Category: Bureaucracy

Let’s Be Clear On This: Republicans Are Not the Patriotic Opposition, They are the Treasonous Enemy

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Why do I say this?

Because at the core of our system of government is the idea that people should be denied the right to vote, nor have excessive roadblocks placed in their way, and that the vote and vote counting should be free and fair.

Well, we are now seeing evidence that the system set up to tabulate vote in Ohio in 2004 was constructed in a manner which appears to specifically designed to facilitate a man-in the middle attack:

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio’s vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush’s unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.
Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell’s company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State’s election night server layout system.
Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to “input data” and thus alter the results of Ohio’s 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: “Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not.”
Spoonamore explained that “they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want.”

(emphasis mine)

The Republicans constantly accuse the Democrats of voter fraud, the sort where some people who should not vote, but do. Retail voting irregularities.

This is wholesale voting irregularities, and, unsurprisingly, the Republicans take their lead from “Uncle Joe” Stalin, who said, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”

Seriously, watching the Republicans is like watching the Soviets: You know that they are doing something because they accuse the other side of this.

And then we have Wisconsin, where the Republicans are requiring a DMV supplied voter ID while closing DMVs in Democratic districts:

Michael Shatz, a Wisconsin blogger:

This story shows just how stupid neoconservatives think the public really is. Walker and his ilk pass a bill requiring voters to present valid photo identification at the polls. Then, in the same breath, Walker and his ilk propose a bill to close the identification issuing centers (the DMV’s) in the Democratic districts, making ID’s more difficult for low-income voters to obtain.

And the reaction when they were called on it was just classic:

A high-ranking DOT official rejected that claim, saying the changes were based on economics, not politics.

Rep. Andy Jorgensen, D-Fort Atkinson, called on the state Department of Transportation to reconsider its plants to close the Fort Atkinson DMV center. The department plans to expand by four hours a week the hours of a center about 30 minutes away in Watertown.

Jorgensen said he was concerned doing that would discourage people from Fort Atkinson from participating in elections.

“What the heck is going on here?” Jorgensen said. “Is politics at play here?”

Transportation Department executive assistant Reggie Newson denied that politics was behind the office closure plan, saying the decisions were being made based on what made the most economic sense.

“This has nothing to do with politics,” he said. “We’re trying to make sure that we can provide service in each county statewide efficiently.”

How conveeenient.

This is not the opposition.

These are people who are determined to destroy our government in order to achieve power.

I believe that the term “Seditious Conspiracy” applies here.

Here Is a Shocker

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The Registrar of Deeds for Guilford County, North Carolina, Greensboro and environs, after hearing horror stories about fraudulent loans, decided to go through his own deeds, and went through all the deeds transferred from 2006 to 2010.

The results? That in a cursory examination, well over half of the deeds were in some manner fraudulent:

But Jeff Thigpen, the register of deeds in Guilford County, North Carolina, a county of about 465,000 in the center of the state (the largest city is Greensboro), decided to survey all the mortgage documents submitted to his office by DocX, a notorious “mortgage mill” that processes documents on behalf of lenders, between August 2006 and April 2010. He was inspired by a 60 Minutes investigation revealing numerous forgeries, backdating, and other false information on mortgage documents. “When I saw that [story], I was basically on fire,” Thigpen says. “‘I know this material is in my office, I’ve got to find it, I’ve got to get it out.'”

Out of the 6,100 documents Thigpen examined, 4,500 showed signature irregularities. The name of one DocX employee, Linda Green, who was acting as a vice president for several major banks, was forged 15 different ways on the Guilford County documents, rendering them invalid. Thigpen’s investigation was one of the first systematic assessments of mortgage document fraud in the entire country, certainly more robust than anything conducted by state and federal regulators.

Thigpen, as well as his Essex County equivalent John O’Brien, have been making as much of a stink as they can about this, they have asked the Iowa Attorney General, Tom Miller, to hold off on his proposed national settlement pending a real investigation. (some older posts here)

That would be the right thing to do, of course, but considering the fact that Miller is angling for some sort of position in the Obama administration, and the Obama administration is as interested in pursuing the banks for wrong doing as they are in pursuing Dick Cheney for outing a CIA agent, I don’t expect that there will ever be a meaningful investigation of Bankster wrongdoing.

And In the World of the Surreal…

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The CIA is touting its green credentials by revealing that they generate heat by burning shredded documents:

A press release from the CIA explains that their “burn after reading” practice conserves energy because the exhaust from their incinerator generates steam to heat water at CIA headquarters. Says the CIA:

In addition to saving fuel, that process reduces the amount of waste–which would otherwise be destined for landfills–by nearly 1,000 tons per year. The CIA increases its recycling efforts each year, annually collecting over three tons of plastic, glass, cardboard, aluminum, construction debris, and other waste.

I dunno, I find this kind of …… odd.

The Term for this is Bureaucratic Seppuku

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It is also courageous and so if anyone knows of a new job for State Department spokesman PJ Crowley, drop him a line.

You see, Crowley called the torture treatment of Private Bradley Manning by our military “Stupid.”

