Labels: idiocy, Republic Party

Labels: cynicism, idiocy, incompetence, Republic Party

The Coleman team appears to be laying out a continued strategy of casting doubt on the legitimacy of the Minnesota election result by pointing to a fundamental underlying idea of this dispute: The margin of error is simply too big in a race this close.

"Is there some point at which the margin of error is just too wide compared to the difference in votes to determine who truly won?" Coleman lawyer John Rock asked Ramsey County (St. Paul) elections director Joe Mansky. Mansky replied that there is absolutely such a point, with accuracy topping out at over 99.99%.

"All of which is pretty good," Mansky said. "But remember that one in every thousand is not an issue when somebody wins by 200,000 votes. When they win by 200 votes, the margin of error in our computation is likely large enough to have an impact on our result, and I think that's the situation that we find ourselves in here."

Of course, this opens up the question of how Coleman could justify any finding of a win for himself, since even a mathematically possible Coleman victory margin would be too narrow for these purposes. At this point we're looking at Nate Silver's hypothesis, that Coleman might be aiming for a do-over election as a possible outcome.

Labels: 2008 election, Norm Coleman, Republic Party

Labels: cheap symbolism, Republic Party

It's now becoming clear that there is a good-sized contingent of Republicans who are openly defending Chip Saltsman, the former Tennessee GOP chairman and candidate for RNC chair who sent out a CD to committee members that includes a parody song called "Barack The Magic Negro."

• Mike Huckabee, for whom Saltsman served as campaign manager, has chimed in to defend Saltsman against the charge of racism, while at the same time acknowledging that "Chip should have been more careful" in picking the CD. "It shouldn't be the main factor in the RNC race," Huckabee wrote on his blog.

• Another person defending Saltsman has been Mark Ellis, the GOP state chairman in Maine -- not the sort of place you would automatically expect someone to stick up for this: "When I found out what this was about I had to ask, 'Boy, what's the big deal here?' because there wasn't any."

• "I don't think he intended it as any kind of racial slur. I think he intended it as a humor gift," said Oklahoma committeewoman Carolyn McClarty. "I think it was innocently done by Chip."

Labels: racism, Republic Party

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — the son of one president and the brother of another — has been working the phones since Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) announced earlier this month that he won’t seek reelection in 2010. Sources say Bush hasn’t made up his mind about running for Martinez’ seat, but that he’s getting green lights from would-be contributors and blessings from Republican Party leaders.

Strategists and political observers take it as a sign that Bush will run.

"Everything indicates that he's in," said David Johnson, a Republican strategist and the CEO of Strategic Vision. "You're not making calls and laying the ground work for fundraising unless you're clearing the field for your candidacy."

Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida and an expert on Florida politics, said Bush's phone calls around the state are "a good sign" that he could be jumping in the race, something that she says is "music to the ears of Florida Republicans."

"Nothing could have come at a better time," MacManus said. "Republicans here in Florida were so down after the election. The mere mention of Jeb's potential Senate run has put Republicans in a much more festive holiday mood."

Labels: 2012 election, Bush family, Jeb Bush, Republic Party

The FBI, after years spent focusing on national security, is struggling to find agents and resources to investigate wrongdoing tied to the country's economic crisis, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions.

Citing current and former FBI officials, the Times said cutbacks in its criminal investigative workforce following the September 11 attacks left the FBI weaker in areas like white collar crime.

The cutbacks were the result of a shift in focus to terrorism and intelligence matters. More than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all those in criminal programs, moved into those areas, the Times said.

"Clearly, we have felt the effects of moving resources from criminal investigations to national security," the newspaper quoted FBI Assistant Director John Miller as saying. "In white collar crime, while we initiated fewer cases over all, we targeted the areas where we could have the biggest impact. We focused on multimillion-dollar corporate fraud, where we could make arrests but also recover money for the fraud victims."

While the FBI plans to double the number of agents working on financial crimes, people within and outside the Justice Department question where the agents will come from and whether that will suffice, the Times said.

Records and interviews show that FBI officials have warned of a looming mortgage threat since 2004, and asked the Bush administration to fund such nonterrorism investigations, but the requests were denied and no new agents were approved for financial criminal investigation work, the newspaper said.

