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Rated A+ By NRA, Stefanik Is Married To Major Gun Lobbyist

Rated A+ By NRA, Stefanik Is Married To Major Gun Lobbyist

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York State, now the third highest-ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, has an A+ rating with the National Rifle Association (NRA). Stefanik has not been shy about echoing NRA talking points, and the GOP congresswoman is not the only gun industry ally in her family.

Stefanik’s husband Matthew Manda, according to Albany Times Union reporter Wendy Liberatore, is public affairs manager for the Newtown, Connecticut-based National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) — and he was one of the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit that is trying to block a New York State law that increases potential liability for gun manufacturers.

Manda, Liberatore notes, “frequently writes for the NSSF website and other outlets about the group’s events and policy stances.”

In April, the NSSF hosted a “Congressional Fly-In” event in Washington, D.C. that, Manda wrote, included “dozens of firearm, ammunition and accessories industry leaders who spoke face-to-face with elected officials.” One of those officials was Stefanik.

Liberatore reports, “When the Times Union called Alex deGrasse, a Stefanik adviser and frequent campaign spokesman, to ask if Manda’s work influences Stefanik’s stance on gun rights, deGrasse called the reporter ‘a very sick person.’ He then sent an e-mail calling the Times Union ‘sexist.’”

DeGrasse, according to Liberatore, wrote, “The Times Union is stooping to another new low and attacking her husband. You should ask both current Democrat challenger candidates what their positions are on Democrats’ gun control proposals.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

New York Legalizes Adult Marijuana Use And Expunges Pot Convictions

New York Legalizes Adult Marijuana Use And Expunges Pot Convictions

ALBANY, N.Y. — New York officially legalized weed Wednesday as Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation that will regulate the sale of recreational marijuana for adults and expunge the records of people previously convicted of possession. Legislators approved the long-stalled measure late Tuesday, sending the bill allowing adults over 21 to use marijuana legally to the governor’s desk. “This is a historic day in New York — one that rights the wrongs of the past by putting an end to harsh prison sentences, embraces an industry that will grow the Empire State’s economy, and prioritizes marginalized ...

‘Illegal Coordination’ Complaint Filed Against NY GOP Congressional Candidate

‘Illegal Coordination’ Complaint Filed Against NY GOP Congressional Candidate

A Washington D.C.-based watchdog group has filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission against Andrew Heaney, who is running for the Republican nomination in New York state’s 19th Congressional District. The complaint accuses Heaney’s campaign of illegal coordination with New York Jobs Council, a political action committee that appears to have been created by him.

The complaint, lodged by the Campaign for Accountability, focuses on a series of donations made to the NY Jobs Council, a PAC founded in June 2015, according to registration papers filed with the FEC. The committee has raised $60,000 to date, mostly during a two-week period last summer. But in financial disclosures available on the FEC website, $55,000 of those contributions have come from companies owned by Heaney or Skaggs Walsh, a fuel oil company now owned by his sister, Alison Heaney.

The National Memo reached out to the Heaney campaign for comment but so far none has been forthcoming.

Shortly after the donations were made, Heaney filed a statement of candidacy with the FEC in August, 2015. Since then, the report alleges, Heaney “almost certainly directed his companies to funnel at least $20,000 to a recently-created Washington, D.C.-based independent expenditure-only political committee called NY Jobs Council.” The committee has broadcast a total of 86 tweets, 21 of them attacking John Faso, former minority leader in the New York State Assembly and another of the Republicans currently competing for the party’s nomination in the 19th Congressional District.

“This is an obvious case where someone has some illegal coordination going on,” said Daniel Stevens, deputy director at the Campaign for Accountability. “Sure, the amount may be small, but breaking the law is breaking the law.”

The NY Jobs Council lacks a website or much description of its mission on its Twitter page, other than “supporting candidates for Congress who are dedicated to public policies that create jobs for our great state.” The committee is headed by Rob Cole, who also runs In The Field, a consulting firm that appears among a few recipients of funds filed by the NY Jobs Council. Cole, a well-known Republican political operative, heads the consulting firm with James “Jake” Menges, another Republican operative who once nearly choked a New York City Councillor in front of cameras in 1998.

Cole and Menges also run a firm called Crimson Public Affairs, and although their names or faces don’t appear on its site, the firm is registered under their names in Florida. The Heaney campaign has paid Mr. Menges and Crimson for consulting work, while NY Jobs Council has paid In the Field for consulting. In addition, both the Heaney campaign and NY Jobs Council paid the Jackson-Alvarez Group for research.

With Cole and Menges working for the Heaney for Congress campaign through Crimson Public Affairs, and NY Jobs Council through In the Field, it is difficult to determine whether or not those firms are providing NY Jobs Council with any information they also shared with the Heaney campaign.

Heaney presented himself as a small business owner who worked his way up via his family oil company in Queens. Since the Fifties his family has owned Skaggs Walsh, which donated $35,000 to the NY Jobs Council at end of June, 2015. His campaign’s biography page alludes to Skaggs Walsh without naming the company specifically. A further $20,000 came from Heaney Energy Corporation, Little Deep, and Submarine Rock, all businesses owned by Heaney, according to the Campaign for Accountability.

“There are laws against coordination and that appears to be what Heaney and the super PAC are doing,” said Stevens.

The FEC has the power to fine political parties and campaigns for violating its rules. The Ohio Republican Party was fined in mid-January for failing to disclose some $70,000 in political receipts. But with the advent of the Citizens United ruling, campaign finance laws have been hollowed out and enforcement comes late, if ever.

