The 2012 primary in Virginia; any news?

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Virginia and Ohio—quiet and quieter

On tomorrow’s ‘Super Tuesday’ primaries, safe predictions do not abound. One remaining prediction is the lack of suspense over the outcome in Virginia.

Mitt Romney

With only two candidates allowed on the ballot—neither of them Newt Gingrich with his southern strategy, who had been leading the polls in Virginia—a nation is not bating its breath. Items of real news aside from vaginal probes are few and thin.

One is that King George County, Virginia, is not under the Voting Rights Act as of now.

Another is that on the eve of the primary, Rep. Eric Cantor has endorsed Romney. No surprise there. There is no Gingrich or other ‘alternative’ on the ballot, and it was a safe guess that Rep. Ron Paul was not going to get Cantor’s endorsement. Almost simultaneously, a top Cantor aide has abruptly resigned from Cantor’s staff to join the ‘Young Guns’ Super PAC. An objective observer could also bet that Romney’s chances in tomorrow’s Virginia primary are considerably more solid than those of the upper-ticket GOP in the general election in Virginia.

More on the general tenor of the political discourse in Virginia (setting aside vaginal probes), from Roll Call:

“Similar attempts at “no super PAC” pledges have fallen flat in California and Virginia. Former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) told a debate moderator that he would “agree to it tomorrow” if he and former Sen. George Allen (R), his opponent in the open-seat race, could nix outside spending. Allen responded during the forum that such a pledge would tread on free speech.

Anti-Kaine broadcast attacks by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS have already topped $1.5 million, according to his campaign. Kaine is one of eight Senators and a dozen House Members targeted in a U.S. Chamber of Commerce ad campaign that by some estimates is in the $10 million range.”

There’s a lot of quiet free speech of the behind-the-back kind in Virginia, the state that most resembles Dallas on a larger scale.

That quietness has been breached lately, to the intense regret of GOP insiders, by the remarkable state requirement that prospective abortion patients get a vaginal probe.

Virginia governor

If only corporate media outlets would stop talking about ‘moderate’ Republicans. In practice, the so-called moderates are those flexible on the social issues who always go along with rapacious economic policy.

But more on that later. Unfortunately, the big contest re Virginia, bigger than Romney’s tax returns, is not hitting in the big-time media. The big contest is the court battle—initiated by Gov. Rick Perry—over the issue of how far a state party can go, even in-state, to block intra-party competition.

 

Rick Perry

Quick run-down or recap:

Perry having failed to qualify for the ballot in Virginia’s GOP primary, he sued Republican members of the State Board of Elections, joined by the other GOP candidates who likewise failed to get on the ballot, over Virginia’s onerous rules for qualifying. District Court Judge John Gibney, who gave Perry et al. a temporary ruling holding up the mailing of absentee and overseas ballots, then ruled against Perry’s bid to be placed on the ballot. Perry et al. appealed the decision (not joined by Michele Bachmann, who had dropped out of the race). Both sides were briefly appellants.

Siding with Perry along with his fellow GOP non-qualifiers was the ACLU.

Gibney allowed the ballot process to go forward, saying that the plaintiffs—Perry, Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman, and Rick Santorum—could not re-play the game after losing. Huntsman dropped out of the lawsuit, having dropped out of the presidential nomination fight.

Rick Perry dropped his appeal Jan. 27. Newt Gingrich dropped his appeal Feb. 6. Case closed. So it’s over–except that it’s not over, because the rules are still on the books.

As politicos know–and discussed for a couple of days, before designating Mitt Romney as the inevitable nominee, then almost dumping him, then waffling on the razor’s edge of whether a primary loss could finish him off—Perry and Gingrich failed to get on the Virginia ballot when they could not turn in enough signatures. Only Romney and Ron Paul managed to qualify as candidates for the Virginia primary with its 50 delegates to the national convention. At issue are Virginia’s rules for signature gathering: Even a major-party candidate must turn in petitions with 10,000 valid signatures, including 400 signatures from each of the Commonwealth’s congressional districts. Furthermore, Virginia requires that all signature gatherers must be residents of Virginia. Judge Gibney commented that the resident-gatherer rule struck him as unconstitutional but said that plaintiffs should have filed earlier.

Since in most cases a party must be injured before filing a lawsuit, it is puzzling to a non-lawyer how a candidate can claim injury before being excluded from the ballot (or before losing).

Another problem with the time-frame argument in the Virginia case, however, is that the party rules used to keep Perry and (especially) Gingrich off the ballot are new. As the Republican Party of Virginia said in its official statement on the certification process,

“In October 2011, RPV formally adopted the certification procedures that were applied on December 23 . . . Candidates were officially informed of the 15,000 rule in October 2011, well in advance of the Dec. 22 submission deadline.”

 

A little local history

Recapping–as previously written, the use of a primary election in Virginia is itself relatively new. As one local blogger and political watcher points out, there was no Virginia Presidential Primary before 1988. Previously, both parties chose their presidential nominees, as in many other states, in a nominating convention. “The state decided to hold a primary in 1988, likely in an effort to gain more prominence for the Commonwealth in the first election since 1968 where there would not be an incumbent President running on either party’s ticket.” The rules for getting on the ballot were fairly loose: a candidate had to be “prominently discussed in the news media” or qualify for primary season matching funds. The first primary was won by George H. W. Bush for the Republicans and Jesse Jackson for the Democrats.

For whatever reason—possibly Jesse Jackson’s victory, the local informant suggests—Virginia went back to using conventions instead of primaries in 1992 and 1996. (The move also kept Independent Ross Perot from making much headway in the Birthplace of Presidents.) The Commonwealth brought back the primaries in 2000, but with strict rules, the same as now—except that in 2000 and 2008 they were not enforced. There was no GOP primary in 2004, because incumbent George W. Bush was the only GOP candidate on the ballot. In 2012 there is no Democratic primary in Virginia.

What brought about this sticking to the letter of the rules? The major difference is that “in October 2011, an independent candidate for the legislature, Michael Osborne, sued the Virginia Republican Party because it did not check petitions for its own members, when they submitted primary petitions. Osborne had no trouble getting the needed 125 valid signatures for his own independent candidacy, but he charged that his Republican opponent’s primary petition had never been checked, and that if it had been, that opponent would not have qualified. The lawsuit, Osborne v Boyles, cl 11-520-00, was filed in Bristol County Circuit Court,” too late to affect his election but with noticeable effect on the presidential primary. Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli was so dismayed by the exclusion of almost all the Republican candidates from the primary ballot that he briefly considered trying to change the rule during the election year.

We are reliably informed, in short, that GOP contenders for the White House are being held to a standard previously unmet—not only the most restrictive of any state in the nation, but newly adopted (or enforced) only months before the election. If Obama or Tim Kaine or any other Democratic candidates had shifted procedural ground this way, it would be blazoned coast to coast.

Oddly, this historical fact also did not feature in the defendants’ filings to the appeals court. To the contrary, defendants argued:

“The presidential primary is scheduled for March 6. Two candidates met the statutory requirement of filing 10,000 valid signatures, including at least 400 from each Congressional district. In past elections, there were larger slates of candidates who have met the Virginia statutory requirement and were included on the primary ballot.”

Unsurprisingly, the entire GOP state establishment supported Romney and the Board of Elections in the lawsuit, against plaintiffs Perry et al. Perry gained the support only of Gingrich, Huntsman, Santorum and Michele Bachmann—before she dropped out of the presidential race—and briefly of Cuccinelli, along with the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU filed an amicus brief arguing that the rule that signature gatherers must be from Virginia is unconstitutional, violating the rights of speech and assembly.

