Saturday, February 21, 2004

Ahnold Defends Marriage, Gropes Aide

The L.A. Times reports, without a hint of irony:

"SAN FRANCISCO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger directed the state attorney general Friday to take immediate action to stop San Francisco's parade of same-sex marriages, hours after a second San Francisco Superior Court judge refused to order a halt to the unions."

The sanctity of marriage and the rule of law, two values for which the guvernator has the utmost respect.

The LAT also has the touching and inspirational story of one father's commitment to his daughter's ambition to be all that she can be.

WASHINGTON — Karen Weldon, an inexperienced 29-year-old lobbyist from suburban Philadelphia, seemed an unlikely choice for clients seeking global public relations services.

Yet her tiny firm was selected last year for a plum $240,000 contract to promote the good works of a wealthy Serbian family that had been linked to accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.

Despite a lack of professional credentials, she had one notable asset — her father, U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who is a leading voice in Washington on former Eastern Bloc affairs.

She got the contract after he championed the efforts of two family members, Dragomir and Bogoljub Karic, to win U.S. visas from the State Department, which so far has refused them entry.

Intelligence officials warned Weldon that the brothers were too close to Milosevic, who is accused of leading the "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslav federation.

But the congressman has praised the Karics, who own a vast empire of banking, telecommunication and other firms, as model business leaders and humanitarians. He has portrayed them as victims of faulty intelligence reports and, last month, asked the CIA to sit down with them and sort things out. He has repeatedly pressed the State Department to give them visas.

Karen Weldon said her father "developed a rapport" with the Karics and introduced her to them. But her firm, Solutions North America Inc., won the consulting contract on its merits, she said. Her father declined to answer questions for this article.

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