Win a few, lose a few.

Yesterday, Paul reported on the fireworks erupting in the Senate over ethics reform. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) went to the wall for a watered-down reform proposal, which would have kept the public from knowing which lawmakers inserted billions of dollars worth of earmarked expenditures. Republicans, with the help of nine Democrats (and Joe Lieberman), kept him at bay by pushing an amendment that would force nearly all earmarks to be identified by their sponsors.

Today, Reid appears to have accepted defeat. From CQ (sub. req.):

After losing a critical floor vote Thursday and scrambling in vain to reverse the decision, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., found the spirit of bipartisan compromise more to his liking Friday morning.

Reid offered an olive branch to Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., agreeing to embrace his amendment to a pending ethics and lobbying overhaul (S 1) with some modifications. DeMint’s amendment, which Democratic leaders tried but failed to kill on Thursday, would expand the definition of member earmarks that would be subject to new disclosure rules. . . .

Friday morning, a chastened Reid said, “Yesterday was a rather difficult day, as some days are. We tend to get in a hurry around here sometimes when we shouldn’t be. Personally, for the majority, we probably could have done a little better job.”

Showing he can be every bit as bullying to advance a bad idea, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) held open a vote on his watered down earmark reform legislation today in order to round up enough votes to push it through.

Part of the Senate's ethics reform bill deals with earmarks -- lawmakers' often abused practice of inserting items in legislation to direct funds to special interests (a la Duke Cunningham). According to current rules, lawmakers can attach earmarks anonymously, a state of affairs inviting abuse. Reform efforts have sought to change that. Republicans and good government types have criticized Reid's version of earmark reform legislation, which is weaker than the version passed by House Democrats, saying that it doesn't go near far enough in terms of disclosure.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) offered an amendment today that mirrored the tougher legislation passed by House Democrats.

According to Craig Holman of Public Citizen, Reid's version, if it had been applied to earmarks as part of legislation passed last year, would have disclosed the sponsor of only approximately 500 earmarks. DeMint's amendment would have forced sponsors to be known of roughly 12,000.

"DeMint's version is considerably tougher," Holman told me, noting that both Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who co-sponsored the bill, are "on the appropriations committee and haven't really believed in strong earmark reform propoals in the first place."

But Democrats sought to block DeMint's amendment, with an effort led by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). They failed, due mostly to nine Democrats, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and freshmen Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Jim Webb (D-VA), who crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT). Here's the roll call tally.

But instead of then passing DeMint's amendment, as would normally occur in the Senate, the Democratic leadership held the vote open, a move that Senate Republicans called unprecedented, and reminiscent of tactics used by the GOP-controlled House that voters just booted.

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Allow us to ride our Solomon hobby horse a little more.

Yesterday, not long after The Washington Post announced that it had snagged the AP's John Solomon -- citing, among other things, his courageous exposure of Sen. Harry Reid's "ethical missteps," -- news came that the Senate ethics committee had cleared Reid for accepting free ringside seats from the Nevada Athletic Commission.

That ethics complaint, of course, had been spurred by one of Solomon's hit pieces on Reid, and the one, to our judgment, most riddled with inaccuracies and omissions that served to pump up Solomon's rather lame story.

But who doesn't get cleared by the congressional ethics committees nowadays?

Most interesting to us was the AP's story on the decision, which was written by the AP's Erica Werner -- not Solomon.

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"Abramoff Reports to Prison; Officials Focus on Reid, Others," was the headline of an ABC story yesterday reporting that Jack Abramoff, the convicted lobbyist, was dishing dirt on a handful of Democratic senators, Harry Reid (D-NV) in particular.

"Abramoff has offered testimony [to investigators] about his contacts with 'six to eight seriously corrupt Democratic senators,'" ABC News reported, citing "sources close to the federal investigation." One "source close to the investigation" told ABC that $30,000 in contributions to Reid from Abramoff's tribal clients "were no accident and were in fact requested by Reid."

