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From Wikileaks to the War on Terror, from climate change to the financial crisis, today politics unfolds in a world of 24/7 news media. Whether parliamentary decisions or street protests, information can travel in less than a second, delivered around the world to screens we hold in our hands. This hyper-mediated environment brings with it new challenges and opportunities for politicians and political organisations. It raises issues around privacy, security and exposure, highlighting questions of citizenship, identity and democratic participation.
What does it mean to develop political campaigns and marketing strategies in these times? How do we respond to such challenges and make the media work for us? To navigate future careers in politics, graduates need expertise that bridges foundations in political thought with practical skills for doing politics in our media saturated world. With more than 8,000 politics graduates in the UK each year, a specialised degree in Politics and Media from BU can help your skills stand out.
The entry requirements for this course are 112-128 tariff points from 3 A-Levels or equivalent qualifications.
If English is not your first language, you will need to provide evidence that you can understand English to a satisfactory level. English language requirements for this course are normally:
IELTS (Academic) 6.0 with minimum 5.5 in each component, or equivalent.
Year 1 - Level C
The History of Political Thought
This unit provides an introduction to key and contested concepts in political theory. This includes: debates on notions of the state, power, civil rights & disobedience, justice, freedom, gender, equality, fairness, toleration and democracy. This unit will relate historical debates and disputed meanings to contemporary political realities.
Comparative Government & Politics
You will be evaluating the usefulness and legitimacy of politics. This will involve consideration of classical comparative techniques such as electoral systems, leadership, development, culture, legislatives, judicial systems, ideology and participation.
Experiencing Politics
You will debate the role of the media in politics, cultivating political ideas and the way in which people influence one another about politics. The unit introduces a wide range of concepts and ideas including identity politics, symbolic representation, cultivation theory, mediatisation, politics and popular culture and participation.
Media, Journalism & Society
The unit introduces you to the role of journalism in society, as well as to the nature, history, structure and social roles of print, broadcast and digital media. It aims to evaluate the significance of cultural, technological and regulatory change on the media industries and assess the challenges and opportunities posed by the changing nature of the public sphere and includes the evaluation of theoretical perspectives.
Emerging Global Themes
You will gain an understanding of the global economic, political, financial and business contexts within which organisations operate. You will also gain an understanding of market economics and the economic forces affecting the private and public sectors. You will also consider the role of communications as an intermediary socialising practice that influences social and group identity in a multicultural society.
Communication & Research Skills
You will acquire knowledge of the major perspectives influencing the study of academic and marketing research and engage in the systematic search and research procedures required to investigate topics effectively. You will critically evaluate existing research findings and data sources and produce written work in a standard format that meets academic and professional expectations.
Year 2 - Level I
Critical Debates in Contemporary Politics
This unit will focus on challenges to political traditions by considering current debates on such broad concepts as citizenship, engagement, functionality of political institutions, political conflict and global/cosmopolitan societal trends. You will learn how to engage with such debates, how they 'fit' into a fuller understanding of politics and media, and, how to begin contributing to these debates.
Digital Communication Strategies
You will acquire a detailed, critical understanding of the impact of emerging digital technologies. They will be able to develop a critical understanding of issues raised by current digital and interactive media and apply marketing communications, politics and public relations conceptual frameworks to digital environments.
Global Current Affairs
The unit aims to engage you with current debates in international and multimedia journalism, while introducing major global developments and their impact on news reporting. You will develop your judgment and ability to link developments from different localities, periods and spheres of human activity, while dealing with issues of, and challenges to, professional practice.
Political Marketing
You will gain an understanding of the links between marketing and politics from both practical and theoretical perspectives. You will explore the current practice with reference to key innovations by political organisations and candidates for election, and theory from the disciplines of marketing, political marketing and political theory, students are equipped to debate what role marketing does, can and should have in the process of politics.
Political Campaigning
You will learn the practical and theoretical issues relating to the design, execution and reception of political campaigns in the context of electoral contests. You will be required to read widely within a range of areas which examine current debates on campaigning, as well as analysing a range of contests and designing a campaign.
Political Psychology
You gain grounding in political psychology, and to establish psychological perspectives as an intrinsic element in the systematic study of politics, especially in relation to a focus on politics and media. You will be introduced to the major paradigms in individual and social psychology which have been applied to the political domain.
Work Placement (6 weeks)
Year 3 - The Placement Year
Optional one year placement
Year 3 or 4 (depending on placement) - Level H
The Dissertation provides you with the opportunity to develop and demonstrate your critical, analytical and research skills by conducting a significant piece of academic work. You will specialise in a topic of your choice, in consultation with an allocated Supervisor.
New Political Communication
This unit will equip you to think beyond current practice and blend together key theoretical perspectives to tackle the big debates circulating within literature on political communication. Students will draw on their intellectual engagement in years one and two and any practical experience they have gained to question current trends in practice and offer practical potential solutions.
Option units: please choose 3 of the following options
Environmental Communication
Fundamentalism, Extremism and Terrorism
International Relations
Media, Conflict and Power
Persuasion and Influence
Political Mobilisation and Engagement
Political Journalism
Public Diplomacy and Nation Branding
Public Relations, Power and Democracy
Social Communication
Transnational & Multicultural Communication
This will prepare you for careers in local and national government, non-government organisations, and think tanks, as well as further study at postgraduate level. Upon successful completion of the course, you might find you get a job as a:
Political press officer/spokesperson
Campaign strategist
Digital communication strategist
Political project manager
Communications director
Political journalist
¡Infórmate ahora sin compromiso!


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The case of Lindquist's $300,000 text message: Is it public?
According to Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist, the public has no right to see a text message he sent to a co-worker four years ago suggesting "a political strategy to deal with a news story" about his office.
Call it the $300,000 text message. Lindquist contends it's not a public record, but it's the heart of a four-year-old public disclosure lawsuit that pits sheriff's deputy Glenda Nissen against the prosecutor. Nissen believes the message will show Lindquist retaliated against her in the course of a long-running dispute.
Taxpayers have shelled out $315,945 in legal fees to defend Lindquist's position so far. In recent weeks, the legal fight over the message and five more from Lindquist's personal phone has provoked the local equivalent of a constitutional crisis. Thursday, facing mounting legal pressure, Lindquist released a sworn affidavit in response to a directive from the state Supreme Court.
Lindquist's affidavit partially describes, for the first time, the general nature of messages he sent Aug. 2, 2011. He doesn't provide the actual content of the messages, and he doesn't identify the recipients, but other records in the lawsuit make their identities plain. He wrote texts to then-Lakewood Police Chief Bret Farrar, sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer, and Mary Robnett, then the chief criminal deputy at the prosecutor's office.
"I do not believe any of these text messages were within the scope of my employment or have a nexus to the decision making process of the agency and are therefore not public records," Lindquist's affidavit states.
Robnett received the final message, shortly before midnight on a Tuesday.
The sixth text, at 11:51 pm, was from me to this person, and suggested a possible political strategy to deal with a news story.
Affidavit of Mark Lindquist
"The sixth text, at 11:51 pm, was from me to this person," Lindquist states, "and suggested a possible political strategy to deal with a news story."
The news story appeared in The News Tribune. It referred to Nissen. It described the settlement of a lawsuit she had filed against Lindquist's office, alleging retaliation by Lindquist and his staffers in response to complaints about how prosecutors were treating her at work.
Lindquist had negotiated with editors and county staffers about the wording of the story throughout the day, according to court records and internal records of The News Tribune.
Robnett left the prosecutor's office in 2012, following a dispute with Lindquist. She told The News Tribune Saturday that she doesn't remember what the key text message said. She said she tried to recover it from her old phone without success. She's also asked Lindquist to provide the message to her.
"I don't mind releasing those messages," Robnett said. "I've contacted the county executive and offered to give a release. I've contacted Mark Lindquist and asked him to resend the message so I can see the content. I haven't heard from him."
I don't mind releasing those messages. I've contacted the county executive and offered to give a release. I've contacted Mark Lindquist and asked him to resend the message so I can see the content. I haven't heard from him.
Mary Robnett, former prosecutor
Lindquist's affidavit contends that because the message to Robnett was political in nature and composed on his personal phone, it's none of the public's business.
