I borrowed this 2011 photo from the blog “Flathead Memo” and the exceptionally good job of chronicling the present “Tea Party” in Montana: “Montana’s half-baked, fully Koched Running on Empty Tour” by James Connor, 21 August 2011. I trust that he will take this as homage, and not a theft (click photo to enlarge):
Left to right, Kalispell tea party organizer Linda Johnson;
AFP’s president, Tim Phillips; Kalispell attorney
and former Ron Marlenee aide Duncan Scott.
Pay attention to the fellow on the far right (appropriately). He’s important in what follows.
This is long. I know that. But it is also a chronicle of over 30 years of Kochian politics and it’s broken into four chunks. I could stretch it out over the week, but you need to see all of this. So, more words, less pictures.
Links may have expired. I have not added illustrations. But this comes to us unfiltered from 2006. You can read the complete series (and all links are) HERE.
It’s a bit of an epic story, gleaned from tracing ONE operative of the Howard Rich/Ed Crane political machine (the original David Koch campaign gang) …
13 OCTOBER 2006
Unlimited Terms of Endearment Part XXIII: The Secret Life of Duncan Scott
(Part the first)
Duncan Scott is a good Republican, to all outward appearances. He’s the chair of the Flathead County Republican Party, and a founder and president of the Pachyderm Club. He practices law just outside of Glacier National Park.
In 2000, in New Mexico, he was George Bush’s lawyer, tapped by the campaign to file suit on behalf of Bush to have all of New Mexico’s ballots impounded, when it looked as though Bush had won New Mexico (he later lost narrowly in the recount). He was even a Republican state senator from Albuquerque. His Republican bona fides were beyond question.
But Duncan Scott had been quietly living a double life.
***
Originally a Montana boy, Scott graduated with the class of 1974 from Great Falls High School in Great Falls, Montana. That year, the top 20 hit songs were:
1. The Way We Were, Barbra Streisand
2. Seasons In The Sun, Terry Jacks
3. Love’s Theme, Love Unlimited Orchestra
4. Come And Get Your Love, Redbone
5. Dancing Machine, Jackson 5
6. The Loco-Motion, Grand Funk Railroad
7. TSOP, MFSB
8. The Streak, Ray Stevens
9. Bennie And The Jets, Elton John
10. One Hell Of A Woman, Mac Davis
11. Until You Come Back To Me, Aretha Franklin
12. Jungle Boogie, Kool and The Gang
13. Midnight At The Oasis, Maria Muldaur
14. You Make Me Feel Brand New, Stylistics
15. Show And Tell, Al Wilson
16. Spiders And Snakes, Jim Stafford
17. Rock On, David Essex
18. Sunshine On My Shoulder, John Denver
19. Sideshow, Blue Magic
20. Hooked On A Feeling, Blue Swede
21. Billy Don’t Be A Hero, Bo Donaldson and The Heywoods
[OK: 21, but what lover of music could possibly omit "Billy Don't Be A Hero"? - HW]
When Duncan Scott graduated from high school, Montana was 91% White, with about 6 percent Native Americans and hardly anyone anything else:
Montana US Census 1970
* White: 90.6%
* Black of African American: 0.3%
* American Indian/Alaska Native: 6.2%
* Asian: 0.5%
* Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islands: 0.1%
* Hispanic/Latino (of any race): 2.0%
* Two or More Races: 1.7%
But, to be fair, Montana was making steady progress. In 1910, Montana had been 113.2 percent white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau*. So in a mere six decades a 23% shift in the ethnographic breakdown of the state had occurred.
[*I know this sounds crazy, but that's what the official document says: 113.2 percent, and who am I to argue with the authority ofthe United States Census Bureau? - HW ]
The winter of Duncan Scott’s freshman year in high school, the Libertarian Party was founded a couple states down the Rockies, in Westminister, Colorado — just outside Denver and not quite all the way to Boulder — in the home of David Fraser Nolan on December 11, 1971 — his original vision composed of equal parts Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand.
[Nolan is running this year, BTW, as the Libertarian candidate for Tucson, Arizona's 6th Congressional District seat - HW]
On August 8th of the summer that Duncan Scott graduated from Great Falls High Sschool, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. (That may explain the bad pop music from that year.)
Scott went to Stanford and then worked as a staffer for Montana congressman Ron Marlenee (served 8 terms, 1977-1992). Marlenee was one of Montana’s two congressmen until 1992, and was staunchly, well, a little wacky.
Sierra, Jan-Feb, 1992
The August coup – US Forest Service and timber policy
Paul RauberCounterrevolution in the Rockies: The timber industry flexes its muscle.
… The timber companies and their allies in Congress were apoplectic. In a May 23 letter, Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) sternly reprimanded Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson. “Dale, I am very disappointed with the Forest Service’s accomplishment and accountability for timber outputs in Idaho and the nation as a whole,” he wrote. “You have serious management problems that must be addressed. It is my hope you will move to assure targets are met and line officers are held accountable.” Craig’s complaints were echoed by Senator Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) and Representative Ron Marlenee (R-Mont.).
The political heat being directed at the Forest Service is a result of the severe overcutting of private woodlands in the northern Rockies. (From the air, western Montana and northern Idaho look like checkerboards, forested areas alternating with clearcut land belonging to Plum Creek and other giant timber companies.) Having exhausted its own resources, the timber industry expects the Forest Service to increase the cut on the public lands, and is outraged when it does not.
And, Marlenee could always be counted on to stand up for traditional values:
Reintroduction of wolf is a howling success
Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Sep 3, 2003… at another press conference [in 1989], the anti-wolf forces were also out. Former Rep. Ron Marlenee, R-Mont., threatened to call for introduction of wolves in Utah along the Jordan River, City Creek Canyon or Liberty Park.
But, while he was against wolves hunting, he was entirely in favor of hunting by humans.
Sierra, May-June, 1994
Home on the rifle range – National Rifle Association opposition to Mojave National Parkby Paul Rauber
Since the Desert Bill’s introduction in 1986 [to create Mojave National Park], opposition has come mostly from the mining industry, welfare ranchers, the BLM, and off-road-vehicle yahoos. The gun buffs did not come out shooting until 1991, when then-Representative Ron Marlenee (R-Mont.) introduced an NRA-inspired amendment that would have allowed hunting in what is now the East Mojave National Scenic Area once it became Mojave National Park. Marlenee’s amendment passed the House, but the bill stalled in the Senate and went no further that year.
or:
Common Cause Magazine, Jan-March, 1992
How special interests cater to Congress
Peter Overby[It] bought a 30-page advertising section in Sports Afield to publicize the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, a two-year-old organization that fights for hunting and fishing enthusiasts on such issues as gun control and animal rights. Jointly produced by Hearst and the foundation, and packed with ads from Smith & Wesson, Anheuser-Busch, Colt, Winchester and Remington, the magazine section featured articles by and about the caucus. Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) linked outdoor sports and national oil policy to explain “Why Alaskan Sportsmen Support Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Rep. Ron Marlenee (R-Mont.) wrote that “America’s Hunting Tradition Must Be PROTECTED FROM FANATICS.”
In 1992, congressman Marlenee was forcibly retired by the voters:
National Review, Oct 19, 1992
Cleaning House – 1992 congressional elections
Michael FredenburgMontana lost one of its two House seats, forcing a matchup between two incumbents, conservative Republican Ron Marlenee and liberal Democrat Pat Williams. The candidates’ voting records have followed their respective party lines, and Marlenee is hoping to capitalize on Williams’s support for the National Endowment for the Arts, painting him as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal who is willing to use the taxpayers’ money to fund pornography.
Marlenee lost the election. Evidently there were more pro-pornography fans in Montana than he’d banked on. But the ex-congressman soon landed on his feet, with his years of friendship for hunting rewarded with a job as a lobbyist for, well, let the gun fans tell you:
The Gottlieb-Tartaro Report,
$30/12 issues,
12500 N.E. 10th Place,
Bellevue, WA 98005August, 2003
GUN RIGHTS TRIBUTE: RON MARLENEE TO RETIRE AS HUNTING LOBBYIST
It’s not often the GT Report singles out a gun rights defender for a special tribute. We do it this issue because of RON MARLENEE’s decades-long record of defending gun rights in a way that deserves greater appreciation: defending the right to hunt.
Safari Club International, a leader in protecting the freedom to hunt and in promoting wildlife conservation worldwide, recently announced that RON MARLENEE, its highly effective lobbyist, will retire in December of this year but work on retainer through January 2004.
Gun owners everywhere owe MARLENEE a lot. MARLENEE served 16 terms as a U.S. Congressman prior to becoming SCI’s lobbyist in 1992.
I know what you’re thinking: Didn’t we just learn that Marlenee served EIGHT terms? Yes. That’s right. These little errors creep in and we have to make allowances. And I know what else you’re thinking:
What does this have to do with Duncan Scott?
I will cheerfully admit that ex-congressman Marlenee’s actions are in no wise indicative of Duncan Scott’s character or beliefs, but I include this information because this is a BLOG, and, unlike commercial writing, I don’t have to play mother may I? with some glassy-eyed editor, nor do I have a deadline or space restrictions.
When I cease to delight you, you will cease reading. So. I can include ex-congressman Marlenee because he’s a colorful old coot, and a bit of Montana history. I also include him because to read his testimony AS a lobbyist is just plain pure-dee bizarroworld fun:
TESTIMONY OF SAFARI CLUB INTERNATIONAL
Before the Subcommittee on Fisheries, Conservation, Wildlife and Oceans, Committee on Resources
United States House of Representatives
on March 13, 1997
On the H.R. 39,
THE AFRICAN ELEPHANT CONSERVATION ACT
REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 1997
Submitted by The Honorable Ron Marlenee
Director of Legislative Affairs, Safari Club InternationalIn our view, the African Elephant Conservation Act is an extremely important piece of legislation because it assists African countries in meeting conservation goals for a species that we all believe is important…
[...]