The report was surprising, particularly given that in the thousands of pages of Abramoff's emails, billing records and other documents released over the past two years, there's little evidence that the Republican lobbyist or his team worked very hard to persuade Democratic lawmakers to support their clients, legally or illegally.

Curious to learn more, we called a number of Abramoff's former colleagues from his heyday at the Greenberg Traurig lobby firm to see how the story struck them.

"Jack has not met eight Democrats in Washington," one lobbyist told us.

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The Los Angeles Times does their muckraking duty this morning, taking a look at the new Democratic leadership's penchant for earmarking. And what did they come up with?

Soon-to-be Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) secured millions to build a bridge near to land that he owns, likely increasing its value.

Last year, Reid earmarked $18 million in federal funds for the bridge linking Nevada and Arizona by traversing the Colorado River, just a few miles from Reid's 160-acre undeveloped plot on the Arizona side of the border. According to the Times, Reid "valued the Arizona land at $500,000 to $1 million in his most recent disclosure, which reported total assets of at least $2.2 million."

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Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is amending his disclosure reports in response to the recent AP report on a 2004 land deal -- and straightening up a few other "minor" details.

In a statement, Reid said that his disclosure forms will now reflect that he transferred the title of the land to an LLC in 2001. Reid had disclosed his ownership of the land in reports, but not the transfer of the land to an LLC. He eventually sold the land in 2004 for a $700,000 profit.

I criticized the AP's original piece on the deal, written by John Solomon, for mischaracterizing the LLC transfer as a sale (for more on that, read my earlier post). In its follow-up piece today on Reid's statement, the service continues to describe the transfer as a sale.

In addition to clarifying the land deal reported by AP, Reid disclosed two other "minor" real estate assets. The top-ranking Senate Democrat also reimbursed his political campaign for $3,300, "to fully reimburse the campaign for donations it made over several years to the employee holiday fund in my apartment building."

Reid's full statement is below...

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Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) "collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn't personally owned the property for three years," the AP reports.

Except that's wrong. Reid made a $700,000 profit on the sale, not $1.1 million. Also, the story, by the AP’s John Solomon, makes it sound as if Reid got money for land he didn't own. But that's not the case.

It’s not the first time that Solomon has published a misleading story about Reid. This is the third such story by Solomon over the past six months. Each time, Solomon has hit Reid for taking actions which might create the appearance of ethical impropriety. But because Solomon writes for the most powerful news organization in the land, these very gray-shaded stories pack a wallop. It doesn’t help that on numerous occasions, he has missed or distorted key details – missteps that help blow up his stories.

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Democrats have tried to make a campaign theme out of the "culture of corruption" in GOP-run Washington. But stories like this don't help their cause one bit.

From his perch as the top Dem in the Senate, Harry Reid (D-NV) -- that's would-be Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to you, ma'am -- has been trying to do big favors for a close real estate developer/lobbyist friend, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. Unfortunately for his pal, Reid's efforts were only middlingly effective.

How close is Reid to Harvey Whittemore? Reid's son, Leif, is Whittemore's personal lawyer. At one point or another, all four of Reid's sons have worked for Whittemore's law firm. Whittemore says the relationship goes back "decades." (Reid wouldn't comment to the Times for the article.) And Whittemore's given $45,000 to Reid's various organizations, plus $20,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Eight years ago, Whittemore sank at least $15 million for land and rights in a 67-square-mile tract of empty Nevada desert, the paper reported. There, he hoped to build a massive development of 159,000 homes, 16 golf courses, and requisite stores and services.

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So what was John Solomon's competition at the AP for their weekly contest?

Below is the full text of the internal Associated Press email lauding Solomon for his work on the Reid story. This text includes the long list of stories deemed insufficiently controversial to deserve the editors' plaudits - like, for example, coverage of a riot in Kabul.