 

By the way, Virginia law also recognizes only the Democratic and Republican parties as political parties. No third parties allowed. Furthermore, no write-ins are allowed in the primaries.

Ironies abound in the current situation. The well-funded Texas Governor Rick Perry, Virginia resident and U.S. history consultant Newt Gingrich, and three other Republicans failed to get on the ballot in ‘red-state’ Virginia. Perry did not get enough signatures. Gingrich collected more than 11,000 signatures, but over a thousand turned out to be fraudulently signed by one person. Candidates Bachmann, Huntsman and Santorum did not even file to get on the ballot in Virginia. Thus only Romney and Paul remained eligible to compete, this in a year when—as ever—southern states are eager to make their mark on history. Florida even gave up half its delegates by moving up its primary date, against GOP national party rules.

Under the U.S. Constitution, rules for getting on the ballot are left to the states, and there is no national standard for ballot access. Legislation to limit how far states could on restricting access has been introduced repeatedly by Rep. Ron Paul, but without success.

The rationale for restrictions to ballot access is protecting the integrity of elections. Yet the Virginia rules give a pass to exactly those most liable to jeopardize election integrity, namely the biggest and best-funded campaigns. The biggest list of signatures is exempt from any checking at all. The defensive RPV statement shows that the RPV itself recognizes this exemption as questionable.

Only the Virginia GOP brought you that rule that even the Democratic and the Republican parties, established parties, have to spread their signatures around among every congressional district. The rule effectively prevents a college town from harvesting enough signatures to put, say, Ron Paul on the ballot with ease. Ironically, it did not bar Ron Paul, whose supporters are both dedicated and able to read. It just barred every other potential not-Romney candidate.

 

Ohio

With regard to Ohio, briefly it can be said that the GOP establishment has worked, behind the scenes, to keep things from getting even uglier in the state. Some of the same people who fabricated Terry Schiavo’s case as rightwing martyrdom are still out there, in the wake of the Chardon, Ohio, shootings.

Birth control is an economy issue

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Since when is birth control not an economy issue?

 

Rick Santorum

‘The economy’ ‘versus’ ‘contraception’, contraception as a ‘social issue’, ‘social issues’ ‘versus’ ‘jobs’

—Why is the 2012 political campaign being represented this way?

On a planet inhabited by more than seven billion people, birth control is pro-life.

In a nation like the United States, where population decline does not number among pressing social problems, birth control is the economically viable way forward.

Prosperity and income distribution, after World War II

This is not new. The post-war generation knew it. The overwhelming majority of American families in the postwar baby boom—the families, the parents, who produced my generation—had two or three children. More than four was an exception. The ‘only child’ was an exception. The majority of GIs returning after the war, who married, bought houses, built the suburbs, went to college on the GI bill—or not—and spent decades on their jobs, the overwhelming majority of them—they produced an heir and a spare, as the Brits say of their royals. Or maybe two spares. Having gotten more than a glimpse of the carnage and destruction of World War II, they came home and reproduced themselves with maybe a little something left over. The average number of persons per household in the U.S. in 1964, according to the 1985 World Almanac and Book of Facts, was 3.3. This was before household size declined with rising separation and divorce, before a rise in one-parent households, etc. Where are Ozzie and Harriet when we really need them?

 

Ozzie and Harriet family

And that was during the BABY BOOM, famous for regenerating the U.S. economy partly by injecting into it—the goat entering the python—large new numbers of potential consumers as well as citizens. Baby boomers’ parents were able to accomplish what they did largely because they had birth control.

The generation of veterans of the Great Depression and World War II wanted and expected to live better than its parents and grandparents. They limited their childbearing, and they did it deliberately, with the social approval of their peers/population cohort. Betty Friedan notwithstanding, gone, after World War II, were the days when it was routine for a married couple to have a child every year to help on the farm, knowing that the number might be held down by infant and child mortality anyway. Gone were the days when it was routine for kids to quit school in second or third grade, or in sixth or seventh grade, to work on the farm. Gone were the days when the number of children in a family was limited only by the mother’s health, and when one wife died after numerous births, another took her place to produce more offspring with the grieving widower. The postwar generation that produced the Baby Boomers? The generation that gave birth to ours? –We may not be hearing much about it on the campaign trail right now, ladies and gentlemen, but they used BIRTH CONTROL.

 

1950s family in a 1950s ad

Proud of it, too. Birth control may not have been blazoned on billboards across the nation, but you can look at a raft of 1950s advertisements featuring what is represented as the typical family–and the overwhelming majority will picture either two or three children.

If there is a downside to this picture, it is NOT that using birth control roused intense social antipathies, at least not in any neighborhood I knew of. The downside included pharmaceutical companies’ reluctance to adhere to safety and health standards—‘regulation’–and familiar prejudices. People too dumb or too ignorant or too foreign were the ones who didn’t use birth control, was the perception, less often voiced than sensed. People who held human life cheap, as we used to hear. People who lived in such teeming hordes that it was not feasible for them to value human life as we do—this was sometimes the message—they were the ones who didn’t use birth control. In fact, not using it was part of their problem. They did not have access to the advances of Western medicine.

Including birth control (along with television, advertising, and new cars).

The parents I knew employed birth control willingly. It wasn’t talked about much–because it didn’t need to be talked about, let alone defended. I may have grown up in a politically polarized neighborhood, but never in my life did I hear anyone arguing about the use of birth control, ever. Never did I hear anyone in my parents’ generation have to defend using birth control. For one thing, it was nobody else’s business. It was your own business. For another, it was a good idea, and everyone knew it. Even before the days when reproductive treatment was the extent of most women’s health care, birth control was not by any means a left-right or conservative-liberal issue. Every father on my block, when I was growing up, was a proud father. Every one of them was home from World War II, and glad of it. (One dad got deathly ill after going into the Army, spent months convalescing from grave illness in a military hospital, and was sent home honorably discharged.) Not one of these dads went all-out to have as many kids as possible. Not one. It is remarkable that the anti-contraception rhetoric of Rick Santorum and of gag-a-goat Rush Limbaugh is being presented exclusively as a woman’s issue.–To a man, the fathers that I remember from my growing up years wanted the number of kids they could support—and by the way, supporting and bringing up children included at least hoping to send them to college some day. Sending your kids to college, like the freedom to use birth control if you chose, the freedom to move where you chose, the right to be paid for your work, and the ability to buy a house if you saved, was a sign of advancement. They might have given up college for themselves, entering World War II, and without much discussion of the sacrifice, but they did not necessarily intend for their offspring to forgo college.

The Baby Boom generation, be it noted, is the generation of Rush Limbaugh* and Rick Santorum. The unparalleled prosperity produced by Baby Boomers’ parents, using birth control among other sensible material practices, also spawned the mega-millions in media, lobbying and acquisitions that have so richly rewarded Limbaugh, Santorum, and Mitt Romney.

This entire population trend—widespread use of birth control, smaller families, skyrocketing prosperity in peacetime, and an unparalleled expansion of the U.S. economy from 1943 to 1973—was also part of the large over-all transition of America from an agrarian nation to a fully industrialized one. The grandparents of Baby Boomers had more children than did the parents of Baby Boomers. The parents of Baby Boomers often had more children than did their offspring. Each of my four grandparents came from a family of from nine to twelve offspring. My two parents came from families of four and five. My parents had two. I do not recall one instance, not one, of either older generation urging the younger generation to have more children. Not one. Having fewer mouths to feed was an economic advantage. Not only was this common sense such a commonplace as not to need expression, the topic arose, if it arose in discussion at all, mainly in connection with people who did not use family planning. Nobody wanted to live like the Joads.

