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I hope you read the story in the LA Times on Saturday about Fred Thompson. A pro-choice group claims it hired attorney/loggyist Fred Thompson, Esq., to lobby for abortion rights in the 1990s. Several people and various documents allegedly support their assertion. But Thompson denies it. A spokesman for the former Tennessee senator denied that Thompson did the lobbying work. But the minutes of a 1991 board meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. say that the group hired Thompson that year. His task was to urge the administration of President George H. W. Bush to withdraw or relax a rule that barred abortion counseling at clinics that received federal money, according to the records and to people who worked on the matter.
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Thompson spokesman Mark Corallo adamantly denied that Thompson worked for the family planning group. "Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period," he said in an e-mail. LA Times (there's a follow-up on Thompson's dimming star in Sunday's LA Times, too.) [These links may not work. You may need to go looking around on the Times' site for the stories.]
The criminal fraud issue talked about by Miles Mogulscu at the Huffington Post (asking whether Thompson could get in criminal trouble for billing for something he says he didn't do) only addresses half of the issue. According to Wikipedia, Thompson is a lawyer. I don't know where he's licensed to practice law, but if he billed the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA) -- the association for whom he allegedly did pro-choice legal/lobbying work -- and if he didn't do the work for which he reportedly was billing, you'd think the NFPRHA would file a disciplinary complaint against him and he'd be sanctioned by his state's disciplinary board. It would be interesting if he were fighting and losing a disciplinary complaint proceeding AND running for president at the same time. North Dakota's right-wing fringers claim they know Thompson's heart on the choice issue. Some even claim they don't care where Thompson comes down on the issue because they know in their hearts that, in Fred's heart, he's a good guy and a federalist. All good-guy federalists -- they claim -- support the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I love that. It shouldn't be a big surprise that Thompson, a Republican, would be willing to sell himself to anybody willing to pay for his services. But the interesting part of this whole story is watching all the wingers who claim to be able to look into peoples' hearts or look into people's eyes and "know their souls." "I've looked into Fred's eyes and I know his soul, and he's a good guy," they'll tell you. It makes them all look and sound like the mood-ring wearing, bare-footed, birkenstock carrying, small-round-wire-rim-glasses wearing, squishy-soft hippies they all hate so much.
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