Internal FBI data shows the cutbacks were especially sharp in areas of white collar crime like mortgage fraud, with more than 600 agents lost, or more than one-third of 2001 levels.

According to Justice Department data, fraud prosecutions directed at financial institutions dropped by nearly one-half from 2000 to 2007, insurance fraud cases fell 75 percent and securities fraud decreased by 17 percent, the Times said.

Labels: Bush Administration, Republic Party, vote suppression

"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again. Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic."

Who's that speaking? And what's he talking about?

That's fired US Attorney David Iglesias talking about the news leaked today that the DOJ and FBI are opening a nationwide investigation into allegations that the community organization ACORN is somehow working to undermine the November election through fraud. For more from Iglesias and his fellow fired US Attorney Bud Cummins, don't miss TPMMuckraker's Zack Roth's interview post from earlier this evening.

Iglesias got fired not long after the 2006 midterm election because he wouldn't get off the dime and bring bogus vote fraud indictments against Democrats or time other indictments of Democrats to sway the 2006 election. In other words, he got canned for not doing what a number of his former colleagues at the DOJ are happily doing this very day.

Nor was Iglesias simpy a respected attorney with solid enough connections to swing a US Attorney appointment. He was a rising start in the New Mexico Republican party. Iglesias was the Republican nominee for Attorney General in 1998. (Not that it's immediately relevant to this question, but Iglesias was the Navy JAG lawyer on whom Tom Cruise's character in A Few Good Men was based.) This was that reassuring case where a political person's partisan attachments butted up against his integrity and the latter won the day hands down. This is someone who knows this scam from the inside and whose testimony -- literal and figurative -- comes not in line with partisan attachments but in spite of them. Everyone should listen.

Labels: disenfranchisement, immigration, racism, Republic Party, selective prosecution

Labels: 9/11, cheap symbolism, chutzpah, Republic Party, shamelessness

Labels: lobbyists, Republic Party

It is with great sadness that we have learned of the tragic death of Democrat Party Chairman Bill Gwatney. He was an admirable Arkansan and gave so much to this state and his party.

Labels: assholes, Republic Party

Earlier today, some extreme rightwing blogs went into outrage overdrive as someone "discovered" an anti-semitic blog over at the open-registration "community blog" my.barrackobama.com. Israel Matzav declared “Barack Obama Explains how the Jewish Lobby Works.” Doug Ross was a little better off with the “Official Obama Blog.” LGF, in a classic pot-calling, said that there was "something deeply wrong with a presidential candidate who attracts so many of these hateful psychotics."

Kyle and Matt over at Comments From Left Field, however, would like to point out that - as usual - the outrage is entirely manufactured. The truth is that it's a "ratfuck" operation, reminsicent of Roger Stone's infamous "Socialists for McCloskey" scam in 1972.

How? Matt explains:

- The original “Jewish Lobby” post, copy-pasted to my.barack.com by a “Juan Carlos”, appeared in April in on a site called “Real Jew News”, run by anti-semite nutcase “Brother Nathaenal”.

- All anti-semitic comments originally appeared on the Real Jew News post, with corresponding timestamps. For some reason the comments at my.barack.com have my.barack urls, even though they appear to have been directly copy pasted from Real Jew News.

[snip]

Let's repeat that for the hard of understanding : The anti-semitic post and its hateful comments were ported directly over from the rightwing Real Jew News site; the names and time stamps weren’t even changed to protect the innocent. Only two comments were made on the actual Obama site - and they were both complaints about the post.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, insanity, Republic Party, scumbaggery, wingnuttia

Labels: assholes, Republic Party

All he has to do is not fall asleep.

All he has to do is not throw up.

All he has to do is not drool.

Labels: Fred Thompson, idiocy, Republic Party

"We sound like we don't want immigration; we sound like we don't want black people to vote for us," said former congressman Jack Kemp (N.Y.), who was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 1996. "What are we going to do -- meet in a country club in the suburbs one day? If we're going to be competitive with people of color, we've got to ask them for their vote."

