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Author: muckety
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Murphy & Kress: accountants to the stars
Yesterday, we posted a story on addresses in New York that gave the most money to the three presidential campaigns.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Tracking contributions by address is more difficult on the west coast, where the wealthy are likely to have private estates rather than high-rise penthouses. For privacy, many donors process their campaign contributions through their money managers or other hired help.
That’s how we stumbled across 2401 Main St. in Santa Monica, Calif.
The address tracks to Murphy & Kress, an accounting firm that takes care of a clientele so exclusive that it refuses to confirm its clients.
FEC filings indicate that Murphy & Kress handles financial affairs for Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Denzel Washington, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Geena Davis, among other prominent figures in the film industry.
Coincidentally, all parties listing their address 2401 Main St. supported Democratic candidates in the 2008 presidential election.
Damon and Affleck have given to Obama, as have Denzel Washington and Geena Davis. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward supported both the Clinton and Obama campaigns, giving the maximum donation to both.
Company spokesperson Fariba Lary declined to comment on any clients of Murphy & Kress, “due to confidentiality.”
Yet on liner notes for her album, Mistaken Identity, Donna Summer thanks the firm “for keeping all the finances in order.”
Funny how celebrity agents hunger for publicity, while their money managers prefer to stay beneath the radar. Murphy & Kress does not even have a public website.
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Silicon Valley startup mentality boosted Obama’s campaign (Muckety.com)
Think of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois as an Internet startup that began small and then took off, suggests Joshua Green in the June issue of Atlantic magazine.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.“He had great buzz, a compelling pitch, and no money to back it up,” writes Green of the relatively unknown candidate who entered the race early in 2007 and now seems to have it all but sewn up.
“He wasn’t anybody’s obvious bet to succeed, not least because the market for a Democratic nominee already had its Microsoft.”
But the Silicon Valley venture capitalists were impressed by Obama’s enthusiasm and newness, and with their help and Internet savvy, Obama eventually out-performed the fund-raising efforts of his main opponent, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
The difference between the two campaigns was apparent this week, after Obama scored a convincing primary win in North Carolina and Clinton came through with a narrow victory in Indiana.
The Obama campaign emerged with millions of dollars on hand. It raised $134 million in the first quarter of this year, $240 million since the campaign started. And it has plenty of cash on hand for the remaining primaries.
In contrast, even though it has raised $195 million overall, the Clinton campaign is almost running on empty. Clinton loaned her campaign $6.4 million recently, adding to an earlier loan of $5 million.
Green details how Obama’s fundraisers created a money machine that connected to an untapped army of small contributors but still reached out to monied people with monied friends.
Their first correct move was making a sustained effort to recruit Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
“In a colossal error in judgment, the Clinton campaign never made a serious approach (in Silicon Valley) assuming that Obama would fade and that money and cutting-edge technology couldn’t possibly factor into what was expected to be an easy race,” Green writes.
Obama’s relative youth and inexperience was not a negative in the minds of the California venture capitalists.
“No one in Silicon Valley sits here and thinks, ‘You need massive inside-the-Beltway experience,’” said Obama supporter John Roos, CEO of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, a Palo Alto firm that advises startups and venture capital firms. “Sergey and Larry were in their early 20s when they started Google.”
From the start, the venture capitalists did for Obama what they would do for any start-up; they hit up their friends for money.
Mark P. Gorenberg, managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and a fundraiser for John Kerry in 2004 and for Democratic Congressional candidates in 2006, early on committed to bring in $250,000 for Obama.
Like Gorenberg, Steven J. Spinner, an entrepreneur and CEO of Sports Potential Inc., also became a member of Obama’s national finance committee and pledged to raise $250,000. “I’m a startup guy,” he told Green. “We take measured bets. … If you’ve got the right plan and the right leadership, the game can be won. That’s how I looked at Obama.”
But Green stresses that in addition to money, the Silicon Valley connection carried with it “the technology and the ethos” that propelled Obama into the lead.
