into Mr. Flynn in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office the day after Mr. Flynn was fired. Mr. Trump’s request caused great concern for Mr. Comey, who immediately wrote a memo about his meeting with the president.
And investigators working for Mr. Mueller have questioned witnesses about whether Mr. Flynn was secretly paid by the Turkish government during the presidential campaign. Mr. Flynn belatedly disclosed, after leaving the White House, that the Turkish government had paid him more than $500,000.
Mr. Flynn’s firing was, in some ways, the first domino that set off a cascade of problems for Mr. Trump. After the president ousted Mr. Comey, news surfaced that the president had requested an end to the Flynn inquiry, a revelation that led to Mr. Mueller’s appointment. That, in turn, raised the profile of an investigation that the president had tried mightily to contain.
When it rains, it pours. This one's for the ninnies at the St. Johns Republican Party, including Trump-loving corrupt Sheriff DAVID SHOAR, who legally changed his name from "SHOAR" in 1994:
‘Keep coming at me guys!!!’: Donald Trump Jr. meets Russia scrutiny with defiance
President Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. communicated with WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. Here's what the messages say. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
Donald Trump Jr. had just posted a batch of private messages he exchanged with WikiLeaks during last year’s campaign, confirming reports that he communicated with the website that published stolen Democratic emails obtained by Russian military intelligence.
“More nothing burgers from the media and others desperately trying to create a false narrative,” the president’s oldest son wrote on Instagram. “Keep coming at me guys!!!”
Over the course of the week, Trump Jr. went on to tweet or retweet criticism of his father’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton; actor George Takei; Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.); and former vice president Joe Biden, sharing unsubstantiated claims about him from an anonymously sourced blog post.
Faced with deepening scrutiny of contacts he had in 2016 with people tied to Russia, the 39-year-old has adopted a provocative response: defiance.
In public appearances and on Twitter, Trump Jr. has taken an increasingly caustic tone, mocking critics and shoving himself into the scrum of the country’s most polarizing debates.
It’s an unorthodox legal strategy for someone under scrutiny by congressional investigators, whose every word could be used against him. But the approach fits with the real estate executive’s growing public persona as a right-wing provocateur and ardent defender of Trumpism.
“He’s very smart to be in the spotlight,” said Charlie Kirk, a friend and the founder of the conservative college and high school group Turning Point USA. “Would they stop the investigation if he stopped tweeting? He’s in a situation where either you defend yourself, reassure the base, reassure the supporters, or stay silent. And if you’re totally silent, it only increases suspicion.”
The Trump base is with him, Kirk added: “Most people can’t even keep up with this stuff, anyway.”
The Russia-related controversies have heightened Trump Jr.’s rising profile. Once a supporting character on his father’s reality TV show, the vice president of the family business is now an in-demand figure on the paid speaking circuit and a political player all his own.
Last month, he delivered a speech on the field of the cavernous Dallas Cowboys stadium, sounding off to a group of University of North Texas donors about “liberal imperialists,” media “vitriol” and universities that “train your children to hate our country.”
After the speech, for which Trump Jr. was paid $100,000, “he did selfies with half the people who showed up,” said G. Brint Ryan, a Republican mega-donor and Trump adviser whose tax firm co-sponsored the 800-attendee event.
Two weeks later, he was billed as the featured guest at a party for Trump administration staff held in a chandelier-lit study at Trump’s Washington hotel, where dozens of high-ranking officials sipped cocktails and Trump wine from the family’s Virginia vineyard.
This image of Donald Trump Jr.'s Twitter account shows a series of direct messages he received from the Twitter account behind the WikiLeaks website, including his responses to the communications, which he posted Nov. 13. (Associated Press)
Trump Jr. referred questions about his activities to the family’s private company, which did not respond to requests for comment. His brother Eric Trump said in a statement that “Don and I are totally dedicated to running our family business, The Trump Organization, which has been an incredible experience.”
“While our sole focus remains on the business, our father has the most important job in the world, and we could not be more proud of all that he has accomplished in his first year,” he said to The Washington Post. “Don and I will always remain his biggest advocates and supporters.”
Trump Jr.’s attorney, Alan Futerfas, said his client is exercising his freedom to speak his mind as a private citizen.
“He is simply voicing thoughts and concerns and his hopes for America that he shared on the campaign trail,” Futerfas said in an interview. “He cares deeply about these issues, and there’s no reason that he should not continue to express his opinion.”
Friends say the flame-throwing by Trump Jr. — a devoted outdoorsman and father of five who spent the campaign revving up voters at camping outfitters and shooting ranges — is merely the response of a loyal son.
“If you were him and watching the mainstream liberal media attack your father day after day, it would get kind of tiresome and you’d react, too,” said Doug Deason, a wealthy Dallas donor and investor who joined Trump Jr. last month for a pro-Trump super PAC’s fundraising-strategy session at oilman T. Boone Pickens’s mega-ranch.
Others who know Trump Jr. see grander ambitions. He is “more of a politician than his father,” said Louise Sunshine, a formerTrump Organization executive who has known the Trump kids since they were born. “Donald was a businessman . . . but Donald Trump Jr. is making it his business to be a politician.”
Trump Jr. did not always appear destined to follow his father’s path, moving to Aspen after college for a year of fly-fishing and bartending. But by the time his father launched his White House bid, Trump Jr. was a key purveyor of the family brand, having joined the family business and co-starred as a “boardroom advisor” on Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice.”
He traveled almost constantly for 18 months as his father’s surrogate, mixing his outdoorsman bona fides with sharp swipes at Clinton, at one point warning she would reshape the United States into a “socialist state.”
After the election, Trump Jr. and his brother took over managing the Trump Organization, which their father still owns. Eric Trump told The Post in February that “the company and policy and government are completely separated. We have built an unbelievable wall in between the two.”
This year, Trump Jr. attended the openings of a Trump-brand hotel in Vancouver and a luxury golf complex in Dubai. Later this month, when his sister, Ivanka, heads to India as part of a White House trip, Trump Jr. will travel there, too, to help launch two Trump-branded tower projects in Kolkata and Gurgaon.
