Posted on 06/09/2005 1:42:55 PM PDT by archy
This is a WorldNetDaily printer-friendly version of the article which follows.
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
Corruption, Tennessee-style Posted: June 1, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Joseph Farah
Back in the presidential election year of 2000, WorldNetDaily set out to give the nation a small taste of the widespread, institutionalized political corruption that spawned the career of Al Gore.
The result was a monumental 18-part series that some Tennessee observers credited with costing the vice president his home state and the electoral votes he needed to win the presidency regardless of the controversy in the state of Florida.
But it was also a costly series for this news organization.
For the last five years, WorldNetDaily has been defending itself, at great cost, against a $165 million defamation lawsuit filed by Gore's top fund-raiser in the state, auto dealer Clark Jones.
Just last week, however, an FBI sting operation in the state, dubbed "Tennessee Waltz," resulted in the indictment of five officials and ex-officials, at least one of whom played a significant role in the series.
Sen. John Ford, a Democrat and part of a Memphis family political dynasty who backed Gore, had skirted the law before, but, according to the series, received help from powerful people – including law enforcement authorities in the state.
According to former members of the Tennessee Highway Patrol, Ford allegedly fired a pistol at a trucker on Interstate 40 near Lexington, Tenn., in 1990. A Dallas trucker reported the shooting to the Highway Patrol station in Jackson, Tenn. The Jackson troopers called Nashville headquarters for guidance, and according to a former THP official, TBI director Larry Wallace said, "Don't stop that car [Ford's]. Let it go."
At this point, there was adequate time to apprehend Ford on the interstate and search his car for the weapon. But because of Wallace's order, Ford escaped and wasn't questioned until the next day. By that time, there was no pistol found in his Mercedes-Benz.
Although a bullet was recovered from the truck, Ford accused the trucker of making everything up. A jury in Jackson acquitted Ford of all charges.
Ford recounted how he sometimes stays with one family and other times he stays with the second. Since he pays nearly all the bills for both families in homes he owns, he wanted to make it clear to the referee in the case that he can't afford to pay any more court ordered support for a third woman, the mother of another 10-year-old girl he fathered.
The demands on him were even more outrageous, Ford said, because one of his two gal pals was pregnant yet again with another of his future offspring.
Ford ironically headed, until his forced resignation last week, the Senate committee that guides Tennessee's child welfare policies, and, for the past year, he has tried to make use of a law he authored that keeps court-ordered support lower when a father is financially responsible for other children.
Some days he shacks up with ex-wife Tamara Mitchell-Ford and the three children they had together. On others, he stays with his longtime girlfriend, Connie Mathews, and their two children.
Ford and Mitchell-Ford divorced in 2002, but not before the ex plowed her car through Mathews' home. It was Mitchell-Ford, his ex, who was six months pregnant with the 62-year-old's latest sperm donation when he testified in the hearing last January.
By the way, neither of the two homes in which Ford lives is in the senatorial district he represents.
Ford was battling a child-support suit by Dana Smith, mother of his 10-year-old daughter, who is a former employee when he served as general sessions clerk. She won a 1996 sexual harassment verdict against him. He contends that any increase in support for Smith and her daughter should be weighed against his obligations to his other five minor children.
Ford had been in the Tennessee Senate for 15 terms before his resignation.
In concluding my commentary on Ford last January, I posed some hypothetical questions:
Perhaps I answered my own questions. There's a great cost to exposing these rascals – a price we at WorldNetDaily are still paying, despite the intervention of the FBI and its sting operation.
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Joseph Farah is founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND and a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. He is also the founder of WND Books. In addition to his daily column in WND, he writes a nationally syndicated weekly column available to U.S. newspapers through Creators Syndicate.
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Because the people of Ford's district are pretty much just like him. Well over half of the prisoners in state custody come from Memphis.
Don't forget that there's also a federal Bureau of Prisons medium security prison facility in Memphis as well, FCI Memphis!
He is standing up against the Man on the behalf of his constituents. And I may add if anyone should run against him, their rest of their life will be sheer Hell.
I don't reckon I'll be eating there in the near future....
Also the one out here near the Navy base. ford is now saying it was done to damage JUNIOR's chances at the senate...JUNIOR is doing a lot of defensive double talking and distancing himself from uncle dearest.
I'm a native Tennessean, born and bred, and proud of it. My family comes from middle TN/Cumberland Plateau, about halfway between Nashville and Chattanoga, up on the mountain. I grew up in the fifties and heard the adults talking politics. The consensus was if you didn't have deep pockets and greasy palms, forget it. My family loathed Albert Gore Sr. He was a crook through and through. Junior learned from one of the best. I've been gone from the state a long time but the politics are still the same, dirty.
What do Mr. Ford's racial persuassion be? Because there is corruption all over it is hard to tell. H.L. Hunt, the Texas oil baron, also kept two homes and two families. Bunker and Lamar have different mothers, as do others but I am not that up on them all. Just curious.
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