Tag Archives: Republican Party

How the Democrats Keep Losing. 2017, Part 1. Georgia special, 6th District, April 18.

Posted on by
Reply

Right now the 2017 race getting most attention is the Georgia 6th Congressional District special election, coming up on April 18. Georgia went red in 2016, as did Georgia’s 6th Congressional District; see below. But a ‘competitive’ special election in the 6th is being ballyhooed by commentators as well as by the national Democratic Party and by some outside groups.

The best over-all coverage so far comes from Ballotpedia:

“This race is one Ballotpedia is watching closely. Although it is normally a safe Republican district, polling and spending in the district indicates a competitive race. The election will replace Tom Price (R), who was confirmed as U.S. secretary of health and human services. Prior to his cabinet appointment, Price represented the 6th District from 2004 to 2017. Two interesting angles have emerged in recent weeks: 1) which Republican candidate might emerge from the crop of 11 to advance to the runoff; 2) Will there even be a runoff, if Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff is able to coalesce enough support to break 50 percent in the primary?”

Actually the April 18th special is not a primary, as Ballotpedia points out elsewhere. Rather, it is a general election with declared candidates from four parties. If no candidate breaks 50 percent, the two top candidates advance to the June 20 runoff.

Dan Moody, GOP candidate in Georgia's 6th

Dan Moody, GOP candidate in Georgia’s 6th

Some breathless coverage has evolved, if that’s the word, from the arithmetic of the field: the GOP has eleven declared candidates, while the Democrats have a mere five–frontrunner Jon Ossoff, physician Rebecca Quigg, Navy veteran and college professor Richard Keatley, former state senator Ron Slotin, and sales manager Ragin Edwards, the one woman of color in the race. The smart money is backing Ossoff to take a runoff spot.

That in itself looks like a plausible projection at this point. Let’s say that Ossoff gets into the two-person runoff. Then what?

Here’s where the coverage and the political attention get interesting, or twisted.

National Democrats have invested heavily in Ossoff:

PICKING A HORSE – “House Democrats invest in Georgia, wait on Montana,” by Campaign Pro’s Elena Schneider: “Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock weathered Trump’s 20-point wave in Montana. Republican Greg Gianforte, who lost to Bullock in 2016, is the front-runner for the open House seat, after infuriating some in his own party for failing to appeal beyond his conservative base . But national Democrats can’t stop talking about Georgia. The DCCC is sending money to hire nine on-the-ground staffers to help Democrats in Georgia’s 6th District. Jon Ossoff, the 30-year-old front-runner to carry Democratic hopes into a special election runoff, has already raised a whopping $1.85 million to replace Republican Rep. Tom Price in the traditionally red seat. The DNC is following suit, with interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile saying Thursday that the committee will make investments there.”

So have Georgia’s state Democrats. So have some outside groups such as the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund and End Citizens United, which as of March 30, Politico reports, had raised half a million for Ossoff. Enthusiastic emails ask for donations to the Ossoff campaign round the clock, at every moment that can be called a juncture or a “deadline”. (Alan Grayson’s emails, far and away the best-written, give some good commentary on the asks.)

And all of this is based on–what? On Donald Trump’s relatively slim win over Hillary Clinton in Georgia’s 6th. According to Daily Kos, the presidential vote in the 6th was 46.8 percent for Clinton, 48.3 percent for Trump. The narrowness of the win in a district in a state Trump carried by five points has gotten a lot of attention.

Here’s where the yes-but comes in. Georgia also cast votes for Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2016. The Kos breakdown of congressional districts did not tally non-major parties. The 2016 Libertarian vote is typically not factored in. It goes unmentioned in the special-Georgia-6th emails drumming up support and contributions for Ossoff. It also goes unmentioned in most commentary.

However, as pro-Libertarians have noted, in the Sixth District, it amounted to five percent:

“The Gary Johnson-William Weld Libertarian ticket’s solid 5 percent tally in Georgia’s 6th District over-performed its statewide and national percentage, stretching past 7 percent in some precincts.”

So, adding up, Georgia’s 6th gave 53.3 percent of its presidential vote to Republican or right-leaning candidates in 2016. Write-in votes in the entire state came to one half of one percent; thus awarding every write-in vote in the 6th to a Democrat or left-leaning candidate, hypothetically and impossibly, still leaves the margin of victory at 53.3 percent to 46.8 percent. Not by any definition was this a close race, or ‘competitive’, let alone a squeaker.

It could also be suggested that some votes went Libertarian not only in reaction against Trump–as ceaselessly touted in  media coverage and wishful partisan discussion–but in a confidence that Trump would win anyway. If so, the confidence turned out to be justified. In short, Hillary Clinton lost the 6th by 6.5 percent.

Meanwhile, GOP House Representative Tom Price was cruising to reelection in the 6th, with more than 61 percent of the vote to Democrat Tom Stooksbury’s 38-plus percent.

The special election on the 18th, be it noted, is for U.S. House.

This run-down has not been clarified in any of the numerous emails that urge Sanders voters and others to donate to Ossoff.

So, where are the Democrats at in Georgia’s 6th?

Let’s start with gender, this being the year we hear that more women than ever are activated, marching, energized–the buzzy term–and running for office. In Georgia’s 6th, the eighteen or nineteen declared candidates include four women–Quigg and Edwards for the Democrats, Karen Handel and Amy Kremer for the GOP. So far, Ossoff has dominated in coverage on the Democratic side, gender be damned; Handel leads in polls on the Republican side. Handel, Judson Hill and Bob Gray are reportedly the robust GOP contenders for money and endorsements. Looks like gender is a non-starter, at least for the Democrats. So much for women.

Ditto in the coverage, at least as regards Georgia 6. Politico, for example, has been boosting Ossoff since the beginning of the year. Its most recent article on the special election (yesterday) has him the only one in the picture. Actors Alyssa Milano and Christopher Gorham’s stumping for Ossoff has gotten warm mention. Of the four other Democratic candidates, three have not been named on Politico‘s large web site. (Try the search.) The name of Rebecca Quigg, who came out strongly for the Affordable Care Act as a physician, is not findable on Politico.com at this writing. Anywhere. Nor is Edwards’.

Not that this is all gender, you understand. Keatley’s name is also not found on Politico, and Ron Slotin has gotten one mention there this year.

Mistakes 2.0. Democrats still cruisin for a bruisin

There are a few troublesome elements here.

Going beyond the scope of this article, I continue to observe that cable coverage is often the face of ‘the media’ to the general public; that cable coverage tends to dovetail into political insider-ism; and that both too often meld in public perception with ‘the Democrats’–especially when the Democratic Party aggressively plays along with all of the above. Nothing could be more discouraging.

Look what’s going on in Georgia. You have 1) a race where Democrats are in the minority, past and present, but where the Democratic Party is focusing attention and resources; 2) in which, still, the Democrats are trying to coalesce around one candidate, boosted by party insiders and the party apparatus; 3) a large part of the effort is to make the one candidate seem inevitable and unstoppable; 4) with eager cooperation from media outlets starving out other Democratic contenders rather than reporting on them; 5) all trying to motivate voters largely by Trump-bashing the opposition; 6) all while over-optimistically estimating probabilities of a win; and 7) neglecting or ignoring more viable districts and under-served populations in the West and on the Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, tireless and round-the-clock pleas for money are pumped out with party support. On top of everything else, the special takes place just after April the 15th, except that there is an extension for Income Tax Day this year–meaning it coincides with the Georgia 6th special election.

For the moment, the math isn’t there. Did Dems learn anything from 2016?

Perhaps there will be some benefit to having a Democratic candidate in the Georgia 6 run-off, assuming that happens. But not unless the Democrats change for the better once the runoff spot is in the bag, if it is. That means positives on health care, education, and infrastructure. Going TrumpTrumpTrump as Clinton did will only corroborate a suspicion that the party has nothing to offer.

Remember, if the lost GOP voters had viewed Trump half as hysterically as some commentators do, they would have held their noses and voted for Clinton.

