It was another exciting week for Katherine Harris's Senate Campaign: not only was she caught lying about her achievements in Congress, but her high-level campaign staff resigned. Again.

Let's start with the lying. The Palm Beach Post reported last week that:

On the campaign trail and in her literature, U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris boasts that, as a freshman member of Congress, she passed the American Dream Downpayment Act, "enabling 4.5 million low-income workers to own their first home while growing the U.S. economy by $256 billion." Federal reports indicate Harris' claims are grossly exaggerated.

Those federal reports state that 13,000 low-income families have been assisted. So that means Harris was only off by about 4,487,000 families. According to the Post, "Harris' congressional spokesman, Gerry Fritz, conceded Wednesday that the claims in her campaign literature were inaccurate. 'Someone in the campaign made an error,' he said." No kidding.

Now let's find out why Harris's staffers have been leaving her in droves. It seems that in the summer of 2005, when rumors were flying that Joe Scarborough might run against Harris in the Republican primary, she called top GOP donors and told them that the former Republican congressman "would have to answer questions about the strange death of a former staff member in 2001," according to the Miami Herald. For those of you who missed that story, it's quite simple: one of Scarborough's staffers turned up dead in his office in 2001; her death was ruled to be accidental. If you're wondering why the case didn't make major headlines, it's because at the time the media was busy chasing down another congressman who didn't murder one of his former staffers: Gary Condit.

Anyway, the point is that Joe Scarborough didn't even have a chance to announce he wasn't running before Harris started making nutball phonecalls to donors accusing him of murder. That didn't play well with her advisers, who have since referred to her thusly:

"This (story) encapsulates everything wrong with her as a candidate. She reacted without thinking. She made stuff up. She called people she had no business calling. And when confronted with the insanity of her - I use this term lightly - 'strategy,' she denied it and tried to blame someone else." - Jim Dornan, former Harris campaign manager

"It definitely hurt fundraising. It drove her crazy, but it didn't take long to get her there." - Ed Rollins, former Harris campaign manager

"I wish Katherine Harris the best, but it appears all the old patterns are repeating themselves: Tantrums. Minor things cause her to blow. She doesn't take advice. Micromanaging to the Nth degree. It's nothing new. But I didn't have the energy to move on with the campaign, considering everything." - Glenn Hodas, former Harris campaign manager

Wow, and those are her friends talking. I bet poor Katherine is longing for the good old days when she could just play footsie with college newspaper reporters.

Oh, and one last thing: it was revealed last week that Harris has decided to take $100,000 out of her campaign coffers in order to renovate her home. I'm not joking.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/top10/252

Harris takes back $100,000 from campaign to renovate home
BRENDAN FARRINGTON
Associated Press
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Katherine Harris gave her campaign more than $3 million to run for Senate, but then took back $100,000 to finish renovating her "historic home in Washington, D.C." her campaign revealed Friday.

The campaign said that the Republican congresswoman would sell the house, if necessary, to fund her embattled Senate race to unseat Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. The decision was immediately questioned.

"I have never heard of a candidate taking money out of a campaign coffer like it's an ATM. It absolutely boggles my mind," said former Harris campaign manager Jim Dornan. "This is a woman who has completely lost touch with reality. You don't take your campaign contributors' money, whether it's yours or not, and spend it to renovate you house. This is absolutely insane."

The campaign announced Harris repaid some of the money she already gave the campaign in a press release detailing fundraising for the three months ending June 30.

Nelson's campaign manager Chad Clanton was almost speechless when he heard about the report.

"I don't know what to say. It's just another bizarre chapter in the Katherine Harris campaign," he said.

The campaign said Harris has raised $1.1 million in donations during the quarter and said she has $2.6 million remaining in her campaign account. By comparison, Nelson raised $2.5 million in the same quarter and has $12.1 million remaining in his account.

The announcement comes the same week Harris lost much of her core campaign staff for the second time since getting in the race last summer. Her campaign manager, Glenn Hodas, resigned after three months on the job, saying Harris was uncontrollable. He is the third person to hold the position.

Harris announced on national television that she would spend $10 million of her own money on the race, but Friday's press release referred to the money as a loan.

Harris trails Nelson by more than 30 points in most polls and has been plagued by problems. Fundraising has been slow, GOP leaders tried to find another candidate, and she has received more attention for her association with a corrupt defense contractor who gave her $32,000 in illegal campaign contributions than she has on issues.

Harris also faces surgery on Monday to remove an ovarian mass.
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradent...s/15042374.htm

Harris' family has been referred to as one of Florida's wealthiest and most politically influential. [3] Her father owned Citrus and Chemical Bank in Lakeland, Florida.[4] Her grandfather was Ben Hill Griffin, Jr., a wealthy businessman in the citrus and cattle industries and a powerful figure in the state legislature.[5]. The Ben Hill Griffin Stadium at the University of Florida is named for him.[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Harris

THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME How the 'felon' voter-purge was itself felonious

In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely.

http://www.gregpalast.com/Harpers_img.htm

Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida?s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as "David Butler," (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks. In Harris?s elections office files, next to DBT?s sophisticated verification plan, there is a hand-written note: ?DON?T NEED.?
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1

GRAND THEFT AMERICA
http://www.ericblumrich.com/gta.html

Stop lusting after her. Good lord...

Oh my Gawd, her family has money. Thank Gawd the dems all come from poor families like the Kennedys, Rockefellars, Gores, Kerry-Heize, and pelosis. Yes, those damn money grubbing republicans. What a joke child.

Austin Powers: That ain't no woman! It's a man, man!

No no...


"She's got machine-gun jumblies! How ever did I miss that?!?!?