Friday, August 05, 2005

He was just looking for the union label!


Senator Jon "Goofy" Corzine and union hottie Carla Katz
They don't make union bosses like they used to!


What would the Democrat party be without rich goofballs in bed with union bosses? Literally:
The New Jersey governor's race exploded into a firestorm yesterday, with the revelation that super-rich Sen. Jon Corzine gave $470,000 to a former flame who runs one of the biggest state-employee unions.

The value of the donation ballooned to as much as $615,600, because Corzine also paid the gift tax.

The Democrat stonewalled questions about whether he gave any other money to sultry Carla Katz, who represents 9,000 New Jersey state employees as head of Local 1034 of the Communications Workers of America.
...
The senator denied there's any conflict of interest, saying that if he's elected governor, he wouldn't be the one directly negotiating with his ex-girlfriend.

Spokesman Tom Shea refused to say if Corzine still provides financial support to Katz , saying: "He's just chosen not to discuss a private relationship."

But Larry Noble of the Center for Responsive Politics said, "As a political matter . . . I think he has to answer whether there is an ongoing financial relationship. The voters are going to want to know."

New Jersey Republican Chairman Tom Wilson called it "déjà vu all over again" and evoked memories of the sleaze that led former Gov. Jim McGreevey to resign after putting a man with whom he'd had an affair into a sensitive job.
They do seem to have a problem that way.
Katz met Corzine in 1999 during his campaign for Senate. Their relationship went public in 2002, a year before his divorce became final.

The relationship ended in July 2004 and Corzine turned the loan into a gift on Dec. 9 — one week after he launched his campaign for governor.
Good timing! More at the Asbury Park Press, but for the real dirt, check out this New York magazine piece on Senator Goofy:
Corzine reached out to the crafty, powerful then-Senator Robert Torricelli, the dark prince of New Jersey politics who was investigated for ethics violations and eventually forced out of public life. When the Senate ethics committee cited him for accepting pricey gifts (but not for more serious charges), he chose not to run for reelection.
...
Corzine bristles at even the hint of a suggestion that there was anything untoward about his relationship with Torricelli. “I was a first-term freshman senator and he was the senior senator and he was very helpful in showing me how to get things done,” Corzine says...

It is one thing for Corzine to view Torricelli within a political context as “the oracle,” as one veteran pol put it, but people who know Corzine well believe that the relationship went much deeper. “There’s a whole group of us who believe that when Jon developed his relationship with Torricelli, he began to live some sort of lifestyle that resulted in the breakup of his marriage,” says someone close to Corzine and his ex-wife.

Corzine and Joanne, who’d met in kindergarten and were married for 33 years, split up early in 2002. She issued a blistering statement claiming that politics had “had a noxious effect” on their marriage.
...
Corzine had a two-year affair with a woman named Carla Katz. What makes this relationship of public interest is that Katz, a cagey political operator, is president of the Communications Workers of America Local 1034, a union that represents nearly half of all New Jersey state employees.

A few people close to Corzine believe that Torricelli engineered the coupling. “Katz was told where to be and when to be there,” one of them told me. “I think Torricelli wanted to control Jon. In order to do that, he had to bring him down to his level. He had to bring him into his political world, and Carla Katz was a key part of that world.”
Woohoo! What would New Jersey politics be without "Da Torch"? As for Corzine, he's been playing out of his depth for years, but his money is always welcome, I'm sure.