Where does the GOP get these lunatics?

 

The anti-birth-control party

But don’t take my word, or recollection, for the above.

Use reason. Friends on the right, ask yourselves the following questions: Did my parents have two or three children? If so, THEY USED BIRTH CONTROL. Did my parents have fewer than five or six children? If so, THEY USED BIRTH CONTROL. Did my aunts and uncles have fewer than five or six children? If so, in all likelihood, THEY USED BIRTH CONTROL. Did other parents in the neighborhood have two or three children? If so, in all likelihood, THEY USED BIRTH CONTROL. As Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, the (newest) ugliness of Rush Limbaugh on this matter attacks the women in his own family. Rick Santorum may have come from a different family structure than Limbaugh’s, but even so, for Santorum to look out over an audience of supporters, most of whom have fewer children than his seven, and criticize the use of contraception as libertinism, is incomprehensible. And no, Santorum is not attacking immorality; he’s attacking birth control. If he wanted to inveigh against premarital sex, he could do so. Instead, he goes after contraception.

Use conscience. In a world periodically wracked by famine, epidemic and wars, playing one’s part in holding down population growth is considered socially responsible. It was considered socially responsible even in the post-war years, when global population was much less than now, when the population of the United States was around 180 million, and when veterans were inclined to replace a population depleted by world war.

Use evidence. Baby Boomers, like their parents, have historically believed in birth control. An interesting datum from my yellowing Information Please Almanac, 1980, appears under the heading “Family Planning”:

“A recent survey conducted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute found that about 4 in 10 married couples have sterilizations within five years after the birth of their last wanted child. Sterilization prevents about 270,000 unwanted births per year.” (806)

This statistic presumably does not include families for whom the family doctor tactfully or accidentally circumscribed future pregnancies. Where is Marcus Welby when we really need him? Enough said.

 

Marcus Welby, T.V. family doctor

For the same year, the same source indicates that the overwhelming majority of U.S. families were two-person, three-person, or four-person—38 percent of all families were two-person families, 22 percent were three-person, and 20 percent were four-person. In other words, 80 percent of all U.S. families in 1980 had four persons or fewer. Only three-tenths of one percent of U.S. families included more than seven persons.

 

*Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) is encouraging a boycott of Rush Limbaugh’s sponsors. Second the motion.

Limbaugh sponsors listed on Facebook include Quicken Loan, Century 21, and Legal Zoom.

Also–Clear Channel, which brings us Limbaugh’s voice, is mostly owned by Bain Capital. No wonder Mitt Romney backed down from his initial responsible, respectful, sensible comment on birth control and the losing Blunt amendment.

How are they going to avoid making in-kind political contributions, when the general election approaches?

Is Mitt Romney a buzz-kill for gold markets?

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2012 Republican primaries and gold stock price

Do gold stocks take a hit when Mitt Romney wins a primary?

gold stocks yesterday

 

This is better than hemlines.

The candidates

 

Yesterday, February 29, 2012, the day after Mitt Romney won the Arizona and Michigan primaries convincingly (pretty much), in a very highly touted contest, gold and silver stocks plunged across the board. That includes gold futures, gold mining and related mining, and silver along with gold. You might think the stability and reassurance provided by a big win from Mr. Wall Street himself would buttress high-end markets. Instead, everything gold went down.

Check this quick list.

“Nothing gold can stay,” Robert Frost said. One understands that gold and precious metal companies are notably volatile stocks; commodities are volatile in general; mining is an extremely hazardous occupation; international markets and foreign companies and foreign governments complicate the market further. Gold and silver were described by a cable tout just yesterday, as chance would have it, as particularly “emotional” markets. Also, needless to say, one event does not make a pattern.

The image

 

Still—are gold stocks, gold and silver, silver stocks, and related mining company stocks going up every time somebody besides Romney wins? Are they going down, almost across the board, every time Romney wins? So far this season, it looks that way.

Checking the GOP primary schedule thus far this year, and double-checking the primary results thus far–in brief, gold stocks go down every time Romney wins.

  • On Tuesday Jan. 3, Romney was thought to have won the Iowa caucuses—very narrowly, but an announced win. Gold and silver were down somewhat on Jan. 4. Ron Paul came in third in Iowa.
  • Tuesday, Jan. 10, Romney won the New Hampshire primary, but the win was discounted as a next-door-state inevitability. Ron Paul came in a good second place. The next day, gold and precious metals were up somewhat.
  • On Saturday Jan 21 Newt Gingrich won the hotly contested and much-hyped South Carolina primary. On Monday Jan. 23, gold and silver shot up to their highest in a month. It should be noted that Gingrich had publicly boosted gold—Gingrich to commodities sector: “HIRE ME!”–and that Iran was banned from trading in gold. Romney finished second in South Carolina, Ron Paul fourth.
  • Saturday Jan. 28, the Maine caucuses began, to continue through the next days, won by Romney but with Ron Paul coming in a strong second—and some Paul-leaning precincts not reported in the vote tally. In the climate of another disputed win, on Jan. 30 and Jan. 31, gold and silver were mixed but up.
  • Tuesday Feb. 7, Santorum swept the Colorado caucuses, the Minnesota caucuses, and Missouri’s non-binding primary. Ron Paul came in second in Minnesota. Early on Feb. 8, gold and silver stocks enjoyed a definite rally, up, then down, ending mixed.
  • Tuesday Feb. 28, Romney won the Arizona primary and the Michigan primary, solidly defeating second-place finisher Santorum. On Feb. 29, gold stocks were down significantly, silver ditto, mining ditto, etc.

 

Note: This is obviously, and avowedly, a superficial discussion, not a serious argument or a prediction that gold and silver stocks, futures, mining companies and bullion will decline on March 7 if Romney does well on ‘Super Tuesday.’ Even if the correlation above were definitive instead of highly selective—I left out all the other days–there is a margin of diminishing returns. A Romney win may become less and less newsworthy over coming weeks, and if so, the credibility of touting any other candidate as the alternative to Romney will also decline. Thus any relationship between media-hyped primaries and a market, if there is any, will also be affected.

Also, note that candidate Ron Paul openly advocates returning to the gold standard, and there is no question about his sincerity. Financial disclosure forms filed by Paul reveal that he has invested in several gold companies. What effect if any Paul’s policy statements might have on gold stocks is unclear, but they may have some effect.  Maybe any seeming relationship between Romney’s fortunes and gold markets is really a reflection of a relationship between Ron Paul’s campaign and the markets.

Still, it is more fun to follow the ups and downs of a stock price, as with this company, than it is to follow hemlines, which have been all over the place for decades. And just for fun—note that indeed the stock price of this particular gold-aimed company traded down on Feb. 1, 6th, 8th and 29th.

It is somewhat of a buzz-kill to note that it also traded down somewhat on several other days the past month.

 

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Funny and sad, leading up to Super Tuesday

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2012 Super Tuesday–

Former GOP front-runner Herman Cain

With the 2012 primary calendar moving inexorably toward ‘Super Tuesday,’ this is as good a time as any to indulge a quick review of past fatuities this election cycle.

Michele Bachmann

It’s anything for a joke with some people.

The following is a short list, nowhere near exhaustive, reflecting fleeting moments in time over the months leading to where we are today in the GOP primary season, 2012.

