H4a news Clips [April 26, 2015] Summary of Today’s news


As Baltimore mayor, critics say, O’Malley’s police tactics sowed distrust [Paul Schwartzman & John Wagner, WaPo, April 25, 2015]



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As Baltimore mayor, critics say, O’Malley’s police tactics sowed distrust [Paul Schwartzman & John Wagner, WaPo, April 25, 2015]
Democrat Martin O’Malley weighed in Saturday on the national debate about policing that now includes the city where he was mayor, and where the police strategies he implemented provoked heated debate.
COLUMBIA, S.C.—Democrat Martin O’Malley weighed in Saturday on the national debate about policing that now includes the city where he was mayor, and where the police strategies he implemented provoked heated debate.
Speaking to an audience of party activists here, O’Malley called the police-custody death of Freddie Gray part of “a painful history in our country, a legacy that we continue to work on and work through and seek to overcome every day.”
“We have been seeing far too many tragic videos of police-involved deaths in our country,” said O’Malley, who became Maryland governor after serving as Baltimore mayor, and is considering a White House bid. “We have to make all our institutions more open and transparent.”
It was as a crime-busting mayor some 15 years ago that O’Malley first gained national attention. Although he is positioning himself as a progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton, O’Malley also touts a police crackdown during his time as mayor that led to a stark reduction in drug violence and homicides as one of his major achievements.
Yet some civic leaders and community activists in Baltimore portray O’Malley’s policing policies in troubling terms. The say the “zero-tolerance” approach mistreated young black men even as it helped dramatically reduce crime, fueling a deep mistrust of law enforcement that flared anew last week when Gray died after suffering a spinal injury while in police custody.
Police in Baltimore — like their counterparts elsewhere — have had strained relations with African Americans for generations. But community leaders say the relationship reached a nadir during O’Malley’s tenure, thanks to a policing strategy that resulted in tens of thousands of arrests for minor offenses such as loitering and littering.
Although prosecutors declined to bring many of the cases, activists contend that those who were arrested often could not get their records expunged, making it harder for them to get jobs.
“We still have men who are suffering from it today,” said Marvin “Doc” Cheathem, a past president of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, which won a court settlement stemming from the city’s policing policies. “The guy is good at talking, but a lot of us know the real story of the harm he brought to our city.”
Bishop Douglas Miles, a community leader, said O’Malley’s department “set the tone for how the police department in Baltimore has reacted to poor and African American communities since then.”
“None of us are in favor of crime,” Miles said. “But we also recognized that you couldn’t correct the problem through wholesale arrests.”
For all the criticism, O’Malley twice won election as mayor, capturing nearly 67 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 2003 on his way to a second term. In an interview Saturday, he said he believes to this day that his administration did the right thing.
Then-Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley talks to senior citizens in Prince George's County in this 2006 file photo. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
“They were individual arrests, and oftentimes of the same people again and again and again,” O’Malley said. “We achieved the biggest reduction in . . . crime of any city in America, and none of it was easy. All of it was hard. But there were very few people who want to return to those violent days of 1999.”
[O’Malley, trying to get noticed, hits Clinton from the left]
Crime fell during O’Malley’s mayoralty, with the number of homicides declining by 16 percent — part of a wider decline across much of the country. At the same time, the number of arrests in Baltimore soared, reaching 108,447 in 2005, or about one-sixth of the city’s population.
“What was positive was that there was zero-tolerance for criminals and drug dealers locking down neighborhoods and taking neighborhoods hostage,” said the Rev. Franklin Madison Reid, a Baltimore pastor. “Does that mean there was no down side? No. But the bottom line was that the city was in a lot stronger position as a city after he became mayor.”
Benjamin T. Jealous, a former president of the national NAACP who worked with O’Malley when Maryland abolished the death penalty in 2013, credited him for supporting a civilian review board as mayor and for a sharp drop in police shootings that occurred during that time. Jealous said O’Malley’s “mass incarceration” police strategy is “a separate issue” than police brutality, and “a conversation for a different day.”
“It was a period where a lot of mayors were doing whatever they could to try to reduce crime,” Jealous said.
But others wonder about a hidden cost.
A. Dwight Pettit, a Baltimore lawyer whose clients have won numerous settlements from police brutality complaints, said O’Malley’s “approach to policing when he was mayor was disregard for the Constitution.”
“His philosophy was, ‘Put them in jail and figure it out later,’ and that will solve the crime problem,” he said. “It created a confrontational mentality with the police.”
Over the past year, as he has criss-crossed the country, O’Malley has talked about alleged police misconduct in places such as Ferguson, Mo. and North Charleston, S.C. On Saturday, he called Gray’s death “another awful and horrific loss of life.”
“Whether it’s a police custodial death or a police-involved shooting,” O’Malley said, “we all have a responsibility to ask whether there’s something we can do to prevent such a loss of life from happening in the future.”
Earlier this month, at a civil rights event convened by the Rev. Al Sharpton, O’Malley said his crime-reduction efforts as mayor saved many lives. “There are a thousand fewer black men in Baltimore who died violent deaths over the last 15 years than otherwise would have died had we not come together.”
Sharpton — who said he invited O’Malley to speak at the convention because he is a potential presidential candidate -- still recalls O’Malley’s police strategies when he was mayor, which he criticized at the time for leading “to a lot of racial profiling and harassment of black men.”
“It breeds mistrust when you have everyone stopped two or three times,” Sharpton said. “It permeates throughout the community.”
Baltimore’s history is rife with moments when tensions between the police department and black residents flared. In 1942, for example, 2,000 African Americans from Baltimore marched in Annapolis to protest the fatal shooting of a black soldier by a white city police officer. Nearly 40 years later, the local NAACP branch demanded a federal investigation into police brutality in the city.
In 2005, with O’Malley in office, Cheathem recalled the local NAACP branch being “inundated with calls from African Americans and Hispanic men saying they were being arrested and no charges were being filed.”
A contingent of activists “met with the mayor and shared our anger — that these guys weren’t being charged but were coming out with arrest records,” Cheathem recalled. “We requested that this process be stopped, and he was not receptive to it at all. We left with the idea that we had no recourse but to sue.”
The NAACP joined in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU that was based on the arrest of a 19-year-old man with no prior criminal record who spent hours in jail for dropping a candy wrapper on the street while sitting on the steps of his aunt’s house. The suit named O’Malley and other Baltimore officials, including the police commissioner, and alleged that the Baltimore police had improperly arrested thousands of people “without probable cause and in violation of the U.S. Constitution.”
The complaint was settled four years later, with Baltimore agreeing to pay an $870,000 settlement. By then, O’Malley was governor. But the memory of his police strategy endured.
“We’re not saying the mayor had ill intentions,” said state Del. Jill Carter (D-Baltimore), a longtime O’Malley critic. “He probably had the best intentions. But when all the evidence hit that this was creating more problems, he should have been able to reassess it.”
Peter Hermann contributed to this report.
National Blogs

