A team of political hoaxers fooled New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and a thousand construction-industry members today.

Posing as fictitious senior HUD official Rene Oswin, Andy Bichlbaum -- a member of the Group the Yes Men -- promised big (and unlikely) changes in New Orleans to a privately-organized conference in Kenner, Louisiana. Among his expansive promises, according to CNN:

- Energy giants Exxon and Shell would spend $8.6 billion "to finance wetlands rebuilding from $60 billion in profits this year."

- Wal-Mart would withdraw its stores from poor neighborhoods and "help nurture local businesses to replace them."

- the federal government would spend $180 million to fund "at least one well-equipped public health clinic for every housing development."

- the feds would reverse plans to replace public schools with private and charter schools, and instead create a national tax base to supplement local taxes.

HUD quickly confirmed Oswin wasn't part of their agency. "This announcement is totally false; it's totally bogus," spokeswoman Donna White told CNN, who said no one named "Rene Oswin" works for the department. "I'm like, who the heck is that?"

Yes Man Mike Bonanno responded to an email from TPMmuckraker this afternoon asking whether his group was behind Oswin: "yes. Guilty as charged."

The Yes Men have been responsible for numerous political hoaxes in recent years, including the Halliburton SurvivaBall (to protect managers against rapid climate change), and a hamburger made from human waste (to solve the global hunger crisis). They were the subjects of a 2004 documentary, the Yes Men.

"It's really a sick, twisted -- I don't even want to refer to it as a joke," HUD spokeswoman White told CNN. "At this point, it's not funny."

Update: An earlier version of this story did was written before the Yes Men's involvement had been confirmed.

Harper's blog profiles Rep. Joseph "Jeb" Bradley (R-NH), a reformed-hippie conservative whose vote history tracks closely with his investments:

Bradley has voted in a way that makes him look more like a stockholder than an elected representative. For example, he owns nearly $1 million in oil, gas and electric company stock and has taken over $45,000 in campaign contributions from energy industry PACs. Bradley has consistently voted with energy interests since taking office, often stripping key environmental and consumer protections in the process. It's a textbook case of why there should be some financial threshold at which it becomes mandatory for members of Congress to put their wealth in blind trusts.

Vote your wallet, indeed.

Who's trying to stop the government from telling its citizens where their tax dollars are being spent? Help find out.

Just before the August recess, the Senate was set to vote on a bill co-sponsored by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) that would create a public, searchable database of all federal grants and contracts. Envisioned as a Google-like website, it would provide free, immediate access the information, which can be alarmingly difficult to obtain.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously passed the measure July 27th, and S.2590 seemed to be speeding on its way to full Senate passage when, in the dark of night, an unknown Senator placed a "secret hold" on the bill. According to Senate rules, the bill will never come to a vote as long as the hold continues.

So who's the culprit?

Since he/she is unlikely to fess up, bloggers from the left and right have united in the effort of eliminating suspects one by one. The only way to do this is to call your Senator's offices up and get an answer. Over at Porkbuster.org, they're keeping a tally; 27 Senators have responded to readers and bloggers and said they weren't responsible for the hold. GOP Progress (via Wonkette) got that total up to 33.

We think TPM readers should get in on the act. If your Senator has yet to respond (see the Porkbusters tally), give his or her staff a call and politely ask if the Senator was the one who placed the secret hold. And let us know how it went (email us at comments (at) tpmmuckraker dot com).

Updates below the fold...

Most readers are familiar with the Blackwater Security company, mainly because it's the biggest mercenary security force in Iraq. Blackwater got an unwanted boost in name recognition in 2004, after it sent four of its men into the horrific Fallujah ambush driving an unarmored car. The image of the men's charred corpses hanging from a local bridge is now an icon of the early days of the U.S. occupation.

The company's reputation has been further tarnished by its taking $100 million more from the State Department than Foggy Bottom can justify. Oh -- and for clearing over $30 million more in taxpayer monies to "protect" FEMA rebuilding operations in New Orleans.