The program also teaches the game scouts to evaluate the elephant populations from the point of view of their hunting trophy quality. This is important because it maximizes the revenues that can be obtained from a use of this natural resource, while minimizing the biological impact of the program. The revenues are a key incentive to conservation, and provide much of the funding used for such conservation. I have attached a paper entitled “Returns from Tourist Hunting in Tanzania,” which describes in detail the economic importance of this activity. [i.e. shooting elephants for trophies - HW] It states that foreign safari hunting (which is called “tourist hunting”) had a value of more than $10 million for Tanzania in 1992….
Now, that’s SOMEthing. Anyway, Duncan Scott served in congressman Marlenee’s office, along with current Montana congressman Dennis Rehberg.
Rehberg, a year older than Scott, is better than just a “good” Republican. According to the Washington POST’s tally of his votes,Rehberg voted the GOP party line on every bill before this congress except for two times: Once, on the Immigration Law Enforcement Act of 2006, he didn’t vote. And once, this term, he actually bucked the party and bravely voted for the Pension Protection Act of 2005. Duncan Scott originally took a different path.
Scott came back to Montana and went to law school. In 1982, during his last year, he jumped into ballot initiative politics. He was in on the ground floor on a ballot measure, working on the language, working on the petition drive, working as the state coordinator for the bill with the Libertarian Party.
According to the Montana Legislative Research Service:
Services#: 1981-1982
Petition#: I-94
Title: Licensing – beer and wine
Sponsor: Libertarian Free Trade Commission/Duncan Scott
Reviewed by: Harrington
Status: on ballot
Vote: 121,078/For 182,724/Against
Passed: REJECTED
Or 39.85% of the vote.
Duncan Scott moved to Alaska, where he continued to work for the Libertarian Party.
It was now the pivotal year in LP history, 1983. In 1980, Ed Crane had run the Clark for President campaign, garnering the largest percentage that the LP ever got. Mike Arno and Rick Arnold had been the Libertarian Party’s ace petitioners in drives to get the LP on the ballot across the country. Originally partners, they had separated to each found companies that specialized in petition drives that you might recognize from this year:
National Voter Outreach, and Arno and Associates [See Part II ], who handled several states for the old Clark for President machine. 1980 had been the year that David Koch bought his way onto the Clark ticket by promising to spend $500,000 of his own money as the Vice Presidential candidate, and Howie Rich, Eric O’Keefe and the rest, under the supervision of Ed Crane of the CATO Institute ran the campaign.
The LP was not happy with the Craniacs by 1982.
The Crane operatives were accused to spending too much money, and finally, Ed Clark himself retired the campaign debt out of his own pocket.
Alicia Clark, Ed Clark’s wife, and an accomplished businesswoman in her own right, had been elected National LP Chair, and Eric O’Keefe was the salaried National Director of the Libertarian Party — whose National office was then in Washington DC. And then came the donnybrook in Bozeman, Montana.
The late economist Murray Rothbard*, a founding member of the Cato Institute, takes up the tale in the July 1982 Libertarian Forum:
[* Howard Rich's wife Andrea has an interesting connection to Rothbard. From "The History of Laissez Faire Books And the People Behind It"
Andrea read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead in college and later attended her lectures at Nathaniel Branden Institute for several years. She was also very involved with the Libertarian Party, both nationally and in New York, from 1972 to 1983. During that period, she spent much time getting radicalized in Murray Rothbard's living room.]
In the July 1982 issue of the LIBERTARIAN FORUM, Murray Rothbard writes:
The LP NatCom meeting at Houston, March 27-28 was a quiet but deeply satisfying event, for it marked the distinct turning of the tide on the National committee. As we reported in our August-January issue, the Bethesda, Maryland meeting on November 7-8, 1981 was an exciting one in which a newly forged Grand Coalition of Mason and Clark forces beat back a determined attempt by the Crane Machine to seize power.
[...]
Behind the scenes at Houston there circulated two stunningly revealing memos which embarrassed and helped subdue the Craniacs and strengthened the resolve of the Grand Coalition. One was a memo by Crane himself to the various Crane Machine bigwigs, setting the line about what should be done about Ed Clark’s proposal to hold a public opinion poll about the LP, and stressing the importance of keeping the interpretation of poll results in Craniac hands. In this Feb. 16 memo, [Ed] Crane instructed[who runs the CATO institute until his forced retirement this year] his Machine to stop opposing the poll itself, but rather to make sure to control its interpretation. The shocker is that the memo was sent, not only to top Craniacs Tom Palmer, David Boaz, Leslie Key* [*Leslie Graves, Eric O'Keefe's wife -- HW], Chris Hocker, Kent Guida, and the Riches, but also to LP National Director Eric O’Keefe, who, as an employee of the entire Natcom, is supposed to be strictly neutral among the factions. This memo raises profound questions as to whom O’Keefe is reporting to.
The other fascinating memo circulating at Houston was anonymous, dated Feb. 16, and sent to other top Crane Machiners. Our sister magazine Libertarian Vanguard has now revealed that the author of this snide and arrogant memo was none other than Chris Hocker, publisher of Crane-run Inquiry magazine. The June issue of Libertarian Vanguard publishes the entire memo.
One important aspect of the Hocker memo is that he refers frankly and openly to the “Crane Machine” and assumes that his readers are all members thereof. This should put to rest once and for all the various naifs and Pollyannas in the Libertarian Party who have claimed that there is no Crane machine and that it is all a figment of some of our imaginations. So let us all from now on stipulate: there is a Crane Machine.
[...]
My own perspective is that the Craniacs, preppie or no, all try to look and talk like tough, cool young professionals, neo-Haldemans. Look at the Craniacs, and one gets the feeling that one is back in the Nixon White House, with all the tough, cool, obnoxious young folk — the Cheneys, the Deans, et al., ruled by Haldeman/Crane himself.
If the Grand Coalition made any mistakes at Houston, it was in underestimating the extent and depth of our majority. Presumably that will be rectified at the next NatCom meeting at Billings, Montana on August 7-8.
3. The Audit Report
Dave Walter (Pa.)’s Audit Report was a thorough investigation of the National Headquarters, a Craniac stronghold, with some sensational implications. Most fascinating was the revelation that National Director Eric O’Keefe had made “at least a hundred” calls to the Cato Institute in San Francisco during 1981 [long-distance, D.C. to San Francisco - HW]. Since Cato, Ed Crane’s base, is supposed to be non-political, what would the director of a political party be doing making almost daily calls to Cato? Unfortunately, NatCom failed to question O’Keefe in depth on this one.
And then, in Billings, Montana (it is unknown whether Duncan Scott was present at the NatCom meeting, but it seems impossible that he wouldn’t have been) all hell broke loose in the Libertarian Party. Rothbard writes:
September 1982
BLOCKBUSTER AT BILLINGSOn Sunday, August 8, in Billings, Montana, only a few miles from where the imbecile General Custer got mowed down at the Little Big Horn, the National Committee of the Libertarian Party held one of the most dramatic and significant meetings in its history. Eric O’Keefe, ex-radical turned Craniac National Director, was ousted from his long-held post by National Chair Alicia Clark. Alicia’s right to fire O’Keefe was upheld by the NatCom by a vote of 17-11, after which it was approved by 20-7 Alicia’s naming of former Texas LP Chair Honey Lanham as interim Director for a six-month period.
[...]
On Sunday morning, before the meeting, Alicia Clark asked O’Keefe for his resignation. Any gentleman, concerned about alleviating trouble for the Party, would have resigned without question. But not only did O’Keefe refuse to resign, he stubbornly refused to accept the Chair’s right to fire him. In the tense opening hours of the Sunday meeting, O’Keefe persisted in claiming that Alicia had no right to fire him, and maintaining that he was and would continue to be the National Director, and would resume his duties in Washington promptly. Things were getting hairy. Would O’Keefe have to be ejected from headquarters for trespass?
Suffused with bureaucratic megalomania, furthermore, O’Keefe made stump speeches, virtually adopting an “I am the Party” attitude, and maintaining his own indispensability to Party success. By taking this absurd and arrogant line, O’Keefe unwittingly helped demonstrate to one and all the necessity for his ouster. What we were all seeing in action was the behavior of a runaway, power-hungry National Director, whose dismissal clearly came none too soon.
Taking up O’Keefe’s preposterous assertion of his immunity from discharge by the Chair was the stunned, shocked, and apoplectic Crane Machine, led by “Mr. Robert’s Rules” himself, Jim Johnston. In a claim even more idiotic than usual, Johnston asserted that the Chair did not even have a legal right to rule on his point of order. (It is said that every year the Illinois LP auctions off, at high rates, Jimmie’s dog-eared copy of his previous year’s Robert’s Rules). Johnston even had the discourtesy to block unanimous consent to allow the NatCom to hear the arguments of the Chair’s parliamentarian, I. Dean Ahmad. Alicia of course ruled against Johnston’s point, and the motion went to the full NatCom. It needed a two-thirds majority to overrule the Chair, but the Chair won out on her right to fire O’Keefe by the comfortable majority of 17 to 11.
[...]
Thus, when told that Honey Lanham had been an able Texas chair and asked what Honey’s occupation is, Madame DeFarge Leslie Key [*Leslie Graves, Eric O'Keefe's wife. SeePart 8 - HW] burst out, with sneering contempt in her voice: “She sells cosmetics.” Never was elitism more odiously displayed at an LP meeting. When Andrea Rich badgered Alicia with the question: “How does Honey Lanham make her money?”, a NatCom member, a person conceded by everyone to be one of the finest and kindest gentlemen in the Libertarian Party, was moved to burst out, in a rare display of anger, “That’s none of your business, Mrs. Rich!”
