Penning Thoughts

Imagine stepping into your Army superior’s office in one of those former palaces inside Baghdad’s Green Zone and saying, “I refuse to participate in any more combat operations.” Probably wouldn’t make them very happy, especially since you had security clearance and recently had been given top honors for your service. You were high profile soldier, good enough to be a military escort for VIP visitors to Baghdad ... And a sniper when not providing escort protection.

This, however, is not the plot for a TV show or movie or book. It is, rather, the real life experience of Army Spc Eleonai “Eli” Israel, who, at the time of his resistance, was stationed at Baghdad’s Green Zone palace, called Camp Victory, with the Joint Visitors Bureau, Bravo Company, 1-149 Infantry of the Kentucky Army National Guard.

Upon making his statement of resistance, Israel told me, “I was immediately and aggressively detained and confined illegally [no contact with a lawyer, family or friends] for three weeks.”

Unfortunately for those who sought to silence him, Spc. Israel had been telling his view of the war via Internet blogs, writing of what he had seen in the way of “killing everyone who resisted” the military, and torture. “We are torturing right now,” Israel told me, and our government is guilty of as much “mass killing and torture” as Saddam Hussein.

What Eli feared after he announced his refusal was that he would “disappear” from his family, friends and the public. “I thought it was a likely scenario,” he said to me. “I was not able to contact anyone; I was flagged as a security threat and was forced to take psychiatric evaluations. I had the fortune of [holding] the highest scored security clearance, and two weeks before my stand” had been given among the highest evaluations for his performance.

“If my story had not gotten out, they [would have] tried to re-write my history.”

Here’s what happened after his detention.

Those who followed his blogs on http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/ and other sites, including Iraq Veterans Against the War, knew something was amiss when his postings suddenly stopped. They saw him disappear. On the “Courage” site on June 21st this announcement appeared:

“Yesterday, Eli’s urgent message from Baghdad buzzed around the Internet.” This is that message:

“I have told them that I will no longer play a ‘combat role’ in this conflict or ‘protect corporate representatives,’ and they have taken this as ‘violating a direct order.’ I may be in jail or worse in the next 24 hours. Please rally whoever you can, call whoever you can, bring as much attention to this as you can. I have no doubt that the military will bury me and hide the whole situation if they can. I'm in big trouble. I'm in the middle of Iraq, surrounded by people who are not on my side. Please help me. Please contact whoever you can, and tell them who I am, so I don't ‘disappear.’”

Later, he wrote, “It would have been a lot ‘easier’ for me to simply keep doing combat missions for a couple more weeks, and be done with things. Moral convictions are not based on timing or convenience.”

Eli spent two months in an Army brig in Kuwait for his courage to stand up to authority. Why did he do it?

“I started to see myself in the eyes of the people shooting at me,” he said to me. “It’s an information war,” he said; “an occupation” full of “bribes, threats and intimidation” aimed at “turning them against each other and against us.”

“When I first signed up, I believed everything I was told,” Eli told me. Eventually, he saw that “the situation on the ground is not” what we’ve been led to believe. “We’re killing everyone who resists. Decisions are not being made by [Prime Minister Nouri al-]Maliki.

This war “is about control of the day-to-day decisions of another country. The people in Iraq want to control their own lives. [They fight] because no one is going to take over their country,” just as we would do under similar circumstances. “They want us to leave,” Eli said to me.

“It’s not democracy [over there]; we’re imposing martial law ... with raids on houses, torturing people. The people of Iraq are trying to protect the dignity of their own families and keep us out.” He spoke of seeing “on the street, a mother screaming for her children.”

While chauffeuring VIPs, Eli began to understand, he noted, that “corporate representatives tell our generals what kind of action to take.”

And he reacted with anger, when he saw President Bush’s speech to the VFW. “He was comparing it to Vietnam, and he was laughing.”

“Young people in the U.S. don’t have access to the same information I do; they need to know that my military brothers and sisters died for the same lies” our young people hear from our leaders. “The best thing I can do,” Eli concluded, “is speak out, and surround myself with others who believe as I do.”

He has joined the campaign of former Alaska Gov. Mike Gravel, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, and was driving the Governor on a southern campaign tour, while speaking with me Sunday.