How Long Will Democrats Stand By Hillary in Face of Financial Disclosures? [David Paul, Huffington Post, April 25, 2015]
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is off to a challenging start with the beginning of a stream of scandals.
Hillary Clinton is in, and with her announcement the rest of the Democrats considering running for president in 2016 are out. In a manner reminiscent of the Republican Party of old, Democrats have ceded the nomination to Hillary Clinton. It is not exactly clear why this is the case. She clearly has a large following in the party and has a huge fundraising base, but that was true eight years ago as well. Perhaps it is because she lost a close race for the nomination last time that she is being handed the baton this time. Or perhaps the theory is that as the scorned candidate and cuckolded spouse she has suffered enough, that it is her turn. Whatever the reason, Hillary is off to a rocky start, and it could be a long year.
It used to be that the Republican nomination outcome was pre-ordained. Sure, the GOP went through a primary process, and every so often--1964 comes to mind--the clash between the conservative and establishment wings of the party could be titanic. But the era of the GOP as a tightly controlled cabal where candidates waited their turn and tenure and experience were rewarded is over. This year, the imprint of Barack Obama is evident as well. Tenure and experience are passé. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio are first-term Senators, and each mock rather than defer to the establishment candidate, Jeb Bush. John McCain, Bob Dole and George H. W. Bush must look on and shake their heads.
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, will be the candidate of experience. She only announced her candidacy two weeks ago, but already Clinton fatigue has begun to settle in. Hillary has been in the public eye for a quarter of a century, yet she began her campaign with a strategy to remake her image. Her campaign--we knew this already--will be a meta-campaign. It will not be about what she believes in or promises to do, instead everything she says and everything she does will be scrutinized from the perspective of strategy. What she says will not be the focus, but rather why she is saying it. Little or nothing will be taken at face value.
This is because strategy rather than commitment and values are central to the Clinton brand. Bill Clinton emerged from the back woods of Arkansas and won the White House as a "New Democrat". A New Democrat was a phenomenon not of principle but of strategic positioning. In accordance with game theory, in a two-party race, a candidate should seek to position him or herself as close to the opposing candidate as possible in an effort to capture the "median voter" in the center, and then take by default everyone else on their side of the ideological spectrum. Bill Clinton embraced this strategy and moved as close as he could to the moderate Republican position with the expectation that he could then take all of the votes to the left of that position. Thus it was that voters on the left who voted for Bill Clinton for president in 1992 described the experience as being at a shotgun wedding. Bill Clinton said it best early on in his first term when he pronounced to his cabinet, "We're all Eisenhower Republicans now."
Hillary's coronation has not been eagerly embraced by the Democratic left. She has been unable to convince those who have urged Elizabeth Warren to run that she shares the Massachusetts Senator's outrage at the pandering to Wall Street, or those who admire Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that she is animated by passion for traditional Democrat values, including support for labor and distrust of free trade, charter schools and other hallmarks of now-entrenched New Democrats. In Hillary's remarks declaring her candidacy, she took the obligatory swipes at Wall Street and growing income inequality. But her claims that she would work to repeal the carried interest exemption that blesses hedge fund and other investment managers with a lower tax rate than Warren Buffet's secretary, or perhaps champion campaign finance reform rang hollow, and were quickly dismissed even by Wall Street supporters as a necessary strategy would never be manifest in policy down the road. Hillary's claims that she would take on Wall Street and campaign finance--issues that animate both the right and the left against the entrenched center--only served as a reminder that the Clintons have been the recipients, through campaign contributions, speaking fees and donations to the Clinton Foundation, of literally billions of dollars in largesse from the richest people, corporations and countries in the world.