"I used my personal phone for what I believed to be conversations and messages related to personal or political matters," the affidavit states. "I avoid using my work phone for personal matters. Critically, I do not and cannot use my work phone for political matters and must use my personal phone for all political communications."
At the time the text message was sent, Lindquist was not facing an active campaign. His affidavit says he maintains a campaign between elections.
He had taken office eight months earlier, after winning an election the previous fall. Nissen, the subject of the news story, was not a candidate for office and never had been. Her involvement in the news story related to the lawsuit.
Robnett, aware of Lindquist's characterization of his message as political, said, "I don't think there was a political campaign going on at that time. I think the election was over."
Robnett, aware of Lindquist's characterization of his message as political, said, "I don't think there was a political campaign going on at that time. I think the election was over."
In 2010, Nissen had been accused of mailing an anonymous death threat to Robnett. She has always denied it. Sheriff's detectives investigated the possibility at the time, but found no forensic evidence linking Nissen to the letter. An outside prosecutor's office declined to file charges against Nissen, citing lack of evidence.
Other records tied to the investigation show that Lindquist and his staffers steered the investigation and discouraged detectives and Sheriff Paul Pastor from investigating anyone but Nissen as a possible suspect.
Lindquist's affidavit is part of a larger action set for arguments in Thurston County Superior Court on Friday. County Executive Pat McCarthy has asked a judge to appoint an independent attorney to represent taxpayers in the public-records lawsuit. She contends Lindquist is too personally conflicted to make fair legal decisions in the case. Lindquist and his staffers disagree.
Asked for a statement regarding his affidavit, Lindquist referred questions to his attorney, Stewart Estes, who said the affidavit satisfies the Supreme Court's directive. Estes added that he expects the issue will be resolved at next Friday's hearing in Thurston County.
Joan Mell, the attorney representing Nissen in the case, said Lindquist's affidavit doesn't pass the legal smell test. She and Nissen believe the "political strategy" message Lindquist continues to withhold will provide proof of retaliation.
"Lindquist hopes by declaring his colleagues 'friends' and his missives 'political,' that the trial court will let him take his texts and go home," she said. "The Supreme Court has said it has higher expectations. The Public Records Act does not contain a 'Politician' exemption. The trial court knows how to achieve transparency where public information is at risk. Nissen should be reading those texts soon."
Sean Robinson: 253-597-8486, @seanrobinsonTNT

subset: commoncrawl


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The greatest tragedy of the modern welfare state is that we have allowed it to deprive us of a fundamental opportunity to practice virtue, responsibility, generosity, and compassion. —Arianna Huffington, The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul.
Gardiner has no background! And so he's not and cannot be objectionable to anyone! —Jerzy Kosinski, Being There.
Fueled by his father's money and his wife's ambition, Texas millionaire Roy Michael Huffington Jr. is trying to buy his way into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 1996, after brief stops in the House and the Senate. He hasn't quite made it to the latter yet. That's why the first-term California congressman, who moved to Santa Barbara from Texas only in 1991 and has almost no legislative record—he's on his way to spending more money on a campaign than anyone ever has in the history of the Senate, perhaps $25 million, to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Dianne Feinstein. And that's only one part of the Huffington story.
"If anyone thinks she hasn't seen herself in the White House yet, then you don't know Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington," says Peter Matson, a former literary agent of the Greek-born, Cambridge-educated author. "Michael was searching for himself, and Arianna found him," says a friend who knew them before they were married. "My illustration for them is 'Driving Michael Huffington': Arianna wearing a cap behind the wheel and Michael sitting in the backseat looking perfectly bewildered."
Yet Huffington has already managed to win once with the help of his wife, who frequently spoke in his place and who has been dubbed "the sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers." In 1992 he spent 5.2 million - $43 a vote – and gave many thousands more in donations to cultural and charitable institutions in his Republican district in a slash-and-burn campaign aimed first at turning out nine-term congressman Bob Lagomarsino and the at defeating his Democratic opponent. Now, he's in the process of spending five times that on the Senate race against Feinstein, and rapidly depleting his $70 million share of the money from the sale of Huffco, the oil-and-gas company his father created, in 1990. And he's doing it all on TV, where everything is scripted for him and where he doesn't have to talk to the press or to voters.
"He's a media projection. When the cameras go away, nothing is there," says political reporter Nick Welsh, who contributes to a popular column in The Santa Barbara Independent, in which Huffington is routinely referred to as "the alleged congressman." Indeed, Michael Huffington could easily become the Chauncey Gardiner of the 90s—the man who says nothing to great acclaim. "Huffington has never stood up for anything: I've never seen a position paper, a press conference, even an ad where he's said anything," declares Santa Barbara Republican activist Hazel Richardson Blankenship. "Once in a while you can actually get a complete idiot elected to the U.S. Senate, and it could happen again."
I caught up with Michael Huffington and an aide in the hall outside the congressman's Capitol Hill office the day he reversed his earlier support for the crime bill and voted to block it from getting to the floor for final consideration. Having tried in vain to set up an interview, I introduced myself and said, "Do you remember me? We met at a party."
"Yes, I do."
"I'd like to ask you just a couple of questions."
"No questions, sorry."
"Just one or two."
"None, thank you, we're going to have lunch."
"But you're just walking along here."
"Will you excuse us, please. I'm with a gentleman."
"Can you just tell me what the most important thing in your Senate campaigning is?" At this point Huffington called to a congressional guard, "Officer this lady is bothering me. Would you mind asking her to leave?"
"Is this how you treat the press when you're running for the Senate?" I asked.
"Is there a time when we can talk?"
Michael Huffington's behavior in Congress is considered strange by many ex-staffers I talked to. He would disappear for days without letting his staff know his whereabouts, and he'd refuse to tell them how he might vote on any issue before it came up on the floor of Congress. "He never communicated with us. We said, 'God, where's he coming from?'" reported one. "I don't know if has thoughts. A very large number of his policies are reflections of his wife's attitudes."
Before last year's Hyde-amendment vote, which caused Huffington to waffle on his pro-choice position and vote against federal funding for abortions for poor women, he called Arianna from the cloakroom off the floor of the house. "On any big decision you'd go in and talk to him and leave, and then you'd see his phone light go on, and he'd call Arianna to ask her," says another ex-staffer. "Walking from his desk to your own, you could 3,2,1 and Arianna was on the line."
Huffington is so secretive that he keeps a shredder next to his desk and once directed a staffer to shred an office copy of the Congressional Record, because it was "nobody's business" how he voted. "You never had to prepare anything for him, because he wasn't going to do anything," says a former legislative aide. For a time all press releases went through Arianna, who played the enforcer. Although Arianna denies that she has ever threatened anyone who worked for them, one aide who left claims that Arianna told her, "You ever say anything about us and I'll come back and try to pin things on you." There's been similar intimidation in California. "Arianna and Michael Huffington know not to threaten people with 'You'll never work in this town again,'" says Hazel Blankenship. They exerted pressure, for example, to have Jerry Cornfield, the Santa Barbara News-Press reporter assigned to cover Huffington, replaced; they complained about him to the editor and refused to acknowledge his queries. Cornfield soon left the paper.
Huffington has not held a single formal press conference since he announced for the Senate, he will not release his tax returns, and he does not go to bat against the government for companies in his district, even if it means losing hundreds of jobs. Yet the local press has often acted like putty in his hands. For example, when Huffington refused to help Raytheon, the giant defense contractor, get the State Department to lift a ban on installing its equipment on Taiwanese ships—which would mean the loss of not only a $100 million contract but also a possible 250 jobs—he declined to be interviewed. Instead, the News-Press, which is owned by the New York Times Company, printed a general statement for him when it broke the story, and later allowed him to respond on the op-ed page. The decision was not popular in the newsroom. Everyone knew that the Huffingtons had recently become godparents to the daughter of the op-ed-page editor.
