So anonymous blogger REALLY PATRICIA started posting a series of blog entries on December 30, 2011. I received an email from the blogger that day linking to the entry while doing something truly productive on a day off: Watching the first season of “Raising Hope” on Netflix.
I responded to the email stating that since the blogger is not known to us, we needed to give a chance for Buck McKeon or his staff to respond to the accusation. I sent an email to an address that Patricia McKeon has used to correspond in the past giving 24 hours to respond before SCVTALK linked or commented.
About one hour later at about episode 7 where, ironically, our hero Jimmy Chance goes to work at Howdy’s Market to obtain health insurance for his child Hope, I received a call on my personal phone from the Congressman himself, asking for an extension to Wednesday, January 4, to respond to the inquiry because of the holiday weekend.
I was quite impressed (and my normally cynical children were as well) that a Congressman would call me in my living room to ask for grace, which I was only too happy to provide, on behalf of both myself and the entire SCVTALK editorial board.
Well, it is close of business on January 4, 2012 and I have received no further contact from the Congressman or any of his staff, so my conscience is clear and we have provided the link above and some commentary below.
The anonymous blogger has done a lot of work examining and linking to public documents to show that the McKeon Congressional campaign has made payments of various kinds and amounts over the years to McKeon family members or companies with an ownership interest or other involvement by McKeon family members, in addition to the annual salary of Patricia McKeon as campaign manager. Most of the payments seem to deal with Web related expenditures, from Web Hosting to web development.
Now making payments from a campaign to a family member for goods or services is not per se illegal. An offense occurs if the payments are in excess of “fair market value” of the services rendered or goods provided. The blogger thinks he has found a “smoking gun” that the payments for web services, with which he or she seems to be familiar, seem quite high. Other technology folks have also commented to me on the record that the charges are inflated by some minor factor, generally combined with a dig on the overall quality of the Congressman’s website.
Now (my opinion only) this argument does not impress me. It has been my experience that when folks argue that someone “overcharged” the next line is that “I would have charged (some percentage) less” which is entirely subjective and difficult of proof unless the charges are at least a factor of 20 or 30 times the baseline “custom.” (They are not in this case.) So I am 90% confident no laws were broken by the campaign.
However, it is true that the McKeon campaign seems to have gone to some lengths to disguise acts of (perfectly legal but somewhat distasteful) nepotism, and perhaps that is the question that should really be addressed.
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