But much of his public calendar appears dominated by politics rather than business. In recent months, he has headlined GOP dinners, fundraisers and rallies in Indiana, Texas and Montana.
Some organizers said they broke fundraising records after donors flocked to hear his stories of life as a Trump. At one event for the Indiana Republican Party in May, he said the first person to call his brother when Eric was expecting his first child wasn’t his father, but Vice President Pence.
Last month, a day after the Trump hotel division announced it had hired a new vice president, Trump Jr. was hunting pheasants with a shotgun alongside Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), one of his father’s top supporters.
Donald Trump Jr., left, walks with Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) after a pheasant hunt near Akron, Iowa, on Oct. 28. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
Presidential children traditionally serve to soften and humanize their fathers, reminding voters that the nation’s leader can be a family man, too. But Trump Jr. has sharpened his father’s already-pointed edges, often amplifying the president’s grudges.
On Twitter, he regularly jabs at the president’s antagonists, from liberal media personalities to Republican politicians to kneeling football players. Responding on Tuesday to a CNN guest’s claim that the president rarely attacks white men, Trump Jr. rattled off 19 of his father’s white-male targets in a single tweet, including former president George W. Bush and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
He often retweets or references far-right voices, as well as websites aimed at conservatives, such as Gateway Pundit, the Federalist and Breitbart News. Earlier this month, he retweeted a comment that the Clintons were “an unscrupulous gang of thugs” and alluded to a fringe-right conspiracy theory alleging that the couple covered up a murder.
In more than 400 tweets last month, he referred to his company only once, retweeting one of its posts offering “thoughts and prayers” after the Las Vegas shooting massacre.
In the coming weeks, Trump Jr. will appear at a $200-a-person fundraiser in Kansas for gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach, a torchbearer for the president’s voter-fraud crusade, and keynote a Turning Point USA banquet for thousands of students in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Kirk, the group’s founder, said the event received hundreds of new applications when Trump Jr.’s attendance was announced.
“Part of what makes Don’s brand unique is he’s not afraid to push the envelope, not afraid to push the boundaries and call people out,” Kirk said.
Trump Jr.’s public bravado comes as he facespersistent questions about what multiple Russia probes will reveal about the role he played during his father’s White House run.
Along with the messages he exchanged with WikiLeaks, Trump Jr. met at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer in hopes of getting damaging information on Clinton. “I love it,” he wrote to an associate about the possibility that the lawyer would have material on the Democratic candidate.
Trump Jr. testified privately in September for five hours before a Senate committee and said in a statement that he “did not collude with any foreign government and [does] not know of anyone who did.”
Buthe faces growing calls by Democratic lawmakers to participate in a public hearing and answer questions about any knowledge he might have about Russia’s effort to boost his father’s campaign.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN in September that she expected Trump Jr. to take part in a hearing “come hell or high water.”
Meanwhile, some of Trump Jr.’s friends said he is struggling with a more fundamental frustration: craving more of a connection to the man he called at the Republican National Convention “my mentor, my best friend.”
President-elect Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at a news conference at Trump Tower in New York on Jan. 11. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In February, Trump Jr. told The Post that he had spoken briefly with his father but said “he’s got real stuff he’s got to deal with.” He told the New York Times earlier this year, “I feel ridiculous bothering him.”
“Don barely talks to his father, and they barely see each other,” said one person close to him who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. “It weighs on him. It does. . . . It didn’t really hit him until laying the wreath before inauguration that this is so much bigger than us, and they’re going to have to make sacrifices.”
Amid his angry online missives are nostalgic posts about the president, whom he dressed up as for Halloween. On the anniversary of the election win, Trump Jr. posted photos of the two hugging and what he called his “favorite piece of campaign memorabilia”: an electoral map signed, “Great job! Thanks, Dad.”
In one video, Trump Jr. says he “had the privilege of being able” to fly with his father to the White House. He can be seen in the helicopter window’s reflection as the president walks away.
Carol D. Leonnig and Jonathan O’Connell contributed to this report.
Marbell Castillo holds her granddaughter Maia Powell during the toddler’s recent checkup at Burke Pediatrics in Fairfax County, Va. Maia is covered through the Children's Health Insurance Program. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Officials in nearly a dozen states are preparing to notify families that a crucial health insurance program for low-income children is running out of money for the first time since its creation two decades ago, putting coverage for many at risk by the end of the year.
Congress missed a Sept. 30 deadline to extend funding for CHIP, as the Children’s Health Insurance Program is known. Nearly 9 million youngsters and 370,000 pregnant women nationwide receive care because of it.
Many states have enough money to keep their individual programs afloat for at least a few months, but five could run out in late December if lawmakers do not act. Others will start to exhaust resources the following month.
The looming crunch, which comes despite CHIP’s enduring popularity and bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, has dismayed children’s health advocates.
“We are very concerned, and the reason is that Congress hasn’t shown a strong ability to get stuff done,” said Bruce Lesley, president of Washington-based First Focus, a child and family advocacy organization. “And the administration is completely out, has not even uttered a syllable on the issue. How this gets resolved is really unclear, and states are beginning to hit deadlines.”
Others paying close attention to the issue remain hopeful that Congress will extend funding before January, but states say they cannot rest on hope.
Ana Elsy Ramirez Diaz holds her son, Milan Rojas Ramirez, as he is seen by physician Margaret-Anne Fernandez at the Inova Cares Clinic for Children in Falls Church, Va. A portion of the clinic's patients are insured through the Children's Health Insurance Program. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
“Everybody is still waiting and thinking Congress is going to act, and they probably will, but you can’t run a health-care program that way,” said Linda Nablo, chief deputy director at Virginia’s Department of Medical Assistance Services. “You can’t say ‘probably’ everything is going to be all right.”