The general lack of scrutiny in California, coupled with the services of expensive, high-powered handlers and advisers such as Ed Rollins, Mike Deaver, former Reagan speechwriter Ken Khachigian, former Reagan pollster Richard Wirthlin, and Larry McCarthy (the creator of the infamous Willie Horton commercial in the 1988 presidential campaign), has kept Huffington from exposing himself or from being exposed. In one unscripted foray, Huffington told a reporter that he thought his chances of winning Southern California were good because he was on the Los Angeles Music Center board. He seems to feel that his wealth is a protective shield, but it also shields him from reality. He told a staffer, "I don't want anyone working for me who needs a paycheck."
Two young men in Huffington's office felt compelled to leave after he hugged them against their will. In front of two witnesses, he told one, "It looks like you need a hug." The man said no and left the room "to start all over," but when he returned, Huffington hugged him anyway, despite his protests. When the incident was reported in the Los Angeles Times, Huffington responded, "saying it 'was not a big hug,' and the staffer never got one after that. 'I like to hug people. I'm a hugger. So is Bill Clinton.'" Chad Westover, a former Huffington staffer who witnessed the incident, said he felt that "it was not and embrace" but "more of a management technique." However, Westover said the staffer and the congressman "from that point on just didn't click." The young man left a short time later, after Huffington criticized his work.
When Huffington hugged the other male aide, the two men were alone. The then 23-year-old staffer says that, without warning, Huffington came from behind his desk after reprimanding him and said, "Let's hug." The staffer tried to protest; Huffington hugged him nevertheless. After that, he says, Huffington attitude toward him became cold. Another person in Huffington's office, who did not know about the incident when we spoke, brought up as example of the congressman's strange behavior a series of disparaging phone calls he had made about this staffer, who also soon decided to leave.
Huffington's support of abortion for those who can afford it and of gays in the military often causes him to be labeled a moderate. In fact, he is extremely conservative about economics: his mantra is that government is bad—just say no to it. He's even been said to advocate the gold standard.
I called a number of Huffington's Republican colleagues in California and on the House committees on banking and small business for comment on his abilities, but none would call me back. Democrats on those committees with Huffington described him as courtly and pleasant, but essentially a cipher. "On the Hill he's almost a nonpresence … He sort of floats through the place," says New York congressman Charles Schumer. "I've rarely sat on a committee with someone who has made so little impact. He hasn't done anything," says Massachusetts's openly gay representative, Barney Frank, who appreciates that Huffington "votes good on gay issues," but adds that "even when he is around, he isn't."
"He shouldn't be running for the job," says an outspoken Republican conservative, longtime Ronald Reagan pal Barney Klinger. "He's not—his wife is. He doesn't have the intelligence to run for U.S. Senate, but his wife does, so she's running through him."
Huffington did not carry Santa Barbara County, where he lives, in last June's Republican primary. Feelings toward the Huffingtons where they are best known and most closely observed run very high. "The hatred of him is beyond hormonal here," says Nick Welsh. Stories abound about people seeking help who were turned away by Huffington's office. Former staffer Westover says constituent services received "a high priority," but Kehar Johl, for example, related to me that he was told to request assistance in obtaining a visa for a relative from Feinstein's office instead.
The Huffingtons live in a $4.3 million Italianate mansion in Montecito. Arianna employs about a dozen staff members, and the turnover is rapid. "He's obviously so busy he's not terribly involved," says Barbara Coventry, who likes to be called "consultant," rather than tutor to the Huffington children, Christina, five, and Isabella, three. Instead, Arianna's mother, Elli, a follower of the late Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, holds sway, along with Arianna's sister, Agapi, who has taught a course on "how to be a goddess" to local women. The servant problem has been acrimonious and unceasing, although Coventry says that things have improved. Not so at their Washington residence, where Arianna hired ambassador to France Pamela Harriman's former servants, some of whom fled within a few months, after being treated "like slaves."
"We were joking about making a T-shirt that said, i quit the bitch," says a researcher who got diverted to menial tasks. She says that she in tears many times. "Arianna was so cruel—mean and nasty to everyone in the house." According to former employees in Santa Barbara, she issued orders over a speakerphone from the bathtub, kept a lock on the refrigerator, threw frequent tantrums, and sent the children's bodyguards to the store for her Tampax. Worse still were slurs overheard by the staff about "stupid and lazy" Mexican help at a time when Huffington was trying to target Latino voters in his district.
By the same token, almost everyone I spoke with remarked on what a charmer and world-class flatterer Arianna can be. "I've seen her charm people right down to their socks,' says Hazel Blankenship. Marcy Rudo, one of the principal researchers Arianna hired to work on her biography of Picasso, travelled with her through the South of France to interview sources. "She was dazzling. I saw her operate, melting the most reticent, unwilling-to-speak people. I saw her disarm them totally," Rudo told me. "She has a determination that's beyond most human comprehension … I felt I had been lady-in-waiting to a Mack truck."
Yet in Santa Barbara, after being told time and again that people there feared the power of the Huffingtons, I was surprised at the number ready to register their disgust with the couple's high-handed tactics. After writing a critical letter about Arianna to the News-Press, former Huffington supporter Marsha Wayne says, she received so many calls to applaud her that "I'm almost a celebrity." Wayne now distributes a bumper sticker saying, i was had by huffington-take a hike, mike! Many in town still remain charmed however. "Some friends are so envious and jealous they can't appreciate the art form," says Eva Haller of her close friend Arianna. "It's like watching a magician appear and disappear and make things look better than they are." I ask if that's good for the country. "I can't deal with it that way," Haller responds. "I'm fascinated by her."
"There are two schools of thought about Arianna," says Mort Janklow, her U.S. agent on the Picasso book. "One is that it's all deliberate and calculated and she's ruthless. The other is that she really convinces herself beforehand. She sells herself first." There is definitely a spacey quality to both Huffingtons, which allows them to go after what they want unaffected by the impressions they leave behind. The pervasive sense is that everyone and everything is "of use": the Huffingtons schmooze you and then they use you.
Not surprisingly, a key part of Michael Huffington's political platform neatly coincides with his wife's latest book, The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul. The thesis of the book is that humankind's hunger for spirituality is as great as its drives for survival, sex, and power, and that if we would all get beyond the empty striving of materialism, give vent to our better nature, and volunteer to help the poor more the wasteful welfare state we live in would be eliminated.
Huffington's debut speech on having volunteerism replace welfare, however, delivered to a group of black entrepreneurs in San Diego in August, was a disaster. Dave Lasher reported in the Los Angeles Times that Huffington was peppered with questions and complaints, that he didn't know the cost of the current welfare system-though one of his commercials says we have "wasted 3.5 trillion" on it-and that he wasn't certain which government programs he would eliminate. Lesher quoted the Reverend George Walter Smith, the Republican who hosted the event: "People left here completely laughing. This man does not grasp the issues."
To launch his crusade, Huffington donated his congressional salary to fund Partnership for Children of Santa Barbara County, a group Arianna began, some say, to emulate Hillary Clinton's interest in children's issues. The partnership has given out $132,000 in grants and helped children with dental problems in Huffington's congressional district, but the News-Press reported that it has recently run into severe financial problems. The Huffingtons also lent their home for a fund-raiser for the Partnership, but Arianna sent the group the valet-parking bill for $400. Michael told Charlie Rose on his talk show, "People are ready for something beyond materialism."
Since volunteerism is meant to be a cornerstone of Huffington's Senate campaign, I asked Arianna where she personally had volunteered. She said she volunteered "very regularly". I had been told that she was seldom seen at her children's pre-school in Washington, and Michael announced in April to the Los Angeles Times that he couldn't recall where he had volunteered before last New Year's, when he gave out food in two shelters, except to do fund-raising for his alma mater, Stanford. But now Arianna mentioned her church and Storyteller, a nonprofit Santa Barbara organization that cares for homeless and abused children during the day. I was hardly prepared for the reaction I got from Liliana Hensel, the executive director of Storyteller.
"No, she has never volunteered here. In three years, no one has ever seen Arianna but twice, and both times she brought a TV crew with her. It was self-promotion, nothing more. She's never given a penny to us and never even worked with the children," said Hensel. "The board as well as myself feel the same way about her. We don't want our name used in connection with her… It's using needy children in a needy situation for political gain and it's really disgusting." Hensel went on to say that several months earlier she had gotten a call from Michael Huffington's secretary, asking if he could stop by at one o'clock. "I said wonderful, but the children would be napping then, and I didn't want any TV cameras or press… She called me back in 15 minutes. He had found another agency. Is that blatantly telling you something?"