When one NatCom member asked about Lanham’s managerial experience, former chairman Dave Bergland incisively pointed out that the three previous directors, including O’Keefe, had had virtually no managerial experience before being hired.
[...]
But the most revealing ranting of the day was emitted by Howie Rich, possibly the top Craniac straw boss on NatCom. In her explanation of why she fired O’Keefe, Alicia had mentioned that Eric had repeatedly failed to carry out NatCom and her own directives to: expand much-needed internal education, help build state parties, and assist in fund-raising. All these three vital areas of activity were grievously and consistently neglected by O’Keefe, despite Alicia Clark’s repeated urgings. What he had done instead was to devote virtually all Headquarters’ resources to campaigning, particularly to assisting the Craniac ventures of Howie Rich’s Campaign of ’82 and especially the Randolph race for governor of Alaska.
In the course of his philippic, Howie Rich thundered that all these other matters were “peripheral,” that only campaigns really counted. Evidently, ideas, principles, state parties and even financial stability could go hang. There spoke the naked, sinister voice of the Crane Machine. After the vote and the ineffectual ranting were over, the Craniacs all walked out of the meeting, never (with the exception of Hocker and Palm) to return.
[...]
The ouster had been building up for months, as Alicia tried repeatedly and in vain to get O’Keefe to expend resources her (and NatCom’s) way. Instead, O’Keefe had his own agenda, the Craniac agenda for the Party.
[...]
For the buildup of anti-O’Keefe evidence became overwhelming. It was these damaging revelations that sparked the final decision of Alicia on Saturday night to ask for O’Keefe’s resignation for the following morning. Perhaps the most damaging disclosure was the Finance Committee report by the highly respected Matt Monroe, a report which the bored Craniacs hardly attempted to challenge.
Monroe reported that under O’Keefe tutelage, the heavy NatCom debt, instead of being paid off, had increased since the beginning of the present NatCom term in September 1981. Even more irresponsible in view of the LP’s shaky financial shape was the change in the nature of the debt. For some of the long-term debt had been paid off, but only by seriously increasing the short-term debt to various vendors in Washington, D.C. Monroe wrote ominously that “this debt should be rolled back as much as possible if we are to function among vendors in Washington, D.C.” He continued by warning: “Our effectiveness in the future will depend, not only on the amount of money and candidates we can raise but also on our credibility with local merchants who provide us with their merchandise and allow us to use credit. At this time there are few of those, if any, left in the Washington, D.C. area who are willing to extend us credit.
And yet, despite the seriousness of the financial situation, Monroe reported that, “My impression is that the financial and fund raising activities are low priority items at this time in the minds of the people who manage the National office.” In trying to launch a monthly pledge program for the national party, Monroe found in despair that “I have requested help from Eric O’Keefe and have not received it.” As a result, Monroe reported that he would instead have to do all the work in Houston with local Houston volunteers, since O’Keefe and headquarters would not cooperate. Monroe also noted that he had requested assistance from the previous Finance Chair [Leslie Graves Key], but had received no “promises or advice in matters of fund raising.”
[...]
If O’Keefe & Co. were incapable of working with volunteers, they were apparently even less able to work with many state parties. Bitter letters were read into the record on Saturday by the state central committee of the Louisiana LP and by the chairman of the New Mexico LP denouncing O’Keefe, headquarters and its practices. The Louisiana Party wrote of national’s “arm-twisting recruitment [of candidates] process,” and declared that “at this point we don’t know if we are victims of an overzealous staff, poor management, an amateur con-game, or a combination of all three.” Christa-Bolden, New Mexico LP chair, wrote bitterly of “the ineptitude, incompetence and lack of trustworthiness demonstrated by the individuals purportedly in charge of National Headquarters.” O’Keefe’s failure to pay petitioners in New Mexico as promised, led to Ms. Bolden’s conclusion: “It is up to the people running the National Party to support state organizations where possible …
[...]
But the most damaging revelation from the point of view of libertarian principle was the June 15 memo from O’Keefe to Howie Rich on “Campaign Issue Selection,” setting forth O’Keefe’s strategy for the campaign. In the first place, this odiously sellout memo was sent to Rich over the head of Sheldon Richman, chairman of the outreach committee and supposedly Rich’s boss, to the justifiable complaint of Richman. In addition, O’Keefe’s Craniac strategy is horrendous, and represents another giant step downward in the degeneration of Craneism into blatant and total opportunism. Proposals by LP candidates, declared O’Keefe, must be confined to “proposals which voters can believe could be implemented in the near term. Like the Clark campaign’s proposals, they should be essentially first Year proposals.. .
[...]
There were other revealing passages in O’Keefe’s memo to Rich. One: “No particular civil liberties issue seems nationally prominent right now.” So much for civil liberties. Oh really, Eric? And what about the massive assault on abortion rights looming in Congress? And what of federal drug enforcement? And grandson of S. l.? And the unleashing of the FBI and CIA, etc. And the Post Office Bill? But I suppose none of that could be handled realistically, pragmatically, in one year’s time.
[...]
So what is O’Keefe’s substitute for these excellent compact statements? “I can’t tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats…. We need some fresh ideas and a real change.” Go ahead say it, Eric: we need a new beginning. And we got one, but with Ronnie Reagan.
For this monstrosity alone, Eric O’Keefe should have been sacked, and sacked hard, and Rich and his cohorts along with him.
Alicia Clark came into the chairmanship race determined to bring unity to the Libertarian Party, and to rise above seemingly petty and useless factional disputes. When she came into office, she was open to all NatCom members and factions, and distributed committee posts and functions with an even hand. But she found that O’Keefe & Co. would not cooperate. It was their way or nothing. She saw O’Keefe and the Headquarters Staff keep to their own agenda, and so, after a long train of abuses, she finally acted, and acted with decision and dispatch. Just as we learned about Alicia, Alicia seems to have learned about the nature of the Crane Machine.
As one top Clark adviser of 1981 put it recently, with his usual wit and flair: “A year ago I believed in unity and balance in the Party, and an end to all the petty bickering and faction fighting. I’m a slow learner but I’ve learned, and now I make Rothbard look like a moderate on the Crane Question.”
And this from the November/December 1982 Libertarian Forum:
… let us now turn to the two top Craniac campaigns in the nation. The most important, of course, was Dick Randolph’s race for Governor of Alaska. In early summer, Randolph, for some curious reason, turned his entire campaign over to the Crane Machine, lock, stock, and barrel–and to Eastern preppie carpetbaggers at that. After offering the job to several others and having it turned down, the Crane Machine sent Kent Guida–fresh from his only political experience as third-place loser in a three-person race for national chair in 1981-to Alaska as campaign manager (?!) for Randolph.
Other Craniacs poured up there, including Anita Anderson and Paul Beckner, and Ed Crane himself and the Riches were much in evidence. Crane and his hireling Chris Hocker were made co-finance directors of the Randolph campaign in the lower 48. And when Craniac Eric O’Keefe was kicked out of his job as National Director of the LP in August, he was immediately trundled up to Alaska to help run the show.
For a year, the Craniacs had been trumpeting Randolph as a “winnable” candidate, and O’Keefe managed to direct a great deal of headquarters resources into the fight. Randolph put out a campaign book, Freedom for Alaskans, which was witheringly reviewed by a former VP candidate and National Chairman Dave Bergland in the October frontlines as gravely downplaying libertarian principle.
In short, a typical Craniac campaign: lots of hype, lots of splash, lots of money, opportunistically burying principle, and run by the much vaunted tough young neo-Haldeman “professionals” of the Crane Machine itself.
And what was the result? Absolute unmitigated disaster. Remember that Ed Clark got 12% of the Alaskan vote for President in 1980, and that a popular minor party candidate should do much better for Governor or Senator than some out-of-stater running for the top political job of President. Remember also that Dick Randolph was a two-term State Representative as a Libertarian, and had been a Republican State Rep in the past; he had name recognition throughout the state. And how much did Randolph get, after all the “professionalism,” and tons of money? Only 15 per cent! Unbelievable.
Furthermore, the amount of money collected and spent by the Randolph campaign was enormous. At this writing, we don’t know the precise figures, but various reports from Crane Machine sources range from the enormous $550,000 to a staggering $1 million. This means, that to gain his 25,000 votes, Randolph spent somewhere between a whopping $22 and $40 per vote. (Contrast this to Steiger’s 8 cents a vote in a similar absolute vote range!) This is surely one of the highest dollar/vote ratios in American political history. It is true that Jay Rockefeller spent in this range in his race for governor of West Virginia, and that Tom Hayden spent something like it this year for State Rep in California. But the difference is that they won, whereas all Randolph got was a measly 15 per cent.
[...]
The Crane Machine are not only lowdown opportunists and betrayers of libertarian principle, they are incredibly inept and bumbling opportunists to boot. They sell their souls only to win a mess of nothing. But, if you look at their record, they have been successful so far in two and only two important ways: (a) in continuing to con the Koch brothers and other contributors into pouring millions into their shabby operations; and (b) in continuing to con activists into doing the foot-soldier work of getting signatures, stuffing envelopes, etc.*
[* 2006: They still don't pay their interns, and brag about it. -HW]
[...]
A grim footnote to the Crane/Randolph Alaska disaster was the equivalent Craniac catastrophe in New York. In a race where Eric O’Keefe claimed the chances to be “excellent” for FLP gubernatorial candidate John Northrup to get the 50,000 votes needed for ballot status, Northrup got a miserable 18,000 votes for 0.36% of the total. But, in contrast to Alaska, this calamity was scarcely a surprise, since it simply continues the grisly and unbroken record of disasters committed by the tiny, inept, and Craniac-ridden New York Party. The New York Party is run like a feudal fiefdom by Craniacs Gary Greenberg and Howie and Andrea Rich, and Northrup’s campaign manager was the well-known Craniac operative, Bruce Majors.