Most CHIP families, who earn too much for Medicaid but too little to afford private insurance, are not aware lawmakers’ inaction is endangering coverage. They’re about to find out, though. Virginia and several other states are preparing letters to go out as early as Monday warning families their children’s insurance may be taken away.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which administers the program at the federal level, issued a notice to state health officials on Nov. 9 detailing their options if CHIP funding does run dry. States forced to end the program will need to determine whether enrolled children are eligible for Medicaid or whether their family will need to seek insurance through an Affordable Care Act marketplace, the guidance said.
Longtime physician William Rees remembers the years before CHIP’s safety net, when families without coverage would put off bringing a sick child to the doctor until symptoms were so severe they would end up in a hospital emergency room.
“Pediatrics is mostly preventive medicine, it’s so important what we do,” said Rees, who has practiced in Northern Virginia since 1975. “It’s about trying to keep up with routine visits. If [children] don’t have insurance, that often doesn’t happen, so CHIP keeps them in the system and they get their vaccines when they’re due.”
The program, which is credited with helping to bring the rate of uninsured children to a record low of 4.5 percent, has been reauthorized several times over the years. And under the ACA, the federal government sharply boosted its match rate. It now provides 88 percent or more of every state’s CHIP costs.
Congress has been unable to agree on how to pay for the $15 billion program moving forward, however. President Trump’s 2018 budget proposed to cut billions from CHIP over two years and limit eligibility for federal matching funds.
The uncertainty has states scrambling. Arizona, California, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon and the District of Columbia will run out of CHIP money by Dec. 31 or early January, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Children and Families. At least six more plan to take some sort of action to address the potential funding loss, including notifying parents their children are at risk of losing coverage.
Some states operate CHIP as an independent program and would have to shut theirs down if federal dollars dry up. In Virginia, resources are expected to be exhausted by late January. Nablo said she has no choice but to send notices Dec. 1 to the families of the 66,000 children and 1,100 pregnant women in the state who are covered.
“We don’t want to act too fast if Congress is going to restore this, but we also want to give families enough time,” she said. “We have kids in the middle of cancer treatment, pregnant women in the middle of prenatal care.”
Texas plans to notify families in January that the program could end. Funding problems there were exacerbated by Hurricane Harvey because the state asked the federal government that it be allowed to waive co-pays and enrollment fees for CHIP children in counties declared disaster areas. With less money coming in, funds could be exhausted even sooner than the state first projected, according to Christine Mann, spokeswoman for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
In West Virginia, where CHIP funds are expected to run out in March, officials overseeing the program voted this month to shut it down Feb. 28 if Congress hasn’t acted.
(Kaiser Family Foundation)
Other states, including Maryland, developed their CHIP program as an extension of Medicaid and so are required by law to find a way to keep it going. The same applies to the District, which will need to come up with as much as $12.5 million in local funds to cover the approximately 14,000 children enrolled, the D.C. Department of Health Care Finance said. The agency will begin looking next month at where money can be diverted.
“It’s pretty chaotic out there,” said Joan Alker, executive director at the Georgetown center. “What really troubles me about it is [CHIP] is successful. Everyone should feel good about it. There’s no reason for this to be lagging on like this. This should be an easy win for Congress.”
CHIP has become a political issue in the gubernatorial race in Maryland, where funding would run out in March. Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has pressedfor Congress to pass a reauthorization. A potential Democratic opponent, Ben Jealous, has criticized him for not having a backup plan to protect the 140,000 children who would be left uninsured.
In Washington, lawmakers in both parties agree on the program’s merits but are at an impasse over how to pay for it. The House passed a bill this month along largely party lines to extend CHIP funding for five years in part by cutting an ACA prevention fund and raising Medicare rates for wealthier seniors.
That measure is unlikely to be taken up by the other chamber. Senators, led by Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), are working to find a bipartisan solution. Hatch was one of the authors of the original CHIP legislation in 1997. The other was Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who died in 2009.
“I am working with my colleagues to advance this bill in a fiscally responsible manner so we can ensure coverage is maintained,” Hatch said in a recent statement. Yet during a heated exchange last week in a committee meeting on the GOP tax overhaul, he voiced little urgency.
Back up your concern for the poor by starting with an extension for CHIP, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told Hatch.
Hatch responded angrily, “I’m not starting with CHIP.”
Andy Slavitt, who was acting CMS administrator under President Barack Obama, can’t believe there is anything to debate. That Congress would hold up popular legislation that has never before been subject to politics speaks to the “very fragmented culture of lawmaking,” he said.
“It’s a core program that many low-income families rely on. It’s widely acclaimed to be a success,” he said. “We’re operating in a mode that we don’t do anything until it’s an absolute crisis, and we’re creating more crises that don’t need to happen.”
When Congress failed to extend funding in late September, CMS was able to provide several states and U.S. territories with emergency money to keep their programs going a bit longer. The agency has used about $542 million in leftover funds from previous years, but it has limited resources to assist much longer.
Marbell Castillo, who often takes her granddaughter Maia to her doctor appointments, worries about future health coverage for the little girl if CHIP is not funded. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
As families hear that their children could lose health insurance, they’re shaken. Marbell Castillo learned about the possibility during a recent checkup with her granddaughter Maia Powell at Burke Pediatrics in Fairfax County, Va.
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The appointment, in an exam room decorated with “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” decals, covered the gamut. A nurse practitioner asked about what the 16-month-old was eating and when she slept. Maia got her height, weight and temperature taken. She also got her chubby thighs stuck once, twice, three times with vaccinations for diphtheria and other illnesses.
Castillo walked out with Maia balanced on one hip and worries on her mind. She often takes the little girl to appointments so her 23-year-old daughter, who works two jobs, doesn’t have to take off.
Without CHIP, Castillo wondered, what would they do for affordable health insurance for Maia?
“They can’t leave people without this program,” she said.