I got a similar reaction for Barbara Tellefson, the executive director of the Santa Barbara Council for Christmas Cheer, which runs the Unity Shoppe, where the poor can "shop" for food as well as clothes and toys made by senior volunteers. Tellefson, who supervises more than 4,000 volunteers, was asked if Arianna could visit with a TV crew for a "video essay" to promote her book. The Unity Shoppe is mentioned in the book; Arianna once chaired a fund-raiser for the charity, and Michael made a $10,000 donation. Nevertheless, Tellefson was stunned when the video aired. It clearly gave the impression that Unity Shoppe is an offshoot of Arianna's Partnership for Children. "I received many calls from local people," said Tellefson. "They were shocked and upset with the way Mrs. Huffington and her film editors created the illusion that the work of the Unity Shoppe was a result of her efforts, and that it is her dream to have a pilot program for other cities implemented by a Partnership for Children."
"They're scary," one of Michael Huffington's former legislative aides told me. "They're scary because it's a process taking place in America. Democracy for the average guy isn't there, because these guys buy elections, and they buy them on ego."
To Arianna Huffington, there are two kinds of people who serve in public life: leaders and managers. Managers are the grunts who tinker with the process. "Most of the legislation introduced is either damaging or irrelevant," she declares when I meet with her in a coffee shop near her home. Dianne Feinstein is a manager, whom Michael Huffington told to "get a life" the night he won the primary. "Dianne Feinstein was quoted saying, 'Government is my life', and that's part of the problem," says Arianna. "Government should not be a politician's life." Her husband's transcendent vision is "much more radical. Feinstein is a manager. Michael is a thinker and a leader. We're not going to turn things around with managers. Managers reshuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic. That's what she's doing."
"You're thinking about a radical new vision in which government plays a completely different role?" I ask. "Absolutely, where the concept of citizenship is redefined to include involvement in the community." She adds, "Most people in the last 30 years, when they are confronted with a problem, ask the question: What is the government going to do about it? We need to start asking ourselves the question: What am I going to do about it? … I have given six speeches on the subject, in which I develop this theme." And now Michael is running on it.
Arianna Stassinopoulos first became noticed in her undergraduate days at Cambridge. She was the first foreign woman president of the Cambridge Union, the venerable debating society, which led her into a romance and lifelong affiliation with a reigning cultural figure of the time, pundit Bernard Levin, whom she met as a fellow quiz-show contestant. An avid disciple of the late discredited guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Levin long wrote Arianna's toasts for her and still advises her on her books. "Even then," says a Cambridge classmate, "she was ambitious beyond measure." Soon Arianna was launched into British society and the great beyond, eventually becoming the author of six books, parts of three of which she has been accused of appropriating from others. In our interview, to which she has volunteered to come in place of her husband, many of the techniques she learned on the debating fields of Cambridge are put into play.
For example, I try to pin her down on why Michael will not release his income-tax returns. Arianna began her latest California residence in 1988, but Michael stayed in Texas, where there is no state income tax. He was officially living there when his older daughter was born in California, and he did not declare himself a resident of California until 1991, in the process of avoiding California income tax on his share of the $600 million sale of Huffco. At first, Arianna avoids answering: "He has done everything that is required by law." Next it is Feinstein's fault: "He feels that he has released everything that is legal. He feels Dianne Feinstein has attacked him for not paying his taxes." Then it is my fault for asking: "I think that maybe you have made up your mind." And finally: "Beyond that, you need to talk to him." But, of course, Michael is not taking any questions.
She claims that she has no input whatsoever into Michael's congressional office, that she merely helps out with strategy in his campaigns: "These are all illusions, [that] all these things in his congressional office go through me—it's just totally unreal and untrue." She does not know that I have just spoken to Arianna supporter Donald Smith, the executive director of the Western Commercial Space Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in Huffington's district, who has had extensive dealings with Huffington's office. When I asked him what Arianna's role was, he told me what everyone else ended up saying: "She's locked into everything he does. She's the one doing most of the talking for him."
No, Arianna tells me, she does not have a large turnover of servants. Haven't I ever dismissed anyone? That's what they once said about Jackie Kennedy, too. "I can be cruel," she finally admits. "Of course, I'm trying to improve myself every day and get better and be better—at whatever I'm doing." Arianna tells me she sees her life as similar to being on a train. "Being on a train and going home to God. And on the train is my family, the people I'm closest to. And outside the train, everything that happens to my life is scenery. Some of it is beautiful scenery. Some of it is ugly scenery . . . but the train moves on."
In Paris in the late 70s, Arianna Stassinopoulos was ordained a minister in the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. In 1984 she was baptized in the river Jordan. M.S.I.A. is a New Age church to its followers but a mind-manipulating cult to many of those who have left it. In her ordination, Arianna, who attained the highest level of secret initiation, "Soul Initiate," swore devotion to a curious divinity. The document of ordination reads: "We do this through the order of the Melchizedek Priesthood, the Office of the Christ, the Mystical Traveler, Preceptor Consciousness, and into God. This delineates for you the divine line of authority." In other words, the instigator of a Senate campaign preaching traditional values has long been beholden to a most untraditional form of religion, led by a guru who considers himself more powerful than Jesus Christ. M.S.I.A. ministers believe that the Mystical Traveler, the chosen one of God on earth at any given time, is now John-Roger, the founder of M.S.I.A. They believe that the Preceptor Consciousness, which is embodied on the planet only every 25,000 years and is therefore higher than Christ, is personified by John-Roger. Soul Initiates such as Arianna are required to pray by chanting the secret names of God that John-Roger gives them. They either follow the rules or renounce the ministry, which is fully accredited in California and which allows them to perform weddings and baptismal ceremonies. Arianna Huffington, who has followed the diminutive John-Roger all over the world for two decades, has never renounced her ministry. She told me, "That's not necessary. Because to me a ministry is something of being of service . . . not about performing baptisms and weddings." When I asked Arianna if she still chants the names of God that John-Roger gave her—a dead-bang giveaway, according to ex-M.S.I.A. members, as to whether or not someone still believes—she replied, "These are sacred questions . . . I pray. I'm not going to discuss how I pray."
Records filed with the California attorney general show that between July 1990 and June 1993 Arianna Huffington contributed $35,000 to the Foundation for the Study of Individual and World Peace, formerly the John-Roger Foundation. John-Roger, or J-R, the 60-year-old Utah-born former schoolteacher based in Los Angeles, was born Roger Hinkins but metamorphosed during a nine-day kidney-stone-induced coma into a self-proclaimed god. He has been accused in various media exposés, notable in the Los Angeles Times in 1988, of mind control, electronic eavesdropping, and the sexual coercion of male acolytes—charges he denied. He encourages his 3,000 or so followers to tithe, i.e., give 10 percent of their income to him. Ex-member Susan Roberts remembers Arianna during an M.S.I.A. retreat in upstate New York in 1987, standing up and saying, "'Dahlings, if you want to marry a rich man like I did, then tithe!' Everyone whooped and hollered."
John-Roger has told his followers that they have the power to change weather patterns and dismantle nuclear weapons. Yet Arianna has always defended him, though now she consistently minimizes how close they have been and insists, in interviews about John-Roger's multimillion-dollar empire, there is "nothing that you join."
"Of course there's something to join. You have to enroll in the discourses in order to be an initiate of the Traveler," says Susan Roberts. "She's a very lying woman." Another ex-follower, Dodie Brady, who participated in more than a dozen M.S.I.A.-sponsored events with Arianna on three continents and who witnessed her baptism in the Holy Land, agrees. "When we were in it, we all considered it our church. I don't know why Arianna is lying about it." Now that Arianna is courting Christian conservatives, touting her Greek Orthodox religion, and appearing with televangelist Rober Schuller on his Sunday-morning show to extol her husband's advocacy of prayer in the schools, her allegiance to John-Roger is definitely something to keep hidden. "If the Christian right knew what M.S.I.A. was about, " says Dodie Brady, "they wouldn't be endorsing Arianna and Michael Huffington."