But, once again, in a manner echoing the much more grandiose Alaska caper, the New York Party managed to raise the hefty sum of approximately $100,000 for the doomed Northrup, weighing in with a big dollar/vote ratio of about $5.50 a vote. Yet the Northrup defeat should easily have been foreseen by anyone familiar with the New York Party or the state’s political situation.
And this grace note is found at the end of thatNovember/December 1982 Libertarian Forum:
HURRY! READ THE BANNED ISSUE!The Laissez-Faire Bookstore has always tried to serve impartially all sectors of the libertarian movement, and it has carried the Libertarian Forum since its inception. For several years, the Bookstore computerized our mailing list and shipped out each issue to our subscribers. Now, Andrea Millen Rich, the new proprietor of the Laissez-Faire Bookstore and a top operative of the Crane Machine, has banned the Lib. Forum from its sacred portals. Mrs. Rich’s reason: because the lead article in the September issue (“Blockbuster at Billings”), which told the story of the firing of Eric O’Keefe as National Director of LP, consisted of “vile and demented lies.”
From being “radicalized” sitting in Murray Rothbard’s living room, Andrea Rich was now banning his magazine from her newly-purchased bookstore. Something that would shake the very foundations of the Libertarian Party was now clearly brewing.
This was only a foretaste of what was to come.
And Duncan Scott? Oh, don’t worry. All the major players will converge in Manhattan on Saturday, September 3, 1983.
But Scheherazade perceived the coming of the dawn and fell silent.
Courage.
18 OCTOBER 2006
Unlimited Terms of Endearment Part XXIV: The Secret Life of Duncan Scott (ii.)
“Serving the Sun Valley, Idaho resort communities,” The Idaho Mountain Express — “Idaho’s largest twice weekly newspaper” –published this story today:
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Idaho initiative receives nationwide funding
Libertarian foundations support Proposition 2By GREG MOORE
Express Staff Writer… This House Is MY Home has received $110,000 from America At Its Best, which, according to the financial disclosure report, is based in Kalispell, Mont. However, This House Is MY Home Chairman Laird Maxwell said he chairs that organization as well. Various media stories have named [Howard] Rich as a primary funding source for America At Its Best. Maxwell said Rich had provided seed money to the organization, but he said he was uncertain whether he was still a contributor….
That Kalispell, Montana address of “America At Its Best” is the law office of Duncan Scott, who also sent $870,000 to Nebraska (at last count) for a pair of initiatives, neither of which were “Eminent Domain/Takings” initiatives.
It’s all rather complicated. So we’ll just keep following Duncan Scott, pausing only to note that Laird Maxwell’s “seed money” from Howard Rich came to something on the order of, well … here’s the latest figures hot off the Idaho Secretary of State’s office website:
America At It’s Best (sic)
PO Box 1678 Kalispell MT 59903
4/17/2006
$50,000.00America At It’s Best (sic)
PO Box 1678 Kalispell MT 59903
4/17/2006
$50,000.00Fund for Democracy*
73 Spring St Ste 406
New York NY 10012
3/21/2006
$80,000.00[*The San Francisco Chronicle, Oct 5, 2006:
(California) Donations included ... $1.5 million from (Howard) Rich's Fund for Democracy, which he describes simply as "a trust." The organization is not incorporated and has no publicly stated aim. ]
Fund for Democracy
73 Spring St Ste 406
New York NY 10012
4/12/2006
$25,000.00Fund for Democracy
73 Spring St Ste 406
New York NY 10012
4/13/2006
$50,000.00Fund for Democracy
73 Spring St Ste 406
New York NY 10012
4/25/2006
$55,000.00Fund for Democracy
73 Spring St Ste 406
New York NY 10012
5/5/2006
$22,000.00Fund for Democracy
73 Spring St Ste 406
New York NY 10012
6/2/2006
$5,000.00Maxwell, Laird
702 W Hays Ste 16 Boise ID
3/21/2006
$50.00
And that’s it. [I assume that the error of It's (it is) as opposed to "Its" (a possessive form of 'It') was the a clerical error in the SOS's office. Clearly it's not "America At It Is Best." It's nonsensical in its application, grammatically.] Onward:
When we strip away the masks, “America At It’s Best” (sic) is Idaho’s Laird Maxwell and Montana’s Duncan Scott. (How it is that Montana AAIB contributes to Idaho’s “This House is MY Home,” when Idaho’s Laird Maxwell is the chairman of AAIB is a mystery no one has quite yet made sense of).
The “Fund For Democracy” is Howie Rich. And Laird Maxwell even makes a $50 cameo as the crusty, homespun Idahoan fighting to empower the “people,” as Rich’s operatives in every state claim. Laird’s wife Lori Maxwell (nee Klein) is quoted mouthing standard Richian rhetoric this week by the Center for Public Integrity:
Arizona’s Million-Dollar Man
Pro-207 forces rake in more money from the Howard Rich machineby jim morris
Published: October 11, 2006… Lori Klein, the executive director of Arizona HOPE, says that there is nothing nefarious or surprising about the hefty out-of-state donations.
“Many businesspeople [in Arizona] were afraid to contribute to us, even though they believe in property rights, because of the draconian retaliation they would experience from the cities,” Klein says. “Government is just so entrenched in the private affairs of the business on one level or another – through regulation or licensing or zoning – that the guys with money don’t want to go up against the powers that be…”
We know that the relationship between Laird Maxwell and Lori Klein is now a marital relation. The exact nature of the relationship between Laird Maxwell, Howie Rich and Duncan Scott isn’t known. What is known follows.
Dick Randolph had been, in Murray Rothbard’s words in the 1982 Libertarian FORUM, “the jewel in the LP diadem ever since he won his seat in the State House from Fairbanks.”
In 1982 — as chronicled elsewhere — Randolph ran for Governor of Alaska as a Libertarian and lost. Randolph’s fellow Libertarian, a professional hunting guide named Ken Fanning, had been elected in 1980. In 1982, Fanning lost his bid for re-election, too. In 1984, Andre Marrou was elected, returning the LP to the Alaska statehouse in Juneau.
If Randolph had been the jewel, then Alaska was the crown. They’d been the most successful, had elected the largest number of Libertarians, and, they were making quite a lot of money fundraising.
But, in 1983, the Libertarian Party of Alaska decided to get serious, and hired an executive director, possibly the first hired by any state LP in the USA.
In a telephone interview with Andre Marrou, the 1992 LP presidential candidate recalled the political climate at the time:
Marrou remembered Randolph’s gubernatorial run in 1982. Eric O’Keefe came up there. And he remembers meeting Ken Guida, confirming Rothbard’s report in the Nov-Dec 1982 Libertarian Forum.
In early summer, Randolph, for some curious reason, turned his entire campaign over to the Crane Machine, lock, stock, and barrel — and to Eastern preppie carpetbaggers at that. After offering the job to several others and having it
turned down, the Crane Machine sent Kent Guida — fresh from his only political experience as third-place loser in a three-person race for national chair in 1981 — to Alaska as campaign manager (?!) for Randolph. Other Craniacs poured up there, including Anita Anderson and Paul Beckner, and Ed Crane himself and the Riches were much in evidence. Crane and his hireling Chris Hocker were made co-finance directors of the Randolph campaign in the lower 48. And when Craniac Eric O’Keefe was kicked out of his job as National Director of the LP in August, he was immediately trundled up to Alaska to help run the show….
“It was the next year [1983] Dick Randolph called me up,” Marrou says. Randolph said “We want to have a full time executive director for the [Alaska Libertarian] party.”
“Randolph nominated Duncan Scott. I didn’t know him.” At the time, Marrou was the state LP officer in charge of elections. Duncan Scott was hired as the Alaskan LP state executive director, on salary. And there was plenty of money for that salary.
The LP had been quite successful in raffling off airplanes at $20 per ticket. If they sold all their raffle tickets, they would collect $60,000 for a $10,000 airplane, Marrou recalls. They also put pull-tabs in the bars. “But they didn’t bring in as much as the airplanes.”
He recalls Duncan Scott in 1983: “Very good executive director of the [Libertarian] party. [Alaska's LP] was the only party with paid employee. Duncan Scott was good at managing, good at fundraising, etc.” Scott was, according to Marrou, “Fairly thin; he wasn’t tall, about 5’10″ Sharp, college graduate; he had a law degree. I respected him a lot.”
In 1983 and 1984, Duncan Scott was also the director of something called “Alaskans for a Competitive Economy, Inc.” which, Marrou explains, was the accounting mechanism for a petition drive and ballot measure from the Libertarian Party.
Unlike Scott’s 1982 experience in Montana, the Alaskan initiative was successful. “We eliminated 52 pages of regulations, and abolished the Alaska Transportation Commission,” Marrou says, adding, “I was one of the three who incorporated ['Alaskans for a Competitive Economy'].”
During this period, “Duncan and Dick were palling around a lot together.” Randolph, an experienced pilot, would fly Scott to Randolph’s hunting lodge on Clark Lake. By contrast, Marrou says he was never invited to the hunting lodge.
But, in September of 1983, the National Convention was held in New York City….
We pick up our tale at the 1983 National Libertarian Party convention in New York City, where ten years earlier, Andrea Millen and Howard Rich had been elected the Chair and Vice Chair, respectively, at the founding of the New York Free Libertarian Party in 1973.
In 1976, the NY FLP suffered a schism, [ Libertarian Forum, April 1976 ]:
The big libertarian political news from New York is the defection from the Free Libertarian Party of nine of its leading members, including four of its former candidates for office, and two of its former chairmen. Of the nine, three have resigned from the FLP outright (Childs, Millen, and Rothbard), while the other six remain, in the words of the joint statement of the nine published below, alienated, but continuing to do what they can “for our cause … on their own.” All of them have “disengaged” from the FLP.