1: Bill Nelson for Governor: Excellent idea. "Walkin' Lawton," Lawton Chiles returned from the Senate to serve two terms as Governor. Meanwhile, if Senator Nelson runs for Governor, I think Palm Beach County State's Attorney Dave Aronberg should run for Senate. I'm from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. I support candidates who speak "for the people, not the powerful," That's why I supported Bernie Sanders, while John Morgan backed Hillary Clinton.
UPDATE with h/t to government watchdog Tom Reynolds: 2. John Morgan apparently can't run for Governor now. It's less than a year before the election. Florida law says you can't change your party registration and run for office under a new label. 3. John Morgan apparently can't change his registration to "independent." There is no "independent" party any longer. There's only "No Party Affiliation." 4. John Morgan needs an election lawyer. 5. I nominate government watchdog Tom Reynolds for investigative paralegal in John Morgan's office -- Tom called and pointed out points 2 & 3 after reading the original post.
“I can’t muster enthusiasm for any of today’s politicians,” John Morgan wrote on Twitter. | Brendan Farrington/AP Photo
John Morgan: I'm leaving Democratic party, Nelson should run for governor
TALLAHASSEE — John Morgan tossed a bomb Friday into the 2018 political landscape, saying in a post-Thanksgiving message he is leaving the Democratic Party, and that Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson should not run for re-election, but rather seek the governor's mansion so he can leave a "legacy."
“I can’t muster enthusiasm for any of today’s politicians,” the prominent trial lawyer and Democratic fundraiser wrote on Twitter. “They are all the same. Both parties. I plan to register as an independent and when I vote, vote for the lesser of two evils.”
Morgan did not close the door on the idea of running for governor himself — a notion supported by many in his party — but said in his message, if he did, he would do so as an independent. In follow-up text messages with POLITICO Florida, Morgan confirmed he was not saying he would not run for governor, “just not as a Dem,” he said.
He said he would still support Democratic candidates he “likes personally,” including Sen. Bill Nelson. Morgan, though, said he thinks Nelson should run for governor, not a fourth-term in the U.S. Senate.
“I believe [Nelson] should run for governor. He is the Dem’s best chance and he would be happier there,” Morgan wrote in a text message to POLITICO Florida. “In the Senate he accomplishes nothing. As governor he could have a legacy.”
It’s both a nod to how Morgan views the governor’s mansion, but also an implicit knock on the current field of Democratic gubernatorial candidates.
Even though he is not running, Morgan has lead the so far lackluster Democratic field in recent polls. The perceived current front-runner is former Rep. Gwen Graham of Tallahassee, who has been running since early May and has roughly $2.5 million in the bank. That number is surpassed by both declared Republican nominees and likely future candidates already stocking away cash for a potential run.
Two other candidates who have been running for months — Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum and Winter Park businessman Chris King — have also failed to garner real momentum. Former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine announced earlier this month he was also seeking the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. His promise to put up to $25 million of his own wealth into the race could inject energy into the Democratic field.
Morgan said Graham could run for Senate, a post he deems less important than governor because Democrats are in the minority in that chamber.
“The Dems have little if no chance of taking the majority. Why sit on the back bench,” he said of Nelson. “I would urge him to be bold. Gwen or one of the others could run [for Senate].”
“I bet the Dade SA gets in now,” he added.
Morgan was referring to Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle. In June, POLITICO Florida reported on a quiet meeting of Democratic strategists at her home to try and plot out a run for governor. Their conclusion was that one of her biggest hurdles would be the fact that her office decided not to prosecute after years of investigating the death of a schizophrenic African-American inmate who died in 2012 at Dade Correctional Institution, after guards forced him into a scalding hot shower.
Morgan said, while he would support some Democratic candidates he likes, he would not raise a dime for national groups like the Democratic National Committee.
“F--- no,” he said when asked if he would help national organizations. “That’s like pissing money down a rat hole. Read Donna [Brazile's] book”
Morgan was referring to a book by the former interim DNC chair, previewed this month in POLITICO Magazine, where she says the party essentially rigged the DNC to support Hillary Clinton before the Democratic primary was over.
“Bunch of dumb ass political hacks,” Morgan added.
St. Johns County resembles the dysfunctional mafia family in journalist Jimmy Breslin's "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight."
Case in point: St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners' Tourist Development Council, has no information on the county website more current than March.
Inept TDC staff fails to provide proper public notice of meetings and is below the standard and behind the times on transparency.
Democracy dies in the dark.
Bed tax funded TDC needs an Inspector General audit and investigation.
TDC is recipient and distributor of millions of dollars in wasted, misdirected bed tax revenues (squandered on advertising instead of public benefits like a new pier).
Read the inevitable and inimitable e-mail correspondence from government watchdog Tom Reynolds has not been answered. I agree with Tom -- the County Administrator, MICHAEL DAVID WANCHICK is incompetent. Will he be fired?
A SIMPLE TASK OF UPDATING AND YOUR MANAGERS CAN'T DO THEIR JOBS!
Meetings, Agendas & Minutes
Meeting Notices
The Tourist Development Council is required by the authorizing legislation to meet at least four times per year, but has chosen to meet monthly. The meetings are held on the third Monday of every month in the County Auditorium at 500 San Sebastian View at 1:30 p.m. Notices of meeting dates and times are furnished to members of the media well in advance of scheduled meetings. Any changes in dates, times, or meeting rooms will be posted. Meeting schedule.
NOT UPDATED SINCE MARCH 2017!
WOW, DUDE!
PLEASE FIRE WHO IS NOT DOING THEIR JOB!
Meeting Minutes
For the current meeting agenda, please see theTDC calendar.
1. So, controversial St. Johns County Sheriff DAVID SHOAR claims the SJSO Chaplain is a "real integral part of our culture." As Francois de La Rochefoucauld said, "Hypocrisy is the Homage Vice Pays to Virtue."
2. Deceiving Christian believers by affecting ethics and religion, SHOAR covers up multiple wrongful deaths at the hands of his deputies, including Michelle O'Connell and Andrea Sheldon.