Arianna told me that John-Roger is merely "a friend," that "there is nothing I participate in," that "I have not spent many years in his training," and that "he has never been a guru—nobody's been a guru to me." There is no acknowledgment of him in her current book. Ex-followers of John-Roger with whom I spoke were incredulous at these denials. Jim Brady, the ex-head of John-Roger's Insight training seminars in the Northeast, told me that in 1986, when Michael Huffington worked for the Department of Defense, he was called by Arianna as a fellow M.S.I.A. minister to bless her rented house in Georgetown. "It was just the two of us. It took about an hour, and you have to pray first, invoking John-Roger: 'Light of the Mystical Traveler, Preceptor Consciousness, be with us now.' I blessed every room, from all the way down to the wine cellar up to her office on the top floor." Arianna denied that any blessing ever took place.
When I pressed her repeatedly about whether John-Roger was higher than Jesus Christ, she refused to answer directly five times and professed not to know what I meant about the Preceptor Consciousness. "That part of it doesn't interest me." "Arianna," I said, "I have talked to people who believe that you have been in a cult for over 20 years." She gave me another nondenial denial: "Well, did I do anything ever that made you think that I am a member of a cult?" I mentioned that I had been told that she recruited people and J-R paid her to do this, which she also denied, although many of the social elite of New York and Los Angeles met John-Roger at dinner parties she threw. Art-book dealer Dagny Corcoran, for instance, told me that on a number of occasions she was seated between J-R acolytes and that of course she met John-Roger. "It was like trying literally to sell things to your friends. I'd never had that happen to me."
Arianna was key to John-Roger, who, says an ex-follower, "can read what drives you and feed it . . . Her purpose fit hand in glove with J-R's. She got to satisfy her power lust, and it was absolutely what 'God' wanted." Not only was Arianna passing along stock tips she had gleaned from one of the rich men she was trying to land at the time, financier David Murdock, she was also able to introduce John-Roger to such people as Peter Jennings, her close friend Barbara Walters, who was a bridesmaid at her wedding, and the actor Raul Julia. In exchange, John-Roger allegedly paid her "consulting fees" to help support her costly, over-the-top, debt-ridden lifestyle. One of his checks to her was for $10,000. "I was there in his bedroom when they discussed the money for Arianna," says Victor Toso, one of the several former members who have charged they were pressured to submit to sex with J-R. Arianna flatly denied receiving any such payments, and says she lived off lecture fees and her sizable book earnings. Finally, after I brought up the hierarchy yet again, she said, "It's like saying to me Jesus Christ is higher than this table or something. I don't express myself that way. Of course there is no comparison between Jesus Christ and John-Roger. That is absurd."
Within the last year, Arianna was seen at the $5,000-a-plate Founders Circle dinner, which John-Roger presides over for his inner circle. When I asked her why she gave him money, she was finally direct: "Because I believe in the work that he's doing with people—his teachings."
Peter McWilliams, a best-selling author who split from John-Roger only last March and who is embroiled in a lawsuit with M.S.I.A.—he has recently published Life 102: What to Do When Your Guru Sues You—remembers many times when Arianna would publicly share intimate details of her life with Michael, who evidently keeps his distance from John-Roger. McWilliams has met Michael Huffington several times, was Arianna's houseguest last year, and recently received a fund-raising letter from Michael saying that "it's never easy to ask for money from friends." He was also one of about 50 people on a special computer mailing system with J-R. According to McWilliams, Arianna would complain that Michael didn't want to pay for a big mansion in Santa Barbara because he preferred Texas, and at one retreat several years ago she beseeched the guru to tell her how to get her husband to impregnate her again. "And John-Roger would answer these questions," says McWilliams, "something like, 'You know, dahlin', we made a deal here. . . and if you're looking for a romance in the bargain, you're being stupid.'" Arianna seems to have absorbed so much from John-Roger that even the image of her life as being on a train appears on John-Roger's tapes. The title of the talk show she currently hosts, Critical Mass, on the Christian-conservative-endorsed National Empowerment Television, is also taken from a New Age concept and John-Roger's statement that "a critical-mass change in consciousness creates possibility, liberating us from the idea of impossibility." In Washington, Arianna has become the source of titters and endless gossip for her peculiar "Critical Mass" dinners, where she presides as moderator for guests who are not told that they are being tape-recorded, and where Michael, if he shows up, remains virtually silent.
Several of the nine sources I spoke with who had been with Arianna in M.S.I.A. told me that John-Roger guided her every step in her pursuit of Michael Huffington, whom she had met through the socialite Ann Getty, even as to how to negotiate their prenuptial contract. "He was perfect. He was rich and he had no point of view, so she could mold him," says a source. "It happened incredibly fast." Before and after every date, Arianna would check in with the guru by telephone, to see "what would God do next." McWilliams says, "It was like the Machiavelli brothers telling the princess how to win the war." For his own amusement and that of "the guys" who tended him, J-R would put Arianna on the speakerphone so that they all could hear the travails of her sex life, which she also "shared" in retreats and seminars.
Before Michael Huffington, Arianna had made plays for former California governor Jerry Brown, est founder Werner Erhard, developer and publisher Mort Zuckerman, and billionaire David Murdock. Arianna's major crushes were Erhard and Brown. "She very much wanted Jerry. She was a liberal Democrat then," says a close friend at the time. "She felt he could become president with her behind him." According to Peter Matson, "She was telling lots of people there was a wedding in the offing. In those days it was definitely Democratic politics. She raised money for Gary Hart. I met Gary Hart for the first time in her living room."
"She had an event at her house, a big dinner for my Senate election, but I couldn't go, so my parents went, "says Jerry Brown, who considers Arianna "very intelligent and very interesting—a lot of fun." Of course, Brown, Zuckerman, and Murdock all met John-Roger. Jerry Brown says, "I had an uncomfortable feeling about him." While Mort Janklow was Arianna's agent, he met John-Roger at one of her dinners. "I was astounded she was so impressed with him," he says.
The imperial sense of entitlement that so many feel Arianna Huffington displays in her work and her dealings with people was surely strengthened by being in such close communion with John-Roger. "When you think you are living under the power of the living Jesus, you lose perspective," says M.S.I.A. dropout Walter Ligon. "'I'm going to take care of you for the rest of your life-just chant my name.'"
Arianna Huffington has been accused of plagiarism in her best-selling biographies of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso, and Vanity Fair has learned that she also "borrowed" heavily for her 1983 book, The Gods of Greece. Two previous Callas biographers felt their material had been lifted. One, Henry Wisneski, said he did not care. The other, the late Gerald Fitzgerald, according to sources close to Arianna at the time, received a substantial settlement, although Arianna has maintained that the amount was only "in the low five figures."
When Picasso: Creator and Destroyer was published in 1988, it outraged the art world. With the help of Picasso's former mistress Françoise Gilot, Arianna painted a portrait of a cruel sex addict and genius who had no compunctions about ruining the women who loved him. According to Lydia Gasman, an art historian at the University of Virginia, Arianna tried to ingratiate herself with her even before the book came out. Gasman had not formally published her widely hailed four-volume Ph.D. thesis on Picasso, which was easily available on file in typescript. Picasso's principal biographer, John Richardson, a contributing editor of this magazine, praises Gasman as having "done more to unlock the secrets of the artist's imagination than anyone else." Gasman had been the first person to decode Picasso's arcane poetry and connect it to the symbolism in his art, the only person to interview his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, and the first to discover that for Picasso art was a form of magic to counter evil. Gasman had coined the creator-destroyer concept with regard to Picasso's art, and she was planning to publish her life's work in book form with Yale University Press.
On the eve of publication of Arianna's Picasso biography, according to Gasman and her husband, Daniel, Arianna started calling them. She also sent Gasman a letter saying that she had quoted her and that "each quote is fully attributed in the Source Notes in the back of the book." When Gasman received the book, she was in Israel tending her sick mother, and she gave it only a cursory once-over. She sent Arianna a note. Later, however, after Gasman had given Picasso a more careful reading—it cites her only twice in the source notes, and not at all in the acknowledgments—she was horrified. "What she did was steal 20 years of my work."