Walter Block
Andrea Millen [NOTE: later, Andrea Millen Rich]
Murray N. Rothbard
Roy Childs
Ralph Raico
Jerry Tuccille
Gary Greenberg
Howard Rich [NOTE: married Andrea Millen]
Fran Youngstein [emphasis added- HW]
After that, explains Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, a delegate to the 1983 National Convention, the Southern California Libertarian Party Chair and Los Angeles County Party Chair, “They all left the New York party,” but the ‘disengagers’ remained involved at the national level.
It is well to keep that walkout in mind, along with the Bozeman, Montana walkout in the summer 1983: when Eric O’Keefe was fired, preceded by a massive parliamentary fireworks display.
The New York National LP Convention of 1983 was eagerly anticipated. The arc of the party was on the rise. (from the Libertarian Party’s “history” webpage)
1972
First national convention held in June in Denver, Colorado. John Hospers, a philosophy professor at the University of Southern California, is nominated as presidential candidate. LP vice presidential candidate Tonie Nathan becomes the first woman in U.S. history to receive an electoral vote.1978
Ed Clark receives 5% of the vote in his race for Governor of California.Dick Randolph of Alaska becomes the first elected Libertarian state legislator.
1979
Presidential nominating convention held in Los Angeles. Ed Clark and David Koch named as presidential and vice presidential candidates.Permanent ballot status achieved in California as more than 80,000 voters register Libertarian.
1980
Ed Clark appears on the ballot in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam, and receives almost one million votes. His campaign runs extensive national television ads and offers many Americans their first look at what the LP has to offer. Many in the media recognize the LP for the first time as a serious political force.Dick Randolph is re-elected to Alaska state legislature. Ken Fanning, also running as a Libertarian, is elected to Alaska legislature.
1982
Louisiana congressional candidate James Agnew receives 23% of the vote. Alaska gubernatorial candidate Dick Randolph receives 15% of the vote. Arizona gubernatorial candidate Sam Steiger receives 5% of the vote.
The 1983 Convention had started out looking like a glorious new day for the Party. They would nominate their 2004 Presidential ticket. And then bad things started to happen:
It was an odd week to begin with. The presidential “campaign” within the party had begun in early 1983.
Murray Rothbard writes in the February 1983 Libertarian Review:
I bring tidings of great joy: We have a presidential candidate.
His name is Gene Burns, of Orlando, Florida. At the last NatCom meeting at Orlando, on December 4-5, I first met Gene Burns by appearing on his radio talk show. I was impressed by the astuteness of his questions and his obvious sympathy with and knowledge of libertarianism. Then, at the banquet Saturday night, Gene delivered a magnificent, stem-winding speech that brought the entire audience to its feet.
Jocularly, without realizing how prophetic we were, some of us nudged each other and said, “Hey, what about him as a Presidential candidate?” And now, that dream has come true.
But in the week preceding the LP Convention Burns unexpectedlywithdrew from the race.
It wasn’t supposed to be an exciting convention. Since January, radio talk show host Gene Burns of Orlando, Florida had been campaigning hard for the Presidential nomination. No one was in the field to oppose him. The desperate Crane Machine, trying hard for a “big name” candidate, sought for months to induce Republican Representative Ron Paul to run against Burns, but without success….
Then Burns dropped the bombshell [LF, Sept/Oct 83, page 2.]:
The peaceful lull, and all hopes for a serene convention, ended abruptly on Thursday, August 25, when I and a few others received a lengthy mailgram from Gene Burns announcing his withdrawal from the race, this announcement coming a mere four days before the convention. Burns made the mailgram public that afternoon, declaring that not enough funds had been raised for his race. Following a pattern that he had established in early and mid-June, Burns, when faced with a financial problem, dropped out of the race without consulting any of his LP friends and supporters, then promptly made himself incommunicado for many days, going fishing, and answering no calls.
Political maneuvering began in earnest, with three factions arising within the LP: [p. 6]
[Floor leader for the successful nominee, Dave Bergland] Emil Franzi, in his typically perceptive way, has engaged in an incisive sociological class analysis of the composition of the Libertarian Party. “There are three groups in the Party,” he points out, “the preppies, the rednecks and the hippies.” The “preppies” or would-be aspiring preppies are the Crane Machine, the epitome of the three-piece suit Eastern Establishment; the “hippies” are the Radical Caucus, and the “rednecks” are the Alicia Clark supporters of 1981. There is not, of course, a 1-to-1 correlation here, but the broad breakdown provides a remarkably accurate fit of the three factions. The Crane Machine is the “respectable” preppie elite, the opportunistic seekers after power; the rednecks are the unpretentious populist voters, the people of the heartland of America….
For a time, Tonie Nathan, the 1972 Vice Presidential candidate (and a featured speaker at this year’s 2006 National Libertarian Convention) was the “Defense Caucus” candidate. She withdrew early on, and supporters went to the Dave Bergland camp and the Earl Ravenal camp (the “Crane Machine” candidate).
[p. 9]
The Crane Machine had three aces up its sleeve at this convention … The second, which appeared toward the end of the week, was the very visible and imposing appearance of multi-millionaire David Koch. Koch, moving around the delegations with Randolph and MacBride, laid it on the line: If Ravenal were nominated, he was prepared to give $300,000 to the Party for ballot drives. And what this “Unity” spokesman was asked, “if Bergland is nominated Would you, in the name of unity, then contribute an equal amount to ballot drives” “Certainly not,” David Koch replied, “I only contribute to first-class candidates.”
Koch had run in 1980 as the Vice Presidential candidate after pledging to spend $500,000 on the campaign. But this time the LP wasn’t buying.
When, after a long series of tough floor battles, Bergland was nominated, the Crane Machine got up and walked out of the convention.
Tonie Nathan remembers that it was odd. “We were supposed to have a dinner that night.” But none of those who walked out returned. Except for one, Nathan says. “Howie Rich came to the dinner.”
Melinda Pillsbury-Foster remembers, “He[Duncan Scott]just went ‘poof.’ They all went ‘poof.’ They were all just GONE.” The Craniacs had left the convention, but until the dinner that Saturday night, September 3, 1983, no one else in the LP realized it. And, for the most part, the “Craniacs” never returned again.
As has been noted in previous reports, the “Crane Machine” includes most of the major players in the “Howie Rich & Friends” group that have been the subject of this entire series. [see: "The Crane Machine Revealed"]
Add to that group that walked out of the LP Convention Duncan Scott. Tonie Nathan remembers that Scott was there, but can’t recall if he was one of the group that walked out. Pillsbury-Foster is sure: “Yes, he was there, and yes, he was one of those who walked out.” But he did not stand out, which Nathan confirms.
Duncan Scott returned to Alaska, still was running the ballot measure campaign for the Libertarian Party and the “Alaskans for a Competitive Economy, Inc.” (ACE) And, still the Executive Director of the Alaskan LP, Duncan Scott led that 1984 campaign — a successful year for the LP. Andre Marrou was elected to the Alaskan state house, and the ballot measure passed. Bergland’s campaign didn’t fare very well, as the Crane wing of the party sat out the presidential campaign.
[NOTE: according to one eyewitness, Howie Rich and his brother-in-law, Paul Jacob, worked in Connecticut under assumed names. Jacob, former Chair of the Arkansas Libertarian Party, had gone underground after his indictment on draft resistance charges on 23 September, 1982. Jacob was later arrested and tried, on July 1-2, 1985, offering the Libertarian defense the draft is a form of slavery and by resisting he remained free. He was found guilty, sentenced to five years -- the maximum -- with 4 ½ suspended. He spent the next several months as a guest of the U.S. Government -- HW]
But, even with the losses of 1982, Alaska remained the “jewel” in the LP diadem.
And then, one day in March of 1985, Andre Marrou called Dick Randolph. Marrou had a long-term plan for the Alaskan party — part of which was for Randolph to move up to the Alaskan Senate, combined with a number of other moves, culminating in a Libertarian ticket for Governor and Lt. Governor. “Dick shot me down,” saying that “the Libertarian party was dead, etc. etc.” Marrou recounts.
And then, a short time later, with rumors flying about a Randolph Republican bid for governor, “I called Dick in March ’85,” to ask Randolph if the rumors were true. “Dick said, ‘I’m not going to do that [jump to the GOP]. I’m a dedicated Libertarian’.” But two weeks later, Dick Randolph announced that he was moving to the Republican party to run for governor.
“He went on statewide radio and announced that the Libertarian Party was dead.” Marrou was incensed. “Dick broke his word to me. I asked specifically if he was going to do this. He said ‘no’.”
I located the secretary of the Randolph campaign in 1986 (she lists her involvement as from 1985 to 1986, so the campaign was just under way when Marrou called Randolph in March of ’85.) Her name is Lillian Simmons, she was a legal secretary at the time and she is currently running for Texas House District 52 as the Libertarian candidate. She writes:
In 1985 I worked as a secretary at the campaign of Republican Dick Randolph for Governor of Alaska. Dick Randolph had served in the Alaska Legislature as a Libertarian previously, and he had sponsored and passed the Alaskan Dividend. This is the Alaskan reverse income tax. This governor’s race was a primary race with thirteen Republican candidates. Dick Randolph ended up in third place. It was a high third place.
In a telephone interview last week, I asked Ms. Simmons whether she knew Duncan Scott during the Randolph for Governor campaign in 1985-6.
“Oh yes. He ran the campaign,” she says. “He was a very nice man.”
Foster-Pillsbury says that there has been a lot of speculation that Duncan Scott talked Dick Randolph into returning to the GOP. When told of this speculation Marrou said that he didn’t know, but that it was “entirely possible,” adding, “I never would have thought Duncan Scott or Dick Randolph would do it.”