3. As reported in November 2013 by The New York Times and PBS Frontline, Sheriff DAVID SHOAR was the author of the Michelle O'Connell homicide coverup 2010-to date.
4. As The New York Times reported in 2017, SHOAR sought to get FDLE Special Agent Rusty Ray Rodgers fired, investigated, prosecuted and incarcerated for doing his job."
5. SHOAR routinely violates constitutional rights, as he did in illegally taping attorneys meeting with clients, as held by four federal judges on two courts. "Integral part of our culture?"
6. SHOAR ducks questions, even from County Commissioners. In fact, everything about SHOAR reeks of deception, phoniness, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery. (SHOAR legally changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994).
7. Yes, Virginia, Hypocrisy is the Homage Vice Pays to Virtue.
HELPING OTHERS: Deputy, chaplain living life of service through the Sheriff’s Office
CHRISTINA.KELSO@STAUGUSTINE.COM Deputy Kelly Kemp stands in the courtyard of the St. Johns County courthouse on Wednesday, November 22, 2017.
Some might say the photo says it all.
Submitted by a parent, and posted later to the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page, Deputy Kelly Kemp is seated on the tailgate of a pickup truck listening intently to a young man seated next to him.
The boy, the father said in a letter of thanks sent to the Sheriff’s Office, was having a rough start to his school year and a needed a pep talk.
“Deputy Kemp did not hesitate for one second and took him under his wing,” the father wrote. “He spoke with him for quite a bit, while I stood aside. He spoke with him about respect and so many other life lessons.”
The son later asked to send a thank-you card to Kemp.
The Facebook post generated 87 comments, nearly all of them praising the deputy for the work he does.
One woman’s post said the experiences she had with Kemp “weren’t under the best circumstances” but said she was “always impressed by his caring demeanor.”
“I listened to how he spoke to children who were in his community service program,” she wrote. “He always spoke to them with such respect and empathy. He is definitely a genuine man and great role model.”
But Kemp, who serves as the Sheriff’s Office chaplain and heads up the agency’s civil citation program for juvenile offenders, would say he’s just doing what he was called to do and the praise should be directed to God.
“Everything we do is to his glory and his benefit,” Kemp said at the end of an interview earlier this month when he sat down with The Record to talk about his work.
During that roughly hour-long conversation he talked about how he got into law enforcement, the chaplaincy and the civil citations program.
Kemp, who finished his training young, has worked in law enforcement essentially from the first day he was old enough to do so legally.
“I had to wait 15 days to get my certification,” he said.
From there he worked as a reserve officer in Fernandina Beach and with the Florida Park Service for years until one day he heard God speak to him.
“Go and sin no more and preach the gospel through law enforcement,” were the words he said he heard as plainly as if they came from someone sitting next him.
“The next day I got a phone call from Sheriff (Neil) Perry to come in for an interview,” he said.
Perry, who served as St. Johns County Sheriff from 1984 to 2004, hired Kemp as a reserve deputy and to work as the agency’s chaplain. He also worked shifts on patrol and helped with the Police Athletic League, or PAL, teams as well.
St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar hired Kemp full-time shortly after he was elected in 2004.
An ordained minister who studied at Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary, Kemp said he spends the majority of his time working with the juveniles in the civil citation program. The rest is split between his chaplain duties and his continued work with PAL.
The civil citation program started under Perry as a way to keep juveniles who find themselves on the wrong side of the law — for minor offenses — out of the criminal justice system, but still having to atone for their mistakes.
Cited rather than charged, all juveniles who find themselves in the program meet with Kemp and their parents at Kemp’s office in the St. Johns County courthouse. There, he speaks with them about discipline and respect and, through an assessment of their situation, determines whether or not they need drug or alcohol counseling or whether they can pay their dues as sentenced through Teen Court.
Either way, Kemp continues to work with the teens, helping them and mentoring them as they complete their community service hours, which can include setting up equipment for PAL games or delivering turkeys to those in need during the holidays.
It is work that Kemp said he sees making a difference even though much of it is not “quantifiable” in any way.
The program, Kemp said, has a low recidivism rate, but even with the handful of those teens who do get in trouble again, there is often something to be thankful for.
He told of one student he had spent a good deal of time with, who, after fulfilling the requirements of the program, got in trouble again for fighting.
He said the teen asked, “Please don’t tell Deputy Kemp, I don’t want him to be disappointed in me.”
“There was obviously a success with that,” Kemp said.
Shoar said Wednesday that Kemp “is always available” and works tirelessly to help others, offering that it is likely his deep faith that sustains the busy schedule.
“He’s able to combine that with his love for children and the youth in this county,” he said. “He’s just a great guy.”
In some ways, Kemp is also the spiritual face of the Sheriff’s Office. He can often be seen at memorial services and ceremonies offering a prayer for the day. But a lot of the other spiritual work gets done behind the scenes, in the hallways and patrol cars of the Sheriff’s Office.
Shoar said the work that he does with the youth combined with what he does to support his fellow deputies has made him an “invaluable” member of the agency.
“He’s just devoted his life to helping other people,” he said.
As chaplain, Kemp works with his colleagues who are having family problems or are dealing with stress from their jobs.
Without forcing the issue of faith, Shoar said, he often just offers quiet support.
“You know Kelly will come in and just ride with them,” he said.
“He’s a nonjudgmental voice and he’s a nonjudgmental ear.”
If a deputy is injured on the job and the family needs to be notified and comforted, “the first guy there is Kelly Kemp,” Shoar said.
Doing that kind of work, for well over a decade now, and offering the type of discreet support that the job demands, has earned Kemp a lot of friends and deep connections with those who have served in the Sheriff’s Office, Shoar said. He is often invited these days to give eulogies at funerals for those who have passed, something indicative of the way he has touched people’s lives.
“He’s become a real integral part of our culture,” Shoar said.
1. So, controversial St. Johns County Sheriff DAVID SHOAR claims the SJSO Chaplain is a "real integral part of our culture." As Francois de La Rochefoucauld said, "Hypocrisy is the Homage Vice Pays to Virtue."