"She used it as a data bank," says Daniel Gasman, who teaches the history of ideas at the City University of New York. "I had a heart attack from this whole business." John Richardson backs up the Gasmans' claims, saying that Arianna got away with using Lydia Gasman's thesis as a "kind of dictionary." He says, "Throughout her book, Stassinopoulos Huffington systematically cannibalizes Gasman . . . and, almost as bad, cheapens Gasman's brilliant concepts."
When Gasman returned from Israel, she confronted Arianna. "I told her she was an intellectual kleptomaniac." She says that Arianna asked, "Don't you think I've added anything?" At one point, "she started to cry and said, 'I didn't mean it. I think like you,'" Then, says Gasman, "she proposed 'Entre nous, a secret arrangement if I can make it up to you.'" During dinner at a Manhattan hotel, Michael Huffington joined them. "How much money do you think your work is worth?" Gasman says he asked bluntly. She answered, "One million dollars. I worked all my life on it." She says the Huffingtons rebuffed her. The Huffingtons say it was Gasman who raised the money issue. "I told them I was going to put together all the evidence and make it public . . . The lawyers said, 'You are right, but legally it's difficult.'"
Copyright infringement is often very difficult to prove. Copied quotations have to be virtually exact. The Gasmans, whose lawyers lodged a complaint with Simon & Schuster, Arianna's publisher, don't have the money to fight a big case. They have also been scared off by the Huffingtons, who have called the Gasmans' charges "a hoax" and have threatened to sue them, for extortion. Daniel Gasman has compiled more than 100 pages of similar passages, thematic ideas, and language in his wife's work and Arianna's text, and is planning to publish the material.
Lydia Gasman mentioned that Arianna, in her book The Gods of Greece, was enormously indebted to psychologist James Hillman. I called Hillman to check. He told me that he recognized many insights from his book Re-Visioning Psychology, presented by Arianna without attribution. Arianna cites Hillman eight times in her index, but "the basic ideas running through the book are mine—that's what they're for. I just find her method not decent, not scholarly." Hillman added, "I praise her for her 'mercurial' gifts. As you know, Mercury was the god of thieves."
Before Arianna, Michael Huffington was so obscure that, despite his wealth, hardly anyone in his hometown of Houston with social or business connections knew of him. He once confessed to a California reporter that "before Arianna," whom he married when he was 38, maybe a dozen people had his phone number. "He was neurotic, tall, mournful, and in deep self-analysis, trying to figure out who he was," says a woman who was once fixed up with him. "You'd never mistake him for a good ol' Texas boy." As a teenager, Huffington was sent to board at the Culver Military Academy in Indiana. Later, he got degrees from Stanford and the Harvard Business School.
Michael's father, Roy, a major donor to the Republican Party and George Bush's ambassador to Austria, is a Harvard-trained geologist and wildcatter who made a huge strike in natural gas and oil in Indonesia in 1968. He was apparently a master at maintaining good relations with the Suharto dictatorship, and by 1975, after $1.5 billion had been invested to build a plant, Roy M. Huffington, Inc. was shipping 30,000 barrels of oil a day. Liquefied natural gas, however, was the greater treasure; by 1977 the equivalent of 70,000 barrels a day was being to shipped to the Japanese. Privately owned, Huffco always guarded its books, but Bill Taylor, the company's former head of accounting in Indonesia, says that in the 80s boom Huffco's share of the joint operation with its U.S. partners and the Indonesian government was "$60 to $65 million a year in pure profit."
Huffington likes to tell voters that he grew up middle-class and has suggested that he earned his first million by the sweat of his brow. His first "million" actually came from a buyout by his partners in an investment-banking venture. He also portrays himself as a successful businessman who can stop the wasterof federal money. In 1976, Michael joined Huffco at the financial end and sought to diversify the company. He spent years secretly buying up the equivalent of 11 blocks of real estate in downtown Houston and 419 acres near the airport. He also pushed for a multimillion-dollar drilling company but at the end of the 80s both ventures were major busts. Huffco lost another $65 million on a California refinery project, which Huffington says he opposed. The company left unpaid both $6.7 million in taxes the state of California claimed it was owed and a $6 million loan to a Texas bank, of which Huffington Sr. was a director. The bank later collapsed, and U.S. taxpayers footed the bill.
"Michael didn't add any value to his father's company-it was all there," says George Berko, a vice president of Unimar, a Huffco partner in Indonesia. "There was always concern among the operators that Michael would take over. They weren't going to conscience that." Taylor, however, says that Michael worked "very diligently and very hard."
Given his wealth and tall, blond looks, Huffington would appear to be extremely eligible. But he was rarely seen out with women, and rumors have swirled about his sexual preference. "I'd be shocked to death if there was ever affairs with girls," says a Houston woman who grew up with him. "There were escorting situations—he never had date dates. He told he thought it was terrible, the morality of young women today. He was appalled with a woman who put her hand on his leg after the third date."
I spoke with an openly gay close friend of Huffington's, who said, "For quite a few people it's not exactly black-and-white. I wouldn't be amazed if he thought in a couple of directions, but now he's a straight man with a couple of kids… He's very happy with Arianna." I also asked both Arianna and Michael Huffington about allegations that he is gay. Arianna replied that no one had ever brought up the question to her, adding, "That's like saying Michael is Chinese." Jim Worthen, an ultraconservative Santa Barbara talk-show host, however, described to five lunches he had had with Arianna, during which she tried to get him to endorse Michael while he raised the issues not only of Michael's sexual orientation but also of her long association with John-Roger. I asked Michael Huffington himself about the allegations after he summoned the guard to throw me out of the congressional building. "Sorry, I have no comment," he replied.
Huffington has long had a spiritual bent and political aspirations. So it seemed perfect when Ann Getty got Arianna and Michael together at the San Francisco Opera in 1985. When he asked her what was the most important thing in her life, she answered, "God." Lightning struck. "When she met Michael, she set him on fire somehow and made him feel gifted," says their friend Sugar Rautbord. Getty offered to pay for the wedding reception, which she assumed would cost about $10,000. It ended up costing $100,000 more than that, and still being talked about eight years later for its outré ostentation. For several years afterward, Ann Getty felt so violated that she would barely speak to Arianna.
Two years before the marriage, Michael had started lobbying hard for a job in Washington. Today he attacks Feinstein for accepting money from political-action committees, calling her a "special interest slot machine." But he has given $10,000 to Newt Gingrich's GoPAC, and while he was on a Washington job hunt during the Reagan presidency, the Huffco PAC and his family were contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the G.O.P. In fact, records filed with the Federal Elections Commission as well as in Texas and California, show that since 1979 Michael, Arianna, Michael's family, and the Huffco PAC have contributed at least $1,036,989 to federal, state, and local campaigns and initiatives, including $391,850 by Michael in California since 1991, and $22,000 to Senator Phil Gramm of Texas. Arianna was telling people in Santa Barbara last summer that Gramm would pick Michael to be his running mate if he got the presidential nomination in 1996.
Huffington was first up for a job in the U.S. Commerce Department, but his name was suddenly withdrawn. The Wall Street Journal recently reported the probable reason: Huffco had been fined $250,000 by the Commerce Department for "repeated unlicensed shipments of shock batons, handcuffs, billy clubs, fingerprint materials and computer equipment" to Indonesia and Singapore, authoritarian governments with numerous human-rights violations. He finally landed a job in the Defense Department, as deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy, but lasted only a year. The Huffingtons abruptly left town and returned to Houston. "She was house hunting in River Oaks," says the doyenne of Texas gossip columnists, Maxine Mesinger, "and all of a sudden they went to California."
In fact, Huffington himself stayed in Texas. He persuaded his family to sell Huffco after he had spent three days at an Episcopal retreat shortly after Arianna suffered a miscarriage. In April 1990, Taiwan's Chinese Petroleum Corporation bought the holding in Indonesia and the Houston real estate for an estimated $600 million.
