Ed Martin involved in controversial Obama ad
Anybody who knows peripatetic Republican lawyer Ed Martin knows that he enjoys doing lots of things — serving as chief of staff to Gov. Matt Blunt, heading the St. Louis 
Elections Board, organizing opposition to the Anheuser-Busch takeover — but staying on the sidelines is not one of them.
Now, Martin is embroiled in a fight over a controversial ad targeting Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
Martin is one of two board members on a group called the American Issues Project. (The other board member is a former John McCain advisor.)
The organization is being funded by Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, who also gave money to the Swift Boat ads that helped sink John Kerry’s 2004 campaign.
This year, the American Issues Project is pushing an ad that ties Obama to 1960s radical William Ayers Jr.
Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, founded the violent left-wing group Weather Underground, whose activities included placing bombs in the U.S. Capitol and Pentagon.
According to the New York Times, Obama served on a charitable board with Ayers, and was a guest at his home when he was running for state senate.
Obama, the Times said, has called Ayers “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old.”
The campaign claims that the AIP is violating federal election laws, and has asked the Department of Justice to block the Ayers commercial. The pressure seems to be working: Fox News and CNN, as the Politico notes, have on their own decided not to air the spot.
Though if the Obama campaign thought that a letter to the feds would stop Martin, they don’t know him very well.
“These over-the-top bullying tactics are reminiscent of the kind of censorship one would see in a Stalinist dictatorship,” Martin told the Times. “With the only difference being that those guys generally had to wait until they were in power to throw people who disagreed with them into jail.”
In other words, don’t wait for Martin on the sidelines.
Last night on a local radio station Ed Martin said that George W. Bush may not attend the Republican National Convention because of the Gulf storm Gustav. How’s that for spin? Well, that’s one way to keep the most dangerous threat to McCains presidential abitions out of the spot light.
Katrina hit on a Monday and Bush didn’t get to New Orleans until Friday.
But hey, it wasn’t his fault….He was on vacation.
And this is news because? The ad was made by a private organization that is not affiliated with any campaign. Martin is also private - a private citizen that can choose to affiliate himself with anyone he wishes. A total non-story.
Jake,
Why don’t you ever mention Ed Martin’s legal troubles whenever you write this lauding posts about him? We’ve spent thousands to keep his role in the Scott Eckersly case out of the public you just keep enabling Martin’s insane quests.
What is your relationship to this crook?
Mr. Martin could also apply “These over-the-top bullying tactics…” to what happened to fellow members of the legal industry who were dismissed by the current Washingto administration - or MAYBE even to those tactics applied by the Justice Department to those applicants who had a liberal great-grandmother or who had a pet donkey when young…
Maher-
Read the entire IG report and not just the left-wing coverage of the DOJ report. There were just as many officials explicitly eliminating conservative credentials as qualification criteria. Officials as high as Assistant Attorney General Keisler(a republican and Federalist Society member) were sending out memos ordering political credentials to be eliminated as factors of employment.
Randy Watson
It isn’t a matter of privacy. If Mr. Martin wanted this to stay private, he wouldn’t have gone public. And there are rules about financing political discourse. Public discourse is made stronger by public disclosure of who’s paying to influence the public’s opinion.