Major Republican Donor Mel Sembler Plans to Fund Liz Cheney’s New Organization

[seafan]

The rats are still eating our seed corn.



Mel Sembler


Michael Isikoff of Newsweek writes:


October 23, 2009

One of the Republican party's biggest fundraisers confirmed Friday that he plans to help bankroll Keep America Safe-the new political advocacy group started by Liz Cheney to attack President Obama's national security policies. As reported on Declassified Thursday, Keep America Safe will run radio and Web ads criticizing President Obama's national security policies in the home districts of vulnerable Democratic congressmen. "I love Liz Cheney and what she's doing," Mel Sembler, a Florida real estate magnate said in a telephone interview, adding that he planned to be "as supportive as my budget will allow." Sembler wouldn't discuss numbers. But in his case those resources are considerable. A former finance chairman for the Republican National Committee who later served as President George W. Bush's Ambassador to Italy (and chairman of the Scooter Libby Defense Trust), Sembler has pumped at least $456,605 into political races over the past 12 years.

Sembler has long been close to the Cheneys—he tried to persuade Dick Cheney to run for president in 1996 and is now encouraging Liz Cheney to run for Congress from Wyoming (although he added she's not yet convinced "the time is right.") So while not exactly a surprise, Sembler's comments to help clear up one mystery: where at least some of the money will be coming from when Keep America Safe starts running ads blasting Obama for promising to shutdown Gitmo.

Yeah, http://www.alternet.org/story/27725/">THAT Mel Sembler.


November 8, 2005

.....

But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993.

.....

Melvin Sembler stepped down earlier this year as Our Man In Rome -- he also served under the first Bush as Ambassador to Australia. Were Monroe's story unique, his STRAIGHT clinics might still be in business. Instead, his creation, which he stubbornly defends, closed in 1993 after reports of sexual abuse, beating and stomping to boys called "faggots" for hours while being spat upon -- humiliation so bad that a Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it potentially mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a former STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic murder.

Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure settlements sucked it dry, and state health officials yanked its licenses after media reports of teen torture and cover-up, Sembler himself escaped punishment. As one of the preeminent and hardest-working GOP fundraisers, Sembler has received the honor of living during the George W. Bush presidency at the Villa Taverna, the official residence for the U.S. ambassador, which has the largest private garden in Rome. One night in May at "The Magic Kingdom" (as Mel and Betty call it), the dining room filled with smoke from fine cigars, as the ambassador entertained Bush Sr. and an entourage -- until Betty complained that the old friends were stinking up "my house," the Washington Post reported.

He's come home, but still wafting across national drug policy is the influence of his STRAIGHT, which has legally changed its identity to the Drug Free America Foundation (director Calvina Fay denies it's the same organization but the name change is listed in Florida corporate filings). Subsidized by tax dollars, it lobbies for severe narcotics policies and workplace drug testing, with an advisory board that includes the like of Gov. Jeb Bush and his wife Columba, and Homeland Security Director of Public Safety Christy McCampbell. A more pressing issue is that former overseers of Sembler's company, true believers in the STRAIGHT model, are still running spin-off businesses that treat teens with the old methods.

.....

The story begins in 1976 when Sembler, who'd made his fortune in Florida real estate, founded STRAIGHT from the ashes of The Seed -- an earlier program suspended by the U.S. Senate for tactics reminiscent, said a senator, of Communist POW camps. But as the Reagan years rolled into view, and a climate of fear nurtured a Shock and Awe approach to teens, the Semblers found a new world of acceptance for an anything-goes treatment business, meting out punishment in privately run warehouses. Endorsers from Nancy Reagan to George H.W. Bush lent their names to the program, celebrating a role model weapon in the "war on drugs."

Nine years before the elder Bush took office, Sembler was a faithful political supporter, and raising millions beginning in '79 for the Bushes' clash with Reagan for the Republican nomination. In 1988, as Bush finally accepted the GOP's nomination for president, Sembler sat in the front row. With his man in the White House, STRAIGHT would become a vehicle for purchasing eminence as a Drug War thinker. By 1988, Sembler wasn't just running the Vice President's "Team 100" soft money campaign and enjoying steak dinners with him -- he was sojourning in George and Barbara Bush's living room, briefing the candidate on drug policy. As a token of his friendship, he gave Bush a new tennis racket, receiving this note in return: "Maybe we can play at Camp David someday."

.....

Undermining a president trying to bring more stability to our foreign policy ought to carry some kind of penalty.

[orpupilofnature57]

1. Another patriotic misanthrope ,God bless the people that suck up to you.

[MarjorieG]

2. Was it Isikoff tonight talking about running scary ads on 2010 Blue Dogs w. scary Muslim-like Gitmo

prisoners, a la Bin Laden 2002 & 2004.

[seafan]

3. That was Isikoff, all right. The dirty players are still in the game. And Liz Cheney wants in.

Something is going to have to give very soon.