As I reflected on our conversation, I realized I’ve never encountered such in-the-moment bravery and passion for justice. I felt as though I was speaking to a Lieutenant John Kerry, who testified similarly to Congress in 1971. Those who speak truth to power are in danger in these jingoistic times, but Eli Israel has given them a public face and a cause to champion.

For more information on former Army National Guard Spc. Eleonai "Eli" Israel, go to http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/.

Nick Penning (www.nickpenning.com) is an Arlington, Va., freelance writer.

Labels: Iraq, resist, soldier

If life is a race, then the outcome --- in these times --- is all but certain: those who ‘have’ will sail along with few impediments; those who ‘have not’ will struggle forward and be pushed back; for every gain, it seems, brings with it a loss.

How so?

Consider the Connection’s recent HOT (high occupancy toll) editorial, which brought news that the coming of new $400 million state-backed HOT lanes on the Virginia beltway will allow drivers to “move at the speed limit,” if they either bring two other riders with them or, alone, can afford up to $14 to sail along 14 miles of profit-making concrete.

“The plan,” stated our paper’s editorial, “is to charge enough money so that the traffic on the toll lanes continues to move at the speed limit.”

That’s right, if you’ve got the dough, you can go; if your bank account’s too low, your ride will be slow.

And this isn’t the only way the well-off enjoy taxpayer-financed advantages. Consider the security waiting lines at National Airport. The airlines convinced the feds to let first class passengers whiz by us other suckers to a first-class only security check-in. The line moves so fast that these moneyed travelers barely have enough time to take off their shoes before they’re waved along to their departure gate.

At Dulles, if you can afford 30 bucks a night ($17 for each additional day), you can have a valet park your car while you walk to the terminal. If you’re an average Joe, then your option is a reasonable nine dollars per day; but the only way to get to the ticket counter is by shuttle bus, taking a lot more precious time.

Time is money, we hear so often. No debating that when you look at the new beltway scheme and airport parking.

As to the taxes that bring money for airport and highway construction, we all know that if you’ve got deep pockets you can escape a boatload of federal taxes: inheritance taxes got eliminated a couple years back, not to save family farms, as was so often claimed, but to allow the heirs of anyone with an estate of any size to pay nothing.

Prior to the death of that tax, cleverly nicknamed by the Republican Party as the “Death Tax,” an estate of $2 million or more was hit the then-inheritance tax of 46 percent.

IRS records, though, according to Loren Steffy, business columnist for The Houston Chronicle, reported that most such heirs --- due to “exemptions and credits” --- paid a tax of only 18.8 percent. And before Mr. Bush and his GOP Congress killed the inheritance tax, “fewer than 1 percent of Americans who died had estates valuable enough to trigger” it.”

On WETA the other night, Bill Moyers had a discussion with William Donaldson former Bush-appointed chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission, who told Moyers, “I think the sharing of the benefits of society are increasingly disproportionate.” People “read every day about the fantastic profits being made by hedge fund managers and so forth. And yet ... they're paying more for gasoline and paying more for the everyday necessities of life ... . So in effect, the great middle class in this country has not really shared in what's going on now.”

In a soul-baring speech, delivered just before his 2004 reelection in white tie and tails to a prestigious crowd, our president accurately and stunningly stated, “This is an impressive crowd -- the haves and the have mores. Some people call you the elite -- I call you my base.”

That’s right, the man in control of the levers of power served not with ‘compassion’ for all citizens, but with fervor for the top one percent of all U.S. citizens whose wealth, the Federal Reserve has reported, is greater than that of the bottom 95 percent.

So, while you’re stuck in traffic in the coming years of HOT pay-to-drive wealth, think of who’s been represented in Washington during the ‘conservative revolution,’ and understand that you’re not one of them.


Nick Penning (www.nickpenning.com) is an Arlington, Va., freelance writer.

Labels: Bush, inequality, middle class, Republicans

Imagine sitting along the Potomac --- on the afternoon of August 28, 1963 --- near the Memorial Bridge, which pierces into the heart of the Arlington plantation. You could probably hear the orations and ovations taking place on the other side of the river, just around the front of the Lincoln Memorial.