So how did the controversial company get its start? The old-fashioned way, a new book reports: by finagling a secret "no-bid" contract from a close friend in the CIA.

According to Robert Young Pelton, author of the forthcoming book, "Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror," Blackwater's first contract was a secret, no-bid $5 million deal with the CIA, with apparent assistance from the agency's #3 man, who was a family friend of Blackwater's founder. Pelton reports:

Buzzy Krongard had been appointed to the position of executive director of the CIA in March 2001. He had quite a few years of experience as advisor to the [CIA Director], but further back in his career he had been an investment banker, and it was in that capacity that he had first become acquainted with [Blackwater founder] Erik [Prince] and the Prince family fortune. . . .

We'd be remiss if we didn't link to Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage's piece from Sunday on the Bush administration's (read, vice president Cheney's) ongoing struggle to subdue the military's autonomous Judge Advocate General (JAG) corps.

Cheney's failed attempts to bring the military lawyers under the thumb of the Pentagon's appointed civilian leadership date back to George H.W. Bush's administration, but the JAGs remain independent.

So, since the administration doesn't like the JAGs' advice, they're ignoring it -- as they have in the past (see: Abu Ghraib).

Most JAGs, Savage reports, oppose the use of secret evidence against detainees, and their "key request" of the new tribunal system that the administration is developing after the Supreme Court struck down the old system, is that detainees have the right to see the evidence against them. You might expect the administration to listen closely to the advice of the lawyers who will actually be carrying out the tribunals they're designing, but...

Homicide Charges Rare in Iraq War
"The majority of U.S. service members charged in the unlawful deaths of Iraqi civilians have been acquitted, found guilty of relatively minor offenses or given administrative punishments without trials, according to a Washington Post review of concluded military cases. Charges against some of the troops were dropped completely.

"Though experts estimate that thousands of Iraqi civilians have died at the hands of U.S. forces, only 39 service members were formally accused in connection with the deaths of 20 Iraqis from 2003 to early this year. . . .

"'We are indeed having trouble getting convictions and accountability, and so are other countries,' said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice. 'It has struck me that the sentences are kind of modest.'" (WPost)

"[Former secretary of state Richard] Armitage's central role as the primary source on [former undercover CIA officer Valerie] Plame is detailed for the first time in "Hubris," which recounts the leak case and the inside battles at the CIA and White House in the run-up to the war," Newsweek says this week, teasing an upcoming book co-authored by one of its star investigators, Michael Isikoff.

The book confirms that Armitage was one of the initial sources of the Plame leak, for both conservative columnist Robert Novak and the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. Last week, AP reported that Armitage met with Woodward in June, on the same day Woodward had said he spoke with a source about Plame's identity.

"The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation," Newsweek says:

that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.

Update: "Hubris" co-author David Corn has more.

Oh, Katie.

Rep.

From the AP:

The pharmaceutical industry quietly footed the bill for at least part of a recent multimillion-dollar [$10 million] ad campaign praising lawmakers [almost all Republicans] who support the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, according to political officials.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims credit for the ads, although a spokesman refused repeatedly to say whether it had received any funds from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America....

The officials who described PhRMA's involvement said they did not know whether the industry had given the Chamber money to cover the entire cost of the ads and other elements of an election-year voter mobilization effort, or merely a portion.

Montana officials have accused a recently-departed fundraising chief for Sen. Conrad Burns' (R-MT) re-election campaign with securities fraud, according to a press release.

State Auditor John Morrison says Pat Davison defrauded two families of $1.2 million. Morrison said Davison convinced them to withdraw the money from investment accounts so he could put them in "fake" investments, including a bond issue from a local school trust.

Officials from the school "confirmed that no such trust exists and they do not issue bonds," the release states. Morrison has referred the matter to the state attorney general for possible prosecution.