This caused Marrou quite a problem in his re-election campaign. Everywhere he went, he recalls, the local media asked him about Randolph’s defection, and his announcement of the death of the LP. Marrou was not re-elected.
As for Randolph? “He was roundly defeated. That ended our unbroken string of victories. He made big mistake in running for governor. He only got 13% in primary. Last I ever heard from Dick, was in 1985, he was building a boat he was going to live on in the Chena River.”
In 1998, Dick Randolph switched his party membership back from the GOP to the Libertarian Party.
Meantime — now, by all appearances, a good Republican — Duncan Scott moved to New Mexico, to take a job as Assistant Attorney General in the office of the new Republican Attorney General of New Mexico, Hal Stratton.
But Scheherazade perceived the coming of the dawn and fell silent.
NEXT: The CONCLUSION – Howie and Duncan and Money, Oh My!
Unlimited Terms of Endearment Part XXV, The Secret Life of Duncan Scott (iii.)
There is a gap in the narrative here: Sometime between the primary in Alaska, in 1986, when Dick Randolph’s run for Governor ended in a third-place finish, and the beginning of 1987, when Randolph’s campaign manager, Duncan Scott, moved to New Mexico.
Whether he’d moved to work on the Hal Stratton for New Mexico Attorney General campaign, or whether he was invited after Stratton — a Republican with libertarian leanings — won in a notoriously Democratic state is not known. But by 1987, Duncan Scott was working as an assistant Attorney General under Hal Stratton’s Attorney Generalship.
But in the rest of the country, the Libertarian Party had been imploding, and continued through the late ’80s. A sense of it can be garnered from this old USENET newsgroup talk.politics.misc entry:
From: Sean P. Ryan, Hardcore Alaskan
Date: Fri, May 1 1992 9:05 pm… I’ve talked to Libertarians in years past about netting, and the only things which eminate (sic) from their mouths are CompuServe and Fidonet. No matter how hard you try to enlighten them as to alternatives, they don’t listen. I highly suspect the reason to be that CompuServe and Fidonet are home to Libertarian-related discussion, so everyone simply points in that direction and forgets about everything else.
I also would highly suspect the reason to be that either they know, or have heard, about the subsidization of the Internet by the NSF and others, and all of a sudden become principled and back away. Grow up. The bastards are going to steal from you anyway, why not try to take some of their “manna from heaven” for your own? If I remember correctly, it was Duncan Scott, former executive director of the Alaska LP (who left very shortly after and his successors burned the party to the ground here) who was quoted in an Anchorage newspaper around 1984 or so as saying “I find it to be to our advantage to use government money to further our aims against the government.” (Note: that quote is very heavily paraphrased here, as I don’t have the exact quote in front of me. However, he was illustrating the LP’s acceptance of all the benefits associated with its non-profit status as being good. And I would agree.)
This is a widely-held internal critique of Libertarian politics: that, being ideologically against any government at all, dealings with that government become problematic: what do you do with something that you don’t believe should exist?
In our interview, Andre Marrou, the 1992 LP Presidential candidate and 1988 Vice Presidential candidate stated that Libertarians were usually more interested in writing tracts and essays than in actually getting involved with the electoral process.
“The Libertarian party, in my opinion, has the best philosophy and platform [of the political parties], but very few [Libertarians] are very serious about politics,” Marrou said. “They don’t have any interest in getting elected or helping others get elected.”
Certainly Duncan Scott danced out of a burning barn. It had begun immediately after the “Crane Machine’s” petulant walkout at the 1983 National LP Convention in New York. Murray Rothbard writes, in the final issue of the Libertarian Review:
Since that PresCon the C[rane] M[achine] has left the Libertarian Party….
To be fair, Rothbard may well be casting about wildly for bogeymen, because there was no doubt that the Party itself was in severe decline — for whatever reason. The headline dominating the final issue of the LIBERTARIAN REVIEW says it all:
The State of the Movement: The Implosion
The end of a Presidential election year is a good time to take stock, to ask ourselves how our movement is going, and therefore how it may be shaping up for the future. All right: so how goes our movement? The quick answer is, not very well. For the last four years, the movement has been suffering through a severe contraction, reaching during 1983 and 1984 the status of what wordsmith Sam Konkin has called an “implosion.”
And then Rothbard does his best to put a good face on it:
The recent implosion, however, is no reason for despair. No ideological revolution proceeds on a continuous straight line from birth to triumphant victory. Every such revolution proceeds in a zig-zag manner….
But things would get worse in the following years.
In 1987 Duncan Scott stepped away and into Republican Party politics, as did many Libertarians of the day:
Insight on the News
July 24, 1995Libertarians in the big tent - Cover Story
Michael RustThe Republican Liberty Caucus hopes to harness libertarian momentum for the GOP.
At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Eric Rittberg took questions following a panel discussion on “Why Conservatism is Cool.” The executive director of the Republican Liberty Caucus, or RLC, told those gathered that “conservatism may be cool, but libertarianism is cooler. Young people want government out of their wallets and out of their bedrooms.”
Cheers and boos greeted this bold statement, but there was no doubt that the crowd had been made aware of the Tallahassee, Fla.-based RLC and its message — that the Republican Party can be the most effective vehicle for the libertarian message. Certainly the RLC’s leadership carries impressive libertarian credentials. Its leader, until his death earlier this year, was Roger MacBride, the Libertarian Party’s 1976 presidential nominee. (In 1972, as a member of the Electoral College from Virginia, he refused to vote for Richard Nixon, instead casting his ballot for philosopher John Youth Hospers — the only electoral vote ever cast for a Libertarian Party nominee. Hospers’ running mate was Oregon television reporter Toni Nathan — the first woman ever to receive an electoral vote. “The RLC’s interim chairman is former Rep. Ron Paul, who garnered 430,000 votes as the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee in 1988.”
[...]
“A lot of Libertarian Party folks are skeptical of the Republican revolution,” Rittberg says, but adds that passage of nine of the 10 parts of the GOP “Contract With America” isn’t a bad record for 100 days. “And just about every one of those planks was a Libertarian program.” He points to prominent state Republican legislators — Greg Kaza in Michigan, Duncan Scott in New Mexico and Penn Pfiffner in Colorado, all former Libertarian Party state chairmen — and notes that some 25 state legislators around the country describe themselves as libertarian Republicans….
Or, for a more contemporary historical perspective, listen to Eric Dondero, who was, coincidentally enough, a paid petitioner in several states for Howie Rich initiatives this year (see interview published on the same day, July 24th by Ray Ring in High Country News)
from thirdpartywatch.com:
Eric Dondero Says:
July 24th, 2006 at 10:18 amSo much to respond to here… My first comment is to the gentleman who suggested that the Libertarians join the GOP “en masse” and form a distinct wing within the Party. As the guy who founded the Republican Liberty Caucus in 1990, let me assure you, that WE’VE ALREADY JOINED THE GOP EN MASSE.
At the 1989 Libertarian Party National Convention in Philadelphia, there was a purge of sorts. All the “Ron Paul wing” Realists in the LP were basically thrown out by the Bergland/Emerling faction. We wanted to move the Party into the Mainstream, concentrate on elections and campaigns, and not just fundraising gimmicks.
Over the next couple of years, slowly but surely, most of us moved to the GOP. I was the first to leave. In fact, I publicly declared that I was “turning Republican,” right after Michael Emerling “Cloud” purged me.
LP Natcommers Cliff Thies, and Mike Holmes soon followed. Then followed other LP stalwarts like Alan Turin, and scores of others.
I started the RLC, and all the disgruntled ex-LPers rallied around the group.
What’s happened since?
Over 20 libertarians, most formerly associated with the Libertarian Party have won elections to State Legislatures around the Nation. Folks like Greg Kaza (former Ed Clark for President Campaigner) and Leon Drolet (friend of the MI LP) in Michigan. Duncan Scott (fmr. Libertarian Party official) in New Mexico. Penn Pfiffner in Colorado (fmr. LP State Chair). Ken Lindell (fmr. 2-year ME LP member) in Maine. Toby Nixon in Washington State (fmr. 20-year GA LP member). Vic Kohring in Alaska (friend of the AK LP). And scores of others.
What else?
The RLC was largely influential in getting the former Libertarian Party Presidential candidate Ron Paul, first to switch back to the GOP, then to win a seat in the US Congress. The RLC also helped to elect scores of other Congressmen.
The bottom line; The Republican Liberty Caucus is simply proven itself to be the very most effective organization ever for libertarians in the political world. You could argue Cato has proven to be far more effective overall than the RLC, particularly in the Policy area. But in the world of libertarian politics, the RLC is King.
Dondero has been, all summer, a vehement proponent of the Rich initiatives online and in letters-to-the-editor. He was, at one time, Senior Aide to Congressman (and 1988 LP Presidential candidate) Ron Paul. But, his testimony should be taken, perhaps, with a grain of salt (see: http://bostontea.us/node/71#comment-345 )
Duncan Scott IS still listed on the Republican Liberty Caucus website on the advisory board as an “emeritus” member for New Mexico.
(Other board members include the late Idaho congresswoman Helen Chenoweth. See below under the Mountain States Legal Foundation details as to her lateness.)
How he got there is part of the story.
Scott worked for the new New Mexico Attorney General for about a year. In 1988, he returned to private practice in Albuquerque.
In Albuquerque in 1989, Duncan Scott began working on citywide ballot initiatives, including a term limits measure (that passed.) And as an attorney working pro bono, he represented the measure in court, winning at the district level, and then seeing term limits overturned in the New Mexico appellate courts.
