New soft-money group to launch anti-Kerry ads

[Kadie]

New soft-money group to launch anti-Kerry ads

APARNA H. KUMAR, Associated Press Writer
Friday, September 3, 2004


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(09-03) 19:57 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --

Move over, MoveOn.org. The liberal-leaning group that has raised millions of dollars to run negative ads attacking President Bush now has a competitor on the right with a somewhat similar name.

The conservative MoveOnForAmerica.org plans to blast battleground states with anti-John Kerry ads until Election Day.

One of the conservative group's ads criticizes Kerry's role as a private lawyer in representing George Reissfelder, who spent 15 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of a murder.

A second ad, to be rolled out later, will focus on the political connections between Kerry and former Democratic presidential contender Al Sharpton.

more...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/09/03/politics2257EDT0777.DTL

[hedda_foil]

1. Watch for connections with the Willie Horton ads.

[alarcojon]

9. Yes, this Sharpton angle

looks like a blatant appeal to racism. Will the country fall for it again?

[uhhuh]

17. Marks really has it out for Sharpton

He was behind the Americans Against Hate ads in 2000. He treid to tie Al Gore to Sharpton too.

His focus groups must really hate Sharpton to keep dragging him out for abuse.

http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/2000/11/06/stuff.html

Also, Kerry's firm was ASSIGNED the case that freed a wrongfully convicted man. He didn't even ask to defend him, but he obviously did a good job:

"In 1982, Kerry assisted his partner Roanne Sragow in obtaining a new trial for George Reissfelder, who had been wrongfully convicted as the 1967 murder accomplice of an infamous Boston criminal named William "Silky" Sullivan. Reissfelder was serving a life sentence, and in 1980, with the help of a so-called "jailhouse lawyer," a judge decided to appoint Sragow to challenge Reissfelder's conviction. Kerry and Sragow discovered that the convicted murderer, Silky Sullivan, while dying of leukemia in prison, confessed to a priest that Reissfelder was innocent. Kerry and Sragow obtained an affidavit from the priest, confirming that Sullivan confessed that Reissfelder was innocent. With this evidence, and the testimony of a Boston detective who believed that others and not Reissfelder were involved, Kerry and Sragow convinced the judge. Judge Andrew R. Linscott granted a new trial, the district attorney decided against filing new charges, and Reissfelder was subsequently released."


http://news.findlaw.com/newsmakers/john.kerry.profile.html

[BrendaStarr]

23. A few minutes on some very popular boards will tell you

that racism is big in the US and even growing.

The Al Sharpton connection is indeed the race card.

[krkaufman]

26. Ok, how is this a negative for Kerry? I'm stumped. n/t

[KDLarsen]

29. Me too..

.. he helped free a man that had been wrongly jailed for murder - and that's supposed to damage him.. how?

[Orangepeel]

34. he won't have been "wrongly jailed" by the time they get through with him

they'll make him into a cold-hearted, ruthless killer who Kerry freed on a technicality with the help of his activist judge friends.

this situation exemplifies why I get upset during primaries when someone argues that we can't nominate so-and-so because the republicans will use such-and-such against them. It doesn't matter what "dirt" they have on our candidates. If they don't have any, they'll just make shit up.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

28. Remember the blather abt McCain having a black baby?

Until the press finds a backbone, this crap will continue to fly.

[Born Free]

25. Where is the 527 "Christians for Truth" ?

A 527 targeting the bush cowards Christianity could do well, he only became an Evangelical after losing and election to one and anyone that looks at his actions could ask the question "What would Jesus do?" This would all be fair game because the bush team uses religion as one of their character issues, suggesting the bush coward is better because he has faith- well- perhaps it's time to question that faith, is it real or is it just a political ploy?

[noahmijo]

2. uhhh WHAT???

I remember Randi talking about that case. The guy was set free and was going to be executed and thanks to Kerry he was set free!

[GoddessOfGuinness]

10. repiglicans don't like that...

It makes the government appear weak and flawed.
The government must appear perfect even if it isn't.

:puke:

[Tight_rope]

3. Well the civil war has just begun!

[w13rd0]

4. Wow...

...I sense an almost blatant racism emergent from the conservative MoveOnForAmerica.org (gee, how UNoriginal can you dolts get?). Ah, Bushbots, so many character flaws, so little media exposure to point them out...

[cardlaw]

5. kerry's website

doesn't mention any private practice work.

[truthisfreedom]

6. yawn.

[AlCzervik]

7. Why would helping an innocent person get out of prison be bad?

[LisaL]

16. Volunteering to go to Vietnam and being a hero

normally wouldn't be considered bad either. Welcome to the Bush world!