Burns named Davison his state finance director in January. According to Burns spokesman Jason Klindt, Davison left the campaign last month. "Pat Davison resigned on July 27th. He is not Burns’ finance chief," he said in a message. However, a search of the campaign's Web site turns up no press release announcing the departure, and a search of the Nexis database results in no articles mentioning the split.

Klindt added that the finance director spot was a "voluntary position."

Davison also convinced people to invest in several of his companies, none of which had been registered to offer or sell securities in the state, according to Morrison.

Calls to the Montana Attorney General's office were referred to FBI's Office in Salt Lake City, Utah. A bureau spokesperson said she could not confirm or deny "any sort of activity."

Reached by phone this afternoon, the Burns campaign appeared to be unaware of the charges. A receptionist there said all spokespeople were at lunch and unavailable. Telephone messages left at Davison's house and business went unreturned.

Full press release after the jump.

Update: This post originally referred to Davison as Burns' current state finance director.

Montana officials have accused the former state finance director for Sen. Conrad Burns' (R-MT) re-election campaign, Pat Davison, of securities fraud, TPMmuckraker has learned.

Developing. . .

Update: This post originally referred to Davison as Burns' current state finance director.

From ABC:

State Farm Insurance supervisors systematically demanded that Hurricane Katrina damage reports be buried or replaced or changed so that the company would not have to pay policyholders' claims in Mississippi, two State Farm insiders tell ABC News.

Kerri and Cori Rigsby, independent adjusters who had worked for State Farm exclusively for eight years, say they have turned over thousands of internal company documents and their own detailed statement to the FBI and Mississippi state investigators....

At one point, they say State Farm brought in a special shredding truck they believe was used to destroy key documents. State Farm says shredding is standard to protect policyholders' privacy.

The sisters say they saw supervisors go to great lengths to pressure outside engineers to prepare reports concluding that damage was caused by water, not covered under State Farm policies, rather than by wind.

The Washington Post asks a provocative question: does bad weather cause corruption?

That Janet Jackson-Osama bin Laden sex scene may be closer to reality than we think -- so says Door of Kush Books, publisher of a new memoir by Kola Boof, the woman who claims to have slept with (and kept by) the al Qaeda leader for several months in 1996.

"If a film gets made about Kola Boof, it will likely be at FOX SEARCHLIGHT," senior editor Nafisa Goma emailed me yesterday. "At this time, that is all that I am allowed to reveal, as it's far too early to publicly discuss the project." I'm thinking, "Pretty Woman" meets "Midnight Express," with a heart?

I called Fox Searchlight to ask if they were really considering a project that would involve Rhythm Nationalist Janet Jackson dancing for and having sex with Osama bin Laden. It's almost pointless to note that they did not respond to my voice mail message.

Also: earlier I reported that Kola Boof objected to being portrayed by Janet Jackson. In fact, Goma wrote me, "Please note that Kola Boof loves Janet Jackson and is a lifelong fan of Janet Jackson, but Boof doesn't want a film made about her life."

And what of her detractors? I checked in with bin Laden expert Peter Bergen, who has called Boof's book "the worst book of the year" and said it was "rife with howlers." Goma had promised to "discredit and humiliate" the CNN reporter and analyst with evidence supporting the tales whose veracity he had challenged.

"Boof is a pathological liar and a fraud," Bergen told me with more than a note of irritation in his voice. "The book is a tissue of lies from beginning to end."

A final note: in an email to Wonkette.com (who has also been following this breaking story), Goma clarified that Kola Boof -- that's "Ms. Boof" if you are, like bin Laden, alleged to be nasty -- was not a "sex slave," despite being abused and forced to dance naked. She was his "mistress."

From the AP:

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said he never thought the courts would prevent the Republican Party from replacing him on the November ballot, a Houston television station reported Thursday.

"I'm very disappointed in our justice system. There doesn't seem to be justice," DeLay told KTRK-TV....

DeLay said he doesn't have second thoughts about his decision to resign from Congress and give GOP leaders a chance to replace him on the ballot.

