Tagged: ethics

Posted: October 27, 2012 at 5:29 pm

GUEST POST: Bucy Wins Integrity Vote

In the can-too, can-not keep-the-cash debate, Democrat candidate for Attorney General Pam Bucy wins for integrity. She did the right thing by returning $35,000 donated by her party during the 6-day, campaign contribution free-for-all before the 9th Circuit Court called it off.

At first, her opponent, Republican Tim Fox, kept the $32,000 he received during this window. And, his campaign was quick to call Bucy’s ethical behavior a “desperate political stunt.” Since when is acting ethically a “desperate political stunt?” And what does it say about the character of someone who’d call ethical behavior a “desperate political stunt?”

Fox eventually gave back his money too, after seeing the political hot water Republican candidate for Governor Rick Hill was in for keeping the $500,000 he received. What is the Fox flip-flop but a “desperate political stunt?”

Key qualities of an Attorney General are ethics, integrity and fairness. Steve Bullock has excelled at these. Pam Bucy has shown she will do the same. Please vote for Pam Bucy for Attorney General and Steve Bullock for Governor.

Posted: June 2, 2012 at 2:46 pm

Report: Rick Hill Used Wife’s Influence to Get Plum State Contracts

Dirty Betti

The Associated Press is reporting that Rick Hill not only made a king’s ransom renting office space to the Montana state government in the 1990s and 2000s, but that his wife Betti used her job in Governor Judy Martz’s office to steer business his way. Thus did Rick and Betti Hill become very wealthy people.

E-mails from Betti Hill, obtained by the AP, show that she was using the influence of the Governor’s office to arrange meetings for Rick with high-level players in state government who dole out state rental contracts. It stinks to high heaven.

Betti and Rick put pressure on the Martz administration to kill a plan to construct a new building. Martz put the new building project in her budget. But shortly after Rick and Betti met with Lt. Governor Karl Ohs and several cabinet officials to complain about it, it got yanked from Martz’s budget. Why did Rick and Betti want to kill the project? Because a new building in Helena would have brought down the price of rent in the Helena market, and landlords, naturally, do not like that. Oops.

By the sound of it, Betti Hill was large and in charge, busting out her Helena GOP street cred, ordering people throughout state government (even the Lt. Governor) not to do anything that might compromise Rick’s business, and even going to bat for other landlords, including a “party leader” who owned a building and needed a favor. As a result, the Hills’ business stayed sweet and they kept raking in taxpayer dough, more than a million bucks worth.

Hill also appears to have used his job as Congressman and his perch as State Fund chair to get similar sweet treatment, since these jobs overlapped with his sweetheart deals. While sitting in these posts, ranting the GOP’s favorite rant about “less spending” and “less government,” he was guzzling down taxpayer money that should have saved rather than spent. Montana taxpayers got bilked because the rent was too damn high.

Betti’s conduct might well be a violation of the ethics law, which says that a state worker may not use state facilities for a personal or business interest.

At any rate, the Hills are clearly no model of fiscal restraint. Betti clearly interpreted her job in Martz’s office as nothing more than a nice opportunity to rake in some serious scratch for her and her hubby, so that they could fly first class to their posh Palm Springs crib.

These e-mails vindicate Corey Stapleton, Hill’s GOP primary opponent, who accused Hill of getting cake deals and special treatment from state government for his mega-landlord business.

But will any of this affect the outcome of Tuesday’s GOP primary? I doubt it. Sure, it is in the newspaper, but most right-wing voters do not read the newspaper. Glenn Beck is unlikely to cover this story.

Stapleton and Miller and Livingstone should have done their homework, hit the pavement, and moved this damaging story a month ago. It might have been a game changer. But they were all either too lazy or too stupid (or both, probably) to bother. Coming out on the Friday before the election, this story will have very little effect on Tuesday’s election.

However, these revelations will be center stage during the long general election battle ahead. Rick Hill is now CORRUPT LANDLORD, INSURANCE EXECUTIVE, CONGRESSMAN, LOBBYIST (and let’s not forget ADULTERER). Geez, if that isn’t a resume for success in politics, I don’t know what is. These are just about the five worst things an American political candidate can possibly be. Plus, Dems will be able to run TV ads against Hill that will simply repeat the accusations made against Hill by all of his GOP opponents. That’s a rare opportunity in a general election, and it’s a very effective play.

Posted: April 9, 2012 at 7:18 am

Ethics Violations Apparent in Supreme Court Race

A right-wing candidate for Supreme Court appears to be blatantly disregarding the Judicial Code of Conduct by having a sitting judge solicit donations on her behalf.

Judge Nels Swandal sent out a mailing on his judicial letterhead soliciting campaign contributions for Laurie McKinnon, a hard right district judge running for Montana Supreme Court. This looks like a clear violation of the Judicial Code of Conduct, which states that sitting judges are prohibited from soliciting funds for a judicial candidate or collecting money on their behalf.