An historic “March on Washington” was reaching its crescendo that hot and sunny day with the arrival of a 34 year-old preacher from Georgia; a man mature beyond his years who helped transform the face of this nation.

You wonder if the traffic on the GW Parkway, which snakes along the shoulder of our county, had slowed, as it does on the night of the Fourth of July. Did people line the banks on our side and listen to young Martin Luther King declare, “I have a dream today”?

When he spoke of “freedom” and “free at last, free at last; thank God almighty, we’re free at last,” did we get it?

If you’re white, as am I, you may have puzzled, “What does he mean, ‘free at last’?” There is no slavery. People aren’t held against their will ... at least they weren’t before the current Administration took office.

But I am not a black man. I did not live in a nation where it was considered ‘sport’ in some states to grab a black man from his home and drag him, with his wife and children watching, to the nearest big tree, where he was spit upon and summarily lynched by a hateful, bloodthirsty crowd.

Imagine; just try to imagine living in a world where you knew this could happen to you at any time and any place for any reason. What kind of life is that? Are you free to live “in pursuit of happiness”? Does your gut clench every night when you try to go to sleep and every morning when you raise into consciousness, wondering if this was the day the cowardly-hooded night-riders would burst into your life?

Move forward to today. In a training session at the office, the leader asks each person how they would describe themselves. “What is the one characteristic that defines you?” Each of us spoke of such things as belief, parent, spouse, or social class. But, when Joseph’s turn came, he simply said, “I am black. That is the one thing I am reminded of every day.”

Do we make that reality happen for the Joseph’s and the Mary’s and Lamar’s?

When you are seated in a restaurant, do you take a second look, when an African-American couple is shown to their booth? At the grocery store, do you find yourself looking into the shopping cart of an African-American mother, as she empties it on the belt? Do you wonder, “Is she going to use food stamps?”

And when you are walking along Columbia Pike or in Clarendon, do you feel uncomfortable if a loud bunch of young African-American youngsters or young adults approaches on the sidewalk?

Finally, when you are driving, if you’re white, you don’t live in fear that you might be stopped by the police, for whatever reason. You aren’t grabbed by the terror that a traffic stop might end with a night in jail, because you ‘look like’ someone who’s being sought for a crime.

Consider this: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, African Americans make up12.7 percent of the US population and 48.2 percent of adults in state and federal prisons and local jails. Human Rights Watch reports, "black men [in 2000] were eight times more likely to be in prison than white men.”

This is an outrage! Add in the facts of intimidation of black voters in Florida and the car chases that have led, here in the Washington area, to the police killing of innocent African-Americans, and we get a tiny inkling of what it means to be black in 2007.

So, who is “free” in these United States? Take a moment to mentally “walk in the shoes” of a person of color, and then step into a store, a diner, or on a sidewalk. Only when we can see each other as the person in front of us, and not the person of color in front of us, will we have reached the time when we all are “free at last.” Let us work, truly work, to make that “dream” happen. Let us end the nightmare of soul-eating prejudice that lurks inside.

Nick Penning, www.nickpenning.com, is an Arlington freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

Carols floated in the air Christmas night, as a little grandson slowly wore out of energy and fell fast asleep at Grammie’s house. The radio music came not from Arlington’s WETA, which now talk, talk, talks all day and night; but from Bethesda’s WGMS, the last bastion of seasonable, reasonable music, that soothed the young tyke to dreamland.

Upstairs, the rooftop heard no more prancing, rather the sound of BBC News, which told of the passing of James Brown, the man whose mantra, “Say it Loud; I’m Black and I’m Proud!” meant more than many of us realized to a generation of African-Americans.

The next day brought sad news a little closer to home: former President Gerald Ford, an orphan who grew up to be a congressman, who lived among us in Northern Virginia; an appointed vice president who fell into office when Richard Nixon resigned; died early in the evening of December 26. His humble accession to Chief Executive brought relief from evil corruption and a long-delayed end to the horror of Vietnam.

Remember the Crescent City, New Orleans? If there’s such a thing as the genocide of a city, what the government has done to the crown jewel of U.S. culture is certainly the victim of it. Our ‘leader,’ generators and klieg lights in tow, ‘rushed’ to Jackson Square more than a year ago and made the promise: “we will do what it takes,” he said. “We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.” Evacuees still beg for help to get home, but the checks to Halliburton contained no guarantee of return; just another buck to the monstrous corporation that lives off the federal trough.