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As Josh points out at TPM, the AP thought that John Solomon's reporting on Harry Reid was just swell. In the internal email sent out to AP staff announcing Solomon's award, this section jumped out at me:

The story and video won widespread play on the Web fronts and newspaper fronts, and stirred an enormous debate in the blogosphere, generating more than 10,000 postings and more than a dozen newspapers wrote editorials chastising Reid, including USA Today.

Hmm. Yes, that "enormous debate" in the blogosphere. As the author of eight of those 10,000 posts, I confess I'm surprised that it doesn't matter to editors at the AP that the debate was over the AP's reporting.

There's no such thing as bad publicity, apparently.

Wednesday evening I received a lengthy reply from the Associated Press responding to my criticisms of John Solomon's initial piece on Harry Reid - I called Solomon, who passed me off to AP's corporate media relations. The reply, unsurprisingly, is a mix of flat-out falsehoods and off-point rebuttals. But it's important that we reply, so I've posted it with my point-by-point response below.

First, let me just say that I would have gotten to this Wednesday night if Solomon hadn't followed up with a still more misleading story. That kept me pretty occupied until yesterday afternoon. So you won't find the issues from Solomon's follow-up addressed below. The reply deals strictly with Solomon's initial piece.

OK. But before I get into the nitty-gritty, let's not lose sight of the big picture.

We went after Solomon's piece for a simple reason. At a time when Congressional corruption is arguably worse than it has ever been, leading to a spreading net of criminal investigations, Solomon used the most powerful organ in the land to attack Harry Reid for what is at very most a minor ethical transgression. Solomon did not allege a quid pro quo. He did not even allege that Reid violated ethics rules. What he argued was that Reid should have avoided accepting the seats in order to "avoid the appearance he was being influenced by gifts." And remember the supposed influence here was from a governmental body with interest - but no demonstrated financial interest - in pending legislation.

You don't have to look far in Congress to find examples of Members who could have exhibited more exemplary behavior. As the conservative-leaning Las Vegas Review Journal wrote in an editorial, "on a scandal scale of 1 to 10, these free fight nights rate about a 2." To puff that story up into an 8 is just bad journalism.

Solomon excluded key exculpatory details that weakened his case. As is clear from the AP's response below, it wasn't that he'd failed to gather these details - it was that he decided readers didn't need to be bothered with them.

And I should mention that in his follow-up piece, the distortions got much worse.

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AP reporter John Solomon seems to think that the best defense is yet more bamboozlement.

Remember back to Solomon's initial version of his story on Harry Reid's acceptance of ringside boxing seats. Solomon claimed that Reid shouldn't have accepted them to avoid the appearance of impropriety. He didn't explicitly note that Reid actually voted against the guys who gave him the ringside seat credentials. But he didn't allege a quid pro quo either.

But now he seems to be saying that maybe it was a quid pro quo.

Check down in today's piece on Reid:

Reid told AP the free tickets did not influence his position, noting he voted for the legislation when it passed the Senate. However, Reid had forced a change in the bill that let the federal commission regulate the TV networks when they promoted fights. After the change, the House never approved the legislation.

For those of us who speak the English language these two sentences have a pretty straightforward meaning. Reid says the tickets didn't influence his position, "however", ergo, on the contrary, he pushed for this change about regulating TV networks. And "after the change" the House didn't approve the bill. Again, going by basic English, the pretty clear suggestion is that Reid's change had something to do with the bill not making it through the House.

In other words, Solomon is saying one of two things, or maybe both. Either the Commission -- the folks who gave Reid the credentials -- wanted this TV network change or maybe the TV network change was a poison pill, meant to torpedo the bill the House, a backdoor way of killing the legislation.

If there's some other way to understand Solomon's words, seriously, let us know.

I don't know much about boxing regulation. So I got on the phone to make some calls.

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Oh my. John Solomon just keeps it comin'.

Via Greg Sargent, I see that John Solomon has rewritten the lead to his follow-up piece on Harry Reid. The distorting lead I pointed out yesterday has been replaced by a more narrative approach.