What these funny historical statements all have in common is that they issued from highly qualified or at least well-regarded media outlets and, however intrinsically ridiculous, were taken seriously at the time by equally established and respectable audiences.

Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin

From the Christian Science Monitor:

“When all is said and done, the race for the 2012 GOP nomination may boil down to just three serious contenders: former Governor Romney of Massachusetts, former Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota, and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi.”

Presidentialelectionnews.com:

“Following the withdrawal of former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, the field narrows a bit while at the same time expanding to accommodate Texas Governor Rick Perry.

The new top tier roughly consists of Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.”

 

The Daily Beast:

“The Republican nomination race has suddenly metamorphosed from a snooze fest into a three-way smack down with a fascinating cast of characters. Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, two aggressive, charismatic religious conservatives, will spend the next few months vying for values voters and the role of chief alternative to Mitt Romney.”

The Alaska Dispatch newspaper:

“Imagine former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, comfortably campaigning in next-door New Hampshire, keeping the home fires warm as he heads toward an anticipated win in the first primary early in 2012. Then the pugnacious governor of Texas, Rick Perry, jumps in and threatens to take it all away.

Could Governor Perry actually succeed?”

The New York Times:

“With a strong finish in the caucuses, Mr. Perry could re-emerge as a top-tier candidate — perhaps the best-equipped to compete with Mitt Romney, the presumed frontrunner, on a state-by-state basis.”

The New York Post:

“Like a Hurri-Cain, Herman Cain’s presidential campaign has been gathering strength and rocking his opponents–while causing political pros to scrap some of their early forecasts for the GOP field.

Fueled by strong debate performances and his trademark quips, Cain has jumped to the top tier in several independent national polls, including pulling up to a dead heat with Mitt Romney in the latest CBS poll, tied at 17 percent, with Rick Perry trailing at 12 percent.”

 

The Washington Post:

“1. Cain is already top-tier: Cain has surged to 27 percent in a hypothetical national primary ballot test — up from just 5 percent in an August NBC-WSJ poll. His current standing puts him on par with Romney (23 percent) and makes clear that the two men comprise the top tier in the race as of today. That Cain’s rise has been fueled almost entirely by the struggles of Texas Gov. Rick Perry (Cain went up 22 points between August and October, Perry dropped by 22 points over that same period) is a dynamic that suggests Cain is now the conservatives’ choice in the contest.”

It may be added that none of these opinions were formed in a vacuum. Not even the goofiest ones were idiosyncratic. The above are not one man’s opinion—each expresses the view or hypothesis held at some point by numerous persons, all experienced in their field.

 

There’s more than one way to go with this. An old saying has it that the worst insult you can level at someone is to accuse him of having no sense of humor. (Can’t say that about the experts quoted above.) I don’t think so. It looks to me as though many people are far more insulted by any criticism, even implied through disagreement, of their judgment of people. This insecurity is often most vehement, vented with most rage, among people who really are not good judges of character, who have shown zero ability to size up a man by his character.

The favorable treatment given by seniors at the Washington Post to GWBush and Dick Cheney as candidates, back in the 2000 election cycle, may be the premier example. Cheney was widely characterized as having ‘gravitas.’ Bush was linked to down-home folksiness rather than to his Wall Street policies. The characterizations masked a breathtaking obtuseness about what Bush and Cheney actually had in mind for the country—assaulting the Middle East abroad and the middle class at home. (Admittedly, the WP had a motive for obtuseness: Bush’s education policy—standardized testing–benefited the Post Co.’s Kaplan Learning sector by billions, a windfall the Post newspaper did not report.)

But the same blinders have been on during the past year, with regard to candidates or potential candidates from Michele Bachmann to Donald Trump. The same people who took George W. Bush seriously as a candidate for the White House were eager to treat Rick Perry the same way, and with the same breathtaking presumption that Texans or Southerners would go for Perry whole hog. They made the same error with regard to Sarah Palin and Women in 2008, and Michele Bachmann and Women in 2011. Regardless of how ridiculous the candidacy, or the potential candidacy, may be, some pundit is always ready to take it seriously—if the person is a Republican. Nor, of course, are the analysts ever held to account for their past mistakes. Who’s keeping score? On television, no one.

The biggest problem may be the way the horse race is so separated, often, from any reasoned discussion of the (disastrous) policies supported by the candidates.

But reporting on policy with the same focus and attention as personalities would destroy the media pretense that the two major parties are somehow equivalent.

There is a continuing dynamic in the GOP contest, 2012, and here it is: It is an ongoing tension between Republican voters who don’t know much about their candidates, and the possibility that they might actually learn about them. The bottom line is that many or most GOP voters in 2012 do not want to know their candidates well. It’s not just that they want to be surprised by a white knight; it’s that they don’t want any information that would shake their willingness to vote along previous party lines or to vote against the president.

So you start with that firm, solid, bedrock fundamental of Tea Partyers and other prospective GOP voters 1) not knowing, AND 2) not wanting to know. This dual fundamental alone goes a long way to explain the brief prominence in the Republican field of Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain. In fact, it is virtually the only thing that does explain the aforementioned prominence.

The same fundamental goes a long way to explain the ongoing longing for some other prominent Republican to enter the race—Sarah Palin, Haley Barbour, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, etc. However unrealistic the demand, and however ineligible a prominent GOPer might be—Palin was a disaster on the ticket in 2008, Daniels was GWBush’s budget director, Christie conducted federal prosecutions timed with political advantage, Bush is still a Bush—there is always some cadre of analysts and unnamed insiders ready to take him/her seriously. As long as they don’t know much about the candidate, s/he is in like flint.

 

Gingrich

It will be mildly interesting to see how this tension plays out over ‘Super Tuesday’ on March 6. At this moment, prognosticators are largely engaged in a cynical guessing game with regard to Newt Gingrich. Will Gingrich’s race-baiting, aided by Romney’s Mormonism and Santorum’s Catholicism, be enough to put Gingrich over the top in the Georgia and Tennessee primaries? Will any of the known anecdotes be enough to shake loose voters from their chosen candidates? Or conversely will any surface gracelessly enough to undermine the attacker rather than the target? This new version of Southern strategy would of course be more viable if Gingrich had succeeded in getting on the ballot in Virginia—where polls showed him leading. (As a result of Virginia’s ballot requirements, only Romney and Ron Paul are on the ballot in the Commonwealth.) More chances for Gingrich on March 13, in Alabama and Mississippi, and another in Louisiana on March 24.

Maybe. They don’t put it as bluntly as I just did, but that’s the game plan.

Meanwhile, more respectably, Ron Paul’s forces are working the caucus states including Idaho, North Dakota, Kansas and Wyoming. As of now little attention looks to be directed any of those places. Iowa is usually the only caucus location that gets big media play. The other primaries and caucuses mainly come down to a question of who will win the most delegates, and an increasingly glum and shriveled media force is increasingly ceding most of them to Romney.

Michigan and Arizona primaries 2012

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February 28, 2012, primaries in Arizona and Michigan

Santorum in Michigan

GOP primaries in Michigan and Arizona today–and it will be mildly interesting to see which candidate Republican voters will be stuck with, if either. On the one hand they have the lurid imaginings of former Pennsylvania Rep. Rick Santorum, who is more and more coming to seem like the type of religio more hell-bent on damning other human beings than on sharpening his own conscience. Deafness to the promptings of conscience might or might not be expected of someone who spent his years out of office working as a corporate lobbyist in DC, even if the lurid version of religion dominating Santorum’s idiom is not stereotypically associated with the kind of inside-the-Beltway job Santorum held, and profited from.