Making matters worse, some Republicans believe, is that the decision to bypass the Morgan State forum comes after all top GOP candidates save McCain declined invitations this month to a debate on Univision, the most-watched Hispanic television network in the United States. The event was eventually postponed.

"For Republicans to consistently refuse to engage in front of an African American or Latino audience is an enormous error," said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), who has not yet ruled out a White House run himself. "I hope they will reverse their decision and change their schedules. I see no excuse -- this thing has been planned for months, these candidates have known about it for months. It's just fundamentally wrong. Any of them who give you that scheduling-conflict answer are disingenuous. That's baloney."

Labels: racism, Republic Party

Norman Hsu donated to Democratic candidates and, believe me, he will be front and center in the media forever. I bet you never heard of Robert Lichfield though, right? He wasn't just a random donor to Republicans. He was a member of the Mitt Romney campaign, charged with bringing in money to the biggest spending campaign. But, besides sucking up cash for Full of Mitt, Lichfield was also involved with child abuse. He quietly slinked away from the campaign but... not much has been heard about this in all the yelling and screaming over Hsu even though he's been bringing in far more money for Flip Flop than Hsu has brought in for Democrats.

Lichfield is named in a federal lawsuit charging that students of the "behavior modification" schools with ties to WWASPS [Worldwide Association of Specialty Schools, founded by Lichfield] were subjected to "physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse."

...The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Utah, alleges brazen acts of child abuse, including that students of the various programs had been forced to eat their own vomit, clean toilets with a toothbrush and brush their teeth afterward, were chained or locked in dog cages, kicked, beaten, thrown and slammed to the ground and forced into sexual acts.

Labels: Republic Party

The only kind of "morality" that this movement knows or embraces is politically exploitative, cost-free morality. That is why the national Republican Party rails endlessly against homosexuality and is virtually mute about divorce and adultery: because anti-gay moralism costs virtually all of its supporters nothing (since that is a moral prohibition that does not constrain them), while heterosexual moral deviations -- from divorce to adultery to sex outside of marriage -- are rampant among the Values Voters faithful and thus removed from the realm of condemnation. Hence we have scads of people sitting around opposing same-sex marriage because of their professed belief in "Traditional Marriage" while their "third husbands" and multiple step-children and live-in girlfriends sit next to them on the couch.

They're all willing to cheer on the "rules of traditional marriage" which do not impose on them in any way (marriage must have a man and a woman -- no problem there). But no "Family Values" politician could possibly survive politically by seeking to enshrine with the force of law all of the other equally important prongs of "Traditional Marriage" (all of that dreary, outdated "until death do us part" business which would deny the "right" for Values Voters to dump their wives and move on to the "next wife" when the mood strikes, or remain shacked up with their various girlfriends and the like).

One larger issue must be addressed. The Republican Party platform clearly rejects the agenda of homosexual activists. The Party, in the wake of the Mark Foley incident in particular, can no longer straddle the fence on the issue of homosexual behavior. Even setting Senator Craig’s situation aside, the Party should regard participation in the self-destructive homosexual lifestyle as incompatible with public service on behalf of the GOP.

Labels: hypocrisy, Larry Craig, Republic Party

First up, Jim Smith, editor of the Jacksonville-based Florida Baptist Witness:

"If someone's walk doesn't match their talk, of course it's relevant. But a politician's conduct "also has to be evaluated in light of other considerations, and we aren't electing saints here," Smith said. "All of us are fallen and subject to sin. We're not looking for perfection. But we do want integrity."

They accuse the left of moral relativism and hair-splitting? On to Father Tony Palazzolo, priest and pastoral consultant at the Diocese of St. Augustine:

"Is it a one-time indiscretion, or a pattern? Was there an apology? Repentance? It seems to me your religious values determine how you make a decision about right or wrong and good and bad, and if you're willing to compromise those values in your private life, it seems the same thing would hold true for a person's public life."

How about this, from John Stemberger, of the Florida Family Policy Council Inc. (he's working to pass a same-sex marriage ban amendment in the Sunshine State). The article notes that he suggests a "sliding scale" when evaluating a politician's fall from grace.