On New Year’s the woefully tragic, heart-tugging photo on the front page of the big paper across the river seemed to sum up much of 2006: a fragile 19 year-old pored over the Arlington grave of her 19 year-old sweetheart, killed only six weeks after being sent to a war with no purpose.

If ever there was a time for citizen involvement in our government, it is now. We can’t just “Let it Be.” We’ve got to step forward and demand change; demand humane policies and demand the elimination of the outrageous, trillion-dollar tax cuts that served to make the rich even richer. Reaping tax rewards while starving government; which exists to serve you and me, not gluttonous corporations and those who run them.

There’s an Arlington Way that, for the most part, works. And the rest of the Commonwealth seemed to get a dose of it when Jim Webb turned out ‘macaca’ Allen. We have a responsibility to make government, beyond our county borders, work for the dispossessed and those in despair.

For the working folks who are being crippled by the cost of health protection and are scared they’re going to lose their jobs. So much good could be done, if we each did our part to show to the nation what a people-centered government looks like. Guatemalan immigrant Jaimen Ortiz did his part when, as Seth Rosen reported, he rushed to catch a little two-year-old who’d fallen from her apartment window. He could have ignored her, but neither he nor any of us can take our eyes away from grief when we see it.

Let’s sow hope this year and do our part to make this fragile green orb, glistening in the incomprehensible and never-ending universe, a refuge for all of humanity. We’re all in this together. So, let’s roll up our sleeves and make this government the shining star of humanity it once was and can be again.

Nick Penning (www.nickpenning.com) is an Arlington, Va., freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection www.arlingtonconnection.com.

Carols floated in the air Christmas night, as a little grandson slowly wore out of energy and fell fast asleep at Grammie’s house. The radio music came not from Arlington’s WETA, which now talk, talk, talks all day and night; but from Bethesda’s WGMS, the last bastion of seasonable, reasonable music, that soothed the young tyke to dreamland.

Upstairs, the rooftop heard no more prancing, rather the sound of BBC News, which told of the passing of James Brown, the man whose mantra, “Say it Loud; I’m Black and I’m Proud!” meant more than many of us realized to a generation of African-Americans.

The next day brought sad news a little closer to home: former President Gerald Ford, an orphan who grew up to be a congressman, who lived among us in Northern Virginia; an appointed vice president who fell into office when Richard Nixon resigned; died early in the evening of December 26. His humble accession to Chief Executive brought relief from evil corruption and a long-delayed end to the horror of Vietnam.

Remember the Crescent City, New Orleans? If there’s such a thing as the genocide of a city, what the government has done to the crown jewel of U.S. culture is certainly the victim of it. Our ‘leader,’ generators and klieg lights in tow, ‘rushed’ to Jackson Square more than a year ago and made the promise: “we will do what it takes,” he said. “We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.” Evacuees still beg for help to get home, but the checks to Halliburton contained no guarantee of return; just another buck to the monstrous corporation that lives off the federal trough.

On New Year’s the woefully tragic, heart-tugging photo on the front page of the big paper across the river seemed to sum up much of 2006: a fragile 19 year-old pored over the Arlington grave of her 19 year-old sweetheart, killed only six weeks after being sent to a war with no purpose.

If ever there was a time for citizen involvement in our government, it is now. We can’t just “Let it Be.” We’ve got to step forward and demand change; demand humane policies and demand the elimination of the outrageous, trillion-dollar tax cuts that served to make the rich even richer. Reaping tax rewards while starving government; which exists to serve you and me, not gluttonous corporations and those who run them.

There’s an Arlington Way that, for the most part, works. And the rest of the Commonwealth seemed to get a dose of it when Jim Webb turned out ‘macaca’ Allen. We have a responsibility to make government, beyond our county borders, work for the dispossessed and those in despair.

For the working folks who are being crippled by the cost of health protection and are scared they’re going to lose their jobs. So much good could be done, if we each did our part to show to the nation what a people-centered government looks like. Guatemalan immigrant Jaimen Ortiz did his part when, as Seth Rosen reported, he rushed to catch a little two-year-old who’d fallen from her apartment window. He could have ignored her, but neither he nor any of us can take our eyes away from grief when we see it.