 

Romney

On the other hand primary voters have former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who famously penned an op-ed for the New York Times Nov. 18, 2008, titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” ‘Flip-flopper’ or not, Romney has stuck by his argument on this one, following up recently in Michigan with a Feb. 14 op-ed in a Detroit paper calling the auto rescue “crony capitalism.”

 

Automobiles and candidates

Santorum has been proclaiming a “two-man race” in the Republican primaries for several weeks. It seems like years. Most of the political press is following suit for the moment–while waiting to see whether Newt Gingrich’s race-baiting resuscitates the Gingrich campaign in the South in March. It is tempting to streamline the Romney-Santorum contest as a contest between the corporate-insider and barking-dog segments of the Republican Party, dignified as ‘wings.’ This would be over-simplification.

Not that Romney isn’t giving this over-simplification all the help he can. Set aside the off-the-cuff references to the two Cadillacs (American-made cars; that’s why Romney mentioned them in Michigan) his wife drives, or to the Nascar team owners Romney knows. More importantly, Romney also advocated letting the foreclosure crisis run its course, an argument obviously not targeted for Arizona. While Arizona’s foreclosure problems do not equate to those in neighboring Nevada, in December 2011 Arizona hit the top-ten list for foreclosures by state. Spikes in oil prices that deter travel to the wide-open spaces in the Southwest will not help over coming months.

Needless to say, Rick Santorum is even farther to ‘the right’ on the auto-industry and foreclosure issues. Santorum may speak touchingly of miners related to him personally, but when it comes to holding mine owners accountable for mine safety—or any other wholesome and necessary regulation to save lives and health—he’s on the other side, if quietly.

 

Speaking of oil prices–

There are a few facts that the GOP candidates—except occasionally for Ron Paul–do not mention on the campaign trail:

  • Gasoine prices spike when oil prices spike. When the price of crude jumps, the price at the pump is sure to follow. Historically, by the way, a decline in crude price is less swiftly followed, and less equivalently, by a decline in pump price.
  • Spikes in the price of crude oil come largely from rampant, unchecked speculation on oil futures; less from demand for the oil than from betting on the future price of oil
  • Speculation on oil futures in recent days—heightened buying ahead of retail, which has driven up the price of crude–has been fueled by the public discourse, if you call it that, over Iran
  • Iran, as we know, is now newly and again being touted as the favorite hot spot for right-wingers in politics and in Fox-ified media outlets, ever on the look-out for the next war to send other people to

Then these cats vilify President Obama for not doing something magical to hold down the price of oil or of gasoline. Even rightwing columnist George Will criticized that one. (It would be interesting to know why.)

Forget the sense of honor and of patriotism that used to keep even lunatic-fringers from attacking a president on foreign policy, on the campaign trail, while he was in the midst of delicate and tense negotiations. Can Romney, Gingrich and Santorum honestly be oblivious to the fact that their own super-fatted rhetoric—figuratively the equivalent of pouring grease on a kitchen fire—contributes to the tension of disagreements over Iran, and thus to spiking oil prices?

If so, they may be the only ones oblivious. Donor lookup is key. The oil and gas industry so far has contributed far less in 2012 than has the finance sector. Oil and gas are obviously holding back to see who their 2012 standard bearer will be, rather than picking one. But contributions from the energy industry are going—not surprisingly—overwhelmingly to Republican candidates (not including Ron Paul). Six to one, they’re donating to GOPers rather than to Dems. Now that Rick Perry is out of the race, they’re donating mostly to Romney. Predictions are silly, but it’s still hard to see Santorum as having a chance.

more later

[update 10:45 a.m.]

“It’s important not to be afraid to stand up for what you believe in.” –heard from a registered Democrat who voted for Santorum in the GOP primary. Also said he was not trying to make trouble; he voted for Obama in 2008 and is not sure, he said, whether he would vote for Obama again in 2012.

There is more than one quick, efficient, on-the-nose lesson here. For one, it nutshells what is  most damaging to Mitt Romney as a candidate: that he comes across as consistently afraid, depending on audience, to stand up for what he believes in. Second, that anyone with this perception would gravitate toward Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich–as though their loathesome fulminations were courage–testifies again to the poor political analysis and weak political reporting most of the public gets.

Third, something about this reminds me of David Plouffe’s epically stupid remark when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head. Plouffe’s response? –to warn against blaming violence in any way on violent rhetoric. (In other words, propaganda doesn’t work? If it doesn’t work, why does the lobbying-candidate cabal use it?) This voter’s comment should be a reminder. The White House would be mistaken to fall into the same hole. The president cannot afford to come across as afraid to stand up for what he believes in.  To do him justice, I think Obama is in fact able to stand up for what he believes in. And he has brought about tremendous change, most of which he has not been given credit for.

But the Rahm Emanuel wing of the party–what they stand for is them, as the saying goes in Texas–has influenced too much of the discussion coming out of media outlets (especially since AOL bought the supposedly progressive Huffington Post).

For the record, I oppose voting in the other party’s primary. No one should be voting for the policies espoused by Romney or Santorum, which boil down quite simply to rich-get-richer and at the expense of the general good. That’s the message to send.

[update]

9:44 p.m. The networks/channels are still calling Michigan too close to call, even though it does not in fact look too close, let alone too close to call. Romney won Arizona, as expected, and looks set to pick up Michigan too–also as expected, though not in the most recent hours. Something like 43 percent Romney to 35+ percent Santorum, with Ron Paul and Gingrich finishing at 11 percent and single digits respectively.

Back to that note on oil prices: legal cases on oil-gas speculation are working their way through the judicial system. I wonder whether something might be accomplished by executive order of a president.

Speaking of legal cases, it is funny that Arianna Huffington and Huffington Post are still being characterized as having “credibility” after selling to AOL without repaying the millions of dollars’ worth of value contributed to HuffPost by unpaid bloggers. With whom does HuffPost still have credibility as a progressive outlet?

The scandal of parasitical management–disgraces continue

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Disgraces continue

The scandal of parasitical management

W. Edwards Deming, the wise man of American industry, said decades ago that industrial problems were overwhelmingly the failures of management rather than of labor. No flame thrower, Dr. Deming attributed U.S. manufacturing problems 90 percent to management, 10 percent to work force.

Deming

That kind of clarity now is 100 percent obstructed by most Republicans running for office. Call it the not-Gov. Walker, or –Gov. Kasich, or –Gov. Daniels principle. Instead, we have ongoing disgraces. The treatment of the work force by so-called managers at the beginning of the 21st century would often shame the 19th century, and the problem is politically exacerbated. Outright shameful conduct is at least passively condoned and is at worst actively supported by GOP leadership, who almost to a man always heed their corporate donors and future K Street employers. Call it the Gov. Walker, or Gov. Kasich, or Gov. Daniels principle. Three examples, out of many possible, follow below.