The issue of money is likely to haunt the Clinton campaign in the months to come. Any hope that Democrats might have had of making hay of the corrosive effects of money on our democracy--whether targeting Citizen's United, SuperPACs or the near-$900,000,000 David and Charles Koch have committed to raise for this campaign cycle--will be neutralized by the many manifestations of the ways that the Clintons have enriched themselves and their world.
This week, the New York Times published a story suggesting linkages between the activities of the Clinton Foundation, Hillary's actions as Secretary of State, and Bill Clinton's receipt of a $500,000 speaking fee from a Russian Bank, surrounding the sale of uranium assets by a Canadian company to a Russian company. The story is a product of an agreement reached by the Times, together with the Washington Post and Fox News, with Peter Schweizer, author of the forthcoming book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich to research the information he has compiled regarding connections between political contributions and speaking fees paid to the Clintons, contributions to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton's actions as a public official.
A decade ago, Philadelphians saw up close the mixing of philanthropy and politics erupt into a corruption scandal. Vince Fumo was a powerful Democratic State Senator in Pennsylvania who created a charitable organization called Citizens Alliance for Better Neighborhoods. In 2004, Philadelphia Electric Company made a $17 million contribution to Fumo's charity. Federal prosecutors began an investigation into whether the PECO contribution had been given in exchange for Fumo agreeing to support utility deregulation in Pennsylvania. Ultimately, the corruption case could not be proven, but Fumo and two members of his Senate staff were indicted on charges of obstruction of justice for destroying electronic evidence, including e-mail related to the federal investigation.
The parallels with the Clinton foundation are ominous: A charitable organization created by powerful political figures, staffed by political associates, taking philanthropic contributions from people and organizations who can benefit from the actions of the sponsors of the charitable organization, and, of course, the destruction of electronic communications that in the worst light could be seen as bearing on those interrelationships.
While the Times was quick to deny that they had documented any quid pro quo or illegal actions in their scrutiny of the uranium deal, the Clinton campaign asserted in the article that no one "has ever produced a shred of evidence supporting the theory that Hillary Clinton ever took action as secretary of state to support the interests of donors to the Clinton Foundation." That may well be true, but it is not necessarily is the point either. For Americans who are distressed by seeing Republican presidential candidates catering their stances on Israel and Iran to curry favor with casino magnate and mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, or who cannot imagine that the $5 billion of Wall Street money given to Congressional campaigns over the past decade is not linked to the increasing concentration of wealth and power in the finance industry, the magnitude of the Clinton empire is troubling in and of itself.
It is just two weeks into the 2016 Presidential campaign and Democrats have ceded their nomination to Hillary Clinton. They better hope that she and Bill have good answers to the questions that are going to be coming their way. We could be in for a long year.
Whose Hillary Fundraiser Is It? Organizers Minimize Katzenberg Role [Dominic Patten, Deadline, April 25, 2015]
Organizers of the May 7th Hillary Clinton fundraiser to be held at Haim and Cheryl Saban’s home say that Jeffrey Katzenberg is not involved in an official capacity, but he will be in attendance.
2ND UPDATE: 8:53 AM: Organizers of the May 7 Hillary Clinton fundraiser to be held at Haim and Cheryl Saban’s home are now telling Deadline that Jeffrey Katzenberg is not involved in an official capacity. Deadline was told last night by reliable sources that Katzenberg would be co-hosting the event, but that got some of the main organizers understandably bent out of shape after they put the whole thing together. The main movers and shakers here are the Sabans and Casey Wasserman. Technically, the Katzenberg claim is true, but it is also overreaching, and it seems understandable some would begrudge a powerful guest for appearing to steal the thunder from an event he didn’t arrange. The way this fundraiser works, any individual who raises $27,000 for the event is automatically named a co-host even if they had nothing to do with the organizing. As for the former First Lady and White House aspirant, it’s gotta feel good there’s a tug of war over her in Hollywood, with cash shaking out at every turn.