But he didn't stop there. And really, why should he? It's so much easier to cherry pick facts to boost your story than submit to the drudgery of countervailing details.

So here's another example of Solomon's bamboozlement. And, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to take you once again into the weedy specifics of this story. But it's worth it, believe me.

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John Solomon's at it again.

Tonight, the AP released a new story on Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). It purports to show Reid admitting that Solomon was right all along, that Reid mistated senate ethics rules when he initially defended himself against Solomon's piece -- and now he's coming clean.

We were pretty surprised to see Reid admit that. And as it turns out, he didn't.

Solomon just arranges the lead in such a way as to mislead readers into thinking Reid said something he didn't.

Going through all the details involves slogging through some minutiae. But it's worthwhile because it's a good illustration of Solomon's MO in his reporting about Reid: write a hit piece and then distort a follow-up response into looking like the target admitted you're right (he did a similar thing after his earlier story on Reid's ties to Jack Abramoff was undermined).

Solomon's piece begins with the following lead:

Reversing course, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid's office acknowledged Wednesday night he misstated the ethics rules governing his acceptance of free boxing tickets and has decided to avoid taking such gifts in the future.

99% of readers - and the AP has many, many readers - will read that lead paragraph and interpret it to mean that Reid has admitted that he misstated Senate ethics rules when he said they allowed him to accept the tickets. He's chastened and he's agreed not to do it again.

But as Solomon writes in his next paragraph, Reid still thinks it was "entirely permissible" to have accepted the tickets. It's hard to square that with Reid's admission, though, right?

Let's jump down into the details.

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OK, so we've nailed this down. It would have been against state law for Harry Reid to have reimbursed the Nevada Athletic Commission for credentials.

Clearly, this is pretty far down in the weeds. But the AP actually got a pretty significant fact wrong. So let me run through the details.

Bob Arum, the boxing promoter who gave the credentials to Reid and Sen. John McCain, made that claim to The Las Vegas Review Journal. But I wanted to check up on that, so I called Keith Kizer, the Executive Director of the Nevada Athletic Commission. Kizer should know - he is a lawyer and former Chief Deputy Attorney General for the state of Nevada.

"It would be illegal," Kizer said, explaining that it fell under a state law prohibiting agencies or individuals for charging access to government property. The credentials provide access to the commission's area near the ring. "It would be like charging someone for access to a senator's office," Kizer added with no apparent sense of irony.

He went on to explain that credentials are given out to governmental officials and others in order to observe the commission's activity. Sometimes the credentials are provided in addition to tickets - sometimes officials sit in the commission's area.

Reid's office, meanwhile, confirmed that Reid received a credential, and not a ticket to the bout: "We know it for a fact that he had a credential.”

I have written to the AP asking whether they planned on issuing a correction and was promised a reply "this afternoon." In his piece, John Solomon referred to Reid having received (reimbursable) "tickets" to the fight.

One more detail that the AP's John Solomon left out in his piece on Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

The crux of Solomon's story was that Reid acted wrongly by accepting free boxing tickets from the Nevada Athletic Commission. In particular, Solomon focused on a title bout in September 2004 that Reid and McCain both attended. "Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., insisted on paying $1,400 for the tickets he shared with Reid for a 2004 championship fight," Solomon wrote.

But it turns out that it would have been illegal for Reid to reimburse the commission for the seats. That's because these weren't actually tickets - they were credentials with no face value given to V.I.P.'s. And according to the boxing promoter who awarded those credentials to Reid, it is illegal for the commission to accept payment for them. Despite that, McCain insisted on paying, and so the commission simply gave his check (written for a seemingly arbitrary amount) to a charity since it couldn't accept it.

What's more, that same promoter says that in other cases where Reid and McCain received tickets that could be reimbursed, Reid paid. That's a key fact which, if true, was left out of Solomon's article.