[countmyvote4real]

8. It’s time to call out these groups as the lying liars they are.

Back it up with real checkable facts.

[BrendaStarr]

24. Mixed message boards are open day and night to help us get the word out

Welcome to the fight!

It will be tough. Right now the Republicans are flooding the boards with their paid posters (and that is a completely hidden campaign tactic of theirs which makes me suspect that the funding is completely hidden too).

But even when we feel we are losing on the mixed boards we are winning. I'm sure of that because the independents (the real ones, not the right wing idealogues that pretend for a while to be independents) tend to side with us after a while.

Our greatest need is for more of our people to do it more often out on the mixed boards.

Otherwise politically naive people are stuck with the lies of the right wing if we aren't engaging them.

[Khephra]

11. MoveOnForAmerica.org?

What is that? The 12094803982 right-leaning group with a name ripped-off from a liberal group? Originality, thy name is NOT Republican.

It's unfortunate that there's so many people out there that are just stupid enough to confuse groups just because of a similar name.

[shraby]

18. AND donate to the wrong group

because they mixed up the names.

[uhhuh]

21. I wonder if Moveon.org could sue?

Or do you think that's what they want in order to get free publicity for this group?

[Snellius]

12. FOX & Drudge subtlely play on this race-hating bigotry all the time

The day of the last midterms Drudge ran a full page, unflattering photo of a group of black people standing before a voting booth. The cation: "Let the best candidate win." The implication is always: vote Democratic and "those people" will be taking over again.

[SKKY]

19. I'm glad someone recognizes Fox for what they are...

...Anyone notice how Mark Furman has been all over Fox the past couple of years? Anyone remember, other than OJ, why Mark Furman is so famous? Rupert Murdock owns Fox. Rupert Murdock is so conservative, he's probably pissed off that we let individuals other than land owners have the right to vote. Fox=Racism. Sorry folks. It had to be said.

[Dickie Flatt]

13. This smells.

Marks makes no attempt to hide his clear GOP and Bush connections, mentioning them prominently on the MOFA website. The ads are amateurish and so is the website, and the domain is registered in Marks' name not the organization's. And on the basis of that, and what I think is no aired ads, they get AP coverage, in which Marks directly compares his tactics to those of the real MoveOn, and says he wants to equal the Swift Vets' success.

Suspicious.

[sandraj]

30. As soon as I saw a post on this group in the

GD campaign forum, my first thought was, "they're going to get media play," while groups like MoveOn are marginalized and ignored.

Once again, a PR front for the Bush administration is being promoted by "news" organizations as newsworthy. Not that I'm surprised.

[Kadie]

32. Good points.

They are just going to see how much free air time they can get. And they will probably get a lot.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

14. He helped free someone wrongly convicted?

Sounds like a plus to me.

[sandnsea]

15. It's official

The right is psycho. Criticizing him for helping get an innocent man out of prison??? We need to do a commercial with all these wild accusations and just have Kerry and Edwards looking at each other, jaw dropped, raised eyebrows, rubbing their temples. This is truly like trying to communicate with a crazy person. How do you present correct information to someone who is nuts???

[RamboLiberal]

20. Here's info on the case

<snip>

The other defendant, George Reissfelder, was arrested in a more roundabout way. Then twenty-six years old, Reissfelder already had a substantial criminal record—an armed robbery when he was seventeen, bad-check charges, and domestic violence against his wife. On the night of the murder of Michael Shaw, Reissfelder told his girlfriend that he was planning an armed robbery in South Boston. This information alarmed the girlfriend, who told her father of the plan, and he went to the police. Even though South Station is not in South Boston, the tie was close enough for the police, and they rousted Reissfelder the following afternoon. They found a gun, which tests later showed had not been fired, but which a witness said looked like one that had been brandished during the South Station murder, and Reissfelder was charged as Sullivan’s accomplice. Prosecutors asked for the death penalty for both men.