UPDATE, 6:53 PM: It was never even a secret that the DreamWorks Animation boss was on board with Team Hillary for 2016 but now it’s official. Jeffrey Katzenberg has been added as co-host of the $2,700 a ticket fundraiser for Hillary Clinton at Haim and Cheryl Saban’s house on May 7. The biggest bundler for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, the DWA CEO will join the Power Rangers billionaire and long time Clinton supporter and Casey Wasserman in hosting the evening event at the Saban’s Beverly Hill home.
While this is Katzenberg’s first formal foray into Campaign 2016 since Clinton made it International Medical Corps Annual Awards Celebration - Showofficial herself in mid-April, it is far from the first time he’s co-hosted a fundraiser with the former Secretary of State. Back in October last year, Katzenberg co-hosted a midterm event for the Democrats that had Clinton as the big draw. And it was a very big draw – bringing in a record $2.1 million for the party. Heading towards the Presidential primaries, Katzenberg and his political advisor Andy Spahn are expected to play a prominent financial role for Clinton in hovering up Hollywood money. Spahn’s wife Jennifer Perry had some news of her own today. Gov. Jerry Brown appointed the Children’s Action Network executive director to the California Community Colleges Board of Governors.
PREVIOUS, APRIL 23 PM: Less than two weeks after she formally announced her latest run for the White House, the former Secretary of State’s first Tinseltown fundraisers have been set on the calendar. Hillary Clinton will be double dipping in Hollywood’s cash register on May 7 with a lunch at Steven Bochco’s and a dinner at Haim Saban’s, co-hosted by Casey Wasserman. Tickets to both shindigs are $2,700 each according to those organizing the events. That amount is the legal individual limit during the primary phase of the 2016 Presidential campaign.
“It was only a matter of time before Hillary came out to Hollywood,” one political insider said tonight. “This is where the Clintons have deep support. This is where the money is for Democrats and 2016 is shaping up to be a very expensive campaign. And this is just the first of many visits she’ll be making in the next year.”
California’s retiring Senator Barbara Boxer is expected to be in attendance at Steven and Dayna Bochco’s Pacific Palisades home. Longtime Hillary supporter and 24 producer Howard Gordon, who hosted a Clinton SuperPAC event last fall, will be there too a that the NYPD Blue and Commander-In-Chief producer’s place. Opening the doors of their Beverly Hills home next month, Haim and Cheryl Saban are also veteran Clinton backers. They hosted a $15,000 a ticket Hillary headlined fundraiser in their home on October 30, 2013.
Both Boxer and Gordon were at the record breaking $2.1 million fundraiser for Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that the ex-New York Senator was the marquee name for back in October last year for the party’s ultimately unsuccessful midterm efforts. That westside event was co-chaired by big Barack Obama bundler co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg. While openly backing Hillary this time round, the DreamWorks Animation boss isn’t signed on for the events in early May – though there is no doubt he’ll be spearheading fundraising for the former First Lady in the coming months.
Time for an independent audit of the Clinton Foundation, says … Common Cause [Ed Morrissey, Hot Air, April 25, 2015]
Citing concerns about potential conflicts of interest and the influence of hidden overseas donors, Common Cause called on presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Clinton Foundation to commission an independent and thorough review of all large donations to the foundation and to release the results.
Will the Left circle its wagons around the Clintons, or ride off into the sunset without them? The Clinton Foundation announced this week that they would conduct a voluntary internal audit after the exposure of their failure to properly declare millions of dollars from foreign governments to the IRS. A leading progressive group, Common Cause, says that’s not good enough:
Citing concerns about potential conflicts of interest and the influence of hidden overseas donors, Common Cause called on presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Clinton Foundation today to commission an independent and thorough review of all large donations to the foundation and to release the results.
“As Mrs. Clinton herself observed earlier this week, voluntary disclosure is not enough,” said Common Cause President Miles Rapoport. “A report in Thursday’s New York Times indicates that the Clinton Foundation violated an agreement to identify all of its donors. The foundation’s omissions create significant gaps in the information that voters need to make informed decisions at the polls.”
To ensure that the audit is complete, Rapoport said the foundation should enter into a contractual agreement with auditors to open its books fully and to make public the complete report of their review.