 

Financial-political corruption is not just a “single issue”

Posted on by
Reply

Lead Paint and the Tangled Web of Corporate Finance

Back in August the Washington Post ran an excellent, heartbreaking article on rip-offs of victims of lead paint poisoning. The article linked here should be read in full, but the short story is that finance companies induce poor people with annuities to cash their annuities in for a lump-sum pittance. In Baltimore, which like other older cities has been plagued by paint containing lead, some sufferers had received compensation for damage to their health from lead paint. But some recipients later sold their valuable annuities for pennies on the dollar. This nasty turn of events followed–of course–the previous heart-rending saga, beginning with the harm to human and animal victims and progressing to most landlords and property owners coming out financially unscathed, or close to it–while the victims fell disproportionately on the public welfare rolls. (Some lead-paint sufferers were then cleansed off the welfare rolls in President Bill Clinton’s ‘welfare reform’.)

The annuities were intended to protect the victims, somewhat, for the rest of their lives, giving them a steady monthly income, since a number of the people harmed were left so affected or ill as to be unemployable. But many of the annuities have been bought up, sold in exchange for ‘ready cash’ by the recipients or by unsophisticated relatives. This kind of scheming is not new. It figures as a plot point in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811:

Her legal allowance was not adequate to her fortune, nor sufficient for her comfortable maintenance, and I learnt from my brother that the power of receiving it had been made over some months before to another person. He imagined, and calmly could he imagine it, that her extravagance and consequent distress had obliged her to dispose of it for some immediate relief.

Two hundred years later, this particular suppurating pimple of financial chicanery has cropped out on the face of Wall Street, with some of the same blaming the victim, too.

Less poetically, we can narrow down the focus from Wall Street.

One company involved is Access Funding, located according to its Zoom Company Information in the LexisNexis database at 6900 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland, Suite 700.

Company records suggest that the company has recently dwindled. Access Funding recently listed $5M – $10M in revenues and 20 to 50 employees–including a “Director of Lottery Services.” However, its recently updated entry in the Lexis database lists “two employees” and revenue in six figures. Public investigations are under way, though slowly. After I recover fully from pneumonia and bronchitis, I hope to do some research in, among other things, the company’s interest in “Lottery Services.” Presumably the link is lottery winners who choose to take their winnings in annuity payments.

For the moment, I am interested in the murk of property ownership. The umbrella concept is responsibility. Property owners can sometimes be held to account for what happens on their property. The idea is that even a wealthy and politically connected landlord is still a landlord, and what happens on the property may be the responsibility of the owner, unless investigation reveals that full responsibility lies elsewhere. According to general principle, however, at least the question of responsibility is to be investigated. This general principle is supposed to apply, so far as I know, regardless of whether the owner is an individual or a corporation. If any harm done turns out to be exclusively the fault of a tenant, so be it, but a light has to be shone. Needless to say, this is exactly the kind of principle under attack by the Republican Party, under the guise of releasing “small business” from the burden of “regulation.” Instead of transparency and investigation, the public gets closed records and murky corporate layers that conceal ownership and responsibility. Instead of accountability, the public gets privatization of the rewards (dignified as “investment”) and socialization of the damages. Ethically or rationally under-qualified insiders do the harm; the public pays for the harm. (As goes the GOP, so go the Clintons. The secretive Clintons have triangulated exactly the same undermining of transparency and accountability throughout their careers, or at least since Bill Clinton lost an early election in Arkansas. This “Republican lite” pattern tends to be under-reported in political commentary, but it is a consistent theme in Hillary Clinton’s life since she was in college–following a track created by paralleling bad actions, but to a lesser degree or in a more secretive way, under the guise of mediating between opposing sides. More on that later.)

Corporate ownership is not an easy trail to follow.

The database of the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation indicates that Access Funding, based in affluent Chevy Chase, Maryland, had at least a couple of previous avatars, now canceled or forfeit. State records indicate the owner as “6900 Wisconsin LLC”–a limited liability company, not required to disclose details of individual personnel or ownership. The owner’s address is given as “c/o Washington Property Company, 4719 Hamden Lane FL 3, Bethesda MD  20814-2909.” Ironically, the secured party for both 4719 Hampden Lane and 6900 Wisconsin Avenue properties is the American Equity Investment Life Insurance Company. Thinking outside the box, it could be helpful if life insurance companies took an interest in health issues connected with the properties they underwrite. But then, American Equity may not have known of any connection between its property interest and the lead paint sufferers. This is one of the unimaginative principles guiding our eponymous ‘Wall Street’: sometimes it pays not to know. Again–this is exactly the guiding principle consistently upheld by a) the GOP, and b) the Clintons. (What is the ‘centrist’ number of lead poisoning cases?)

6900 Wisconsin Avenue

As mentioned, the “Washington Property Co” is pretty faceless, judging from public record. Checking political donations at opensecrets.org, from the Center for Responsive Politics, we can find that some Washington Property Co. exec donated more than $7,000 to candidate Mitt Romney. Peering closely at the state database, we can see an unhelpful typo in the street address of Washington Property Co., listed as “Hamden Lane” rather than “Hampden Lane.” (Typos and other mistakes that impede research are typical for these databases.) For the rest, Washington Property Co. has been active in Maryland since 2004, is as said located at 4719 HAMPDEN Lane, and the owner of 4719 Hampden Lane is “Hampden Lane Project LLC.”

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.

Except that we’re not. The owner of the soul-stirringly named “Hampden Lane Project LLC”? — “c/o Washington Property Company   4719 Hampden Lane Fl 3  Bethesda MD 20814-2909.”

Let’s follow a different version of the company name and see whether that one pans out–the corporate name, rather than the Limited Liability Company name. Washington Property Company Inc., as opposed to Washington Property Co LLC, originated in August, 2004, in Delaware.

This one actually gets us somewhere. Owner name: “c/o Morgan Stanley, Suite 800,  3424 Peachtree Rd, Atlanta GA 30326.” Again, there is a typo in the public record: the name “Morgan Stanley” is misspelled. Again, typical of corporate records in state databases, in Maryland and in other states, adding to obstacles including LLC, LC and corporate names; old names; lack of disclosure of key personnel; and use of registered agents.

The 3424 Peachtree Rd building currently has spaces for lease btw.

3424 Peachtree

Consulting the donor database from the Center for Responsive Politics, one finds that Morgan Stanley in Georgia donates almost entirely to a) Republicans and b) Hillary Clinton. A quick search of the current election cycle shows Morgan Stanley (Georgia) and its key people donating mainly to Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio–and Clinton. The Peachtree company/office has donated $43,000-plus to the Republican National Committee since 2012, mainly in 2012. It donated $20,000-plus to Right to Rise USA, the Jeb Bush-support PAC, in 2015. As in the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton is the stopgap candidate, the fallback position, for the GOP and for Wall Street.

So much for silk-stocking Republicans as somehow separate from the worst elements of either Wall Street or their party. So much for the Clintons as “Fighting for Us”–the slogan the Clinton campaign produced after jettisoning its earlier “Fighting for You.”

One thing the Bernard Sanders campaign has exactly right is that political-economic corruption is game-rigging. This is not just “one issue.” It touches virtually everything. There is no ‘centrist’ amount of lead in house paint.

One more quick point. First, a number of financial companies are in the business of buying annuities, some more respectably than others. Buying up annuities is big business. Second, all these companies contribute politically–if they donate at all–to the usual suspects: top preference goes to the GOP, next tier is Clinton.

Thus–in a quick look–people at Woodbridge Investments, for example, have donated some $135,000 in recent cycles, to Republican candidates including Carly Fiorina. Corona Capital has donated at least $6,400 to GOPers, including Rep. Todd Young of Indiana and Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Client First Settlement Funding conveyed a more modest sum of $500.00 to Florida State Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto, among other donations to GOP candidates and the Republican National Committee. Someone at Settlement Capital Corporation gave $500.00 to John Boehner.

Other company names include Liberty Settlement Funding, J. G. Wentworth, CIYA, Annuity Transfers, RSL Funding, and Sell My Structured Settlement. More research awaits.