2. Deceiving Christian believers by affecting ethics and religion, SHOAR covers up multiple wrongful deaths at the hands of his deputies, including Michelle O'Connell and Andrea Sheldon.
3. As reported in November 2013 by The New York Times and PBS Frontline, Sheriff DAVID SHOAR was the author of the Michelle O'Connell homicide coverup 2010-to date.
4. As The New York Times reported in 2017, SHOAR sought to get FDLE Special Agent Rusty Ray Rodgers fired, investigated, prosecuted and incarcerated for doing his job."
5. SHOAR routinely violates constitutional rights, as he did in illegally taping attorneys meeting with clients, as held by four federal judges on two courts. "Integral part of our culture?"
6. SHOAR ducks questions, even from County Commissioners. In fact, everything about SHOAR reeks of deception, phoniness, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery. (SHOAR legally changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994).
7. Yes, Virginia, Hypocrisy is the Homage Vice Pays to Virtue.
About "our culture" in SJSO. Shoar is hypocritical, at best, using Deputy Kemp and other good officers as human shields. Shoar won't answer basic questions from elected officials and journalists. He acts like an energumen. Perhaps Shoar needs an exorcism?
Justice for Michelle O'Connell. Now. Waiting for Rev. Deputy Kemp -- and other local clergymen to speak out about Justice for Michelle O'Connell -- joining Mayor Nancy Shaver in calling for a federal investigation, as she did in a letter to the record in 2013, after the New York Times article and PBS Frontline story appeared, the year before she beat Sheriff Shoar's pal, then-Mayor Joe Boles.
Shoar viciously attacked and FDLE agent for doing his job. Shoar attacked a grieving family for a private autopsy, accusing them of "molesting' Michelle O'Connell's body. Our taxes paid Shoar and his henchmen writing meanness in in a press release. Guilty conscience? Read it: Sheriff Shoar's statement on release of information on Michelle O'Connell. Posted: May 23, 2016 - 5:24am | Updated: May 23, 2016 - 6:55am A news release from Sheriff David Shoar -- On January 12th, 2016 media reports circulated that the body of Michelle O’Connell was removed from her place of rest by certain (sic) members of her family. At the time, no one was certain (sic) exactly why this was done but the speculation was that a paid (sic) expert witness would be hired by these family members to produce a report that of course would support their belief about the case. Today we learn that this speculation was accurate. The report of the paid (sic) expert was delivered by a resident of Clay County who has a “private investigators” (sic) license with no connection to any official entity including law enforcement. It is critically (sic) important to note that no person officially associated with a prosecutor’s office or law enforcement agency was in any way involved including when she was removed from her place of rest. Why did these certain (sic) family members not request a judge to order a proper and officially sanctioned exhumation? We suspect the answer is that they would not have met the threshold for a judge to order one. Most importantly, there have been three separate officially sanctioned medical examiners review this case as well as two officially sanctioned special prosecutors (Jeff Ashton and Brad King) appointed by the Governor, all have determined there is NO (sic) evidence present to indicate anything other than that Michelle died by her own hand. The last special prosecutor went so far as to write that he was, “thankful it was NOT a homicide because had it been, it could never have been prosecuted due to the actions of the state agent who at one time was involved in this case.” The information presented today is nothing new and all was reviewed during the initial autopsy. Molesting Michelle from her place of rest using some freelance type approach is beyond unconventional, it was reprehensible. The primary advisers to the few family members who will go to any lengths to maintain their moment in the spotlight consist of the private investigator, a former St. Johns County Deputy Sheriff who was fired for ethical (sic) misconduct and who is now a candidate for political office. Interestingly, this same individual has been hinting at some recent political events that there was some “big news” coming regarding the O’Connell case. Coincidently, the last time Michelle’s sister was interviewed on local television she actually told the reporter that this case is about, “politics”. Though thereporter (sic) never followed up on her comment, as the political season evolves it has become very clear what she meant. And finally a career “drug” investigator and current state agent who was recently reprimanded for conducting a “substandard” investigation into the death of Michelle O’Connell. (continued)
(Shoar May 23, 2016 press release, continued): A great question for the public and media to ask would be, why hasn’t the family filed suit against the person they think was culpable in Michelle’s death? The answer is probably the same as why they did not seek an official exhumation, because there is no Probable Cause to indicate Michelle died by anything other than her own hand. Of vital importance that most folks do not understand is that the person that certain (sic) members of the family think is culpable in Michelle’s death, is one of only two people (along with Michelle’s brother Scott) who HAS filed a civil suit in relation to this case (against FDLE and Agent Rodgers). People who are culpable or have committed crimes do not file civil suits because when they do, they can longer shield themselves behind the Fifth Amendment and a civil suit puts everything under a microscope. Fortunately, the civil suit filed by Michelle’s brother Scott and Jeremy Banks is well under way and hopefully (sic) there should be closure within the next year. I have always taken the position that if a jury ever gets to hear what Scott and Jeremy had to endure because of the conduct of a few people with personal agendas, it would shock their consciences and they would rule in favor of both Scott and Jeremy, I still maintain that position. The record clearly shows that we (sic) have always (sic) held employees accountable (sic) at the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office when they violate our policies or engage in criminal conduct. In the past, I have had to discipline and even arrest employees for misconduct. If, however, an employee is unfairly and maliciously targeted by external forces (sic) they will have no stronger advocate than myself. (sic) This case is an example of the latter and not the former. (end of perseverating press release by Sheriff Shoar.
Dep Kemp is the nicest person I know. He has always been a caring and dedicated man of the cloth. He has served St. John's county for years. Dep Kemp is one of a kind and a true friend to all. Keep up the great work. David Ham, retired Sgt. St. John's County Sheriff's Office.
Corrupt lobbyists have been having their way with our government.