"Knowing what I know now, I don't think I would have done it any differently because I read Texas law, I knew what Texas law was," he told the television station.

Does this sound like a man who needs a legal team drawn from nine different firms? Won't all those lawyers just get in the way of his righteous knowledge?

Yesterday, in the rush of events, we linked to an AP piece reporting that charges against Gov. Ernie Fletcher had been "dismissed."

What was missing there was that the charges were dismissed because Fletcher pled guilty. As part of a deal struck with the state's attorney general, Fletcher admitted wrongdoing (although not "criminal wrongdoing"), several of his appointees will be forced to resign, and all charges were dropped.

The New York Times has a good rundown of the agreement.

Sri Lankan Terror Group Paid for Congressman's Trip
"The five-term Democratic congressman [Danny Davis (D-IL)] said he was unaware that the [Tamil] Tigers paid for the trip [to Sri Lanka] and on his required congressional disclosure form he reported that the trip was paid for by a Tamil cultural organization, the Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America, based in Hickory Hills, Ill.

"During the visit, Davis spent most of his time in a region controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, as the group is formally known, and visited the organization's political headquarters. He also met with a police chief for the region appointed by the Tigers." (Chicago Tribune)

We're one step closer to learning whether the GOP-sponsored effort to secure the Green Party a spot on the Pennyslvania ballot will succeed. Today, a judge denied a Green Party effort to have the matter quickly resolved in its favor and punted the mess to the state supreme court.

It's just the latest step in ongoing battle between the Dems and Romanelli.

Funded by conservatives, Romanelli mounted a large-scale signature drive that netted nearly 100,000 signatures. He needed at least 67,000 to qualify, based on a Pennsylvania state law that requires candidates to gather 2 percent of the ballots cast for the largest vote-getter in the last statewide election race.

The Democrats have challenged Romanelli's signatures, alleging that nearly 70,000 of them are invalid.

But Romanelli's lawyer has tried to undercut the Dem's challenge by arguing that the law had been improperly applied by the state. The requirement of 67,000 signatures was based on Democrat Bob Casey's run in 2004 for state treasurer; but Romanelli's lawyer Lawrence Otter argued that the last statewide election was actually a 2005 judicial race.

If Romanelli's motion were to prevail, he'd only need 15,949 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. Today, a state judge ruled against the motion, but indicated that the case should ultimately be decided by the state supreme court due to its unique nature. Otter told me that he planned to file the appeal Monday.

Kentucky's Attorney General has been pursuing an investigation of Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R) since last year; in May, he finally won an indictment charging political favoritism in Fletcher's administration. Today, he got bad news. From the AP:

A judge on Thursday dismissed charges against Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher that had accused him of breaking state law by basing personnel decisions on political considerations.

A lawyer for the Republican governor had been negotiating a settlement to the misdemeanor charges for the past two days, Democratic state Attorney General Greg Stumbo said Thursday.

The special judge assigned to the case, David E. Melcher, dismissed the charges Thursday with prejudice, meaning they can't be brought again.

More, as always, at the BluegrassReport.

Journalism took another hit yesterday when a federal judge ruled the government could legitimately tap the phones of anyone handling "material that is not generally available to the public."

As one observer noted, that's just what a free press traffics. "If the press could only report on 'information generally available to the public,' there would be no need for a press," secrecy expert Steven Aftergood told JTA.

The ruling came in the AIPAC case, which deals with two pro-Israel lobbyists' receipt of classified intelligence from a Pentagon official. The two lobbyists had challenged the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by investigators to secretly record their conversations. But the judge ruled that “collection or transmission of material that is not generally available to the public” qualifies as an activity that could merit wiretapping under FISA.

So exactly how freaky is the rangy al Qaeda leader? Alleged former bin Laden lover/sex slave Kola Boof made a splash recently with her new autobiography, where she claims that Osama was obsessed with Whitney Houston, loved the B-52's and was more or less fixated on women's rears. But some have cried foul: yesterday we noted that bin Laden expert Peter Bergen charged that Boof's book was "rife with howlers large and small."