One of the biggest of these interested companies is Peachtree Financial Solutions. From company statements in the Lexis Nexis database:

Peachtree Financial Solutions is an affiliate of Peachtree Settlement Funding (Peachtree). Peachtree is a specialty finance and transactional tax-planning firm employing over 150 professionals in three offices located in Georgia, Florida and New Jersey. Peachtree has in excess of $500 million in committed financing lines for its specialty finance businesses and has originated over $2 billion in assets. Peachtree is the primary servicer on more than 5,000 transactions and is backed up by The Bank of New York. Peachtree’s servicing activities are routinely reviewed and subjected to agreed upon procedure audits by our financial partners. Peachtree is a full financial audit client of PricewaterhouseCoopers and its principal outside tax counsel for the WealthBuilder program is Foley & Lardner.
REVENUE: USD 17,500,000   www.wealthbuilder.com

Predictably, Peachtree Settlement Funding has been a big donor to both parties, Republicans and Democrats, in past cycles. Sen. Chuck Schumer has particularly benefited from Peachtree Settlement Funding–like any other office holder connected with Wall Street. Interestingly, in the current election cycle Peachtree Settlement Funding appears only in relatively modest donations such as $1,000.00 to Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida. Either Peachtree Settlement Funding has stayed on the sidelines because of the Trump phenomenon, or it is cooling its jets in the wake of reporting on chiseling suffering people out of their annuities, or both.

Meanwhile, there are other problems with annuities, including problems with the annuities themselves. One of the first things that happened to my late mother after the death of my father was that someone came to her front door and sold her a substandard annuity she did not need. (My mother died in 2012, from Alzheimer’s. Fortunately, she did have a good and honest banker, on the ball, who got in touch with the vendor and reversed the transaction.)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has reported on yet another scam–that of financial kickbacks in selling annuities in the first place. The information is reported here.

This is the kind of report not produced by Sen. Hillary Clinton, “a workhorse not a show horse,” as she put it, during her time in the U.S. Senate.

Hillary Clinton’s Emails

Posted on by
1

Actually, the title of this post is a misnomer. They are the public’s emails. But as with the contents of the U.S. Mint, public ownership and public access are two different things.

What we do going forward is what matters most. Facing these State Department emails, let’s start with some constructive recommendations. Here would be my recommendations for policy and best practices, if I could vote on them.

From this time forth,

  1. Work emails for a government agency should be done using government-issued equipment. “GI” wasn’t a bad name for the guys who bore it.
  2. If government personnel choose to send emails or other communications they deem private or personal, on government equipment, it should be with the understanding that the messages are subject to authorized scrutiny. (Many university campuses have pretty much this arrangement, with considerably less of a rationale than the State Department would have.)
  3. When someone’s government service ends, emails and other correspondence should be reviewed by an independent entity (three or more objective people, with enough sense and character to divide up the job equitably). The independent entity would determine which communications are work-related and which, if any, are not.
  4. The non-work-related communications would not be deleted. They would be quarantined for 50 years. The work-related correspondence would be archived according to policy.
  5. To keep the difficulty and expense for others to a minimum, government workers should be advised to keep their personal communications while at work to a minimum. Restrict personal communications to their personal email accounts, and restrict personal emailing or telephoning to their off time (lunch, breaks, after hours).

Emailing is still a relatively new form of communication (if older than IM, texting, or tweeting). Policy to cover communication in government still needs refinement. State and local governments, businesses at all levels, academia, the judicial system and the world of medicine have the same issues.

Not that there aren’t worse problems. 

That said, Secretary Clinton’s arrangement is unique. As described yesterday in the Washington Post,

The server that Clinton used as secretary of state was stored at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., and was shared with her husband, former president Bill Clinton, and his staff. The device was managed during that time by a State Department staffer who was paid personally by the Clintons for his work on their private system.

Setting aside lurid suggestions floated by the GOP, the most rational conjecture as to why Secretary Clinton would set up a private email server is that she wanted to hang on to the material to recycle later, in more books about her career. This is the simplest theory that fits the known facts, including the Clintons’ conduct when leaving the White House in January 2001.

Continuing the saga as outlined most recently in the Post, the server with the emails was taken over by Platte River Networks in 2013; the emails were removed from a second server in 2014; and Clinton’s attorneys then separated the emails they designated as work-related from those they designated as entirely personal. The good news in the most recent Post report is that the deleted emails may be recovered. I hope so; and if there is any question about which emails should released for public reading, that’s what judges are for. My understanding of Clinton’s previous statements is that she and her attorneys intended to turn over all work-related emails.

Clear enough, as far as it goes. However, media discussions of the emails are usually confusing, because the concepts of “public” and “private” are confused. Secretary Clinton’s work as secretary of state belongs to the public. This statement does not mean that all details can be released to the general public. In the public interest, some operations of a public office need to be kept confidential. In the public interest, personnel matters are kept private; government employees like other people have a right to privacy. In the public interest, the safety and security of people who work for us, like the Secretary of State, are protected. Again in the public interest, the safety and security of dignitaries, government officials, and private citizens of other countries are protected.

That matter of safety and security–unfortunately–is one of the places where Hillary Clinton’s private email server fell down.

Some clarification is necessary here.

I have ignored Republican hype about Benghazi from start to finish, partly because I am wrapping up a book on another subject; partly because the investigation so far looks bogus.

(‘Benghazi’ hearings /One /GOP tack to /Undermine /Sense.)

The party that campaigns on “shrinking government” has little room to talk about security. Shrinking “government” means shrinking security. It means shrinking information. It means shrinking advance notice and advance warning and advance planning. It means shrinking tactics, let alone strategy. It means shrinking transparency, oversight, and accountability. It means shrinking the talent pool, in diplomacy, security, and the military as well as in everything else. In practice, it means outsourcing, off-shoring, and subcontracting–all of which are security breaches waiting to happen.

I might add that a party willing to violate the Logan Act, eager to invade other countries, and always ready to downgrade diplomacy and diplomats is not positioned to point fingers over the deaths of heroic foreign service officers and ambassadors. You cannot trust a faction that writes a separate open letter to the state of Iran. And the contestants in the Republican race for the White House have expressed little awareness of what the U.S. Foreign Service, and U.S. diplomats, face. When they bring up dangers abroad at all, it is generally to voice a scurrility about President Obama, who inherited all the disasters left by the previous administration, has done more to contend with such than any other administration in U.S. history–and has had to surmount opposition to even the most common-sense diplomacy, from the very people who created the disasters.

We could also add the party’s over-all allegiance to thuggery, violence, tough talk, and the weapons industry to the list, while we’re at it. The GOP as the party of “security”? Small wonder it scrambles to deflect attention from its own problems, to a lightning rod like either of the Clintons.

So it was a matter of surprise and no little chagrin to learn that the Secretary of State had set up a private email server to handle her State Department work. In other words, she conducted government work on equipment that she purchased and controlled privately. Whether the equipment was “private” in the security sense remains to be seen. Clinton did keep it private in the ownership sense (private property); she did not donate it to the State Department. I am not going to jump to conclusions, especially about security matters, and I have never been a fan of hysteria, especially in politics or the news media. But the emails released so far do reveal a few facts.

Setting aside both the wild accusations and conjecture from the right wing, and the inaccurate or smarmy defenses from Clinton and her allies, some valid statements can be made.

  1. Many of the Clinton emails contained sensitive information. No matter how delusional Republicans in Congress get, the actuality remains that of 4,368 emails released in August, hundreds indicate sensitive details from the daily operations of State and/or negotiations with foreign individuals or entities, in 2009 and 2010. Leaving diplomacy itself out of the picture, if you genuinely care about the safety of the people involved in it, you might care that more than 1,500 emails mention or discuss a “call” or “meeting” or “schedule,” often signaled in the subject line, with the whens and wheres. Thus if some ill-disposed person (besides Sen. Cotton) wanted when-and-where on Secretary of State Clinton or on people she was dealing with, hundreds of emails contained the information. Searching for the predictable word “call” generates 1,409 emails. Many contain “call” in the subject line. Searching for “meeting” generates 836 results, many with “meeting” in the subject line. Some were sent by Clinton, although understandably she received far more than she sent. Often, dates and/or times of the call or meeting are included, and often in the subject heading–along with the names of the people involved. The 2009-2010 emails contain few references to Libya, and none to J. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, or Benghazi; emails from 2012-2013 will presumably contain more.