One night during the trial, in July of 1967, a lawyer from Reissfelder’s defense team, John Costello, met the head of homicide investigations for the Boston Police Department. The officer made an astonishing revelation: he knew Reissfelder was innocent. “He told me, ‘We know your guy wasn’t there,’” Costello said recently. “They didn’t want to lose the conviction of Sullivan, because they knew he was the right guy, by admitting they had the wrong guy with Reissfelder.” The authorities apparently figured that if they admitted they were wrong about Reissfelder, the jury might think they were wrong about Sullivan, too. “It was a death-penalty case,” Costello went on, “and they were thinking this way. It was unbelievable.” Costello brought the officer’s admission to the attention of the judge, but the officer denied making the statement, and the trial continued. Three eyewitnesses identified Reissfelder as one of the robbers, and both he and Sullivan were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

In 1974, Reissfelder won a one-day furlough from prison, and he fled the state. He was on the lam for three years until he was caught passing a bad check in Florida; when he was arrested, he tried to pull a gun on the police. He was returned to prison in Massachusetts, and resumed serving his life sentence. But his story caught the interest of a fellow-inmate who dabbled as a jailhouse lawyer, and in 1980 the inmate wrote a brief that persuaded a judge to assign a lawyer to represent Reissfelder. The judge chose Roanne Sragow.

Sragow visited Reissfelder in prison and told him that, given the uncertainties in the case and the fact that he had already served about ten years, she might be able to get him released on a plea bargain. But Reissfelder insisted that he was innocent and said that he wouldn’t plead guilty to anything. Sragow started digging into the case. Learning of her involvement, John Zamparelli, the lawyer who represented Silky Sullivan at trial, appeared at her office one day and said, “As God is my witness, the cops knew it, the prosecutor knew it, the judge knew it—this guy Reissfelder was not guilty.” As Zamparelli told me, “George had a record, and the cops were dying to get the case closed. The sad part was, the cops even knew who the guilty party was. And he’s still at large today.”

“Roanne was the court-appointed attorney, and I was the helper,” Kerry said. “She did the lion’s share of the work, but that case taught me a lot.”

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact1

Another article.

<snip>

Yesterday's dismissal of the murder charge marked the culmination of two years of work by Reissfelder's court-appointed Boston attorneys Roanne Sragow and her associate, John Kerry. Reissfelder won a new trial last June, largely on the basis of a deathbed statement in 1972 by his codefendant, William Sullivan of Charlestown. As he lay dying of leukemia, Sullivan told a priest that Reissfelder was innocent.

The two men had been convicted of first-degree murder and armed robbery during a $20,000 payroll holdup at the Railway Express Agency at Boston's South Station in 1966. Witnesses identified Reissfelder as being at the scene of the crime.

But for the 15 years of his incarceration, Reissfelder insisted that he did not commit the murder.

He served seven years of a life term in Walpole state prison before he was granted a one-day furlough, and then failed to return to the prison. Three years later, a Florida police officer was trying to arrest him for writing a bad check when Reissfelder pulled a gun and it went off.

No one was injured, but Reissfelder pleaded guilty to a charge of
attempted murder because he was already facing a life term in
Massachusetts and he had been told the sentences would run concurrently, according to Kerry.

http://www.amnesty133.org/ai/actionteams/dp/g_reissfelder.html

- Reissfelder

[Piperay]

22. I don't get it

if an innocent man was wrongly convicted and Kerry got him free than that's a plus for Kerry. :shrug:

[markus]

27. Can you say "Trademark infringement"? Of course you can

I hope that 1)MoveOn.org is trademarked and 2)they have a good lawyer.

Remember, third party (non-candidate) politicals ads have none of the protections of candidate ads. For example, a third-party ad can result in a libel suit. That's one of the ways that one can keep really nasty third-party ads off the air.

[NJmaverick]

31. The best way to fight back

Is to give and give again. Last week I sent the DNC and MoveOn another $50 each. The more WE GIVE the more the truth can be told to the American public

[henslee]

33. More Mod. Republicans must break away from Neocon agenda.

[trapper914]

35. Isn't there a deadline?

It seems I remember a 527 can't mention a candidate by name if it's within a certain time period of the election. I thought I remember that time period being 60 days. Anyone remember the rule?

[Boredtodeath]

36. Think SWIFT BOAT, folks

Stop asking "how can helping a wongly convicted guy hurt Kerry?" and start thinking "how many people will come forward and sign sworn statements that John Kerry got a real bad character out of prison and put him on the streets to commit more crimes?"

Here's a clue:

George Reissfelder - aided by then-attorney John F. Kerry, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president - battled his 1967 murder conviction until 1982, when a priest revealed a dying inmate said Reissfelder was not involved in the slaying. Reissfelder served 16 years in prison. He died of a cocaine overdose in 1991.

Now imagine the headline - John Kerry got a drug dealer out of prison.

That's what's coming. Bet. On. It.

[AngryWhiteLiberal]

37. Boy, what a surprise...Repukes USING RACIAL HATRED for political gain

These racist motherfuckers need to be squashed! I'm so sick of Repuke racist, homophobe, bigots! May all of you choke horribly upon your own putrid bile...

JB