How to use this Page

This week’s Illustration Friday prompt is “Snow”

Please click on image to see it larger

Tweet

By Peter J. Henning

The criminal investigation of former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards for secretly funneling money to his ex-lover Rielle Hunter is moving toward a conclusion, and there is a good chance he will be indicted if federal prosecutors can link the payments to his campaign committee or find that contributors were deceived about the purpose of the donations.

Voicemails released by North Carolina television station WTVD show Edwards’ connection to keeping his affair with Ms. Hunter secret.  An NBC New report in February disclosed that federal prosecutors were planning to take the deposition of one of the sources of nearly $1 million used to keep Ms. Hunter out of sight while she was pregnant with their child.

The investigation into payments made to Ms. Hunter while Mr. Edwards was running for the 2008 Democratic nomination for President has been going on for almost two years.  According to campaign records, she was purportedly paid for producing campaign videos.  A former top aide to Mr. Edwards, Andrew Young, originally claimed to be the father of the child, but has now turned on his former boss and described in detail how large sums were provided to support Ms. Hunter, who is not a target of the investigation.

Sex scandals involving politicians normally just end the person’s political career, at least in this country.  And paying off a secret lover to buy silence is not normally a crime, at least when the politician uses his own money.   According to Mr. Young, however, the money came from wealthy donors, including $700,000 from Rachel “Bunny” Melloon, an aged wealthy patron of Mr. Edwards, who gave personal checks hidden in candy boxes.

The funds provided for Ms. Hunter pose a problem for Mr. Edwards if the money was collected for his presidential campaign committee and instead was tapped to make payments on her behalf, or even given directly to her.  Politicians once viewed their campaign accounts as something akin to a personal piggy bank, and the money can still be used for a number of things that have little to do with actually running for office, like paying for an attorney to defend against an ethics investigation or even a criminal investigation.

Mr. Edwards would not be the target of a grand jury investigation were it not for a provision added to the federal campaign finance laws in 2002 as part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.  That law, codified at 2 U.S.C. § 439a, states that a campaign contribution or donation “shall not be converted by any person to personal use.”  The statute contains a list of uses that would be considered “personal,” such as buying clothes or paying for a vacation.  While it does not specifically list payments to an ex-lover to keep the person quiet while running for President, that would certainly seem to come within the term “personal use.”

The issue for prosecutors is whether the money passed through Mr. Edwards’ campaign committee, or whether it was simply presented to donors as a way to “support” the candidate but never intended to be a campaign contribution.  Federal law imposes strict reporting requirements on campaign contributions, and limits donations to an individual candidate to $2,500. The amount of money collected on behalf of Ms. Hunter clearly exceeded statutory limitations, which may show that the payments were never meant to be related directly to Mr. Edwards’ short-lived campaign for the presidency.  Apart from the campaign finance issue is the question of whether financial support provided to Ms. Hunter was properly reported a

Tweet

On medical progress and stage 4 breast cancer

By Gayle A. Sulik

Elizabeth Edwards died from stage 4 breast cancer (also known as metastatic breast cancer) on December 7th, 2010 at the age of 61. Ms. Edwards was a well-known public figure, notably the wife of former Senator John Edwards, and an accomplished lawyer, author, and health advocate. Her death inspired new discussions of Stage 4 breast cancer, finally shining a light on what has been a relatively invisible segment of the breast cancer community: the diagnosed who live from scan to scan, treatment to treatment, with the knowledge that neither medical progress nor positive attitude will likely keep them from dying from breast cancer.

Following Ms. Edwards’ breast cancer diagnosis in 2004, she quickly became a celebrity survivor. She expressed optimism about cure and continued to pursue an active personal and professional life. After learning in 2007 that she had a recurrence which had already spread to her bones, Ms. Edwards still looked for a “silver lining” despite the fact that her breast cancer was no longer considered to be curable. At that point, doctors called her breast cancer “treatable” – meaning that she would be in some kind of therapy for the rest of her life.

Ms. Edwards knew that she might not live to see her children grow up. Yet  public discussions were hesitant to acknowledge this reality. I remember the PBS news report that featured clips from a press conference in which Edwards’ medical doctor, Lisa Carey of the University of North Carolina Breast Center, stated that many women with stage 4 breast cancer “do very well for a number of years.”

In the interview that followed with Dr. Julie Gralow of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the discussion of prognosis was similarly vague. Dr. Gralow rightly revealed that doctors have “no crystal ball” to see the future and that average survival rates cannot be used to predict an individual’s life span. However, she also circumvented the prognosis issue by using phrases such as “years of survival” and living out “long lives.” We heard about “terrific new therapies,” “great treatments…that don’t cause a lot of symptoms,” and and a new “era of personalized cancer therapy.” Dr. Gralow stressed that Ms. Edwards gives hope to those who are fighting metastatic breast cancer and that “her biggest issue is that she has a couple of young kids to raise.”

Immediately following Ms. Edwards’ death, Dr. Barron Lerner wrote a warm, thoughtful, and informative essay in The New York Times about the lessons society can learn from Ms. Edwards, including the limits of current treatments and the dubiousness of the term “survivor” that, while empowering in some ways can be misleading in others. For the 49,000 new people each year who develop what amounts to be a

By Anatoly Liberman

A correspondent found the sentence (I am quoting only part of it) …stole a march on the old folks and made a flying trip to the home of… in a newspaper published in north Texas in 1913 and wonders what the phrase given above in boldface means. She notes that it occurs with some regularity in the clippings at her disposal. This idiom is well-known, and I have more than once seen it in older British and American books, so I was not surprised to find it in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). To steal (gain, get) a march on means “get ahead of to the extent of a march; gain a march by stealth,” hence figuratively “outsmart, outwit, bypass; avoid.” The earliest citation in the OED is dated to 1707. As far as I can judge, only the variant with steal has continued into the present, mainly or even only in its figurative meaning. (more…)

Share This