While waiting to see those relevant emails, we basically have to hope that no antagonists hacked them or read them, or did so effectively. Clinton’s emails often detailed the when and where of her schedule, with times, dates, places, and names. About 60 emails are a “Mini schedule” for Clinton (heading in subject line). “Mini schedule” emails appear throughout 2009 and 2010. So do emails featuring the word “schedule” in general, with 377 results, sent and mainly received by Clinton, again with “schedule” often indicated in the subject line. The phrase “conference call” generates 31 results, nine from Clinton and the rest received by her; several of these also signal “call” or “schedule” in the subject line.

One oddity is that this set-up was created by someone who, according to the Post, has imposed a series of barriers for reporters trying to get through with questions for her 2016 campaign, and who has complained for years about her lack of privacy, about constant media scrutiny, etc. As Secretary of State, Clinton seems to have assumed that her position protected her privacy, including communication channels she set up outside State.

  1. Hundreds of Clinton’s emails show consciousness of security. References to the “secure” turn up 645 times in the August batch of emails, sometimes in the subject lines. “Secure” includes a “secure line” (15 results), or “talk secure” (13 results, two sent by Clinton), or a “secure phone” (5 results) or a “secure call” (16 results, 2 from Clinton). An email of March 3, 2010, refers to Clinton’s “yellow phone.”

The acronym OPS turns up 148 times. This abbreviation seems to refer to the Watch Officer, State Department Operations Center S-ES/O, 202-xxx-xxxx, Andrew Kim Johnson for one. About 25 of these emails were sent by Clinton, although others are replies with messages sent by Clinton in the email chains. Clinton herself often referred to OPS.

This point brings up a third one.

  1. The email chains show combinations of personal and government, government and political, and personal and political. Partly such combinations would occur in any office or organization. Whose work emails would be devoid of all reference to birthdays, births, or congratulations? But this server and this government correspondence–as we now know–were not in a workplace. It’s funny in a way that Clinton operated a small State Department communications center in her own and her spouse’s private residence. Clinton donors strike me generally as exactly the people who would tend to ridicule a political candidate, for example, whose campaign headquarters were his home.

In any case, some of the email-chain combinations look less benign. There is no denying that Clinton used the OPS secure line for private matters and/or for political matters, not just for high state matters. She refers to doing so. An easy example, not lurid, comes from February 2010.

On February 9, Clinton emailed several colleagues and friends (7:39 a.m.) that New York Times columnist David Brooks “Took a shot at me in his column today,” and asked, “Any idea what prompted it?”

The recommendation in reply was to bring in Brooks, and perhaps other rightwing columnists, “for an OTR with you.”

Clinton agreed but suggested that something more was needed: “Agreed–full speed ahead. But, I think we may also need a more aggressive strategy of pushing our message. Can you call me at home thru OPS? Thx.”

A career State Department employee also replied, but keeping the separate tracks separate, “Philippe and I had an offline conversation about this and I agree entirely” that the Secretary should talk with Brooks and others.

One could argue that mingling social and other emails in the same chains might assist security: the mixed email chains and the mixed subject lines might camouflage, or at least not flag, high state matters. Or so I thought, before I noticed all the emails headed with indicators about what the Secretary would be doing that day, with whom, and when.

 

More later.

Hillary Clinton Would Be Awful for the Democratic Party in 2016

Posted on by
Reply

Clinton as Secretary of State

 

And the Republicans know it.

This post will be short.*

Clinton would be the worst possible choice for Democratic nominee in 2016. Every flaw revealed in the 2008 campaign is still there, not to be ignored in a presidential campaign. Clinton’s one plus is that much of her work as Secretary of State was good; she was part of a good governmental team. But even that work has been compromised. With moral idiocy, Clinton set up a private server for emails. While working for the United States, she used her own email account. So much for benefiting from, and reinforcing, the teamwork of respected professionals. A life in public, and she still does not understand that governmental work belongs to the people of this nation?

Keeping her emails private enabled Clinton to stockpile her writing and correspondence as SecState for future books, of course. Anything to make another few million bucks. (This point has not been made in media commentary about the emails.)

Speaking of money, one strength the Clintons undeniably have is the ability to raise millions. (The fact that I do not understand why people throw money at this unsavory pair is beside the point; they do throw money.) So the Clintons could make partial amends for their thirty years of hysterical selfishness in Arkansas, by continuing to raise money for charity. Instead, as ever with this pair, it is self uber alles. 2000 redux.

And the GOP knows it. Notice how every ‘establishment’ pundit and every GOP public figure has treated Clinton as an inevitability. The tactic kills several American birds with one stone. 1) It denies media attention to every better Democratic candidate. 2) It puts the worst possible face on the Democratic Party. 3) It ensures that most money goes to Clinton, slowing down other potential candidates. 4) It diminishes the gulf between the two major parties, foregrounding the creepy, self-engrossed Clintons and cementing the Dems more firmly to the worst of Wall Street.

The upside for Dems is that the idea of running against ‘Hillary’ has encouraged a multitude of demented candidacies for the GOP nomination. But meanwhile, the GOP has a vested interest in undoing the Obama administration as much as possible, as their only shot at position and money. Promoting ‘Hillary’ is the easiest and cheapest way to do that.

Simple point: the Clintons had thirty years in Arkansas. If they had done a good job, Hillary Clinton would have run for the Senate from Arkansas. If Bill Clinton had been the person he could have been, he would have retired to Arkansas, and been content, like Cincinnatus. But during their THIRTY YEARS in Arkansas, they did as little for working families as they could get away with doing. Their energies were focused elsewhere. And when Democratic voters wanted something better for working families, the Clintons were always there, to throw other figures under the bus, as ‘liberal’.

The ticket our establishment pundits envision in store for us is appalling. I read, but I am one voter among many who will never vote for either a Bush or a Clinton.

 

* I am working on a book that takes most of my writing time.

Remember the ‘nanny party’?

Posted on by
Reply

Remember ‘the Nanny Party’ ?

Has anyone noticed that since the most recent Ebola outbreak began, we’ve been hearing less about Democrats as ‘the Nanny Party’?

Maybe paying attention to public health and public safety is starting to look good.

What with one thing and another, there has been less from the GOP, lately, about

  • defunding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
  • slash-and-burn budget-cutting across the board in the U.S. government, including cuts to funding for the FAA and for U.S. airports where international passengers will be screened for Ebola, funding for the four specialized hospitals in the U.S. where Ebola patients are treated, and funding for vaccine research
  • abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
  • repealing the Affordable Care Act 

There has been less blatant use even of the broad-brush “tax and spend” mantra, and when it is used, the slogan is a sign of a fading campaign.

Not that the bad days are gone forever.

Mike Lee, Ted Cruz

For one thing, whack jobs are still out there, running for office in 2014. Regardless of the outcome in the race for U.S. senator from Iowa in 2014, it will remain incredible that a candidate like GOPer Joni Ernst could run. For the record, Ernst is another candidate who has called for eliminating the EPA–along with the IRS (i.e. funding our government) and the Department of Education.

 

Joni Ernst claims

For another, the Republican Party generally tones down most of the most rapacious proposals right before an election. The (perennial) game plan is to sound halfway decent, for the few weeks leading up to elections, and then to implement the Let’s-bring-back-the-Great-Depression policies in office afterward.

 

More later

The fundamentals are always in place, beyond the silly ‘nanny’ ridicule, beyond the opposition to all public health programs, beyond even the attacks on federal agencies that many people have noticed.

Of our two major parties, by and large it is always the Republican Party that supports the three strategems most dangerous to public health and public safety, along with jobs:

1. Privatizing. See Rick Allen in Georgia (“no position”? on Social Security?). Rick Scott in Florida; also here. Dan Benishek in Michigan, also here. Rick Snyder in Michigan. Fred Upton in Michigan. Tom Cotton in Arkansas.

2. Outsourcing. See House Republicans (CISPA). Terri Lynn Land in Michigan. David Perdue in Georgia; also here. Rick Scott in Florida. Scott Brown in Massachusetts New Hampshire. Tim Walberg in Michigan.

3. Offshoring. See Senate Republicans. David Perdue in Georgia. Carlos Curbelo in Florida.

What privatizing, outsourcing, and off-shoring have in common–aside from damage to employment at a decent wage–is that they are all inherently potential security breaches.

Contracting out to private companies shifts you from cave canem to the dog that didn’t bark in the night. No more public watchdog means lower standards, less accountability to the public.

