Gambling? In the casino?
A peach of a scandal in Georgia
Garrison Keillor
Chicago Tribune
If a preacher secretly accepts a bucket of money from a saloonkeeper to organize a temperance rally at a rival saloon and maybe send in a gang of church ladies to chop up the bar with their little hatchets, this would strike you and me as sleazy, but others are willing to make allowances, and so Ralph Reed's political career is still alive and breathing in Georgia. He has bathed himself in tomato juice and hopes to smile his way through the storm.
The facts are fairly simple. Mr. Reed left the Christian Coalition in 1997 as it was sinking, and he was paid by Jack Abramoff to organize opposition to a gambling bill in the Texas legislature that would have opened the door to competition for Mr. Abramoff's client casinos in Louisiana. So Reed got the good Christians of Texas ("We have over 50 pastors mobilized, with a total membership in those churches of over 40,000--that includes Second Baptist, which has 12,000 members," he reported breathlessly) to bombard the legislature with phone calls and letters denouncing gambling, for which Mr. Reed was paid millions of dollars in gambling money, by way of Abramoff's bagman, Grover Norquist.
Reed also helped defeat a state lottery and video poker in Alabama, on behalf of casinos in Mississippi. In Alabama, he told Abramoff, he had "over 3,000 pastors and 90,000 religious conservative households." He enlisted these Baptists in a fight against one saloon while he was on the payroll of another.
Imagine if Ralph Nader had solicited money from Ford and Chrysler when he went after General Motors' Corvair.
(There's more.)
Garrison Keillor
Chicago Tribune
If a preacher secretly accepts a bucket of money from a saloonkeeper to organize a temperance rally at a rival saloon and maybe send in a gang of church ladies to chop up the bar with their little hatchets, this would strike you and me as sleazy, but others are willing to make allowances, and so Ralph Reed's political career is still alive and breathing in Georgia. He has bathed himself in tomato juice and hopes to smile his way through the storm.
The facts are fairly simple. Mr. Reed left the Christian Coalition in 1997 as it was sinking, and he was paid by Jack Abramoff to organize opposition to a gambling bill in the Texas legislature that would have opened the door to competition for Mr. Abramoff's client casinos in Louisiana. So Reed got the good Christians of Texas ("We have over 50 pastors mobilized, with a total membership in those churches of over 40,000--that includes Second Baptist, which has 12,000 members," he reported breathlessly) to bombard the legislature with phone calls and letters denouncing gambling, for which Mr. Reed was paid millions of dollars in gambling money, by way of Abramoff's bagman, Grover Norquist.
Reed also helped defeat a state lottery and video poker in Alabama, on behalf of casinos in Mississippi. In Alabama, he told Abramoff, he had "over 3,000 pastors and 90,000 religious conservative households." He enlisted these Baptists in a fight against one saloon while he was on the payroll of another.
Imagine if Ralph Nader had solicited money from Ford and Chrysler when he went after General Motors' Corvair.
(There's more.)
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