In the meantime, Common Cause wants the Clintons to stop taking cash from foreign governments and corporations, which would mean shutting down entirely:


And to further guard against potential conflicts of interest, the foundation should stop accepting donations from foreign governments and ​foreign corporations, he said.

That puts Common Cause on the same side as … Ted Cruz. Cruz went a little farther and demanded that the Clinton Foundation return all of the cash they’ve received from foreign governments:


Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is calling for his potential 2016 foe Hillary Clinton to return all donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign governments, as criticism stemming from a new book continues to mount.
“The Clinton Foundation collected tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments including donors who had business interests with the State Department while Clinton was Secretary. She made decisions in that capacity that likely benefited the same people who were giving large donations to the foundation,” Cruz said Friday in a statement.
“At the very least, these revelations present a clear conflict of interest. I call on Hillary Clinton to return the donations from foreign governments. Until she does, how can the American people trust her with another position of power?”

Talk about strange bedfellows, eh?


This goes somewhat outside Common Cause’s usual political portfolio. As of this morning, the top featured stories on their banner carousel were:
Still, when you have groups that normally use their time stoking paranoia about ALEC and the “crusades” of the “religious right” (to end Byzantine campaign-finance reforms? Really?) making the Clintons their targets, that’s a fairly interesting development. When they end up on the same side as Ted Cruz, that’s a consensus worth noting.


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