Outsourcing to a raft of ‘contractors’ leads to a raft of ‘subcontractors’, and each additional level of contracting is another pore (figuratively speaking) to breed suppurating pustules of incompetence, theft, and neglect.

Off-shoring is not only a way to undermine the U.S. middle class. Off-shoring jobs opens more doors to fraud; off-shoring assets enables tax evasion on wealth, including the wealth of multi-national corporations.

All of this is fairly clear. The national political press should report it more clearly.

Grover Norquist Lost

Posted on by
1

Obama won, Grover Norquist lost

2012 election results are in, and Obama won. President Obama should also win Florida. That means an electoral college tally of 332-206.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent at least $28 million against Democrats, lost.

 

Represented by Chamber of Commerce

American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which spent $1 billion against the president and against Democrats, lost.

Karl Rove lost. Grover Norquist lost. Donald Trump lost. Rudy Giuliani lost. Rush Limbaugh lost. Charles Krauthammer lost. George Will lost. Bill O’Reilly lost.

(Here from YouTube is Rove, on air, trying to dispute the outcome in Ohio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQLV7nqD3CA)

The grotesques lost.

‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ are worse than useless as words. The winners-and-losers language cannot be trusted, anyway, as to validity. The commentators most eager to identify winners and losers self-identify as less eager to nail accuracy; a vulgar mindset characterizes notable non-wizards. I do not want to sound as though I were auditioning to become one of the sillies.

But clearly on election day 2012 some won, some lost.

 

The president

Won:

President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden won re-election, and rightly so. They won the popular vote as well as the electoral college. For the first time since 1936, they won re-election with over 50 percent of the popular vote.

FDR

Several deserving Democratic senators won hard-fought re-election in an avalanche of negative advertising, including Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Bill Nelson in Florida, and Jon Tester in Montana.

 

Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren won in Massachusetts, Claire McCaskill won in Missouri, Tammy Baldwin won in Wisconsin, Heidi Heitkamp won in North Dakota, Mazie Hirono won in Hawaii. There are now twenty women in the United States Senate–a record. The senate is better off with such women Democrats.

Alan Grayson won as U.S. Rep in Florida, rightly so.

Tammy Duckworth won for the House in Illinois, in the process defeating the disgraceful Joe Walsh. The swing from awful to good is even bigger than the outcome.

 

Lost:

Lackluster corporate ally Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the author of the Ryan so-called budget, lost. (Rep. Ryan won re-election to the House.)

Rep. Allen West lost decisively in Florida. Way past due, but better late than never.

GOP Senate candidate George Allen lost in Virginia.

Rep. Joe Walsh lost in Illinois.

 

Big money lost.

The Koch brothers, who spent tens of millions on the election, lost.

Sheldon Adelson, who donated tens of millions first to Newt Gingrich and then to Mitt Romney, lost.

The Chamber of Commerce losses and the losses of Rove’s groups, the losses incurred by all the super-PACs massed on the pro-corporate, pro-tax haven, anti-union side of the aisle, are the biggest money losses. But it is worth mention again that wealthy self-funding candidates also lost. Linda McMahon lost in Connecticut; Steven Welch lost to incumbent Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania; most others lost in primaries. The national political press could have seen an augury for fall 2012 in the losses of so many self-funders.

Along with the billionaires and millionaires, corporate executives who stepped off the sidelines to bully the political process through their workplaces lost.

Speaking of losses, the long string of candidates who lost the race for the GOP nomination lost again. They did not help Republicans look better in the general election. Remember the parade–the string of fallen candidates from the GOP campaign trail—Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Tim  Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann. None can claim—although that won’t keep them from trying—that the election outcome enhances his individual credibility, or that they enhanced the party’s credibility.

Republicans lost. They lost the presidential race; they lost seats in the senate; they lost seats in the house; and they lost seats in the state legislatures. Only in governorships did the GOP eke out an advantage, and even there, with more to defend, Democrats kept or took five governorships including the hard-fought governorship of West Virginia.

Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) lost.

House Republicans lost. They lost their two ugliest members, they lost some of their ‘base’, and once and for all the scorn of establishment Republicans for the anti-abortionists was clarified for all to see.

 

Won:

Democrats won. Not all state tallies are complete, but enough returns are in to clarify a nationwide pattern.

Democrats gained two seats in the senate, giving them the edge 53-45. Of two independents–Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and Maine’s Angus King–at least one will caucus with the Democrats. Given the quality of the new Democrats elected, that means the Democrats are stronger now than with the nominal ‘filibuster-proof’ sixty they had in 2009, relying on Joe Lieberman.

Democrats gained at least six seats in the house. In a notable upset, physician Raul Ruiz defeated GOP Rep. Mary Bono Mack in California. (Bono Mack’s husband, Connie Mack, also lost his senate race in Florida.) Dem Pete Gallego beat Quico Consego in south Texas. Lois Frankel beat Adam Hasner in South Florida. If Scott Peters has beaten Rep. Brian Bilbray in California, the gain is at least seven for Dems.

In the states, Dems gained the New Hampshire Executive Council. Democrats flipped at least eight state chambers from Repub to Dem in 2012, including chambers in Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Oregon, losing only two. Early estimates are that Democrats picked up 200 seats in state legislatures, partly making up for the large losses of 2010. Local races parallel the federal and state patterns.

Lost:

Media grotesques lost.

Charles Krauthammer and Rush Limbaugh lost, as mentioned. George Will and Bill O’Reilly lost. Sarah Palin lost. Sean Hannity lost. Dick Morris lost.

The rightwing noise machine lost.

Fox News lost.

Rupert Murdoch lost.

The Wall Street Journal lost. The Chicago Tribune lost.

A host of auxiliary right-wing pundits installed by the newspaper I subscribe to, the Washington Post, lost. David Gergen lost. For that matter, most pundits lost. Dan Balz lost. The WashPost‘s layout editors–whoever composed the unfavorable headlines and picked the disfiguring photos of Obama–lost. George Stephanopoulos’ Round Table on ABC’s This Week lost. Face the Nation lost. Meet the Press lost. Chris Matthews lost.

Many or most of the pollsters–except for Nate Silver–lost.

 

The middle class won. Some degree of tolerance won. Health care won. Social Security won. American labor won. Reproductive rights won. The U.S. automobile industry won. Collective bargaining won. College students won. Mortgage holders won. Banking customers won.

Unfortunately, Paul Ryan won re-election to the House. So did Michele Bachmann. We can’t have everything. Bachmann’s race was tight, though. In theory that should end any discussion of Bachmann as some kind of powerhouse. Still, politically progressives won. Racism lost. Anti-immigrant campaigning lost decisively.

I am not gloating. This is a celebration of improvement, of steps toward a cleaner and healthier body politic. People like Joe Walsh and Allen West never did have any place in public office and should never have gotten a federal office in the first place. Anyone who held the opinion that the election was Mitt Romney’s to win was never qualified to be a political reporter in the first place. Any writer who thought ‘the economy’ an issue that would work in Romney’s favor is unqualified to appear in print. Corporate managers who spent more time throwing their weight around than they did improving their companies never should have been managers in the first place. Corporate management should never have been so pinned to stock price in an imaginary paper market as to neglect product, service and labor in the first place.

Political reporting, like every other kind of reporting, is supposed to shoot for accuracy. So read it here, all you buckaroos and buckaresses who spent a year and a half predicting a ‘close election’ and a ‘late election night’:

  • The presidential race was not close.
  • The battleground states were not razor-thin.
  • Democrats won. It was not fifty-fifty. It was not split-the-difference.
  • Republicans lost. The party has also lost name affiliation among registered voters.
  • Progressives won. Where Democrats lost, it was either a Blue Dog, a Republican-leaning district, or a hard race, sometimes close, where a challenger took on an entrenched incumbent. As mentioned, Alan Grayson won.
  • The right wing lost. As mentioned, Joe Walsh and Allen West lost. So did Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, although their brand of conservatism differs from the ugliness of Walsh and West.

 

more later

The Republican Party’s legitimate difficulties with Todd Akin, part 2

Posted on by
Reply

The Republican Party’s legitimate difficulties with Todd Akin, part 2

 

Akin with Jaco

What Todd Akin did, with his ill-timed comments, was to illuminate

1) the draconian hard-right stand against abortions. This is the no-exceptions position that would prevent terminating a pregnancy for an eleven-year-old girl sexually abused by her stepfather. (The medical case just referred to is not hypothetical. It occurred in Texas. It never became a dispute over abortion. )The no-exceptions position would compel a woman or girl to carry a fetus to term even if the fetus were anencephalic.

