Mel Sembler-"how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations"
"Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy -- despite his past as the founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic".
Sometimes you have to overlook minor character flaws like sexual abuse and sexual torture when it comes to good old fashion Republican fundraising. Mel Sembler, who has "raised millions for the Bushes since 1979" and who has served ambassadorships under both presidents, is a real kink-meister who more than likely would be in jail if it wasn't for his close, and well paid for, relationship with the Bush family.
It's an excellent article about Mel Sembler and his wife, Betty, and their 'juvenile rehab business', STRAIGHT, Inc. and how they got away with what they did, and how they're still doing it-just under a different name.
"As one of the preeminent and hardest-working GOP fundraiser, Melvin Sembler has received the honor of living during the George W. Bush presidency at the Villa Taverna, the official residence for the U.S. ambassador, which has the largest private garden in Rome".
It's about the money...
"Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts, we've done worse than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian. Unlike the FEMA chief, who had real responsibilities, Sembler sometimes found himself a fifth wheel around his own embassy. As the Washington Monthly has reported, the scandal that claimed Scooter Libby's job last month may have sprung from secret Rome meetings between neocons, an Iran-Contra figure and an Italian intelligence boss who later pushed phony WMD documents -- all behind Sembler's back.
But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993. Just one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now a travel agent in Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams show this year about overcoming beatings, rape by a counselor, forced hunger, and the confinement to a janitor's closet in "humble pants" -- which contained weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood. During this "timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat blood at her overseers. "I refused to let them take my mind," she says of the program. The abuse took years to overcome".
Mel Sembler-"how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations"
"Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy -- despite his past as the founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic".
Sometimes you have to overlook minor character flaws like sexual abuse and sexual torture when it comes to good old fashion Republican fundraising. Mel Sembler, who has "raised millions for the Bushes since 1979" and who has served ambassadorships under both presidents, is a real kink-meister who more than likely would be in jail if it wasn't for his close, and well paid for, relationship with the Bush family.
It's an excellent article about Mel Sembler and his wife, Betty, and their 'juvenile rehab business', STRAIGHT, Inc. and how they got away with what they did, and how they're still doing it-just under a different name.