Here’s what Swandal writes (click to enlarge, or view the whole letter here):

The entire Swandal letter (Page 1 and 2) and the exact language of the Judicial Code of Conduct (Page 3) can be viewed here.

Swandal is no stranger to shady dealings with right-wingers. He’s the guy who had to recuse himself from the Rehberg/Barkus DUI boating trial in which one of Rehberg’s staff suffered a severe head injury after neither Congressman Rehberg nor former state Senator Greg Barkus bothered to designate a sober driver. Swandal had to recuse himself because he had a record of supporting Barkus and other Republicans. He even hired Rehberg’s former chief of staff after the brain injury to run his campaign against Beth Baker for Supreme Court. Swandal lost but remains a district judge in Livingston.

The other candidates in the non-partisan race include veteran Beth Best, of Great Falls and Ed Sheehy, of Missoula, though Sheehy does not appear to be raising money.

Posted: February 7, 2012 at 5:11 pm

Another GOP Candidate Caught Scrubbing Infidelity from Wikipedia Page

CNN this week chided the Newt Gingrich campaign for attempting to scrub references to Gingrich’s infidelity and ethics problems from his Wikipedia site.

Gingrich is the latest Republican to be caught trying to keep voters in the dark about his extramarital activity. Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill was caught doing the same here in Montana.

The Billings Gazette reported that:

Wikipedia locked down former U.S. Congressman Rick Hill’s biography page Monday, after more than 30 attempts to add or scrub details about Hill’s past campaigns and his 1976 divorce.

The edits by Hill’s campaign manager included links to articles about Hill’s infidelity to his first wife, and articles describing his nasty campaign tactics in past elections. I guess they didn’t want us to read about things like this Associated Press article from back in the 1990s, describing an episode during Rick Hill’s affair with a cocktail waitress at the Sip N’ Dip Lounge in Great Falls, the bar with the live mermaid tank.

Spaulding remembered learning about the affair after Hill began coming home very late at night. She recalled packing their three sons, aged 18 months to 8 years, in a car once and driving to the Sip-N-Dip lounge where she saw Hill with the other woman. She said she begged him without success to come home.

To be sure, it is probably pretty commonplace for candidates to monitor and ask for edits to their Wikipedia pages. What’s interesting here is the obsessive number attempts to make the same edits. It shows how far Republicans are willing to go to try to keep the public in the dark about their boss’s true characters.

Posted: March 23, 2011 at 6:45 am

Warburton Admits Abortion Ballot-Measures are Designed for Political Purpose: Did She break The Law?

Wendy Warburton, tea partyist legislator from Havre, made the mistake of admitting to Emily Ritter, Montana Public Radio that the reason she has introduced two anti-abortion constitutional amendments is that these two measures, if they appear on the ballot, will “drive Republican voters to the polls,” and thus benefit R candidates in 2012. (Listen to the story here: click “Click to Listen” the story is about 5 minutes and 10 seconds in.)

Putting things on the ballot to drive up turnout is an old trick that the GOP loves, like CI-105, a ballot measure which proposed eliminating a tax that didn’t exist. But the ballot measures are usually put on the ballot by citizen groups or other private interests, which are required to get the signatures from citizens to prove that enough citizens want the measure on the ballot. The measures Warburton is pushing have failed twice in two years to get anywhere close to the number of signatures necessary. It takes 49,000 signatures to place a proposed constitutional amendment before voters.

The Montana code clearly prohibits using government time and facilities for political activity.

Here, a legislator is being open about the fact that she has just wasted the legislature’s time–a significant amount of it, I might add–with a political task assigned to her by GOP operatives, to carry out an electoral strategy. Someone should probably file a complaint.

Beyond that, does this woman have any sense of appropriateness at all? Some common sense advice to Wendy: when politicians do things for purely political motives, they’re supposed to at least pretend to make up some sort of legitimate policy reason.

Posted: December 18, 2010 at 9:17 am

T.E.A. Party’s Number One Earmarker Campaigns Against Earmarks on Taxpayer’s Dime

Here we see what looks like a pretty typical piece of sleazy campaign literature: An oversized, glossy, mailer touting the evils of earmarks. But the first problem is that it is from Montana Congressman Denny Rehberg, Citizens Against Government Waste’s Number One Porking Earmarker in Congress.

Now take a closer look. It’s not a piece of campaign literature, it’s a piece of congressional franking–paid for with our taxpayer dollars. Not only is it a clear violation of the spirit of the franking rules, if not the law itself, but it is the embodiment of wasteful government spending to campaign against wasteful spending on the taxpayers’ dime.

Indeed, Rehberg’s ethical indiscretions have been raising eyebrows and filling mailboxes for years. There’s a pretty blurry line between what is or is not a legitimate use of franking privilege, but just the message alone here makes this one cross it by a mile.

View both sides of FrankingPrivilege here.