2) the superficiality of Republican establishment support of such positions.

 

Scott Brown, "pro-choice Republican"

Let’s put this simply: Most top GOPers do not support these positions. But while quietly opposing them, the top echelon of the Republican Party continues to entice the vote and the financial contributions of party faithful who hold them.

 

Carlson with dancing partner

I have written about the broader topic before, as in 2006 posts on Tucker Carlson of all people. Like Akin, whom he does not much otherwise resemble, Carlson came out with some inconveniently candid remarks at a particularly inopportune moment. Carlson, a Republican commentator who later appeared on Dancing with the Stars, voiced on television the key political fact that the Christian right tends to be used and abused by the power structure it keeps in office.

Things haven’t changed much, in that respect, since 2006. Look at the party establishment’s reaction to Akin.

As everyone not living under a rock knows, Rep. Todd Akin (R), challenging Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) in Missouri, gave a remarkable interview on August 19. Here is the video of the interview, on Fox.

Here is Akin, on abortion in cases of sexual assault:

“Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”

There are two prongs to the difficulty Akin’s statements have caused the GOP. One is the false science, the other is the genuine belief. As I previously wrote, the genuine belief is what is giving the Republican Party so much heartburn.

But the GOP also has its vulnerabilities on the false science.

Rick Santorum

Again, I do not question Akin’s sincerity. But it is incumbent on rational people to correct errors of fact when they arise, especially when they are widely disseminated and when they support disastrous public policy. Remember Iraqi WMD?

CIA corrects previous intelligence reports on WMD

The mystery is not how Akin, or anyone, could form such a notion in the first place, that is, the notion that a raped woman’s body wards off pregnancy. As with other wishful beliefs, the wishful belief that a sexually assaulted woman has innate defenses against pregnancy is underpinned by a few grains of truth. Stress and anxiety can deter pregnancy, even in women who want to conceive and who are trying to become pregnant. (Hence the lucrative explosion in the reproduction industry of fertility clinics and the like.) Injury can interfere with becoming pregnant and can cause miscarriage. Each subsection of this unhappy topic has generated extensive medical scholarship.

On a more cheerful note, studies have shown that most rapists suffer some form of sexual dysfunction. (This is one reason why ‘castration’ does not work as a tool of public policy against sexual assault.)

The more puzzling question is not how Akin formed a wrong notion about conception in the first place but how he, or any literate person 65 years old, could have retained such a notion. Actually, that’s easy to answer: Like any fellow human being who adopts a wrong belief, Akin just never checked his in any meaningful way. He opposes terminating a pregnancy even in cases of rape. His position is obviously painful even for him. So he just adopted the version of science that gave him most comfort. And he never course-corrected, intellectually speaking, even when news reports brought evidence of thousands of Albanian women pregnant after the attacks on Kosovo.

How long did it take Congressman Akin to correct his previous mistake, once it was emphatically brought to his attention?  –About two days.

Here is Akin’s own statement on the interview from his web site, posted August 19, the day of the interview. Note that he does not clarify or retract the false science in his morning comments:

“As a member of Congress, I believe that working to protect the most vulnerable in our society is one of my most important responsibilities, and that includes protecting both the unborn and victims of sexual assault.  In reviewing my off-the-cuff remarks, it’s clear that I misspoke in this interview and it does not reflect the deep empathy I hold for the thousands of women who are raped and abused every year.  Those who perpetrate these crimes are the lowest of the low in our society and their victims will have no stronger advocate in the Senate to help ensure they have the justice they deserve.

“I recognize that abortion, and particularly in the case of rape, is a very emotionally charged issue.  But I believe deeply in the protection of all life and I do not believe that harming another innocent victim is the right course of action. I also recognize that there are those who, like my opponent, support abortion and I understand I may not have their support in this election.”

 

Morgan puts up empty chair

A day later, Akin took a somewhat less firm line by failing to show up at CNN to be interviewed by host Piers Morgan. Morgan avenged himself by satirically positioning an empty chair on set, castigating Akin in absentia.

Eastwood talks to empty chair

By the way, Clint Eastwood may deserve everything he’s gotten in response to his bizarre performance at the Republican National Convention. No one seems to have noticed, however, that Eastwood’s empty-chair routine was surely Eastwood’s idea of a tit-for-tat on the Akin controversy. Now we know that Clint Eastwood, or someone in his household, watches Piers Morgan.

It’s a safe guess that Eastwood, like most top Republicans, was also chafing at hearing about Todd Akin.

Back to Akin–the following day, he issued his public apology on YouTube, including the statement, “The fact is, rape can lead to pregnancy.”

Full text:

“Rape is an evil act. I used the wrong words in the wrong way and for that I apologize. As the father of two daughters, I want tough justice for predators. I have a compassionate heart for the victims of sexual assault, and I pray for them. The fact is, rape can lead to pregnancy. The truth is, rape has many victims. The mistake I made was in the words I said, not in the heart I hold. I ask for your forgiveness.”

Akin has also rightly observed that “the entire [Republican] establishment” turned on him.

Certainly a number of prominent GOP politicians and commentators have condemned Akin’s version of medical science. They’re not out of the woods yet, though. For one thing, that kind of rational criticism tends to be a bit of an uphill climb for them.

The Republican Party, after all, is still the major party dug in about, opposing science on,

  • climate change
  • greenhouse gases
  • tobacco use as a cause for cancer
  • environmental factors as causes for cancer and other diseases
  • occupational safety as a factor in health, e.g. in mining
  • the relationship between highway speed and highway fatalities
  • the relationship between driver age and highway safety
  • the connection between ‘fracking’ and earthquakes

Additionally the GOP has shown itself, shall we say, reluctant to leave intact any kind of regulation that science indicates would boost the safety of the water we drink, the air we breathe and the soil in which we grow food. Congressional Republicans, always fighting from the rear on issues of public safety and public health, even tried unsuccessfully to prevent public disclosure of unsafe consumer products, a reform pushed by the Obama administration.

For related reasons, the same faction is also fighting to the political death to prevent public disclosure of  abuses in the financial sector.

On August 21, Akin told Sean Hannity that Mitt Romney was exploiting the “legitimate rape” issue. Akin had a point. Akin’s gaffe highlights the contrast between the hard-nosed, practical, get-it-done business type Romney wishes to be thought, and the views Romney panders to among non-one-percenters he induces to vote for him.

Republican Party’s legitimate difficulty over Todd Akin

Posted on by
1

Republican Party’s legitimate difficulty over Todd Akin: Re-cap and overview, part 1

 

Returning to the topic of Rep. Todd Akin’s senate race in Missouri, the real sticking point for Republican Party movers and shakers is not Akin’s mistaken science, his comforting notion that a woman’s body will ward off pregnancy in a sexual assault. The real sticking point, for top Republicans including presidential nominee Mitt Romney, is Akin’s genuine belief that abortion is wrong in all cases.

Todd Akin

(Certainly, Akin’s belief appears to be genuine, and short of proclaiming self a mind reader, it can be taken to be sincere.)

The fact that I do not agree with this view is beside the point. The point is that many voters and contributors on whom the upper levels of the GOP depend to keep office do agree with it. The official Republican Party platform adopted at the 2012 Republican National Convention–along with threatening to cut the mortgage interest deduction–holds with this view.

Those religiously conservative voters who hold this view are the people being stiffed by the national GOP, up to and including Romney.

So much for lip service. The Republican candidate for office who most strongly comes out with the anti-abortion party line in 2012–openly, candidly, unequivocally–happens, by some fluke, to be exactly the candidate that almost every well-placed Republican operative tries to exile beyond the pale. Akin’s remarks highlighted a view that many Republicans–especially those in Washington–do not hold. Worse yet, Akin’s remarks interfered with top Republicans’ ongoing strategy of keeping that view quiet.

Akin, Ryan

The adverse reaction to Akin’s remarks by wounded important people in the wounded top echelons of the GOP was swift, widespread and unequivocal.

