Doug Bandow

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Douglas (Doug) Bandow is a former columnist with Copley News Service and former senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He resigned in 2005 due a scandal involving payments for columns from lobbyist Jack Abramoff and wrote about it in the Los Angeles Times. He served as a Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan and as a Senior Policy Analyst in the 1980 Reagan for President campaign. He is also a columnist for Antiwar.com.

Bandow obtained his bachelor's degree in economics from Florida State University in Tallahassee in 1976. He completed a J.D. degree from Stanford in Palo Alto, California in 1979. He worked in the Reagan administration as special assistant to the president and also edited the political magazine Inquiry.[1] He is also a conservative Presbyterian. He was strongly opposed to the Law of the Sea Treaty and authored several books, including The Politics of Plunder.

[edit] Abramoff scandal

Bandow resigned from Cato on December 15, 2005, after admitting he accepted payments from Abramoff — in return for publishing articles favorable to Abramoff's clients over a period of approximately ten years. He has referred to these activities as "a lapse of judgment," saying that he accepted payments for "between 12 and 24 articles" over a period of years. He stepped down after BusinessWeek Online contacted the Cato Institute to probe news of possible payments. He typically received on the order of $2000 per article.[2]

Copley News Service, which carried Doug Bandow's syndicated column, suspended him immediately after the payola news became public. National Society of Newspaper Columnists President Suzette Martinez Standring said his action "isn't a lapse in judgment, it’s soul-selling. With so much practice at tweaking copy for others, I’m sure the advertising industry will welcome him." [3]

Steve Clemons, publisher of the blog The Washington Note, has referred to Doug Bandow as his friend and stated that he would be happy to have him guest blog again, but later withdrew that statement. He said that Bandow's resignation was sufficient penalty for his transgressions, and that the larger problem is the corruption of think tanks. [4]

Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the Institute for Policy Innovation, also took money from Abramoff to write favorable op-ed pieces. "I do that all the time. I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future," he explained.[5]

On December 28, 2005, Chuck Muth, president and CEO of Citizen Outreach, announced that Bandow was joining the think tank as vice president of policy. Although Muth noted that he and Bandow did not "agree 100 percent" on every issue, he expressed admiration for his new colleague's reasoning "based on objective thought and not emotion." "He's able to justify any public policy issue from a limited government standpoint in the best tradition of our Founding Fathers," he said.[6]

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