This from today's Las Vegas Review Journal, hardly a friendly paper to Reid:

[Marc Ratner, then executive director of the Nevada Athletic Commission] said Tuesday the seats Reid and McCain got weren't tickets available to the general public but "credentials" the commission gives only to public officials hoping to observe the commission's activity.

Skip Avansino, current chairman of the athletic commission and a commission member since 2002, said Reid, McCain and the athletic commissioners sat on folding chairs in a small, cramped area, not in the posh ringside seats for which pricey tickets are sold....

Boxing promoter Bob Arum said Reid and McCain also sat in ticketed seating at about three matches each but paid for their tickets "invariably." Arum said McCain and Reid's seats at the Hopkins-de la Hoya fight, on the other hand, were credentials from the commission, not tickets from Arum. But McCain, who brought his wife to the fight, sent Arum a check for the price of two ringside seats.

Arum said he didn't know what to do with the money.

"Those credentials cannot be sold," he said. "There's no price on them. (They are given to) governors, attorney generals, boxing commissioners of other states. ... It's illegal to accept money for a credential."

Arum said he couldn't accept McCain's money but McCain wouldn't take it back, so Arum donated it to Catholic Charities.

Last night, I pointed out the shortcomings of John Solomon's piece on Sen. Harry Reid (R-NV). Despite all that, I have to give Solomon a little credit for at least acknowledging in the second paragraph of his piece a key countervailing fact - that Reid was pushing and ultimately voted for a position counter to what the Nevada Athletic Commission wanted.

But this was apparently too even-handed for CNN.

Here's the second paragraph from the longer version of Solomon's story that ran off the wire:

Reid, D-Nev., took the free seats for Las Vegas fights between 2003 and 2005 as he was pressing legislation to increase government oversight of the sport, including the creation of a federal boxing commission that Nevada's agency feared might usurp its authority. (emphasis mine)

And here's the version of that paragraph as edited by CNN:

The Nevada senator took the free seats for Las Vegas fights between 2003 and 2005 from the Nevada Athletic Commission as he pressed legislation to increase federal oversight of boxing, including the creation of a government commission.

Do you see what's missing? The fact that Reid voted against the party he was allegedly influenced by apparently isn't worthy of mention.

Thanks to TPMm Reader G for the tip.

Late Update: Actually, this change came from the AP.

If at first you don't succeed...

Back in February, the AP's John Solomon ran a lengthy piece detailing alleged contacts between Jack Abramoff's team at Greenberg Traurig and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). As Josh pointed out, although the article concentrated on the fact that Team Abramoff was lobbying Reid on behalf of sweatshop owners in the Northern Marianas, Solomon failed to note that Reid actually voted against the legislation Abramoff was pushing.

Well, Solomon has written a new piece purporting to illustrate still more of Reid's ethical improprieties. He's managed to actually make a weaker case than in his last story.

Here's the central allegation:

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid accepted free ringside tickets from the Nevada Athletic Commission to three professional boxing matches while that state agency was trying to influence him on federal regulation of boxing.

That sounds pretty bad.

Only, there is an exception for gifts from governmental agencies (like the Nevada Athletic Commission) in the Senate ethics rules. So there is nothing untoward about Reid having accepted the free tickets.

But it would still seem pretty bad if Reid had accepted the tickets and then stumped shamelessly for the commission.

Only, he didn't. As was the case with Abramoff and the Marianas, Reid voted against the peddler's interest. As Solomon admits in the piece, Reid was advocating "the creation of a federal boxing commission that Nevada's agency feared might usurp its authority." Reid never changed his position. And this was a dramatically uncontroversial piece of legislation largely preoccupied with ensuring the safety of boxers by creating the United States Boxing Administration. It passed the Senate unanimously.

Now, Solomon puts all these facts in his piece. So he's not covering up a key piece of information like he did last time. He seems to realize that he doesn't have any real story. So Solomon argues that Reid, out of an abundance of caution, should have paid for the tickets to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

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