By 1992, he had built up enough of a political base that he ran in the Republican primary, defeating Les Houston, the Senate Minority leader, a longtime fixture in New Mexico politics.*
[*NOTE: I lived in New Mexico from 1989 to 1993, and remember it well. I worked in 1989 for the New Mexico State Highway and Transportation Department's Legal Office as a Legal Secretary. The atmosphere for Republican appointees in the heavily-featherbedded-Democratic state bureaucracy made being a Republican a very tough thing to be. I say that as one registered "Democratic" at the time. - HW]
While in the New Mexico State Senate, Scott made a rather large media splash.
From the Santa Fe THE NEW MEXICAN
Monday 3/6/95
by Mark Oswald
column, Capitol Chronicle
[Summing up the two-month '95 New Mexico legislative session]:During discussion by the Senate of a serious piece of legislation concerning the psychology profession last week, Sen. Duncan Scott, R-Albuquerque, proposed an amendment. It says:
“When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’s competency hearing, the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than 2 feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts.
“Additionally, a psychologist or psychiatrist shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length, and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand. Whenever a psychologist or psychiatrist provides expert testimony regarding the defendant’s competency, the bailiff shall contemporaneously dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong.”
Usually, anything proposed by Scott – whose hard-core conservatism is like cod liver oil for the Senate’s Democratic majority – goes nowhere. But his wizard-hat amendment was warmly received and passed by a voice vote. It is now part of Sen. Richard Romero’s psychologist bill, as the measure moves to the House.
The moment faded into internet obscurity. The amendment died in the New Mexico House. But, sometime during his Senate membership, Scott joined the Republican Liberty Caucus. And he did something that would prove more substantive, even if it was much less overt:
Duncan Scott formed and remains president of an entity called “Coalition for a Citizen’s Legislature” in the last year of his senate term, 1995. He remains the President to the present day.
From Guidestar:
COALITION FOR A CITIZEN LEGISLATURE INC
PO BOX 587
% DUNCAN SCOTT PRES
ALBUQUERQUE , NM 87103GENERAL INFORMATION
- This organization is a 501(c)(4) Civic Leagues and Social Welfare Organizations
- This organization is not required to file an annual return with the IRS because its income is less than $25,000.
- Contributions are not deductible, as provided by law.
Now, let’s follow Duncan Scott and the Howie Rich groups from there. Here is what Scott has done since then:
Of 1996, it was reported:
The Capital Eye
January 15, 1997Special Interests Hiding Behind “Grassroot” Ballot Items
by Stephanie LimbA record 91 initiatives were on the November 1996 state ballots … For example, the Washington [State] Dentists Association was accused of buying the right to put its agenda on the 1994 ballot by paying signature gatherers $160,000. The dentists argued that the initiative process provided the only fair opportunity to make their arguments because their competitor — the dentists association — enjoys close political and financial ties to the state legislature.
Similarly, in Nebraska, proponents of an initiative to limit lawmakers’ terms in office spent $139,000 on signature gathering. Except for one $2,000 contribution by a deceased resident’s estate, the money came from organized out-of-state interests: $102,000 from the U.S. Term Limits, $20,000 from Americans for Term Limits, and $15,000 from the Coalition for a Citizens Legislature, David Martin reported in Political Finance and Lobby Reporter….
There you go: Coalition for a Citizens Legislature; President: Duncan Scott.
In 1997, Scott joined the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a “charitable” organization that sues on behalf of destitute and homeless mining, oil and timber companies, et al. Founded by James Watt* [*"We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber"], it is probably best known for its ten year battle to disallow the creation of the Grand Staircase of the Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.
Helen Chenoweth was a member of the board until the recent tragedy:
Oct 2, 2006 07:57 PM
CARSON CITY (AP) — Helen Chenoweth-Hage, a conservative Republican firebrand who served three terms as an Idaho congresswoman, was killed Monday when thrown from a car that overturned on an isolated central Nevada highway.
Another prominent member of the Mountain States Legal Foundation was Gale Norton from 1979-83, now Bush’s Secretary of the Interior, from Colorado. Founded in 1976, it kind of died out in the mid-80s, and was revitalized by grants from a who’s who of right-wing foundations beginning in 1995. (See Media Transparency for details. )
In 1998:
Scott’s Albuquerque Coalition for a Citizens Legislature was heavily involved financially in at least two ballot measure fights in Idaho and California. (These are by no means ALL the states, merely some of them):
Secretary of State, Idaho. Campaign & Contribution reports online:
Idaho, 1998 Term Limits initiative
11/02/98 50,000.00
Coalition for A Citizen Legislature*
POB 587
Albuquerque NM 87103
[*The contribution was, evidently a direct media buy from a Missouri ad agency, according to the Idaho Expenditures report:
11/02/98 50,000.00
Coalition for a Citizen Legislature
Thompson Communications
Marshfield MO
Purpose: advertising]01/21/98 10,000.00
Coalition for a Citizen Legislature Inc
PO Box 587
Albuquerque NM 87103
And, in California, from the Secretary of State’s online records[Note, by now you OUGHT to know which of these groups are Howard Rich & Friends entities -- HW]:
PROPOSITION 225:
LIMITING CONGRESSIONAL TERMS.
PROPOSED CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.
INITIATIVE STATUTE.SUPPORT
California Citizens for Term Limits
ID# 960588
(Terminated 1/13/98)CONTRIBUTIONS RECEIVED
Under $10,000
$ 29,150$10,000 or more
$ 372,498Itemized contributions of $10,000 or more:
Americans for Limited Terms
$10,000Coalition for a Citizens Legislature
$35,000Term Limits Leadership Council
$10,000U.S. Term Limits
$317,498TOTAL CONTRIBUTIONS RECEIVED
$ 401,648OPPOSE
No committees identified
And the winner was …
State of California, June 2, 1998 Primary
Proposition 225 – Limiting Congressional Terms.
Proposed Constitutional Amendment.
Initiative Statute. Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures.FINAL RESULT:
2,689,045 / 52.9% Yes votes
2,395,338 / 47.1% No votes
It won.
And, in 1998, Duncan Scott had time to join the Board(s) of the National Right To Work and the NRTW Legal Foundation. He’s the Vice President of one of the Boards. But we have dealt with this at length, elsewhere. (Part 22: Working the Airwaves)
He also had time to join the Legal Advisory Board of the Initiative and Referendum Institute. In a funny little bit of “trivial pursuit” ephemera, it turns out that the Lincoln, Nebraska lawyer, who incorporated Wisconsin-resident Leslie Graves’ “Renewal Voter Outreach” group in Nebraska, Former State Tax Commissioner John W. Boehm*, is ALSO on that I&R Legal Advisory Board. Small world.
[* See Part VIIb, "America At Its Worst"
and ...
UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT
OCTOBER TERM, 2000
COOK v. GRALIKE ET AL.
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT
No. 99-929. Argued November 6, 2000-Decided February 28, 2001.... Briefs of amici curiae urging reversal were filed for the State of Nebraska by Don Stenberg, Attorney General, and L. Steven Grasz, Deputy Attorney General; for the Initiative and Referendum Institute by Patrick T. O'Brien and John M. Boehm ....
Boehm's name and address for this case are ALSO at the bottom of the page on the amicus curiae brief.
Or, finally, from the official 2000 Arizona Voter's Pamphlet:
Initiative and Referendum Institute Opposes Proposition 102
[...]
M. Dane Waters, President, Initiative & Referendum Institute,
Washington, D.C.John Boehm, General Counsel, Initiative & Referendum Institute,
Lincoln, NE.Paid for by Initiative & Referendum Institute]
In 1999 and 2000, Duncan Scott joined two groups that his former employer, Hal Stratton, had formed. One was “Lawyers for Bush.” The other was “The Rio Grande Foundation,” which Scott joined at its founding in 1999. RGF was a “free market” think tank, spending a lot of time on “school choice,” “tax relief” and other favorite crypto-libertarian objectives.
In 2000, as a member of the “Lawyers for Bush” batch, Duncan Scott filed motions to impound the New Mexico ballots for the Bush campaign. In 2002, Bush appointed Hal Stratton Chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. (Duncan Scott doesn’t seem to have been offered any GOP “thankyou” employment).
And, in 2000 and 2001, he gave his old Washington D.C. co-worker Dennis Rehberg $500 for his successful congressional campaign — after the election: $250 on Nov 15 and $250 on April 12, 2001, after Rehberg had been sworn in.
In 2002, taxexemptworld.com reports that CCL was in hibernation or suspended animation:
COALITION FOR A CITIZEN LEGISLATURE INC
(c/o DUNCAN SCOTT PRES)
PO BOX 587
ALBUQUERQUE, NM 87103-0587
Social Welfare Organization
$0 Assets
$0 Expenditures
Date filed: 12/2002
In 2004, US Term Limits ran two campaigns defending their term limits initiatives of the 1990s. One was run in Arkansas by Paul Jacob’s brother, Tim:
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
$640,000 spent on campaign
BY LAURA KELLAMS
Saturday, December 4, 2004In the reports, filed Thursday, Citizens in Charge is listed as having financed the bulk of the campaign, with spending of $611,607.
Contributors listed included the national organization U.S. Term Limits, which, according to the report, contributed $175,000. Another $147,000 came from a group called Americans for Limited Government.
Tim Jacob, whose brother Paul is president of Citizens in Charge, said it was important to term-limits advocates nationwide to defeat the measure.
And the other Term Limits campaign, in Montana, was run by Duncan Scott. Here are his contributors (fromfollowthemoney.org):
Total Money Raised: $88,543
[note: Howard Rich associates account for 97.70% of all funds]
Position: CON CI-42 [easing Term Limits Law]
Election Cycle: 2004
Location: MontanaTop Contributors
US TERM LIMITS
Amount $64,744
% of Total 73.12%AMERICANS FOR LIMITED GOVERNMENT
Amount $18,161
% of Total 20.51%BUTCHER, TREVIS M
Amount $3,600
% of Total 4.07%
And, that brings us up to the 2006 news.