Let’s sow hope this year and do our part to make this fragile green orb, glistening in the incomprehensible and never-ending universe, a refuge for all of humanity. We’re all in this together. So, let’s roll up our sleeves and make this government the shining star of humanity it once was and can be again.

Nick Penning (www.nickpenning.com) is an Arlington, Va., freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection www.arlingtonconnection.com.

Time was, you worked hard, really hard …for decades… maybe you bought a house, a car, and helped your kids go to school. You gave to others who needed help…and then you retired.

You wonder these days if that still is a part of “the American Dream.”

Hard work, providing for your family, paying taxes for the good of your country and humankind, and then…at the end…a regular, modest income from the retirement pension that was part of the package your employer promised. That was ‘the deal’ we came to expect as return for working and living a good life.

Sometimes that promise was in the form of a binding contract, negotiated by the union that stood up for you at your job. In other cases the pension was a well-reasoned assumption, based on years and years of evidence that saw fellow employees get a steady income after retirement.

Well, there’s lots of evidence these days that ‘the good life’ is only available to those with big bucks; because the news seems to be filled each week with a report that another company, ‘forced’ by ‘excessive costs,’ has decided to unilaterally fold-up their end of the bargain and shut down the company pension plan.

No warning. Not even a hint. And then, Boom! Sorry, sucker; we just canned your pension. Go take a hike.

Here’s how the PBS NewsHour, based in Shirlington, described the scene on January 9 of this year:

“IBM, long a leader in defining the relationship between companies and employees in American corporate life last week became part of a new trend, ending its traditional pension plan,” reporter Jeffrey Brown said. “…even well off companies are making the change. In recent months Verizon, Lockheed Martin and Motorola have all announced freezes on their pensions plans.”

It isn’t just that these monster companies are freezing pensions at a certain level. No, starting with United Airlines, which took an unprecedented 2005 move that stunned the nation, corporate America is flat-out terminating pension programs. Arlington-based US Airways made its assault on its employee pensions the same year.

Congress stepped into the fray some 30 years ago and created an agency that’s supposed to protect us, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) --- (http://www.pbgc.gov/index.html) --- which is financed by the corporations whose pension plans they protect. But, according to another PBS investigation for the Frontline program, big business has defied its responsibilities to the extent that four years ago corporate America owed $50 billion to the PBGC. This year, the shortchanging is more than four times that amount: $450 billion.

How can business get away with that? I can’t just decide to stop paying my mortgage. Listen to how Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren described the situation to Frontline: “Let's just be as blunt as we can. They got away with it because the regulators let them get away with it. In all those years in the '90s, when we were doing well, when it was boom times, the big companies kept a sharp eye on what pleases the investors. ... It did not please the investors to put money aside for the employees, and so the big corporations simply didn't do it.”

“It did not please the investors”? Is that what this comes down to? Is our nation really just about making a buck? Is it true that the prevailing attitude is “What’s good for business is good for America”? Economist Martin Goldberg wrote last year, “The not too subtle message is leave corporate America alone.” And to whom would that warning be made? Why to those who ‘represent us’ across the river.

It’s no accident that business throws hundreds of millions of dollars into congressional and presidential campaign coffers. The pay the piper expects in response for his support is to be left alone, to deal with his workers however he sees fit.

This isn’t the America we grew up with, is it? America the Beautiful seems a pipedream, when you read words like those cited above. Is it all a big joke? Has Uncle Sam changed from a kindly gentleman into a cold, cynical and calculating relative?

P.T. Barnun said “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Is that what it’s about, in the end? Are we all suckers who will work until we die or until we get injured or get sick?

This is a far cry from, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.”

Is there any way to turn this around? To stop the relentless pursuit of wealth at any cost? We can start with the folks who occupy that shining, marble, dome-topped building on the other side of the river. If enough of us make a fuss over this, maybe the word ‘retirement’ can come to mean what it has meant for our parents’ generation.

Let’s not let it happen that we became a bitter, ‘what’s in it for me’ nation. Let’s look out for each other and try, as hard as we might, to make this life a good one for each and every one of us.


Nick Penning is an Arlington, Va., freelance writer.