Let no one be accused of exaggerating the reaction. Quick recap:

The day of Akin’s interview, then-presumptive nominee Mitt Romney promptly, if tersely, distanced himself from Akin’s comments.

The similarity between Akin’s no-exceptions position and that of Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, coming swiftly to light, the Romney campaign seems to have decided that just rejecting Akin’s views was not going to be enough. The next day, Romney came out to condemn Akin’s words as “inexcusable.”

The next day, he went farther yet, expressing a public hope that the Missouri congressman would leave the race.

Mitt Romney

Romney, be it noted, was not exactly going out on a limb here, separated from the rest of the party establishment. Other nominees suggesting that Akin should drop out include Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, strongly challenged by Elizabeth Warren. (Brown faces the key difficulty that Warren would make a better senator.)

Elizabeth Warren

 

Reportedly joining in against Akin was incomprehensibly well-paid radio host Rush Limbaugh, though Limbaugh back-pedaled afterward. As the deadline for Akin to drop out without penalty approached its last hours, establishment pressure on Akin mounted.

The August 21 deadline, as we know, came and went with Akin remaining in the race on the eve of the RNC. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) joined the throng asking him not to. There aren’t many occasions when  Issa can chastise someone for ill-considered speech, but he stepped up to the plate this time. Must have been something of a shock to some of Issa’s supporters back home.

Coming to the convention, Romney seized air time in interviews to reiterate his opposition to Akin.

 

Matalin on air

Top GOP operative Mary Matalin went even farther. As previously written, Matalin said emphatically on air that the Republican Party will fund a write-in candidate against Akin in Missouri, if Akin stays in the race. As of last writing, Akin has not dropped out, though Matalin has not yet retracted her statement.

 

Rove at Republican National Convention 2012

Matalin’s king-of-the-hill moment didn’t last long. Funding a candidate to run against Akin was tumbled off by Karl Rove’s expressed desire to murder him. In a gathering for wealthy supporters and party strategists, Rove’s fancy turned to homicide. He later apologized to Akin. Rove was at the convention. Akin was not.

 

So much for pro-life.

It is fair to take Akin’s remarks to be sincere. It would be fair to accept Rove’s remarks as sincere.

And this, gentlemen and ladies, is what the Christian right gets from the national Republican party: It is okay for rightwing pro-lifers to show up and vote; it is okay for them to contribute money in small amounts; it is okay for them to keep Wall Streeters in power. Position to get money, money to get position, all fueled by some vague notion of status.

But when one politician gets so out of line as to state openly the party’s no-exceptions position on abortion–makes clear that yes, that’s what the party stands for–the full weight of the party comes down on him.

The 2004 election revisited, part 4: Ohio

Posted on by
Reply
Rep. Conyers

Revisiting the 2004 election. Part 4–Ohio.

Heading toward the new year, following up previous 2004 election entries. This history may become newly relevant.

GWBush and his ‘brain’

On Election Day 2004, the close states were hit hardest: Voters in some areas in Ohio, Florida, Iowa and New Mexico suffered significant problems casting their votes successfully. Most of the problems were not widely reported, although subsequent efforts in Congress to address the situation did draw some media attention.

Ad hoc committee on election abuses 2004

Anecdotal evidence bears out the thesis presented by statistical researchers, posted previously, that the problems were indeed widespread.

Take for example Mercer County, Ohio, where following the election the information below was relayed to me.

At the time, Washington Journal had just run an article titled “How the Bush camp won Ohio,” remarking that “in some small conservative counties which have experienced net job losses nearing 10% of business payrolls, Republicans still lined up for the president. In Mercer County, which has lost 5% of its jobs in the last four years, residents voted 3-to-1–15,022 to 4,924–for Mr. Bush, a sharp increase over his winning margin in 2000.”

The none-too-subtle subtext here seems to be either that voters in Ohio were peculiarly dumb or, putting the same idea more charitably, that Team Bush successfully persuaded people to vote against their own interest.

book: What Happened in Ohio?

The voter on the ground in Ohio offers a rational second opinion, noting that “this is very peculiar since over 4,800 people voted in this year’s Democratic primary” in Mercer County. So “Mercer County has over 30,000 registered voters and yet Kerry was only able to pick up a measly 87 additional votes compared to the March primary”?

Not only did Kerry allegedly receive only 87 votes above the total cast in the Democratic primary, but Gore had over 5,200 votes in 2000 (when there were 6,227 fewer registered voters in Mercer County).

The reader provides some relevant numbers:

Mercer County, Ohio:

Year 2000:       25,079 registered voters; 18,285 votes cast

Bush 12,485

Gore 5,212

Ralph Nader 392, Howard Philips 13, John Hagelin 24, Pat Buchanan 125, Harry Brown 43

Year 2004:       31,306 registered voters, 20,058 votes cast

Bush 15,022

Kerry 4,924

Other 112

The same reader adds that people might think “this is a conservative county and that many voters may have switched to Bush especially with gay marriage on the ballot. But with 5 percent of the people losing their jobs in the past four years in this county, I think people are far more concerned about putting food on the table and meeting mortgage payments than worrying about gay people getting married.”

Be it noted that Mercer County, Ohio, is among the places where turnout increased in 2004 over 2000. As the researchers previously quoted point out, higher turnout historically favors the challenger, not the incumbent. Voter registration also increased from 2000 to 2004 in Mercer County, by 6,227.

Rampant problems voting in Ohio

Many Americans saw the video footage of voters patiently waiting in line to vote in Ohio, in 2004. Mercer County was by no means the whole story, and the previously indicated statistical anomalies were amply reinforced by anecdotal report from around the state.

Readers and other correspondents sent me an ongoing and growing list of anomalies, deceptions and intimations of vote fraud in Ohio. Part of the list follows.

Discrepancies:

  • Returns certified by officials recorded that all but 10 registered voters in the Miami County, Ohio, town of Concord voted on Election Day. So far, the election challenge team has identified more than 10 registered Concord citizens who did not vote.
  • About 580 more absentee voters were certified in Mahoning County than election board officials identified.
  • Cleremont County was among the counties with challenges to contested returns. In December 2004 a team of volunteer attorneys pored over election records at the Cleremont County Board of Elections, with the Board’s cooperation.
  • In Lucas County, four elections officials were suspended after mistakes or worse in the election.
  • In Cuyahoga County, a third of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out because of alleged registration irregularities.
  • The Associated Press reported a difference of over 17,000 votes in Kerry’s favor after the election more than in the initial vote tallies.
  • In December 2004, Rep. Conyers and Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee asked Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell to respond to inquiries about voting irregularities.

Problems with voting-machine technology:

  • In Mahoning County, election observers have testified under oath, more than a dozen voting machines switched Kerry votes to Bush votes repeatedly, while voters watched.
  • Citizens in Trumbull County using electronic machines, who voted for Kerry, saw their votes register as votes for Bush. Subsequent hearings in Trumbull County, as elsewhere, partially brought to light further possible election fraud.
  • A public hearing at the Warren Heights and Trumbull Library, in Mahoning Valley, where the vote count went to Bush, recorded thousands of complaints of voting irregularities.
  • Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus pointed out that more than half the votes cast in Ohio and the nation were recorded on electronic voting machines owned by Republicans, with no audit trail. One voting machine company, Diebold, also manufactures ATMs (automated teller machines) that do provide a paper receipt for transactions.

Low-tech old-fashioned vote suppression:

  • In Franklin County and other counties, largely Democratic precincts suffered a shortage of voting machines. All the precincts where voting machines were short and lines were long were Democratic precincts. Voters in more affluent neighborhoods reported no shortage of voting machines and no problem with long lines.

Obstruction and failure to investigate by public officials:

  • In December 2004 a legal team partly comprising volunteer attorneys issued subpoenas to top election officials in ten counties where vote-count fraud was suspected.
  • The subpoenas, a first step in interviewing people under oath, were rejected by the Ohio Secretary of State, Republican Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.
  • Ten depositions were served by the election challenge legal team; the other side filed a motion to stop the process; the challengers responded.
  • A lawsuit was filed at the Ohio Supreme Court, charging that a fair vote count would give the state and the presidency to John Kerry rather than to Bush. Notice of depositions was sent to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to appear and give testimony in Moss v Bush et al. The election challenge lawsuit was filed Dec. 17. Blackwell, the Bush-Cheney campaign, and Ohio’s Republican electors had ten days to respond. Each side then had 20 days for discovery or to gather additional evidence, plaintiffs going first. The Bush-Cheney team moved as slowly as possible, to run out the clock until the Jan. 20 inauguration.