"If I'm going to hire a plumber, their primary job is to do it right, and I'm not too concerned with their character and moral life. When does it become relevant? To be a lawmaker and then a lawbreaker means there has been a violation of trust. Character does matter."

Oh, so it only matters if you're caught breaking the law. What this is really about is going back to the good old days where "forbidden immoral acts" occurred on the DL on Saturday night, and you turned up in church in your Sunday best the next day -- and no one knows you broke your marital vows by blowing that guy in that highway rest stop, potentially exposing your spouse to STDs. That's correct "Christian" behavior.

My personal favorite comes from Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, associate of Jack Abramoff, and frequent talking head when the MSM wants a rep from the far right:

Let's be clear what voters of faith are saying. They're not saying that every single politician who professes a conservative viewpoint should live up to that standard. It's really the opposite. None of us are perfect, and we all fall short of God's grace. A lot of times that gets lost when someone's failing becomes politicized."

Yes, working to elect people to deny tax-paying, law-abiding LGBT citizens civil rights while those self-loathing pols cruise for gay sex makes perfect sense.

One frustrated Florida pol wants more reasonable standards for hypocrites. Republican State Senator Jim King of Jacksonville has been fighting off rumors that he was frequenting t*tty bars.

"I live a pretty good Christian life, but in the eyes of some people I'm being disrespectful because sometimes I like to drink wine with dinner. That's frustrating. Elected officials are expected to live a totally different life than their neighbors."

Should private behavior matter in public leaders? Some political observers say yes, arguing that morality is the only way to ensure a politician's voting record stays consistent with his or her personal values. But others say the recent revelations only prove hypocrisy, and some politicians say public expectations can be unreasonable.

Allen's arrest is among sex scandals involving state and federal politicians, such as U.S. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana. Former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley of South Florida remains under investigation after resigning from Congress last year when e-mails revealed him pursuing young former congressional aides. Foley, Vitter and Allen are all Republicans.

One of Florida's gay-rights leaders took note of how some politicians rail against the very behavior to which they are sometimes linked.

"It seems like the people who are the most vocal, the most condemning, the most judgmental, seem to be people struggling deeply with their own personal conflicts, and that's where the scandals come from whether it's the church or politics," said Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, a Tampa-based gay-rights group. "It's fairly routine. Find someone banging the drum of hysteria around an issue, and you'll find someone, generally speaking, who is wrestling themselves internally."

Jim Smith, editor of the Jacksonville-based Florida Baptist Witness newspaper, which circulates 46,000 copies weekly, said "if someone's walk doesn't match their talk, of course it's relevant."

But a politician's conduct "also has to be evaluated in light of other considerations, and we aren't electing saints here," Smith said. "All of us are fallen and subject to sin. We're not looking for perfection. But we do want integrity."

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, hypocrisy, Republic Party

It is tough enough being in the minority, weighed down by the burden of the war in Iraq. Now Republicans have an even more pressing task: keeping their party from being portrayed not just as hypocritical and out of touch with the values of people they represent, but also as a laughingstock — amid headlines like “Senator’s Bathroom Bust,” which ran all Tuesday afternoon on CNN. The story also ran at the top of all the network evening newscasts on Tuesday.

[snip]

With President Bush hobbled by his own political difficulties, the party can hardly look to him to lead them out of the morass. “If we had a coach,” said John Feehery, who was press secretary to Representative J. Dennis Hastert when Mr. Hastert was the House speaker, “the coach would take us in the locker room and scream at us.”

Some Republicans are indeed screaming, particularly the party’s social conservative wing, which places a high priority on ethics and family values. Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group in Washington, said the elections of November 2006, in which Republicans lost control of the House and the Senate, proved that voters want politicians in Washington to clean up their act.

“Exit polls show that was the No. 1 factor in depressing Republican enthusiasm,” Mr. Perkins said in an interview Tuesday. “There is an expectation that leaders who espouse family values will live by those values. And while the values voters don’t demand perfection, I do believe they want leaders with integrity.”

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, hypocrisy, Republic Party, sex

Labels: hypocrisy, Republic Party, sex