Interesting Background on Rove "dirty tricks" and friends

[papau]

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000176&sid=aE_uAkyJXmAE&refer=us_elections

Bush Adviser Rove's Ties to Swift Boat Donor Perry Date to 1978
Sept. 24 (Bloomberg) -- In 1994, when George W. Bush first ran for governor of Texas, Karl Rove was one of his chief strategists. Rove's friend, Houston homebuilder Bob Perry, contributed $26,100, campaign records show. Perry, 71, has been the largest single donor to Republicans in Texas since 1998, contributing $5.4 million, records show. <snip>

Rove, 53, is a senior adviser to Bush, who has raised $260.6 million as of Aug. 31 for his re-election campaign against U.S. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Federal filings show Perry gave $200,000 to help start Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that says it has no ties to Bush, while paying for advertisements attacking Kerry, 60. <snip>

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My comments - later in the story we learn that Perry's company had problems with lawsuits over the houses he builds - so he elected Perry friendly judges via Rove and financed two groups that lobbied for amendments to the state constitution that voters approved in 2003 to limit damages in lawsuits.

Of course the Swift Boat/Bush ties via Benjamin Ginsberg, an election lawyer for Bush's campaign and the Swift Boat group, and Colonel Ken Cordier, who was on a military veterans' steering committee for the Bush campaign,and who appeared in Swift Boat adsm is mentioned. But I had not known Bush super donor Boone Pickens had given the group $500,000.

But the best part of the article was this history of the early Rove from files at the National Archives that contain a transcript of a tape of one seminar (per the Washington Post it may have taken place in Lexington, Kentucky, in August 1972) which records Rove and his colleague Bernie Robinson describing how Rove had posed as a supporter of Alan Dixon, an Illinois Democrat running for state treasurer, going to Dixon's campaign office in Chicago, and taking two reams of Dixon campaign stationery. Rove then printed up a set of 1,000 invitations to the opening of the Dixon campaign headquarters in Chicago,on which was written "Free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing," , and he then handed out the invitations at a free Sly and the Family Stone concert in Chicago.

The best line of the story was "Robinson, 57, now a lobbyist at Livingston Group in Washington...doesn't believe Rove would do anything unethical."