As you read this, think for a moment: your nation is committing war, where hundreds kill and die in your name…right now and into this night. There is bravado, there is fear, and, I suspect, some doubt about why our nation’s flag and its tanks and planes and bombs are rolling the roads and roaring in the sky above a Middle Eastern desert.

Not many weeks ago we heard a similar screaming, ear-pounding cry over our heads, here in Arlington, as the new Air Force Memorial was dedicated near the Pentagon. Because the Air Force Thunderbirds were shooting hundreds of miles per hour overhead, their cries turned heads for miles around.

For a split second, if you’d not read the papers or had forgotten the announcement, you might have thought, “What was that!”, perhaps wondering if, in this age of White House-induced fear, we might be under some sort of attack.

Is it possible to imagine armored personnel carriers rolling down Arlington Boulevard, helicopters chopping the air, and rifle carrying soldiers walking the streets and posted at check points near, say, Glebe Road and George Mason? And that, as those planes careened through the air, muffled ‘booms,’ puffs of smoke could be seen in their wake?

Small countries and guerilla bands could never muster that kind of power….but, emerging powers such as China, and a recently rightward-drifting Japan, can bring shudders to our seemingly peaceful lives.

If we are not immune, why did we seek this war? Why did we stir up greater, worldwide hatred toward our beloved country?

Has our silence aided and abetted our elected leaders to continue forcing young men and women to stop their lives and carry armaments overseas, putting their families at great risk of losing the centers of their existence?

Now, weeks after the nerve-rattling spectacle of Air Force might, we hear talk of ‘pulling back’ or ‘pulling out,’ “as soon as they are ready to defend themselves.” You even hear the word “Iraqification” of the war, through which the reins of warfare are turned to those who live there.

If you’re in your late 50s or 60s, that word conjures up “Vietnamization,” the term then-President Nixon used as part of his ‘secret plan’ to end the war. That plan helped him win election in 1968. Yet seven more long years, and thousands of Vietnam Wall names later, it all came to a whimpering end as the last helicopter lifted the last evacuees from the top of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

As I’ve heard others say, how many Gold Star mothers will be told of heartbreaking loss, while those who started this madness ‘wind down’ our presence in a nation we have destroyed? Now that we know the end is coming, how many widows, how many orphans will be created in these final months ahead?

It has been said before, but is worth saying again, How do we ask another soldier to be the last one to die for a mistake?

Because, at this point, Arlington is being opened for more and more graves, in defense of what?… one man’s refusal to admit the obvious? His pitiful and outrageous attempt to ‘save face,’ as more die, and our nation becomes ever more a target in response to what he has sown.

We can pray for peace, and ask our members of Congress to bring us quickly to that end.

*******************************

Nick Penning is an Arlington freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

Honestly, giving rich persons more money than the average worker helps "America grow"?

First, I don't believe it. But, even if this notion is true, it is flat out unfair to working stiffs who get a few dollars, while millionaires get government donations of $40,000 plus.

Bush, addressing a white tie banquet some time over the past several years, said (approximately), "Some would call you the haves and the haves more; I call you my base."

I think that pretty well sums up where he and his party have their hearts. Suck money out of the federal revenue stream to the Treasury, give it to the rich, and then create a trillion dollar war and give your congressional buddies highways and bridges 'to nowhere' at a cost of millions more.

Where is the justice? Where is the 'conservative' goal to trim the budget?

Where on Earth is this nation going, with a leader who spends ad infinitum, authorizes torture, ignores poor black folks crushed by a hurricane, and tracks the phone calls of every person in this country?

Are we in America? Or perhaps in 17th century France. Let's have wars, lets give to the rich, and let 'them' eat cake.

There must be a person or organization providing money --- beyond Patrick Byrne's seed money --- to finance the huge costs involved in producing the TV spots, buying the air time, setting up state organizations, and developing state-specific legislation in all the states where the '65% solution' is popping up.

Does anyone have info on where this big money for TV and logistics operations originates? The name of a person or organization which we could investigate further?

For example, Rick Perry....is there a big contributor who's encouraging him in exchange for campaign support? Same for Pawlenty in Minnesota, etc.

Please repond to npenning@aasa.org, if you can.

Many thanks.