Michael Huffington did not register to vote in California until September 1991. During the sale, he avoided California state income taxes by keeping his residence in Texas. He thought for a while of starting a movie company and toyed with the idea of buying Santa Barbara News-Press. Between 1988 and 1991, when her daughters were babies, Arianna was not stressing volunteerism. Then shortly before Christmas 1991, when Michael decided that he was running, the Huffingtons gave nearly $100,000 to Santa Barbara charities and local initiatives. "Checks started flying all over town," says Hazel Blankenship. At first, the nine-term incumbent congressman, conservative Bob Lagomarsino, a well-to-do beer distributor who specialized in constituent services to placate his moderate district, appeared to be entrenched. But in 1992 California's congressional districts were redrawn, and Huffington stepped forward. "It turned into a civil war here," says Jim Youngson, who worked Lagomarsino. "The whole Republican party is still fractured and split to this day."
Lagomarsino was stunned by the money Huffington started throwing around and the viciousness of his attacks. "It was just awful. I was in Washington trying to do my job, which was probably a mistake, and he wouldn't debate—he'd send her," says Lagomarsino. "He's a P.R. consultant's dream and a congressman's nightmare," says Norma Lagomarsino, the former congressman's wife. "I couldn't watch TV—his ads on all day long—direct mail almost every day, and videotapes to every registered Republican… He'd make these allegations and he wouldn't answer the same way because he had no record." Then as now, Huffington sought to portray anyone who was actually devoted to political life as contemptible; he constantly ducked debates and direct questioning. Lawyer John Diamond, who actively campaigned for Huffington but has become disillusioned and refers to him as Hamlet Fluffington, says, "He's so insecure that, unless he's totally sure of what you're going to do and he feels safe, he won't let you be around him."
The primary was the hardest hurdle for the Huffingtons, and after they won, Arianna approached Norma Lagomarsino at a Republican ladies' tea. "She backs me against the wall and asks, 'What can we do? We want his endorsement.' She kept saying, 'We're so sorry.' She started to cry big tears… It was strange. They're strange. There is no shame." Arianna denies that she asked for the endorsement and says that Mrs. Lagomarsino "makes things up."
Only eight months after taking his congressional seat, Michael Huffington declared his candidacy for the Senate. (Characteristically, he didn't even tell his Washington office where he was going on the day he flew to California to announce.) A few people saw it coming. A campaign worker says Huffington altered a statement pledging that he would serve three terms in Congress to say that he would serve no more than three terms in the House. By last July, it had escalated to his becoming Phil Gramm's running mate for the presidency. Since then, Huffington's supporters are talking openly about the White House, and Arianna has gotten herself to be seen in some journals as "Hillary's opposite." Blankenship says, "She's bought an election and she's won. Why would she not be measuring drapes in the White House?"
Before April of this year, while Feinstein was off television and in Washington, Huffington spent more than $3 million on TV to narrow his opponent's huge, 26-point lead in the polls to only 6 points, and to double her negative ratings. By Labor Day, Huffington had spent $10.5 million on his campaign. His resources are such that he can almost instantly counter any Feinstein attack by buying the time to counterattack. He reportedly had plans to spend another $2.5 million in a huge direct-mail effort, and he had purchased $5 million more in TV time between October 10 and Election Day, which would give the average California viewer 40 opportunities to see his TV spots. The race is too close to call.


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Be the first OregonLive.com user to add photos or videos of Nash Enterprises
Nash Enterprises can be found at Sears Rd 81510. The following is offered: Contracting Equipment Rental. The entry is present with us since Sep 9, 2010 and was last updated on Nov 14, 2013. In Creswell there are 1 other Contracting Equipment Rental. An overview can be found here.
Industrial machinery and equipment


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These pictures are from last Saturday and Sunday. I narrowed them down a bit. Saturday we flew there really early, and as soon as we got there, we dropped our bags and walked from our hotel at Broadway and 76, to Times Square. We got sushi at Haru, and it was delightful. Later that afternoon/night we met up with Stir and Damon, and went to Westville for dinner (top notch choice yo). Shopping and walking and drinking egg creams with them is great.
Sunday wasn't bad either. Dad and I walked from out hotel the opposite direction, this time ending up at 106th and Amsterdam. We stopped at Zabar's and this other deli called Murray's. It was delicious. Basically we just walked and ate really good food.


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"Draft" – Model Rules for F.C.A.T.A. [updated 30th Mar]
Updated Model Rules 30th Mar 2011 –
Please use the linked PDF file to read proposed Model Rules – [all amendments to standard MODEL rules as published at the Office Fair Trading website [http://www.fairtrading.qld.gov.au/incorporating-an-association.htm] are highlighted in 'yellow'] – Link to PDF file – FCATA Draft Model Rules 20110329
[Original Draft Objects for FCATA – Jan/Feb 2011]
- The establishment of a Community based Aqua-Therapy Program for the greater Fraser Coast Regional Council community.
Purpose Program:
- The purpose of the program is to provide a membership association whereby members will benefit from an aqua-therapy exercise program designed to aid, assist, and provide a self help activity/exercise outlet through professionally supervised aqua-therapy sessions,
- The Association is for members who suffer varying degrees of disabilities causing mobility issues whereby aqua-therapy will provides said members with opportunities to self-help and improve their quality of life through exercise,
- The Association aims to provide encouragement and purpose for members to allow them to network with one another and form community based friendships that allow members greater social outlets and a better quality of life,
- It is simply a program designed to offer persons with disabilities the opportunity to maintain their independence through a self-help program that will improve their quality of life, provide an outdoor exercise activity that will assist with their mobility issues, and to do so at a subsidised cost so in keeping with a community that supports those less privileged.
Targeted Group:
- The program is intended for those citizens living in the larger Fraser Coast Regional Council community who suffer varying mobility issues arising from their disabilities, and other physical ailments,
Management and Operational responsibility:
- The program will seek to obtain funding via various public health programs – both new and existing – through existing Carer Groups already operational within the Fraser Coast region.
- The funding is to be used in providing the services as outlined hereto and elsewhere in the Rules of the Association as outlined hereto.
Outline of Program:
- For the most part – participants of all TIER structures of the program shall be in receipt of 'Concession' card benefits from the Federal Government of Australia. Exceptions to this can be made at the discretion of the Management Committee – depending on circumstances, funding availability, and the Funding provider rules compliance associated with the issuance of any or all the funding the program uses.
- There are no other restrictions to eligibility except those conditions contained in the Clause above.
- The TIER 1-3 structure pertains to the Levels of Disability i.e.
- TIER 1: This grouping is the most important and includes persons with severe disablilities who require full/part time carers.
- TIER 2: This group is represented by self help disability pensioners, and other pensioners with mobility issues and wish to become involved in a healthier aqua therapy/exercise program on a regular basis.
- TIER 3: This group is represented by all the other 'pensioner' groups, including self funded retirees, and people living independently who want to be part of a healthier exercise program to maintain their independent lifestyles.
- For TIER 1 participants – the Association will provide or negotiate with existing Carers for transport to and from the pool.
- For TIER 2 & 3 participants – transport arrangements are by negotiation with the Association by each participant on a needs basis – if transport is required there may be a 'transport' levy applied to offset shortfall in funding allocations to cover the program. If specific 'transport' funding can be obtained – there will be no additional 'transport' levy applied.
- It is acknowledged that the TIER 1 transport costs and requirements will be much higher than those of the TIER 2 & 3 participants. The programs priority will always be to offer those in greatest need a priority service.
- The program plans to operate five days a week – three days at the Hervey Bay and two days at Maryborough one week, and the reverse the following week – i.e. three days at Maryborough and two days at Hervey Bay in the alternate week.
Strategic Plan Time Frame:
- The Pilot Program will target TIER 1 participants and once funding is secured, TIER 2 and TIER 3 programs will commence in Jan 2012 and Jul 2012 respectively.
- See attached Time Frame schedule to see full program implementation.
- Program eligibility will be by way of membership application for all TIER groups.
- There will be a membership fee applicable to all participants and structured to represent the varying TIER group respective requirements, i.e. TIER 1 will be slightly higher than TIER 2 which will also be slightly higher than TIER 3.
