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April 01, 2006

What is the Deal Between Parks and Mannix?

I don’t get it. Kevin Mannix is a fiscal liberal and social conservative. Loren Parks is a tightwad who hates taxes and government spending and is a certifiable pervert. Parks almost always supports right wing Republicans and conservative ballot measures, yet he began contributing to Mannix while Mannix was still a Democrat. You almost can’t get more opposite politically than these two. So why does Parks donate so much money to Mannix?

It has been theorized that the reason is because Parks owes Mannix a “debt of gratitude” for having served as his attorney for a short time while Parks was dealing with a sexual harassment lawsuit. Interestingly, Parks introduced the woman who later sued him to Mannix and when he did so, the woman reported, Parks “looked up and down my body in a lewd manner" in front of Mannix. Mannix, the social conservative.

Both men benefit from the relationship. Mannix, with his network of PACs, nonprofit foundations and personal businesses, has, so far as I can tell, received half a million dollars from Parks, if not more. Much of it has paid his own salary while he produced research that Parks wanted, perhaps for use by other campaigns. Parks has been able to write off huge portions of these contributions as charitable contributions and use the results to benefit his favorite political causes (though he has been fined for using his foundations improperly for political activities - see The Oregonian's article "Foundations directed by Mannix prove boon to his law firm" from 8/14/02).

So is Mannix Parks’s whore, or is Parks Mannix’s easily-manipulated sugar daddy? Or has Parks hypnotized Mannix? Maybe Parks bailed Mannix out financially when his law firm was crashing and now has Mannix doing his bidding. Maybe Mannix saved Parks’s butt in a lawsuit, thereby bending Parks over a barrel. Is any of the benefit each gets from the other sufficient to explain the very odd fact that two people who are at such odds over social decency and government intrusion are linked so tightly together?

I can only say that it makes much more sense that Mannix, who at least a majority of the time relies almost entirely on Parks for his living and who, by all accounts, has engaged in some less-than-ethical campaign finance activities, is the whore, rather than the other way around. Parks has all the money he could ever need. He isn’t a politician or a public person. He doesn’t even live in this state. Why would he need Mannix for anything? Could it be because Mannix, an apparently unscrupulous attorney, knows how to skate by the edges of the law to produce for Parks what no one else can?

I think The Oregonian’s forthcoming expose on Mannix’s questionable campaign financing, while it may reveal the character of the man, is not the real story. The real story, in my opinion, is what is Loren Parks trying to accomplish in Oregon?

In addition to the many contributions Parks has lavished on Bill Sizemore, another social conservative, for years, his foundations gave huge contributions to Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform at a time when Norquist was laundering money back to Bill Sizemore to pay for his paycheck protection (anti-union) ballot measures. I have long believed that scheme was initiated by someone other than Sizemore. I think an investigation by The Oregonian into that question could be much more helpful than yet another expose of Mannix's shady dealings.

Posted by Becky at April 1, 2006 05:15 PM