Finally, the cause of requiring lobbyist registration is advancing in St. Johns County, where outgoing County Commission Chair, Commissioner James K. Johns (R-Fruit Cove), publicly supported it at the November 21, 2017 BoCC meeting. He's the first Commissioner to support lobbying registration publicly -- the first elected official in St. Johns County to support it.
Meanwhile, here's the lead banner headline above the fold story from today's St. Augustine Record, from the Washington Post:
Mueller might be the one who’s ‘draining the swamp’
Tony Podesta speaks to reporters in Philadelphia. (Jacqueline Larma/Associated Press)
President Trump famously promised that, if elected president, he would “drain the swamp” — upending the culture in Washington that favors the well-connected.
It is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III whose work seems to be sending shock waves through the capital, by exposing the lucrative work lobbyists from both parties engage in on behalf of foreign interests.
The Mueller probe has already claimed its first K Street casualty: Tony Podesta. His lobbying firm, the Podesta Group, a Washington icon of power and political influence, notified its employees recently that the enterprise is shutting its doors.
Since Mueller was appointed, more people and firms have either filed or amended registrations that make public their work on behalf of foreign interests than had done so over the same time period in each of at least the past 20 years. Lobbyists, lawyers and public relations professionals who work for foreign companies and governments say Mueller’s probe has spooked K Street, and firms are likely to be more careful in their compliance with public disclosure standards.
“My colleagues are being contacted by waves of clients concerned about this,” said Joe Sandler, an ethics and lobbying lawyer in Washington who specializes in Foreign Agents Registration Act issues.
1:34
Powerful Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta steps down after Manafort indictment
Tony Podesta announced on Oct. 30 that he is quitting his lobbying firm after indictments cast a shadow on work his firm had done with Paul Manafort.(The Washington Post)
The Podesta Group was famous for providing access to Washington power, hosting events for a roster of high-profile domestic and international clients who helped make it one of the city’s most successful lobbying firms. Revenue declined after the 2016 election, but the firm remained a powerhouse.
Tony Podesta, 74, the brother of longtime Democratic adviser and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, resigned on the day Mueller announced charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates.
The 12-count indictment included charges of failing to accurately report lobbying work for a Ukrainian political party as required under FARA. That section made reference to “Company A and Company B,” later confirmed to be the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC, another lobbying dynamo that includes Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who worked on the Ukraine account.
Mueller was appointed in May to investigate possible coordination between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 election, but his work and similar congressional inquiries have stretched into other areas. The charges against Manafort and Gates were unrelated to their Trump campaign work.
According to the indictment, the men used a Brussels-based nonprofit organization, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, to hide that they were running a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign for a Ukrainian political party friendly to Russia. Mueller’s team alleged that the men hired the Podesta Group and Mercury to lobby for the Ukrainians in the United States.
According to the indictment, Gates told Mercury it would be “representing the Government of Ukraine,” and provided talking points to the Podesta Group falsely describing how Manafort and Gates merely provided an introduction to connect them with the European Centre.
An official from the Podesta Group wrote back that there was “a lot of email traffic that has you much more involved than this suggests,” adding, “we will not disclose.” The indictment alleges that Gates and Manafort had weekly phone calls and exchanged frequent emails with the two firms to provide direction on specific lobbying steps they should take. The men paid the firms, which have not been publicly accused of any crimes, more than $2 million from offshore accounts they controlled. Podesta officials have said they initially thought the work they were doing was solely for the European Centre and learned only later of Gates’s connection to the Ukrainian political party.
Even before Manafort and Gates were charged, the Justice Department had put pressure on them to register as foreign agents for their Ukraine work, and they — along with the Podesta Group and Mercury — did so retroactively before indictments were issued.
Mueller’s team, though, still charged Manafort and Gates with including misleading statements on their FARA form, such as the assertion that their efforts did not include outreach within the United States.
Officials from Mercury and Podesta have said for months that they have been cooperating with investigators and have a long-standing commitment to disclosure via FARA and the traditional domestic lobbying disclosure system. They said they did not initially file under FARA in this case based on the advice of counsel.
“We are continuing to fully cooperate as we have from the start,” said Michael McKeon, a Mercury partner.
On the day of the indictment, Podesta announced his resignation from the firm he had founded, telling employees, “It is impossible to run a public affairs firm while you are under attack by Fox News and the right-wing media.”
A week later, the chief executive of the firm, Kimberley Fritts, told the staff that the firm would be closing and employees might not be paid after Nov. 16. She announced that she was off to start her own firm, Cogent Strategies, which includes many former Podesta Group employees. That firm is soon expected to launch publicly.
Earlier this month, Podesta employees, stunned by the sudden implosion of the firm, were told to immediately turn in their company laptops and security fobs. In a statement, a Podesta spokesman acknowledged Fritts’s departure — and the end of an era.
“Tony and Kimberley worked together for 22 years. He has tremendous affection, respect and admiration for her and hopes that she and her team of former Podesta Group colleagues will build a firm that is even more successful than the Podesta Group,” Podesta spokeswoman Molly Levinson said.
Criminal charges for noncompliance with FARA — such as those faced by Manafort and Gates — are rare. The act, implemented in 1938 to expose Nazi propagandists, has been haphazardly enforced in recent years by a Justice Department office that mainly acts on news reports and asks people to register voluntarily.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) noted at a hearing earlier this year that only nine people in the Justice Department work full time on bringing about compliance with the law, and a Justice Department Office of the Inspector General report last year found that those in federal law enforcement often don’t agree on how to do that.
Between 1966 and 2015, the OIG found, the Justice Department had brought only seven criminal FARA cases. Kevin Downing, Manafort’s attorney, noted the rarity of such prosecutions when his client first appeared in court.
“Today, you see an indictment brought by an office of special counsel that is using a very novel theory to prosecute Mr. Manafort regarding a FARA filing,” he said, adding that Manafort was “seeking to further democracy and to help the Ukraine come closer to the United States.”