Land-use initiative makes November ballot
Gregory Hahn
The Idaho Statesman
06-29-2006Idaho voters have another question to answer in November.
An initiative to change the state’s eminent domain and “regulatory takings” laws qualified for the ballot Wednesday with 49,053 signatures – more than the 47,881 required by law. Pushed by conservative advocate Laird Maxwell of Boise, the initiative would restrict governments from making decisions that lower a property’s value without “just compensation” to the landowner.
“We now are gearing up for the campaign to get it passed in November,” Maxwell said.
[...]
Maxwell used $330,000 from two out-of-state groups to pay signature-gatherers to meet the state’s requirements. The money came from New York term-limits and property rights supporter Howard Rich and from “America at its Best,” a group based in the Montana law office of Duncan Scott, a former Republican state senator from New Mexico. Maxwell is the chairman of that group….
Or this, from The Missoula (Montana) Independent:
by Paul Peters
Issue Date 8/3/2006When I walk into Duncan Scott’s Kalispell law office, I’m surprised to hear a live Grateful Dead show coming from the speakers on his computer.
Turns out Scott, who looks similar to Gene Hackman circa 1980, was at the 1974 Missoula Dead show he’s listening to.
It seems strange for a man who has a bullet-riddled John Kerry sign on his door, confesses to be somewhat of a gun nut and who, through an organization called America at its Best (AAIB), steers hundreds of thousands of dollars toward conservative ballot initiatives.
Early this year, Scott became part of AAIB’s new board of directors, helping to take it from being a small group that focused on Virginia-specific issues to one with national objectives. The group is registered as a nonprofit, but in the 501 (c) 4 category. Unlike a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit, (c) 4s do not have to reveal funding sources, as they are not tax-exempt.
This year, AAIB has made $100,000 donations to ballot initiatives in Nebraska, Idaho and Michigan, and $190,000 in Missouri. The money has been used to fund signature-gathering efforts. [NOTE: these numbers are very low, compared to later contribution totals. This was early in the petitioning season - HW]
[...]
Scott didn’t seek a second term in New Mexico. He says, “I decided I could better serve conservative causes by suing liberals rather than serving with them.”
[...]
Now, with AAIB, he has moved behind the scenes, to the money side of initiatives. So far, he notes, out of five initiative campaigns he has worked on in the past, all have made it onto a ballot, and four have passed.
“That’s something I’m proud of,” he says.
Proud, perhaps, but not exactly forthcoming:
OMAHA WORLD HERALD EDITORIAL
Published Tuesday
August 29, 2006The ‘Not me’ problem
… When [reporters] Aksamit and Goodsell asked how the measure originated and why Nebraska was chosen for it, neither the Omaha couple who filed the legal papers for it nor a host of out-of-state activists could supply the answers. When asked “Were you the one?” in regard to a range of key matters, all the players in this peculiar drama provided the same unsatisfactory response.
“Not me,” said the two Omahans. “Not me,” said the deep-pocketed backers in Chicago. “Not me,” said the interest groups in New York and Virginia. “Not me,” said the Michigan and California lawyers who drafted the ballot language. “Not me,” said the Wisconsin woman who ran the petition-collection efforts. “Not me,” said the activist who heads a Montana-based group that served as the financial conduit for the petition drive….
Of course, the writing makes it hard to tell whether they mean Idahoan Laird Maxwell, or Montanan Duncan Scott. But it doesn’t really matter:
Boise WEEKLY
JULY 5, 2006
Idaho’s Measure, New York’s MoneyBY SHEA ANDERSEN
Except for $50 donated by Maxwell, the entire budget for This House is My House (sic) came from out of state, according to reports from the Idaho Secretary of State. $100,000 came from Montana-based America At Its Best. Another $237,000 came from the New York-based Fund for Democracy, headed by Howard Rich, a libertarian activist and major donor.
Like Duncan Scott, Rich spends his money nationwide, funding libertarian candidates and initiatives across the country….
And, finally:
Outside Funds Fueled Petitions
Omaha World-Herald
August 10, 2006LINCOLN – A group with ties to national anti-tax activists spent nearly $1.7 million gathering signatures on a pair of petition drives in Nebraska.
America at Its Best, which lists its address as a post office box in Kalispell, Mont., donated all but $1,998 of the $861,998 contributed to a petition drive to limit state spending.
The group provided all of the funding – $835,000 – for a separate petition that would ban the withholding of food and water from patients, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission….
And so it goes.
To all outward appearances, Duncan Scott is a good Republican. He’s the chair of the Flathead County Republican Party, and president of the Glacier Country Pachyderm Club which meets in the Bulldog Inn on the 3rd Friday of each month at high noon in Kalispell, Montana. He practices law just outside of Glacier National Park. But Duncan Scott has a secret life.
And, he’s not alone.
Courage.
[EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS: If you've read the series, take a gander at http://www.citizensincharge.org/main/project/staff.php . It's priceless, if politically incestuous.]
Back to 2012. Laird and Lori moved to Arizona. They divorced. She ran for Arizona State Senate, and her first campaign contributors were Howard and Andrea Rich, Foster Friess and the owner of the Houston Texans, Bob McNair. When last seen, she was waving a loaded, safety-less pink handgun in a reporter’s face. He lives in Flagstaff and sells high-tech vermiculite.
America At Its Best was revealed to be connected to Americans for Limited Government: their disbursor of monies, William Wilson, is the current President of Americans for Limited Government.
You can read about it here, in “Did Howie Rich Break the Law in Illinois … Again?“ 17 FEBRUARY 2010.
And “Montanans in Action” was ultimately proven to have been funded entirely by Americans for Limited Government.
It’s revealed in 2 AUGUST 2011′s “Credibility, or, a Followup of Sorts“:
Every now and then, a reality check on one’s work ought to be noted. Just stumbled on this old reference to my blogging:
Complaint Says Out-of-State Money Bankrolls “Montanans in Action”
By Courtney Lowery, 7-19-06
New WestAre the “Montanans in Action” really Montanans at all?
Jonathan Motl, a Helena attorney and an old hand at the initiative process, has filed a set of formal complaints with the Commissioner of Political Practices alleging that the groups behind three initiative pushes here in Montana aren’t complying with campaign finance laws.
At the heart of the complaints is a big question: Who is bankrolling the Montana initiatives and are they, in fact, linked with similar measures across the nation?
One of Rich’s front groups. Still in bizness, BTW.
There are four complaints at the commissioner’s office: One against the committees behind each initiative and one against the group orchestrating the measures, Montanans in Action. The initiatives include one that would limit government spending (CI-97), one that would require compensation to property owners if government regulations impacted their property values (I-154) and one that would make recalling judges easier (CI-98). They’re all strikingly similar in language and scope to measures in Idaho, California, Nebraska and Oregon.
The complaints allege, in very basic terms, “you need to report this way and you didn’t,” said Commissioner Gordon Higgins. But where Montanans in Action got enough money to have spent $650,000 already in signature gathering (most of it for paid, professional gatherers) is the big question at play, and it’s unclear how the complaints or a possible investigation might clear that up, or if they even can.Motl alleges Montanans in Action is some sort of front for an out-of-state organization, not the grassroots effort it’s portrayed to be. Oregon writer Hart Williams has done a lot of legwork on tracking the who’s who behind similar initiatives in Idaho, Nebraska, California, Oregon and several other states, and the connections all seem to lead back to New York money, a man named Howie Rich and a group called Americans for Limited Government. (Williams this week gives Rich the a panoramic view. Click here for the latest in his series on the nationwide “movement.”)
Which, made me think of this late revelation (four years later):
“The Lawman”
Montanans in Action details donors in settlement over 2006 ballot measure support
By MIKE DENNISON Missoulian State Bureau |
Posted: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 9:15 pmHELENA – A Montana group that financed three conservative ballot measures in 2006 has settled a long-running dispute with the state’s chief campaign cop, agreeing to disclose the source of $1.2 million used to support the measures.
Montanans in Action, based in Winifred, agreed last Friday to settle a lawsuit filed by Commissioner of Political Practices Dennis Unsworth, who said it violated Montana laws requiring disclosure of donors behind political spending.
Unsworth on Wednesday called the settlement “a ringing endorsement of disclosure,” and said Montanans have made it clear through their laws that they want to know who’s behind political spending.
In documents filed with the settlement, Montanans in Action revealed that nearly all the money it used to support the ballot measures came from groups that Unsworth said are associated with New York real estate developer Howard Rich – a prominent supporter of conservative, Libertarian causes….
Just so’s you know. And, maybe this, which focuses on that same investigation:
Williams interviewed by PBS’ NOW 22 Sept 2006
I know this is all long and involved, but they’re back. They’re “Tea Party” and they’re not just supporting Joe Walsh’s vile campaign against Tammy Duckworth in Illinois, but a raft of other Koch political initiatives and candidates coast to coast.
Isn’t that special?
And, while David Koch has finally canned Ed Crane from the CATO Institute, Howard Rich remains on the Board of Directors, as he remains on the Board of Club for Growth, and Club for Growth, State Action. His old Lieutenant, Eric O’Keefe, runs the Sam Adams Alliance, and heads an “Anti Obamacare” political group, and remains one of the three board members of “Club for Growth, Wisconsin” who helped so much with helping Scott Walker keep his governorship in the recall election earlier this year.
And so it goes.
If I have not entirely burnt you out on all of this, you might check out Murray Rothbard’s collected and scanned “The Libertarian Forum,” which gives you a ringside seat to David Koch’s rise in and exit from the Libertarian Party, and how Koch pushed famed economist Rothbard out of CATO, of which he was a founder and “owned” one third of the stock — the same “stock” used to squeeze Crane out of CATO earlier this year.
Courage.
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What a tangled web they weave.
Weave, crochet, macramé. No creme conditioner in sight at present, tho.