The campaign has used key Internet tools to reach hundreds of thousands of small donors. Social networking sites have been especially important to the effort.
My.BarackObama.com connects Obama supporters, not only raising funds, but also creating a vast community of sorts. Similar and larger groups have formed on MySpace and Facebook.com.
“The social-networking model provided Obama with something that insurgents before him … always lacked, a means of capturing excitement and translating it into money,” Green concludes.
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Clinton campaign scrubs name of Fox News military analyst from website Muckety.com
The Clinton campaign has deleted the name of a controversial military analyst from a press release published months ago on the Clinton web site.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Clinton announced at a Veteran’s Day event in 2007 that former Maj. Gen. Robert J. Scales Jr was among a group of high-ranking military brass joining the campaign’s Veterans and Military Retirees for Hillary Committee.
Scales may be a familiar face to those following the details of the war in Iraq. He has been on television and radio frequently, acting as a paid military analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio.
Last month David Barstow of the New York Times provided a detailed account of how the Pentagon used Scales and other retired military officers as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” to spin the Bush administration’s views on Iraq when they acted as military analysts for the media.
Members of the group were invited to private meetings with senior Pentagon officials where they were briefed on administration talking points. They were also taken on paid junkets to Iraq, to see the war firsthand and talk with officers in the field.
The Times investigation revealed that Scales and some of the other retired officers were in positions to profit from their Pentagon connections by consulting with and/or lobbying for defense contractors.
Scales is the CEO of Colgen, a company which bills itself as “America’s premier landpower advocate – new, lean, well-connected and able to meet the needs of any client or individual.”
Clients listed on the company web site include such defense industry heavyweights as Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman and Raytheon. The CIA and NSA are also on its “growing list of satisfied clients.”
Today, six months after the Veteran’s Day event, mention of Scales has been scrubbed from the press release on Clinton’s campaign web site – well, sort of.
Although the English version of the press release does not list Scales’s name, Muckety found a Spanish version of the release on the Clinton web site that refers to Scales. A list of the advisory committee members in the English version instead contains a blank space where Scales’s name appears in the Spanish version (see images below).
Redacting information from earlier publications could backfire by drawing attention to the issue, said Barbara O’Connor, professor of political communications at California State University in Sacramento.
The campaign “appears to be trying to distance themselves from (Scales). The motive for the deletion is not clear without an addendum and it causes suspicion,” she said. “I would err on the side of being transparent. You took it out and didn’t tell us why and it makes us suspicious.”
The Clinton campaign insists that it removed Scales’ name at his request last November because of his role as a cable network analyst. (See Editor’s note below.)
Editor’s note: Our original lead paragraph for this post read, “The Clinton campaign, in an apparent effort to distance itself from a supporter who has received negative publicity of late, seems to have deleted his name from a press release published months ago on the Clinton web site.”
We changed the sentence after receiving the following response from the Clinton campaign: “Because of his role as a cable network analyst, Maj Gen Scales asked in November to have his name removed from partisan press releases and the campaign complied at the time. Please correct your story to reflect this.”
We’re still awaiting the campaign’s answers to our follow-up questions about why no mention of the redaction was made on the web site and why General Scales agreed to be on the campaign’s Veterans and Military Retirees for Hillary Committee if he was concerned about being viewed as a partisan.
English version of press release (PDF)
Spanish version of press release (PDF)[Muckety.com](https://createpositivechange.org/2008/05/09/clinton-campaign-scrubs-name-of-fox-news-military-analyst-from-website/2681
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4br Penthousduplex in Luxury Obama Blg Great Location
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4br penthous/duplex in luxury Obama blg, great location (Muckety)
Emotions are running so high in this year’s presidential race that real estate agents may want to start promoting buildings not only for their park views and their square footage, but for their residents’ political leanings.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Muckety examined the most recent round of campaign finance reports, analyzing total donations by Manhattan residents who had given at least $1,000. We then totalled contributions by address to see which buildings gave the most to which candidate.
