MnIndy video: Karl Rove’s ‘funny stamps,’ meet Greg Rhodes’ ‘nature photographs’

HE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 20, 2008

WASHINGTON
Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed Freddie Mac, a mortgage finance giant, and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.
In the cross hairs of the campaign carried out by DCI of Washington were Republican senators and a regulatory overhaul bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. DCI’s chief executive is Doug Goodyear, whom John McCain’s campaign later hired to manage the GOP convention in September.
Freddie Mac’s payments to DCI began shortly after the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee sent Hagel’s bill to the then GOP-run Senate on July 28, 2005. All GOP members of the committee supported it; all Democrats opposed it.
In the midst of DCI’s yearlong effort, Hagel and 25 other Republican senators pleaded unsuccessfully with Bill Frist, R-Tenn., then the Senate majority leader, to allow a vote.

Former Tennessee U.S. Sen. Bill Frist has formed a number of partnerships since departing the U.S. Senate two years ago that have kept him in the public eye while staying out of politics — including with former Senate Democratic adversary Tom Daschle.

The City Paper has learned that Frist has quietly teamed up with up with a political figure that has largely defined the GOP for the past eight years — former Bush Whitehouse campaign guru Karl Rove.

Frist and Rove, who is former senior advisor to President George W. Bush, are working to pour millions of dollars into key GOP targeted United States Senate races this election season.

According to sources with knowledge of the Frist/Rove operation, the two national Republican figures have been working with a high-powered Washington-based GOP operative and Rove protégé, Tony Feather. Sources say the duo is raising significant sums of money from individual and corporate donors, which is then directed to Feather(DCI). Feather then determines where the money is spent and can best help Republican U.S. Senate candidates and incumbents–The City Paper

Colored people on a sled and rabbits with horns are very funny stamps.

“The Republican senators targeted by DCI began hearing from prominent constituents and financial contributors, all urging the defeat of Hagel’s bill because it might harm the housing boom. The effort generated newspaper articles and radio and TV appearances by participants against the measure.

Inside Freddie Mac headquarters in 2005, the few dozen people who knew what DCI was doing referred to the initiative as “the stealth lobbying campaign,” three people familiar with the drive said.

They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they fear retaliation if their names are disclosed.

Freddie Mac executive Hollis McLoughlin oversaw DCI’s drive, according to the three people.

“Hollis’s goal was not to have any Freddie Mac fingerprints on this project, and DCI became the hidden hand behind the effort,” one of the three people told the AP.”