(Bang, Bang Maxwell's Silver Hammer Came Down Upon His Head!)
By Brad Friedman on 5/6/2005, 12:06pm PT  

Every now and again we're pleasantly reminded that there are still good folks out there littered amongst the debris that is the American Corporate Media 2005. Or as Murrow presciently predicted, the "vast wasteland".

We found one of those good folks in Carol Towarnicky of the Philadelphia Daily News (she'll be a guest on this weekend's BRAD SHOW who blasted the MSM for ignoring the Gannon/Guckert scandal. This week, it's kudos to Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel for his piece yesterday on your friend and ours, Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL).

You didn't think we forgot about you...did ya, Tom?

It looks like Tom is up to his enchanting old tricks this week as he tries to disentangle himself from the scandals that he's in nearly as deep as Tom DeLay --- he just doesn't happen to be the House Majority Leader (yet), so you may not have heard. (You will in the future...no worries).

Maxwell tears old Tom (Feeney, that is) a new one in his column, headlined "So sorry --- it's the media's fault" from yesterday:

Feeney's chief of staff recently penned an apology to North Carolina's Rotterman and Associates, a consulting and lobbying firm that Feeney's office once listed as having paid for one of his many free trips. (Feeney now says that the influential consultants didn't pay for his trip to West Palm Beach. An influential conservative group did.)

In the letter to Karen Rotterman, Chief of Staff Jason Roe wrote: "I cannot tell you how sorry I am that you were mentioned in the story. As you know, the current environment in Washington is such that reporters are in such a frenzy to write anything about Members' of Congress travel that anything not done absolutely correctly seems newsworthy to them."

The things that Feeney didn't do absolutely correctly were:

Take a $5,600 trip to Scotland, which included golfing at the Royal & Ancient Golf Club at St. Andrews that Feeney has said was paid for by another lobbyist, which would violate ethics rules.

Mistakenly report that lobbyists (the Rottermans) paid for another trip, which would have been another violation.

Still, Roe believes this is all much ado about nothing. "All this is, is media hysteria," he said. "The media think people care about this. They don't."

We wish the media would become "hysterical"! They look fairly sound asleep on most of this to us. What with Runaway Brides and all to worry with.

Maxwell closes smartly with this:

Still, the public scrutiny likely will continue. And to add insult to Feeney's terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad week, Feeney got bumped off a show on Fox News last weekend for another media hot topic: the runaway bride.

Sounds like somebody needs a vacation.

:-) We like Maxwell.

Good to know someone else besides yours truly is on the Feeney beat!

...CONTACT...
Scott Maxwell, Orlando Sentinel

(Thanks to BRAD BLOG commenter, American Woman --- a big Tom Feeney fan she! --- for the link!)

For more info on The BRAD BLOG's continuing investigative series on
The Clint Curtis/Tom Feeney/Yang Enterprises Vote-Rigging Scandal series, please see:
- A Quick Summary of the story so far. -
- An Index of all the Key Articles & Evidence in the series so far.
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