In particular, Bergen cited Boof's alleged retelling of a sexual liaison with bin Laden -- and his mentor Abdullah Azzam and extremist Sayyid Qutb, both of whom have been dead for years.

Au contraire, says Boof's publisher, Calif.-based Door of Kush Books. "We happen to know they're very much alive," senior editor Nafisa Goma wrote in an e-mail to us yesterday evening, "and at a later date, will use that information to discredit and humiliate Mr. Bergen[.]" (She didn't say when that might be.)

What's more, Goma said a movie "about Ms. Boof's book" is "being planned," and "such a major star as Janet Jackson may be taking on the [starring] role."

According to Goma, Boof is "not happy" with the idea of Janet Jackson playing her. Neither, we assume, is bin Laden, who would likely prefer Whitney Houston.

Full text of Goma's email after the jump.

PBS recently weighed in on the Karen Czarnecki flap, saying they were fine with identifying the Bush-appointed Labor Department official only as a "conservative commentator" when she appears on one of their talk shows, where she sometimes discusses the Bush administration's labor policies.

That contradicts the opinions of top media ethics experts, as well as that of the network's own ombudsman, Michael Getler, who called the move a "big mistake" and a possible violation of the network's ethics guidelines. Yesterday, Getler responded to PBS:

Not to routinely identify [Czarnecki] more fully is not being fair and upfront with viewers, in my opinion, and amounts to withholding information they have a right to know.

. . . . [H]aving looked further into this, I also disagree with PBS's assessment. This, in my opinion, is a breach of faith with broad journalistic principles of full and pertinent identification and much closer to being a violation of PBS's own editorial guidelines than it is to meeting those guidelines, as PBS maintains.

Ariz. Congressman Won't 'Cut-and-Run' from DeLay
"As GOP stalwarts try to distance themselves from former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Arizona's Rep. Trent Franks has remained by his side.

"The embattled DeLay spoke at a Franks fund-raiser on Capitol Hill in December. Franks gave $4,200 to DeLay's re-election committee in March, nearly six months after the then-Texas congressman was indicted by a grand jury on money-laundering and conspiracy charges. . . .

"'Congressman Trent Franks isn't going to cut and run from a friend when the going gets tough,' said [Franks spokesman Sydney] Hay, a former 2002 congressional candidate." (Arizona Republic)

Say it ain't so! Peter Bergen, a leading Western expert on Osama bin Laden, says that the recent portrait of the terror kingpin as a Whitney Houston-obsessed, Van Halen-loving schizo pothead doesn't hold up. (Who saw that coming?)

"The worst book of the year, is surely Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof," Bergen writes on his personal Web site. "The book is rife with howlers large and small," he says:

. . . there is one vividly recounted scene in which Boof performs sex acts on a group that included bin Laden; Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two; Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor, and Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian jihadist theoretician. Boof says this happened in Morocco in 1996. However, in 1996 bin Laden was living in Sudan, Ayman al Zawahiri was imprisoned in Dagestan, Azzam had been assassinated in Pakistan thirteen years earlier, and Qutb had been lying in his grave for three decades.

Well, cross that guy off your party "A" list. (Bin Laden, I mean. I hear Bergen can really cut a rug -- even to "Rock Lobster.")

Ah, Coingate. Thomas Noe, the Bush Pioneer who allegedly embezzled more than $1 million from a coin fund he managed for the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation, is on for an October trial.

That's not good news for Ohio Republicans, who've been battered by scandal for more than a year now. Noe's trial, which is scheduled to start October 10th, is expected to go on for months, which means that voters will have a steady reminder of the local GOP's ethical and criminal problems during the heat of the election season.

Noe has already pled guilty to federal charges that he illegally funneled more than $45,000 to the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, but he's fighting state charges of Racketeering, Theft, Forgery, Money Laundering, and Tampering with Records relating to his management of the coin fund.