| The National Journal is taking a look at the increasingly tight appearance of the relationship between Norm Coleman and his lobbyists.
Those lobbyists are the ones that run his campaign and are tight with the brutal military regime in Myanmar.
Good stuff - check it out: Most curiously, Larson provides Coleman with a place to live in Washington. In July 2007, Coleman began paying Larson $600 a month in rent for a portion of a one-bedroom basement apartment in a Capitol Hill town house that Larson owns. The way Coleman explained the arrangement, the apartment serves as a crash pad. The 58-year-old senator sleeps in a bed shoehorned into a 10-by-10 bedroom, and he said he spends perhaps only "three waking hours a night" in the place.
Earlier this month, after National Journal questioned Coleman and Larson about the living arrangement, the senator said he discovered that his rent for last November and January had not been paid. In mid-June, Coleman covered the back rent with a personal check for $1,200 made out to Larson and signed by the senator's wife. Last year, Coleman sold furniture to Larson to cover one month's rent, according to Larson. And Larson held on to yet another month's rent check for three months, cashing it a few days after NJ's inquiries.
Larson's St. Paul-based company, FLS Connect, is a critical component of Coleman's political operation. The firm, which has raised money and hustled up voters for Coleman, has been paid about $1.6 million since mid-2001 by Coleman's Northstar Leadership political action committee and two Senate campaigns, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Larson serves as the PAC's treasurer and provides it with office space in St. Paul; Coleman's Senate campaign stopped renting space from Larson last year. Larson is the L in FLS, which is still closely linked to the disgraced lobbying firm DCI, which also had some funny little links to the campaign of presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
But this is more than just the same old culture of corruption we've come to expect from the modern Republican Party -- Norm Coleman is paying rent with furniture, his wife is writing his checks (since Coleman himself doesn't appear to have listed a checking account on his personal financial disclosure), and the 10x10 D.C. bachelor pad he's renting is owned by the same lobbyist who he pays for political consulting and whose colleagues donate to Coleman's campaign....it's a dizzying array of disingenuous conduct.
Is it a campaign issue, per se? Only if you believe that Washington lobbyists have a bit too much influence already with our elected leaders. One need only look as far as the debacle of a FISA bill that's making its way through the Senate to understand how powerful the lobbyists who control the easy money in Washington really are.
Add Larson and the rest of his FLS/DCI buddies to the list of people Norm Coleman would do well to remove from his company. |
