Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

In his wrap-up of last night’s Paul Scoles conference call, Dan from Young Philly Politics highlighted a 2004 Pittsburgh Post Gazette article about some funny business in the Weldon family. Dan was nice enough to forward me the article, so I’m going to post a little of it here as well. The article was originally published on February 22, 2004 and was written by Ken Silverstein, Chuck Neubaure and Richard T. Cooper.

Karen Weldon, an inexperienced 29-year-old lobbyist from suburban Philadelphia, seemed an unlikely choice for clients seeking global public relations services.

Yet her tiny firm was selected last year for a plum $240,000 contract to promote the good works of a wealthy Serbian family that had been linked to accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. Despite a lack of professional credentials, she had one notable asset: her father, Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Delaware County, who is a leading voice in Washington on former Eastern Bloc affairs.

She got the contract after he championed the efforts of two family members, Dragomir and Bogoljub Karic, to win U.S. visas from the State Department, which so far has refused them entry.

Intelligence officials warned Weldon that the brothers were too close to Milosevic, who is accused of leading the “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia.

But the congressman has praised the Karics, who own a vast empire of banking, telecommunication and other companies, as model business leaders and humanitarians. He has portrayed them as victims of faulty intelligence reports and last month asked the CIA to sit down with them and sort things out. He has repeatedly pressed the State Department to give them visas.

…

The Weldons are the latest example of special interests hiring relatives of important members of Congress as lobbyists and consultants. Over the last year, the Los Angeles Times has identified 11 other House members and 17 senators with relatives who lobby or consult, many of them for clients the members have helped through legislative or other action.

Congressional ethics rules provide few barriers to the practice. They do not forbid members of Congress from helping companies or others who are paying their relatives.

Charming stuff right? Cozying up to buddies of Milosevic is hardly endearing, to say the least. Getting your kid involved with Milosevic’s buddies is downright freaky.

Here are few more choice snippets.

After a Russian aerospace manufacturer hired Karen Weldon’s firm for $20,000 a month plus 10 percent of any new business it generated, Rep. Weldon pitched the company’s saucer-shaped drone to the Navy, which signed a letter of intent to invest in the technology. And Weldon, who chairs a subcommittee that oversees $60 billion in military acquisitions, has been working to get funding for the project, Navy officials say. An attorney for Solutions said the firm did not collect the finder’s fee, and it was later removed from the contract. Federal law bars companies from paying commissions to lobbyists on government contracts.

The congressman helped round up 30 congressional colleagues for a dinner at the Library of Congress to honor the chairman of a Russian natural gas company, Itera International Energy Corp., that had just agreed to pay his *daughter’s* firm $500,000 a year to “create good public relations.” Records show that Solutions North America helped arrange the privately funded affair for the company, which has been trying to improve its image with U.S. officials after questions were raised about its acquisition of vast natural gas fields in post-Soviet Russia.

Karen Weldon’s firm paid for her father’s chief of staff to take a “fact-finding” trip to Serbia, where he met with U.S. Embassy officials about the Karics’ visa problems. The congressman approved the arrangement, travel records show. House ethics rules bar members or staff from taking official trips paid for by lobbyists or registered agents of foreign companies. The chief of staff, Michael J. Conallen Jr., said he reimbursed Solutions with his own money last week after The Times raised questions about the trip.

And just for Jeff, here’s a little Boeing.

Until she launched Solutions, Karen Weldon had been following an entirely different career path. She had an undergraduate degree in education and a graduate degree in information systems. She spent six years, she said, working on “learning and training programs” for Boeing Co., which has a big helicopter plant at the edge of her father’s district. Conallen said Weldon did not help his daughter get the job at Boeing.

Um…right, I’m sure he had nothing to do with it. Anyway, there is plenty more where this came from, but I decided against tempting the Pittsburgh Post Gazette’s lawyers by posting the whole thing. Maybe I’ll do it a little closer to the election.

What would be terrific is if some solid lefty bloggers who live in Delaware County would post it. I only know of two liberal political bloggers who live in Delaware county and both of them only do national stuff. There’s an opening there for somebody who wants to really dive into fray and scream into the void for the underdog. The idea, at least in my mind, would be to start by getting Scoles name into the Delaware County Times or the News of Delaware County as often as possible.

This probably won’t be all that hard. It’s an open secret that the majority of newspaper writers Google their own names at least 4 times a day. Write about the writers, maybe some school board politics, your favorite bar, local traffic headaches, why you’re supporting Paul Scoles and you will have yourself a little audience of self-Googling DCT and NDC writers checking in every day to see if you mentioned them. Before you know it, you’ll pick up one of those nasty little rags and find out that they have a story on page 2 about Delaware County’s exciting blog scene and how it’s really pulling together around Paul Scoles. Not long after that you and others will be asking the ever pertinent question “why are there so many lefty bloggers in Delco?”

I’m not at all joking about this. This would be a great project for somebody to take on. Sound good to you? Then do it. If you live in Delaware County and know how to create a blog then get to it. If you live in Deleware County, but don’t know how to create a blog and this whole shouting into the void thing sounds like fun, feel free to email me and I’ll help get you started.

If there is already a huge contingent of Delaware County political bloggers that I’m not acknowledging, it’s really nothing personal, I just didn’t know.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2005 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.