- All levels of membership fees shall be set by the Management Committee with respect to the Associations annual budget and funding revenues.
- The Management Committee will have the responsibility of managing the number of participants within each TIER group with respect to the funding allocations received on an annual basis.
- The program will be dependent on volunteers to assist with the pool management of TIER 1 participants. Tier 2 and 3 members will be asked to participate as part of these volunteer requirements.
- The program will gratefully accept any public interest in becoming volunteers. Professional service providers with CPR and First AID and aqua-therapy type skills will be sort as part of the volunteer program.
- All volunteers will hold CPR and First Aid certificates – the Program will provide training for all those volunteers who require this accreditation.
- In all TIER groups – the ratio of participants to volunteers and part/full time staff will be fixed at a number to be set by the Management Committee. This will restrict the number of participants if the volunteer numbers are not available to assist with the program. Targeted volunteers will include local Swimming Clubs and their members who are strong swimmers and are interested in being part of the program.
- Local schools will also be invited to become involved via student bodies, or as part of a work experience, or school based project.
- The local Council will be approached and asked to generate a Community rewards style involvement for local schools and sports clubs. This might be in the way of fund raising or school sponsorship participation for parts of the program.
- The same style of incentives from the Business Community will also be canvassed.
Part/Full Time Staff:
- The Management Committee will be responsible for hiring specially trained staff who are experienced in handling severely disabled persons in an aquatic environment. Some training will be offered and provided by the Association to encourage youth involvement and a sense of community participation.
Pool Availability:
- For most members, heated pools will be required for the therapy sessions.
- At the TIER 2 & 3 levels, there will be some members who are proficient swimmers and want to do laps independent of the 'therapy' sessions. This will require designated 'lap lanes' provisioning.
- The total pool access and provisions will be an ongoing arrangement with the Pool Management and be under conditions negotiated with the Council.
- The time duration for each 'pool session' for each TIER group will also depend on negotiations with Council and the number of participants and the TIER group numbers.
- It is expected that all 'therapy' sessions will take place in daylight hours.
March 30, 2011 at 9:45 am


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Arbogast grimaced. His turn. "Oh, now it's the fat jokes? Okay, payback for calling you girly, I guess. We're even. Just so you know, though, I don't even like doughnuts. My downfall is a good fried egg sandwich with two bacon strips, washed down with a pint of milk."
She nodded. "Fair enough. Truce. What I want is this. I want you, personally, to go through the place that was burglarized with me. Nothing more, nothing less, and no report of our visit filed with your department."
He leaned back, considering. Too much to hope she was offering a cash payment for his services, but then again, money had never been his primary motivation. "Has the place been rented out yet? To a new tenant? I presume you know."
"I do. And no, it hasn't."
"You wouldn't be friends with the landlord, would you?"
"Privileged information, officer."
Homer sighed. He was going to do it, obviously. He'd have to go in plain clothes, not that any one of his cops on the beat who spotted him could possibly miss recognizing his vast bulk. Or maybe they wouldn't; the Sling Sleazer was all too accurate with her observation that a lot of police officers were brain dead. What was that first name? He should have written it down right away. Toyota? Toya? No…Corolla. Corolla. He cocked a bushy white eyebrow in her direction. Prematurely white, no indication of age. Ran in his family.
"Corolla, I'll do it if you'll answer one question honestly and truthfully."
"Why me? There are officers in the department with higher rank, not to mention dozens of beat cops you could have easily razzled and dazzled. Why pick on this poor ol' fat desk sergeant?"
"Nice try, Homer." She laughed out loud, a sound he realized he liked a lot even when it was aimed at him.
"The hayseed act. You're a Princeton grad, top five percent of your class."
"Yeah, right. In English Lit."
"Exactly. You use your mind and always have."
"Oh, Lord deliver me." He groaned in mock agony. "It's those blasted essays, eh?"
"Yup." She grinned, a cat dipping a canary in a bowl of fresh cream. "The Essential Liberty Series. You're famous."
He snorted derisively. "They couldn't have sold more than five hundred copies! Oh, woe is me. I'll never outlive them, will I?"
"Probably not," she agreed. "They may just live on after you like Thomas Paine's Common Sense or Herbert Ruud's The Jovian Blessing.
Hoisted on his own pen point. Well, it looked like he had it to do. The little jaunt to the former safe shack would have to be made in daylight to avoid looking suspicious on the face of the thing. On a day he had off, for the same reason…and at an hour when it seemed least likely a beat cop would be around to notice. In EC, especially in the warrens, that meant….
"How about 8:00 a.m. on Sunday? Plenty of church traffic for cover and too early for the rest of our boys in blue to pay much attention." In his precinct, anyway. Unless something big was going down, and being the Frog, he'd know if there was.
"Homey is fine. We're conspirators together now, I guess. You obviously checked me out enough to know I'm curious as any cat. But before I key us back to Level Two on the board, I've gotta know. Where'd you get the name Nails? Because you're tough as nails, or what?"
"That's the usual first guess."
"But off base?"
"Not even in the ball park. When I was about three or four, at least according to my Dad, I'd get this voice when I wanted something I couldn't have. He says it sounded like fingernails on a blackboard."
"Double yowch."
"Let me guess. You still have the voice, and I'm in one piece because I gave you what you wanted?"
"That's for me to know and you to find out, Homey. Or not. Either way, I don't mind being called Nails except when we're out on that little expedition on Sunday. Not really interested in somebody figuring out who I am ahead of time. I pick you up?"
Why not? He had no wife, so jealousy wasn't an issue. Nor was it like she couldn't find him any time she wanted. Besides, maybe being seen with a stunning brunette would improve his stock at the local Singles Mingle.
After she left, he sat thinking for some time. The Essential Liberty Series. He'd penned the first of those essays more than fifteen years earlier. People with strict views from any position–left, right, or center–tended to love some of what he said while hating the remainder…which usually resulted in their hating the entire lot on general principles. Only a rare independent thinker could respond rationally without becoming upset.
Most importantly, those writings had thoroughly inflamed his childhood Southern Baptist Church. The clergy had liked portions of his stands on states rights, railed against his pro choice view on abortion, and come completely unglued over his presentation portraying karma and reincarnation as viable concepts. He'd made history of a sort. The Church had actually quit praying for him and kicked him out, he scared its elders that badly.
It had been a painful time. Series One of the essays had been completed and published, yet he could not make himself sign the open contract for Series Two that sat hopefully waiting on his home desk. With church attendance no longer a part of his life, using church traffic to cover a clandestine operation was about all he had left. Still…maybe he could start writing again. Astounding what a bit of interest from a pretty girl could do to a man. His mind might know full well he was being used to get her what she wanted, that the chance of a young woman like her actually finding him attractive underneath all those years of wear and tear plus a hundred pound covering of lard…nah. Snowball in a hot spot.
But that didn't really matter, did it? The brain could know everything, yet it made no difference at all. Because testosterone had a mind of its own, and right now….
A giant fat-tailed Frog with turbocharged testosterone. The image struck him as hilarious. Frog Arbogast out on the town with Nails Hendrix. Frog and Nails. Frog nails Nails. Now, there would be a headline. Not even the tabloids would touch that one. Still, one thing was certain. Sunday was coming right around, and the Frog was going to help a definitely dangerous journalist dig around under one of his personal lily pads. Sniff the pond scum, they would. Count the algae. Dredge up sludge. See what seed might have been dropped by a former Seeder.
In the meantime, he thought maybe for supper he'd walk the two miles from his apartment to the Railway Restaurant. And back. Could he still walk two miles? Slowly, maybe. Very slowly. Did she know he'd actually been a varsity athlete at Princeton in three separate sports?
Did it matter?
He forced himself to think about really important things like making sure he fed the cat when he got home and changed the litter before going out. Sheba, his long haired feline, usually slept in bed with him. Right now, he was thinking unfaithful thoughts. A human bedmate would be nice. Maybe not even even a stunner like Nails Hendrix. A lesser woman, perhaps. One of the waittresses from the Railway seemed pretty friendly.
It had after all been a long time since Nora's death. Maybe it was time to shed a little flab. Yes, he knew he was being used. It just didn't matter. Didn't matter at all.


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