Willfully failing to register, though, is technically a felony that can come with a five-year sentence. Even before Mueller charged Manafort and Gates, his work had long seemed to indicate that he was taking a more aggressive approach in pursuing foreign agents. His probe also has been looking at former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who retroactively registered as a paid foreign agent for Turkish interests.
The special counsel’s office wrote in a court filing in the Manafort case that, “while criminal charges under FARA are not often brought, the facts set forth in the indictment indicate the gravity of the violation at issue based on the dollar volume of earning from the violation, its longevity, its maintenance through creation of a sham entity designed to evade FARA’s requirements, and its continuation through lies to the FARA unit.”
Not everyone who filed or amended their filings after Mueller was appointed did so because of fear of the probe. Some filings are innocuous, such as firms signing new clients. Others are more notable.
In late August, for example, the law firm Sidley Austin amended its filing to disclose that partner Michael Borden had the previous year met with staffers from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as a State Department official and two congressmen, on behalf of the Russian partially state-owned VTB Bank to “discuss U.S. sanctions on Russian institutions.” Borden declined to comment for this report.
Thomas J. Spulak, a partner at King & Spalding specializing in government advocacy, said more clients have been calling since Mueller began his work to ask, “Do I have to register under FARA?” He said an uptick in registrations might be partially attributable to new people wanting to influence a new administration, but the special counsel was undoubtedly having an effect.
“I think it all goes back to Mueller — this is of acute concern after Manafort and Podesta — and my sense is that it’s going to continue that way for some time,” Spulak said. “If there’s a new normal for foreign agents, it’s going to be to pay a lot more attention to it.”
The Justice Department, too, might be changing its posture. Justice recently pressured the company operating the website and television channel RT — previously known as Russia Today — to register under FARA.
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), asked whether — were it not for Mueller’s probe — the allegations against Manafort, Gates and the firms with which they did business would have stayed secret.
“The point is that a lot of these things have stayed below the radar because there’s not been appropriate focus and attention on it, and the special investigation has brought that, and in the view of many of us, it’s long overdue,” Johnson said, asking the attorney general, “would you agree to work with us — me and this committee — to correct these very serious problems, so we can update our disclosure laws, so that the American people can see what’s going on behind the veil?”
How cool is that? Delightfully high participation rate for a small town of 5573 registered voters. One in every 398 voters applied for a Commission appointment.
Very civilized procedure to fill a vacancy created by Gary Snodgrass resignation. Commission advertised, sought letters of intent and resumes, and got fourteen (14) of them. In sharp and marked contrast, the other itty bitty City, the City of St. Augustine, duked in ex-Commissioner DONALD CRICHLOW to replace resigned Commission William Leary, showing contempt for public participation under corrupt then-Mayor JOSEPH LESTER BOLES, JR.
Awesome that so many interesting, experienced people applied.
They will be interviewed by the four current St. Augustine Beach City Commissioners on December 4, 2017 at 6 PM. "Candidates who fail to attend will be disqualified from consideration."
Come help Commissioners pick a new St. Augustine Beach City Commissioner to fill the vacancy.
Do research.
Ask questions.
Demand answers.
Make disclosures.
Expect democracy.
Because decisions are made by people who show up. The candidates are:
Rosetta Bailey, local government watchdog, former PNC Bank Vice President (who broke the "glass ceiling" eleven years before the term was coined; received 39% of the vote in energetic second-place 2016 run as candidate for St. Augustine Beach City Commission (she lost, at least partly due to Mayor RICHARD BURTT O'BRIEN's unethical campaign tactics).
Thomas F. Reynolds, Jr., local government watchdog, advocate for children's recreation in St. Augustine Beach, strongly recommended by St. Augustine Record columnist Bob Tis, has attended hundreds of local government meetings and was falsely charged by Mayor RICHARD BURTT O'BRIEN with "stalking" during the Mayor's race -- an ex parte injunction was based on lies, but dissolved by the Honorable Howard O. McGillin, Circuit Court Judge, on December 7, 2016
Dr. Patricia Gill, Ph.D., retired college dean and teacher, longtime PZB member, League of Women Voters election forum chair
Dr. James H. Kaye, D.O., retired NJ medical examiner, local physician, who raised concern about mosquito-born diseases and City's failed drainage policy
LTC Ernesto J. Torres, MBA (Ret.), PZB member
Jeffrey Michael Holleran, PZB member, entrepreneur, Stogie's, Ripe Bistro, Spy Sushi and Sangria's Wine and Tapas bar founder, ardent public supporter of Flagler College's too-big 20,000 square foot communications building, a/k/a "The Tuna on Cuna Street."
Kevin Kincaid, PZB member, medical escort; retired Deputy Chief, Fairfax County, Virginia Fire & Rescue
Michael P. Longstreet, PZB member, music teacher in St. Johns County Schools
David A. Bradfield, Realtor®, PZB member (possibly incomplete application, with no actual letter of intent, with a handwritten note that was submitted by Jane West, PZB chair and local environmental and land use planning attorney)
Roberta Odom, PZB member, Realtor® Political Action Committee chair, lobbyist,
Dylan Rumrell, 2016 Sheriff David Shoar campaigner, Ancient City Brewing owner, Realtor®, former paid campaign staff for failed 2010 Democratic Governor candidate Alex Sink (the latter omitted from c.v.)
Dr. Kay A. Watson, Ph.D. retired clinical laboratory supervisor, medical researcher, retired Navy Chief Petty Officer, radioman
Donald J. Samora, Real Estate investor, engineer, MBA
Support for enacting a lobbyist registration ordinance was expressed at the November 21, 2017 St. Johns Commission meeting by Commissioner James K. Johns (R-Fruit Cove) in his valedictory remarks as Commission Chairman, just before passing the gavel to Commissioner I. Henry Dean.
Commissioner Johns is the first St. Johns County elected official to support lobbying registration -- long overdue.
Historic City News posted a brief, bizarre video of some nasty people cursing and insulting each other during Rev. Ron Rawls' November 18, 2017 protest at the commencement of Nights of Lights.
