Honestly, when I read this story in the AJC this morning, I thought it was just about some big GOP donor whose real estate company had collapsed.
http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/at-reynolds-plantation-a-953476.htmlMercer Reynolds and his family had developed a luxury development 80 miles outside Atlanta called Reynolds Plantation, and with the collapse of the real estate market, it had begun to struggle in the last couple of years. In desperation, he begged the homeowners to buy the country club and golf course to keep the company solvent. The homeowners, who are mostly wealthy business people, rejected his offer. Overwhelmingly. So his company is going into receivership. In the story today, what strikes me is that it was the people of Georgia who had basically had enough of this guy. He tried to do a big development in Jekyll Island and was completely blindsided by angry residents. That deal soured and then died. Now the homeowners in a very conservative county have told him to hit the road.
What the article doesn't say a lot about is how important this man was to the Bush/Cheney 2004 re-election campaign. I did a little poking around, and found this illuminating article from the Cincinnati Enquirer:
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/06/13/loc_loc1campaign.htmlHe raised a record breaking amount of money for Bush (and the article is dated June 2004) outraising Kerry in the primary cycle at the date the article was printed ($201 million versus $117 million). The article talks about how he switched to the RNC. The point is he wasn't just another bundler. He was THE bundler for Bush/Cheney. He was in charge of all the other bundlers.
But wait -- if you venture into kind of the DU conspiracy theory type stuff (again, some will believe it, some won't), Mercer's company in TN NextLec (shown at the bottom of the Enquirer article) has ties with, ahem, Ohio IT issues. I did find a guy on LinkedIn who worked for NextLec and talked about it merging with SmartTech. So, basically, Mercer did own NextLec and it did merge with SmartTech. That is established fact. Here is where it gets murky. Not sure about this website but here is the accusation:
http://www.americancrossroadswatch.org/index.php?q=node/5(The site is a watchdog site of Karl Rove's org American Crossroads)
Jo Ann Davidson is former Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives where she pushed for energy deregulation. She was also the Republican National Co-Chair working with former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and GOP IT expert Michael Connell.
Davidson is very close with Bush Pioneer Mercer Reynolds who raised over $200 million for G.W. Bush’s re-election campaign. In 2000, Reynold’s Tennessee company, NextLec, merged with Smartech, the GOP IT company that contracted with Connell and was implicated in the manipulation of the 2004 Ohio election results, the missing White House emails and the off grid GOP email servers.
So, if one believes in conspiracies, the guy who pitched in in open and shady ways to give us four more years of George W. Bush was just paid back by the universe. He he.
(I do feel bad for the homeowners, though. I am not sure what they can do next.)