Cooper Tires lockout

  • Cooper Tires, of Findlay, Ohio: Unionized workers at Cooper Tires gave up millions in concessions in pay and benefits in 2008, to help save the company. Reviews of Cooper’s pay and benefits remain mixed among people who work there. Sales for the company have grown significantly, even in the sorely stressed economy that is the state of Ohio under Kasich, largely because the Obama administration bailed out the automobile industry (over GOP opposition). How did management at Cooper Tires return the favor? By locking out workers in November 2011—that would be right after Thanksgiving—and the workers remain locked out to this day. Lockouts always cost the company money, by the way; they entail hiring and training new help, with all the cost and risk entailed in higher turnover and lack of experience. That these are production workers doesn’t help. Meanwhile, compensation for five top executives at Cooper totaled $9,531,521 in 2010—up from the previous five years, and an all-time high, though listed as lower in percentage terms by Morningstar. The percentage ‘decline’ is owing to a decline in Cooper’s stock price, making options less valuable. Cooper CEO Roy V. Barnes took home $4.7M that year. The kicker is that the company, now pressuring employees to accept a worse contract, has ample funds on hand to purchase a plant in Serbia. Cooper Tire & Rubber still has problems with profitability in terms of its stock price, partly because the company is losing goodwill and suffering in public esteem over the way it is treating its employees. But cost-cutting measures have yet to extend to executive compensation for top management; the Human Resources officer responsible for pushing around employees in ways including the lockout also took home six figures in 2010. The excuse for raising executive salaries, of course, is the declining value of company stock options.
  • Apple, Inc.: Software giant Apple is less susceptible to accusations of lack of innovation or of failing to move with the times. Nor is its profitability suffering. However, its executive compensation is suffering even less, so to speak. Business Week and the Wall Street Journal are among business publications reporting that Apple CEO Tim Cook will receive 2011 compensation valued at $378 million. This, as they point out, stands in some contrast to the $1M annually drawn by late Apple CEO Steve Jobs. It stands in more dramatic contrast to conditions at Foxconn, a Chinese sweatshop used by Apple, where workers committed suicide in waves in 2010. The Apple-Chinese sweatshop connection was highlighted again by Rachel Maddow last night and was reported again by the New York Times recently. It was reported earlier by the Guardian. The story will continue to surface until the conditions are addressed—meaning corrected, once and for all. Whatever the problems of our struggling heavy industry, Apple, Inc., cannot convincingly claim that its pockets are too full of nothing but lint to pay its cheapest employees. N.b. There is also that niggling question of whether Apple couldn’t make more of its products here in the U.S., of course. Another question we’re not hearing raised on the campaign trail. Could it be that Apple is avoiding OSHA and EPA oversight?

Apple employee overseas

  • American Airlines, Inc./AMR: Any passenger who has had to endure AA’s baggage policy, fees for changing tickets, multi-stop routes, and teeny-weeny aging prop planes understands intuitively why American Airlines might need to apply for bankruptcy protection. Like almost every U.S. airline except Southwest, AA socks it to you at every possible juncture, including a baggage fee for checking just one suitcase. At least the company does not charge a baggage fee when it has to check your small carry-on bag, for passengers shunted onto a plane with overhead bins too tiny to accommodate even a carry-on–a frequent occurrence. Since AA is also using an aging fleet and, as mentioned, a large number of smaller and less-safe planes, operating expenses do not look to go down any time soon. Be it noted that decisions not to upgrade the fleet, not to purchase new planes rather than maintaining clunkers, and not to purchase larger rather than smaller planes are all managerial decisions. They violate Deming’s core principles for management; see the link above. They have not made AA profitable. But needless to say, AA top management is not seeking to lay itself off in the bankruptcy. The bankruptcy move is being used to break airline unions. Haven’t we seen this before?

How the company treats passengers is also a managerial decision, or series of decisions, determined by managerial policy—although the corporation does not hesitate to blame ‘government’ at every opportunity. While it is risky to use individual first-person experience as data, I have a first-hand anecdote to fill in the broader picture. For common-sense reasons, I do not usually fly at Thanksgiving. Last Thanksgiving, however, I had to fly to another state to tour Alzheimer’s-certified facilities for my mother, who needed to be relocated. That project is accomplished; all to the good. The trip home to DC on the Sunday after Thanksgiving entailed my getting on four planes. Naturally, there was a mechanical failure on the first of these, a small prop plane, and the two-hour delay meant that I missed the next three connections. Incidentally, the announcement we got about this did not explain the mechanical issue but blamed ‘paperwork’ for the delay, also stating that many mechanical staff were off for the holiday.

I did not know that I was booked on AA in the first place; I had bought tickets on Delta and on a local airline. But Delta was borrowing American planes, or AA was borrowing Delta’s brand. Either way, when I phoned the company about the problem, I was shuttled via phone from one company to the other, each disclaiming responsibility. Both companies had overbooked virtually all flights for the day; “They all overbook,” as one airport employee remarked matter-of-factly. Perhaps company management thought that few people would be traveling over Thanksgiving. That said, the story for me at least had a happy ending: eventually I asked the right question of the right person, who pointed me to the right in-house phone, which got me to someone with an Indian accent who was able to put me on a direct flight to DC at no extra cost. In fact, for the first time in my life I came home with more travel money than I left with—a combination of refunds and vouchers for being bumped. The next day, American’s bankruptcy was announced. Click.

Treatment of customers, including a deliberate policy of overbooking flights, is again a managerial decision.

More later.

To call for an end to the lockout in Findlay, Ohio, go here.

Florida primary, 2012

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Florida primary 2012, yesterday and today

In other news, Florida held its 2012 Republican primary Tuesday. Newt Romney defeated Mitt Gingrich, 46 percent to 32 percent.

For perspective on the hullabaloo over the GOP primary, Republicans constitute 36 percent of registered voters in Florida. Total Florida voters: 11,053,664. Democrats: 4,604,373. Republicans: 3,962,406.

 

Florida law suppresses vote

The former fact was mentioned on MSNBC, not live-voice but in a banner on screen. John King on CNN soon afterward said that the primary was open to “more than four million Republican voters” in Florida.

 

Turnout was 1,663,698 as of recent numbers linked above, or 42 percent of registered GOPers. Down from the 2008 primary, as noted elsewhere, including at TPM, but better than the gubernatorial primary of 2010.

 

Probably commentators will rush en masse to blame the lower (than 2008) turnout on Romney’s “carpet bombing” ad campaign.

History shows primary turnout low for Florida, of course, as in other states generally, so it would be a mistake to read too much into it. Nonetheless, two sizable factors each reduce turnout in a GOP primary in Florida. Only one has been much discussed on air.

  • So many of the in-the-minority-and-they-know-it Obama haters are so content to have any GOP candidate, any at all, that they are content to stay on the sidelines in the primary. Generally they’d rather just know as little about their nominee as possible. They don’t want to be informed of any good reason they have to vote against him.
  • With a foreclosure rate among the highest in the nation, the economy dwarfs every other concern. Even the large media outlets cited exit polls showing economic concerns outweighing social issues, religion, hate-Obama-ism (dignified as ‘electability’), etc., in the Florida primary.

 

And it’s on to the Nevada caucuses.

 

The unfolding primary season is providing a useful punch list of reforms and small election improvements needed, state by state.

 

  • Iowa needed more oversight for careful counting of the vote at its highly respected caucuses. In 2012, some watchful Ron Paul supporters happened to provide the assistance that would better be built into the process. Even though some of them raised the alarm at the time, Romney was still mistakenly declared (more or less) the winner in Iowa.
  • Florida began reporting early returns—broadcast on national television—before all of the state’s polls had closed. This is what the Baptists used to call backsliding.

 

Cable channels, after all, are careful to reassure viewers repeatedly that they will not announce exit polls results on how people voted until the polls have closed. That cable hosts and pundits MSNBC and CNN drop heavy hints of the outcome beforehand, and that the channels jump to announce projected results a few seconds after the much-built-up top of the hour, is beside the point. Clearly the networks understand that it is anti-democratic-process to start announcing results before all citizens have had a chance to vote. Florida earliest returns showed Romney running ahead almost 2-to-1, too. That could not have been heartening for other people voting after work, in the Panhandle.