Company logo

Subsequently, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee found that one precinct in Youngstown, in Mahoning County, recorded a negative 25 million votes. Back in Mercer County, Judiciary found that only 51 votes were recorded for one voting machine showing that 289 people cast punch card ballots president–a loss of 248 votes. The county’s website reported that 51,818 people cast ballots but only 47,768 ballots were recorded in the presidential race, including 61 write-ins, meaning that approximately 4,000 votes, or nearly 7%, were not counted for a presidential candidate.

Problems with Triad GSI voting technology company in Ohio reported on the Internet, not in print

Problems with vote technology in Ohio were not restricted to Diebold. Some concrete information is provided below, involving another major voting machine company, Triad GSI, based in Xenia, Ohio.

The following is a 2004 affidavit by the Hocking County, Ohio, deputy director of elections, Sherole Eaton. It deserved wider dissemination than it received. Ms. Eaton deserved not to be fired for being a whistleblower.

[Text follows:]

  “On Friday, December 10 2004, Michael from TriAd called in the AM to inform us that he would be in our office in the PM on the same day. I asked him why he was visiting us. He said, “to check out your tabulator, computer, and that the attorneys will be asking some tricky questions and he wanted to go over some of the questions they may ask.” He also added that there would be no charge for this service.

He arrived at about 12:30PM. I hung his coat up and it was very heavy. I made a comment about it being so heavy. He, Lisa Schwartze and I chatted for a few minutes. He proceeded to go to the room where our computer and tabulation machine is kept. I followed him into the room. I had my back to him when he turned the computer on. He stated that the computer was not coming up. I did see some commands at the lower left hand of the screen but no menu. He said that the battery in the computer was dead and that the stored information was gone. He said that he could put a patch on it and fix it. My main concern was – what if this happened when we were ready to do the recount. He proceeded to take the computer apart and call his offices to get information to input into our computer. Our computer is fourteen years old and as far as I know had always worked in the past. I asked him if the older computer, that is in the same room. could be used for the recount. I don’t remember exactly what he said but I did relay to him that the computer was old and a spare. At some point he asked if he could take the spare computer apart and I said “yes”. He took both computers apart. I don’t remember seeing any tools and he asked Sue Wallace, Clerk, for a screwdriver. She got it for him. At this point I was frustrated about the computer not performing and feared that it wouldn’t work for the recount. I called Gerald Robinette, board chairman, to inform him regarding the computer problem and asked him if we could have Tri Ad come to our offices to run the program and tabulator for the recount. Gerald talked on the phone with Michael and Michael assured Gerald that he could fix our computer. He worked on the computer until about 3:00 PM and then asked me which precinct and the number of the precinct we were going to count. I told him, Good Hope 1 # 17. He went back into the tabulation room. Shortly after that he (illegible) stated that the computer was ready for the recount and told us not to turn the computer off so it would charge up.

Before Lisa ran the tests, Michael said to turn the computer off. Lisa said, “I thought you said we weren’t supposed to turn it off.” He said turn it off and right back on and it should come up. It did come up and Lisa ran the tests. Michael gave us instructions on how to explain the rotarien, what the tests mean, etc. No advice on how to handle the attorneys but to have our Prosecuting Attorney at the recount to answer any of their legal questions. He said not to turn the computer off until after the recount.

He advised Lisa and I on how to post a “cheat sheet” on the wall so that only the board members and staff would know about it and and what the codes meant so the count would come out perfect and we wouldn’t have to do a full hand recount of the county. He left about 5:00 PM.

My faith in Tri Ad and the Xenia staff has been nothing but good. The realization that this company and staff would do anything to dishonor or disrupt the voting process is distressing to me and hard to believe. I’m being completely objective about the above statements and the reason I’m bringing this forward is to, hopefully, rule out any wrongdoing.”

This dramatic material was ignored by the larger media outlets. It was followed up in the online Free Press, by Ken Hoop here and by Victoria Parks here. Investigation by the House Judiciary Committee found copious indications of problems with Triad GSI. Daily Kos pointed out that the Rapp family behind Triad GSI was headed by a longtime contributor to the Republican Party.

The Judiciary Committee’s analysis stated,

“Based on the above, including actual admissions and statements by Triad employees, it strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course of behavior to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets told them how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law. If true, this would frustrate the entire purpose of the recount law–to randomly ascertain if the vote counting apparatus is operating fairly and effectively, and if not to conduct a full hand recount. By ensuring that election boards are in a position to conform their test recount results with the election night results, Triad’s actions may well have prevented scores of counties from conducting a full and fair recount in compliance with equal protection, due process, and the first amendment. In addition, the course of conduct outlined above would appear to violate numerous provisions of federal and state law. As noted above, 42 U.S.C. §1973 provides for criminal penalties for any person who, in any election for federal office, “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by . . . the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.” Section 1974 requires the retention and preservation of all voting records and papers for a period of 22 months from the date of a federal election and makes it a felony for any person to “willfully steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate, or alter” any such record.398 Ohio law further prohibits election machinery from being serviced, modified, or altered in any way subsequent to an election, unless it is so done in the presence of the full board of elections and other observers. Any handling of ballots for a subsequent recount must be done in the presence of the entire Board and any qualified witnesses.399 This would seem to operate as a de facto bar against altering voting machines by remote access. Containers in which ballots are kept may not be opened before all of the required participants in are attendance.400 It is critical to note that the fact that these “ballots” were not papers in a box is of no consequence in the inquiry as to whether state and federal laws were violated by Barbian’s conduct: Ohio Revised Code defines a ballot as “the official election presentation of offices and candidates…and the means by which votes are recorded.” OHIO REV. CODE § 3506.01(B) (West 2004). Therefore, for purposes of Ohio law, electronic records stored in the Board’s computer are to be considered “ballots.” Triad’s interference with the computers and their software would seem to violate these requirements.”

[emphasis added]

Transcript excerpt from panel yesterday: Tucker Carlson on GOP and evangelicals

Posted on by
Reply

Transcript excerpt from panel yesterday, Tucker Carlson on GOP and evangelicals

 

Carlson on air

From the transcripts:

Copyright 2006 National Broadcasting Co. Inc.
All Rights Reserved
NBC News Transcripts

SHOW: The Chris Matthews Show Various Times NBC

October 8, 2006 Sunday

LENGTH: 3972 words

HEADLINE: Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic and MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell and Tucker Carlson discuss Foley scandal, war on Iraq, woman like Hillary Clinton as American president and their scoops and predictions

ANCHORS: CHRIS MATTHEWS

REPORTERS: TUCKER CARLSON, NORAH O’DONNELL

BODY: . . . [discussion of the Mark Foley scandal with high school pages]

Mr. SULLIVAN: This–and I think Norah’s right. The real theme here is abuse of power, and so it ties in with corruption, the pork, the abuse of our troops in Iraq who have not been given the support they need or even a war plan to succeed.

MATTHEWS: OK, so everyone agrees here that this story, emblematic of whatever…

Mr. SULLIVAN: Just emblematic of abuse.

CARLSON: It goes deeper than that though. The deep truth is that the elites in the Republican Party have pure contempt for the evangelicals who put their party in power. Everybody in… [emphasis added]

MATTHEWS: How do you know that? How do you know that?

CARLSON: Because I know them. Because I grew up with them. Because I live with them. They live on my street. Because I live in Washington, and I know that everybody in our world has contempt for the evangelicals. And the evangelicals know that, and they’re beginning to learn that their own leaders sort of look askance at them and don’t share their values.

MATTHEWS: So this gay marriage issue and other issues related to the gay lifestyle are simply tools to get elected?

CARLSON: That’s exactly right. It’s pandering to the base in the most cynical way, and the base is beginning to figure it out. (Unintelligible).

MATTHEWS: OK. Where are you…

Mr. SULLIVAN: The right is right to be mad about this. They have been duped by these people, and now they’re venting and they have every right to vent.

 

[further discussion on other issues]