Yet the revelations could strengthen Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham law professor who recently announced she was running for the Democratic nomination in the 19th Congressional District. For now the local Republican nominating race looks much like the party’s presidential nominating process, complete with angry infighting and dubious practices.

Clinton’s Ties To Corning Turn Republican Stronghold Into Cash Cow

Clinton’s Ties To Corning Turn Republican Stronghold Into Cash Cow

By Zachary Mider, Bloomberg News (TNS)

NEW YORK — Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one in rural Steuben County, N.Y., the home of the glassmaker-turned-tech-company Corning Inc. The company’s leaders have been enmeshed in Republican politics ever since they backed James Garfield for president in 1880. Two different sons of the founding Houghton family have gone to Congress on the GOP ticket after running the company.

But in July, the current CEO, a registered Republican named Wendell Weeks, gathered some 150 friends and employees in a hotel ballroom in the tiny company town of Corning to welcome the firm’s clear favorite for president of the United States: Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s relationship with Corning, a major employer in upstate New York, dates to when she served as the state’s junior U.S. senator, but they seem only to have strengthened since she left that role almost seven years ago. Over 100 Corning employees have given her campaign a combined $196,700 so far this year, her second-biggest source of contributions by any employer, and ahead of the Wall Street investment banks and Washington lobbying firms that usually give the most in presidential contests. Only three employees gave to other candidates.

Her ability to sustain her ties to Corning points to one of the strengths of her campaign for the presidency: a Rolodex built over decades in public life and painstakingly maintained, offering her a formidable list of allies and more campaign contributions — $77 million — than anyone in either party in the 2016 race. (Jeb Bush is ahead only if independent super PAC funds are included.)

It also points to a potential weakness: She’s been criticized for blurring lines between her official duties, fundraising and personal finances, such as with the corporations that have bankrolled her family foundation and supported her and her husband’s lucrative speaking business.

Corning has done both, but James Flaws, the chief financial officer and a co-host of the July fundraiser, said the company doesn’t stand to gain more than anyone else if she becomes president. “We’re voting for someone who we think is an effective leader for the country,” he said.

The Clinton campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In interviews, some of Clinton’s advocates at the company and in the region said they didn’t expect special attention of the kind they enjoyed when she was in the Senate, nor could they point to any of her campaign pledges that would particularly benefit them. They said they just got to know her when she was their senator, and thought she did a good job. They recalled times when she remembered a name, found money to fix a road, or cut short a nap on the campaign trail to meet with a local official.

“She’s been a friend to us in Corning, and you support your friends,” said Thomas Blumer, 65, a retired supply-chain executive at the company and a lifelong Republican who contributed $2,000.

Amory Houghton Jr., 89, is a scion of the company’s founding family who served as company chairman through the 1980s, and later as a Republican congressman. After his wife died in 2012, he recalls getting a call from Clinton, who was serving as secretary of state at the time.

“She was in Uzbekistan or something like that. She called up and said how sorry she was,” he said. “You could say that was political. I don’t think it was. I thought it was wonderful. Those human touches really made a tremendous difference here.”

One sunny spring day in 2003, Clinton stood outside Corning’s headquarters in a bright orange pants suit, gazing at the back end of an idling school bus. She was there for a demonstration of a ceramic filter the company had invented to reduce diesel pollution. An official held a white cloth over the tailpipe, then handed it, still immaculate, to the senator. She sniffed it. “It’s like a magic trick,” she remarked to a local newspaper, the Star-Gazette. Not long after, Clinton helped direct hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to equip buses and trucks across the country with Corning’s technology.

At the time, the 164-year-old company’s shares were near their lowest point in decades, and it needed the help. A firm that crafted some of Thomas Edison’s first light bulbs had, by the end of the 1990s, shifted focused from glassmaking to fiber optics. When the telecommunications boom went bust just after Clinton joined the Senate, Corning nearly went out of business. It recovered by boosting sales of a broader group of products, including the emissions filters, liquid-crystal displays for TV’s and computer screens, and the high-tech glass in smartphones. It now has about 35,000 employees around the world, including about 5,000 in the Corning area, nearly half the population of the town.

Sen. Clinton helped in other ways, such as intervening in a trade dispute with China over fiber-optics tariffs, and upgrading a key highway. The company reciprocated, directing thousands to her Senate re-election campaign from top executives and through its political action committee.

The support continued after Clinton left the Senate for the State Department in 2009. When she sought to raise $60 million in corporate funding to pay for an American pavilion at a world expo in China the following year, Corning kicked in $500,000. Corning also cut a check of at least $100,000 to her family’s foundation, and paid her $225,000 last year to give a speech to about 200 top executives.

Corning spokesman Daniel Collins said the company’s contribution to the Clinton’s foundation was to support an initiative to promote the advancement of women into senior corporate positions. As for the expo in China, he noted that the company employs more than 5,000 people in the country and an additional 10,000 in the Asia-Pacific region.

Clinton continued to be helpful to the company while at the State Department, according to Blumer, the former supply-chain executive. “If we needed to know who to deal with somewhere around the world, she could help with names,” he said.

Flaws, the CFO, said he scrawled personalized notes to so many hundreds of his friends and colleagues, asking them to come to the $1,000-a-seat July fundraiser, that his hand got sore. As he remarked to the Star-Gazette in 2003, “The Clinton-Corning partnership is very rewarding for both of us.”

Photo: The company that makes intricate and beautiful glassware, Corning, has donated plenty of money to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Brian Holland/Flickr