 

Gingrich

Obviously the smaller corrections are dwarfed by larger problems. Since the moment of Obama’s election, the GOP nationwide has engaged in a campaign of vote suppression on a scale unprecedented since the era of legal segregation. But that issue needs fuller detail.

The 2004 election revisited, part 11–Florida

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Revisiting the 2004 election in Florida

Following up previous posts—

The affidavit by computer programmer Clinton Curtis, written about previously, refers to the unexpected death of Raymond C. Lemme. After Curtis left Yang Enterprises (YEI), he went to work for the Florida Department of Transportation. There he found instances of over-billing by Yang Enterprises, a state contractor.

Curtis

Curtis discussed Yang several times with Lemme, an IG investigator for the DOT. Soon afterward, Mr. Lemme was found dead in a motel room in Valdosta, Ga., death reported initially as a suicide. He died July 1, 2003. Lemme was 56, in good health, and had no known ties in Valdosta. Lemme’s supervisor at the Florida DOT, Robert (Bob) Clift, said in telephone interviews that “So far as I know, only Ray Lemme knows what he was doing in Valdosta, Georgia.”

The question remains, what was Lemme doing in Valdosta? July 1 was the Tuesday before the Fourth; was he on vacation? Was he on a work assignment? Calling in response to questions by voice mail, Clift said, “Neither.” Clift added, “As you know from the police reports, his wife and children are in Tallahassee, so he wasn’t on vacation or anything.  And he certainly wasn’t on a work assignment.”  In answer to a further question, he says also, “No, he wasn’t on leave.”

At the time of the interviews, Clift himself supported the hypothesis that Lemme’s death was suicide. He declined to speculate on motives, saying the family had been through enough. Clift said emphatically, however, that the death was not related to Lemme’s job performance, which he called “stellar.”

This assessment is borne out by a house organ of the transportation department. The Aug. 2003, Perspectives on Excellence, a Florida DOT newsletter, features an award won by the Inspector General’s Contract Fraud Investigation Team. Lemme was on the team.

A team photograph is followed by paragraphs of praise:

“The Inspector General’s office executed Florida government’s most successful attack on vendor contract fraud, producing 15 criminal convictions and recovering $1.5 million. This team is responsible for placing 83% of individual and company names on the Department of Management Services’ list of convicted vendors who are no longer eligible to compete for state business.

Governor Bush’s Inspector General recently presented this accomplishment as a best practice, at a national conference of Inspectors General.”

One of the vendors “no longer eligible to compete for state business” was Curtis’s former employer and Rep. Tom Feeney’s former client, Yang Enterprises. Curtis alleges in his affidavit that the vote-tampering software developed at Yang was a project initiated by Feeney. Feeney, who also served in the Florida state house and had been Jeb Bush’s running mate for lieutenant governor in 1994, went on to Congress in 2002.

Feeney

Lemme’s supervisor confirmed that Lemme was part of an award-winning team and reiterates that his work was excellent. “I worked with him probably for about 18 months to two years,” Clift said, and Lemme was “an outstanding performer, one of the most thorough investigators that I’ve ever worked with.”

“Everyone here who worked with him would say the same thing; we would all say that.”

Clift also emphasized that “All of us who worked with him support the conclusions of the Valdosta, Georgia, police,” that the death was a suicide. Calling suspicions about the surprising death “unfortunate,” Clift also repeated emphatically that Lemme’s “assignment had absolutely nothing to do with voting machines.” “It was not anything secret.” The IG unit investigates “employee misconduct and contract frauds as they impact  DOT,” Clift explained, giving as examples employees claiming more time than actually put in, or travel claimed that is not supported, etc. “On the contractor perspective, [we investigate] contractors who billed us for work they did not do.”

Clift clarified emphatically that Lemme’s job was not in jeopardy. Asked whether Lemme had been fired or going to be fired, Clift said, “Absolutely not. I was his supervisor. His job performance was stellar; other people under him and around him looked up to Ray and modeled their performance on his.” It was Clift who nominated the contract fraud investigation team for a job award. Whatever the cause of death, it was not related to Lemme’s job performance.

But in Clift’s opinion, “this voting machine stuff doesn’t square with the cause of death either.” He reiterated that the cloud of suspicion was “unfortunate.” Responding to further questions, Clift said he had read Clinton Curtis’s affidavit. He confirmed that Curtis reported Yang’s over-billing to the Florida DOT. Without going into specifics, he also confirmed what Curtis said. “Every investigation has varying degrees” of accuracy in its leads, Clift said in general terms, with some facts or details more solid than others.  Referring to public record, he also confirmed that Yang Enterprises “doesn’t hold the contract any more.”

 

Clift filed an affidavit with Florida police about Lemme June 30, 2003. Clift told police, in part,

“I arrived at my office this morning at about 6:30 a.m. My message light was blinking. I had a message from Ray which was left at 6:20 a.m. He said “Something’s come up. I’ll be in late. I’ll call you later I knew Ray had a appointment at the FDOT General Counsel’s office at 1:30. I was called about 2:00 by the attorney he was to meet—he didn’t show up. This is very out of character for Ray . . .”

 

Strange timing

The unexpectedness of Lemme’s death, Lemme’s unexplained presence in Valdosta, Ga., and the timing of the death in the context of Florida’s nefarious electoral politics raised questions that were never answered. As written previously, Clinton Curtis’s sworn statement alleges that software company Yang Enterprises had developed a prototype for vote fraud. The project was developed, the affidavit states, at the specific request of Rep. Tom Feeney (R- Fla.).  Before running for Congress Feeney was lobbyist and counsel for Yang. The strangeness of Mr. Lemme’s death, like Curtis’s affidavit, was not considered a news topic by larger corporate media outlets—intensifying suspicions that the death might be foul play, and might be connected to events at Yang. A more normal reaction in the press would at least have reported allegations in the affidavit.

One lengthy account of the matter is given here, with graphic photographs included. Setting aside any hypothetical China connection, from the perspective of several years afterward it still looks as though the crime should have received greater, sober attention than it got.

Ad wars in Florida not just money, ads

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Ad wars in Florida not just money, ads

 They couldn’t work without an element of verite.

Talking Points Memo runs this piece on Florida today, reporting that Romney forces are outspending Gingrich forces there five-to-one.

“The Dems think these figures suggest something else: that it’s not Romney who’s winning votes in Florida, but the size of his wallet. ”

Point taken. However, these trend lines should not be over-simplified.

Certainly money has a devastatingly corrosive effect in politics. So do infamous ad campaigns–Willie Horton, the Osama bin Laden attacks on Max Cleland in Georgia, etc. This writer opposes on constitutional grounds any notion that a) money is speech, or b) corporations are persons.  The effect of the unanswered ads against Gingrich in Iowa is now part of the history of election 2012.

But the success of that ad campaign went beyond money. The ads were devastating because they showed Gingrich in live and still footage doing things he actually did, because they revived press accounts of Gingrich’s actual deeds.

Romney ads are not the only ones playing in Florida. As another local source points out, pro-Gingrich ads are running every ten minutes in Miami, in rush hour–in Spanish. The line is always the same. The ads attack not Romney but Obama.