Not surprisingly, most of the top addresses were clustered in a relatively small area around Central Park.
The top money-getters in the top 20 buildings are shown on the map below – M for McCain, C for Clinton and O for Obama.
Not all the addresses are residential buildings. Some contributors – including Peter Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone – used business locations. The two private equity managers, at 345 Park Avenue, are backing McCain.
Leonard and Evelyn Lauder, reporting their contributions from the offices of Estee Lauder, at 767 Fifth Avenue, support Clinton.
Among top residential buildings, the historic Beresford, at 7 West 81st Street, went for Obama. Clinton drew the majority of dollars donated by residents of the San Remo apartments, on Central Park West.
([Muckety](https://createpositivechange.org/2008/05/08/4br-penthousduplex-in-luxury-obama-blg-great-location/2671)
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Amidst Bear Stearns Takeover Greenberg and Cayne Criticize Each Other
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G Gordon Liddy Connection Could Plague John Mccain
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Tim Gunn Diddy Jimmy Fallon and Other Stars Pitch Nyc
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G. Gordon Liddy connection could plague John McCain
Writing in the Chicago Tribune recently, columnist Steve Chapman suggested that Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, could have a friend problem.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.In McCain’s case, the friend is G. Gordon Liddy, the conservative radio talk-show house and convicted mastermind of the Watergate break-in.
Liddy, 77, contributed several thousand dollars to McCain’s senatorial campaigns, and this year he gave $1,000 to the presidential campaign.
McCain has appeared on Liddy’s show. And in November he praised Liddy for his adherence “to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great,” Chapman reports.
The McCain-Liddy connection would seem to be much stronger that the link between Sen. Barack Obama, McCain’s possible Democratic opponent for president, and William Ayers, the former member of the Weather Underground. The radical group formed in the late 1960s was involved in several bombings.
Ayers contributed $200 to Obama when he was running for the state Senate in Illinois. And the two served on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago.
Obama condemned the actions of the Weather Underground. But he also noted that he was “an 8-year-old child” when they took place.
McCain criticized the Obama-Ayers connection when it became a campaign issue between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“I think not only a repudiation but an apology for even having anything to do with an unrepentant terrorist is due the American people,” McCain said. Chapman suggests that McCain should do a little repudiating and apologizing of his own for his relationship with Liddy.
An Army veteran of the Korean War era, Liddy graduated from Fordham Law School and became an FBI special agent. Later he served as a prosecutor in New York’s Dutchess County.
His effort to convict counterculture Dr. Timothy Leary on drugs charges then was unsuccessful. Years later, Leary and Liddy teamed up on the speakers circuit.
Liddy joined the White House Staff during Richard Nixon’s first term in office and eventually became part of the White House Special Investigations Unit. The covert group of so-called plumbers tracked down leaks of information and spied on perceived opponents of the administration.
Liddy and E. Howard Hunt Jr., a former CIA agent, put together the 1972 plan to break into and bug the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. Along with the five men caught on the scene, they were eventually convicted on charges of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping.
Liddy refused to cooperate with prosecutors. He received a 20-year sentence that was commuted by President Jimmy Carter after more than four years of time served.
He emerged from prison in September 1977 penniless and unrepentant and remained silent on his role in Watergate until the 1980 publication of his memoir, Will.
In the book, he acknowledged that he once volunteered to kill columnist Jack Anderson, an offer that was not accepted. And he wrote that, after the Watergate break-in went bad, he volunteered to be assassinated.
“‘If someone wants to shoot me, just tell me what corner to stand on and I’ll be there,’” Liddy remembered telling John Dean, the White House counsel.
Liddy has written several more books and become wealthy through his talk show and his speaking appearances. He has also been in films and television shows, including a stint as a competitor on “Celebrity Fear Factor.”
At times, his statements have gotten him in trouble, as when he said, “If the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms insists upon a firefight, give them a firefight. Just remember, they’re wearing flak jackets and you’re better off shooting for the head.”
