Kathy Taylor confronted over voter fraud

It was disheartening to read that someone I backed for City Council has bought Kathy Taylor's self-serving spin on the Great Plains Airlines bailout. The airport was never at risk. The collateral for the Great Plains Airlines loan was a small piece of the apron on the Air Force Plant No. 3 property (now used to manufacture buses and aircraft components). When the Great Plains deal was made, the citizens of Tulsa were told that the City was not at risk. Kathy Taylor chose to cough up our money -- an illegal payment, the State Supreme Court said -- rather than fight for us.

Kathy Taylor seems to be quite comfortable with obfuscation and deceptive spin. A recent example is her attempt to minimize her involvement with Michael Bloomberg's pro-gun-restriction coalition. In last week's forum, she made it sound as if she had only attended one meeting and that only as an observer. The reality: Kathy Taylor was one of the 15 charter members of Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), organized at NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Gracie Mansion in April 2006. Kathy Taylor signed the statement of principles, which included a promise to recruit other mayors to the cause. In October 2006, she attended a second summit in Chicago, posing with other mayors at a press conference, and in January 2007, she joined her MAIG colleagues in Washington to lobby against the Tiahrt Amendment, trying to remove an important protection for lawful gun owners.

Of course, the supreme example of Kathy Taylor's lawyerly and deceptive parsing of words happened early in her first campaign for mayor. It's the source for the Kathy Taylor photo and phrase that you've seen often on BatesLine during this campaign.

The picture and the phrase came from this news report from 2006. KJRH reporter Glenn McEntyre asked Kathy Taylor with official Broward County records showing that she had voted by absentee ballot in Florida in the November 7, 2000, election and official Tulsa County records showing that she voted in person at the polls in Tulsa the same day.

Taylor's attempt to deflect, her Clintonesque parsing of words, her defensiveness, all communicated to me that she was guilty and she knew it. Only after her campaign had had time to confirm that the direct physical evidence of her in-person vote no longer existed -- the voter books you sign at the polls are routinely destroyed after two years -- did she appear at a press conference to say, still rather equivocally, "I can tell you unequivocally that I never would have intentionally voted twice in two states."

Show this video to a grade-school child, and then ask the kid: Is she telling the truth, or is she lying?