“Same ad.  The ad attacked only Obama–the theme was broken promises–jobs, housing. ”

At a guess, it is aimed at Hispanics facing either foreclosure or pink slips, or who know someone who does face either one, betting the farm that the voters will blame the president and will see Gingrich as the GOPer best poised to oppose the White House.

Gingrich

It is hard to imagine Gingrich flying high in the Latino demographic. This has less to do with Cuba than with how he comes across–as disrespectful and presumptuous. Aiming over Romney’s head at the Rose Garden is liable to look much the same way, as far as I can tell.

‘Broken promises’ looks to be the line against Obama in the general election, at this point. They must be hoping for an awful lot of amnesia, even more than usual, given the state of the economy at the end of the GWBush administration and the GOP opposition to every improvement since.

One big question about election 2012 right now is whether the amnesia will be facilitated, or how much, by news media predisposed to a ‘close election’.

The 2004 election revisited part 10, Florida

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Revisiting the 2004 election, part 10–Florida

Today there are still gaps in federal regulatory authority and oversight of the voting technology industry. Not surprising, when you look at the standard GOP talking point about ‘regulation’ as a ‘job killer’, but it is a bit jarring that even the Federal Election Commission (FEC) had a complete list of all the voting machine manufacturers responsible for counting votes in 2004. The GOP in Congress has sustained an ongoing tactic of refusing to confirm nominees for the FEC (as for other agencies and commissions), leaving it consistently short-handed under the Obama administration.

Not that the election commissioners were exactly unleashed under the GWBush administration.

Cartoon

 

Something to remember, when GOP presidential candidates rail against ‘regulation’:

Diebold, now Premier Election Solutions, and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) made most of the electronic voting machines. The two companies, competitors, were also similar and entertwined. A former president of the company that became ES&S is Bob Urosevich. Bob Urosevich went on to become president of what became Diebold. A former vice president of ES&S, meanwhile, is his brother Todd Urosevich. Predictably, both brothers were significant GOP donors. The political ties between Diebold in particular and George W. Bush, in both 2000 and 2004, have been widely reported.

Imagine what GOPers and the Tea Party would say, if a voting machine manufacturer today had equally close ties to the Obama White House?

 

This is not to imply that problems stemmed only from the largest companies. Far from it.

The most startling and dramatic testimony on Florida’s election problems in 2004 has come from computer programmer Clinton Curtis. Curtis was an employee of Florida company Yang Enterprises, Inc. He left YEI in good standing.

 

Curtis

While at Yang, Curtis had an experience since brought to light in sworn testimony and in a startling affidavit.

In fall 2000, Curtis witnessed Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.), at that time YEI’s company counsel and lobbyist, visit the company with an unusual request. In a meeting with at least half a dozen people participating, “Mr. Feeney said that he wanted to know if YEI could develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in an election and be undetectable.”

The request was not a joke. In the conversation, which involved company personnel including Curtis, Feeney “was very specific in the design and specifications required for this program,” Curtis testified. Curtis was directed to create the vote fraud software prototype and did so.

 

Feeney

Feeney, also a Florida state legislator who had run as Gov. Jeb Bush’s running mate for lieutenant governor, ran for Congress in 2002 and won. His 24th district was one of the new Florida House districts drawn after the 2000 census, while Feeney was in the Florida state house.

 

Note: When I was working on this issue after the election in 2004, I called Feeney’s congressional office. Through spokespersons, Feeney declined to comment on the affidavit, saying “We’re not making any statements on the Clinton Curtis affidavit. We haven’t made any statements about it, and we have no plans to make any statement.”

I published an article on the issue–including this flat statement that there would be no comment on the allegations, whatsoever, in future. The column ran in a small local community paper, The Prince George’s Journal. Curtis’s affidavit was not reported at the time in the Washington Post (picking a random example here). For a time, Feeney’s office attempted to pass off the allegations as a joke, Feeney laughing heartily in the occasional interview. However, the “we’re not making any statements” phase soon passed. Subsequently Feeney denied the allegations in response to questions placed by Florida newspapers. Feeney lost his race for reelection to Congress in 2008.

 

What Feeney did not comment on

Given the content of the affidavit, this was one of the more remarkable “no comments” in legislative affairs.

Curtis made his notarized statement on Dec. 6. A registered Republican, he began working for Yang Enterprises (YEI) in 1998. He became lead programmer and had daily meetings with the company CEO. In fall 2000, Curtis sat in on “at least a dozen” meetings about computer projects with Feeney, with Curtis as technology advisor.

 

Yang Enterprises

The affidavit details a chilling sequence in which the vote-altering project was developed, was handed to one of the company managers, and was then delivered elsewhere after an open statement that it was intended to control the vote in South Florida by manipulating margins and percentages in some precincts.

Feeney, the affidavit continues,

“was very specific in the design and specifications required for this program. He detailed, in his own words, that; (a) the program needed to be touch-screen capable, (b) the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment, (c) the programming to accomplish this remain hidden even if the source code was inspected.”

After discussion, the company CEO agreed to try to develop the prototype. The affidavit goes on to describe the vote fraud software prototype developed.

“Hidden on the screen were invisible buttons. A person with knowledge of the locations of those invisible buttons could then use them to alter the votes of any candidate listed.”

Fairly simple, the software was also fairly easy to conceal.

“In an actual application, the user would receive no visible clues to the fraud that had just occurred. Since the vote is applied by race, any single race or multiple races can be altered. The supervisors or any voter would never notice this fraud. Additionally, the procedure could be repeated as many times as was necessary to achieve the desired results. No amount of testing or simulations would expose the fraud as its activation and process is completely invisible to everyone except the person programming the vote fraud routine.”

Vote fraud could be detected by someone looking at the source code.  But the source code would have to be provided.

Curtis’s affidavit goes on to describe other conversations in which Feeney “bragged that he had already implemented ‘exclusion lists’ to reduce the ‘black vote.’

[Update

Speaking of vote suppression tactics, today Florida seniors and others gathered in Tampa to protest legislation designed to reduce the vote. The new law reduces opportunity for early voting, creating an additional burden for seniors and Americans with disabilities who cannot stand in long lines.]

On a separate tactic for influencing the election, Curtis alleges that Feeney “further mentioned that ‘the proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25%’.”

Curtis left YEI soon afterward and took a job in the Florida Department of Transportation. YEI threw a farewell party for him. His farewell card is posted on Brad Blog, which has done a solid job reporting this story. At the Transportation department, he found that YEI, a state contractor, was over-billing. He and another whistleblower were fired, as the affidavit narrates.

Yang Enterprises subsequently lost the contract with the state of Florida, according to Bob Clift, a supervisor in the fraud investigation unit.

 

Meanwhile, in Congress

Rep. Feeney, Jeb Bush’s running mate in the unsuccessful race for governor against Lawton Chiles in 1994, served on the House Judiciary Committee, which held hearings on the 2004 election. Curtis’s testimony was presented fairly early in local hearings convened by Conyers. (In the Judiciary hearings on Capitol Hill that I observed, Feeney did not speak much. He tended mostly to sit, red-faced.) The election hearings went nowhere under the GWBush administration. Massive counter-attacks and a DOJ investigation involving Conyers’ wife, Monica Conyers, continued to take their toll even after the 2008 election.

Feeney also served on the Committee on Science. One of its subcommittees, Environment, Technology, and Standards, shared oversight with the full committee on issues regarding voting standards. Their press person stated that the subcommittee and full committee have both been “very active” on vote issues.

Feeney was also a member of Judiciary subcommittees on Commercial and Administrative Law; the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security; and the Subcommittee on the Constitution.