If there is anything that pisses off Barack Obama, it’s whistle blowers.  His administration has prosecuted them more aggressively than any other administration in  history, and the torture of Manning is delibrate:  They want to extract false testimony from him to implicate assange, and, more importantly, they want to terrify any would-be whistle blowers out of telling the truth:

Mr Crowley made the remarks about Bradley Manning to an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Nonetheless Bradley Manning is in the right place,” Mr Crowley said.

Private Manning is being held in solitary confinement at a maximum security US military jail.

He is shackled at all times and has been on suicide watch at the Quantico marine base in Virginia.

Mr Crowley was asked whether his comments were on the record and replied, “sure”.

President Barack Obama was questioned about whether he agreed with Mr Crowley’s comments at a news conference on Friday.

He responded by saying he had asked the Pentagon directly if the terms of Pte Manning’s confinement were “appropriate” and received assurances that they were.

Mr Obama added that some aspects of Pte Manning’s treatment “has to do with his safety as well”.

Obama’s response is pure, unadulterated bullsh%$.  You asked, and were told that they were appropriate, and that “some” aspects have to do with his safety.

So, you just stated that you know, and that you chose to look the other way.

I am so glad that I live in Maryland, and so I never have to vote for this contemptible ratf%$# ever again.

That being said, now that the dirty laundry is out, how much do you want to bet that the treatment gets better?

Now We Know What Gives Timothy Geithner an Erection

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Noam Scheiber interviewed Geithner, and gave us this gem:

I asked Geithner if he had a grand vision for the postcrisis landscape—for, say, a less bloated financial sector with a smaller role in the economy—and a map for how to get there. Could he be a figure like George Marshall, who helped win the World War and then remade Europe so that it couldn’t happen again?

Geithner hunched his shoulders, pressed his knees together, and lifted his heels up off the ground—an almost childlike expression of glee. “We’re going, like, existential,” he said. He told me he subscribes to the view that the world is on the cusp of a major “financial deepening”: As developing economies in the most populous countries mature, they will demand more and increasingly sophisticated financial services, the same way they demand cars for their growing middle classes and information technology for their corporations. If that’s true, then we should want U.S. banks positioned to compete abroad.

“I don’t have any enthusiasm for … trying to shrink the relative importance of the financial system in our economy as a test of reform, because we have to think about the fact that we operate in the broader world,” he said. “It’s the same thing for Microsoft or anything else. We want U.S. firms to benefit from that.” He continued: “Now financial firms are different because of the risk, but you can contain that through regulation.” This was the purpose of the recent financial reform, he said. In effect, Geithner was arguing that we should be as comfortable linking the fate of our economy to Wall Street as to automakers or Silicon Valley.

And then he smoked a cigarette, and asked if was good for me.

H/t David Dayen.

Sorry for that image.

Federal Judge Judge Spanks Ag Department and Monsanto

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In August U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, in response to the suit by environmentalists, issued a ruling that no new genetically modified “roundup ready” sugar beets be planted until a full environmental impact statement has been filed.

The US Department of Agriculture, never a big one for following the law, then issued permits to plant them anyway.

In response to this the judge has ruled that the crops must be destroyed.

This is what happens when you metaphorically call the judge a cock sucker.

The appeals court has stayed the ruling pending a review, but my guess is that they will be inclined to go along with the judge’s decision.

Judges hate it when you ignore their orders.  They think that it’s illegal or something.

Come to think of it, it is illegal or something.

Excuse Me While My Head Explodes

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So, someone in the Obama administration is floating the idea that it would be a good to make (likely soon to be former her election is still to close to call) Congress woman Melissa Bean head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? (CFPB)

Yes, the Democrat most hostile to both to banking regulations in general and to the CFPB in general, is being mooted by some idiot in the Obama administration economic team *cough* Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner *cough* being the first official head of a bureau dedicated to protecting consumers from predatory lenders.

If Elizabeth Warren played the role of Martin Luther, protesting the corruption in the system by nailing her 95 theses to the door of the church, then Melissa Bean is the Church of Wall Street’s Temple Prostitute, selling indulgences.*

And someone in the Obama white house wants her to head the CFPB.

Never heard of Melissa Bean? Well Jane Hamshire has the bill of particulars: (quoting)

Seriously, if Barack Obama nominates her for this post, it will show that he is completely in the pocket of the banking industry.

To be fair, this could be an administration official, *cough* Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner *cough*, free lancing, but I am inclined to see this as deliberate and calculated. This administration revels in message control.

*Yes, I know, this is a badly mixed metaphor.

This Explains a Lot

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Many years ago, Yves Smith worked for Goldman Sachs, AKA the Vampire Squid,* and she said that Goldman Sachs is actually a cult:

As important, Goldman is a cult. I say that as a former employee, based not just on my experience a very long time ago (boy, am I getting old, more than 25 years ago) but also on reports I get from recruits and what I can infer from press reports. If anything the firm has become more inward looking over the years

The people there honestly believe that working for Goldman is the most elevated calling (Blankfein’s bizarre-sounding “Doing God’s work” remark no doubt resonated within the firm) and doing anything else is a fall from grace. Seriously. People who exit Goldman typically take a year or two to get over it the deeply-inculcated belief that departure = failure (this isn’t my own response; I’ve had a number of men volunteer that to me). Similarly, the first person I met at Goldman, which was through personal contacts, made it clear he was blocked in her career (his boss was too close to her in age) said he couldn’t possibly work for another firm. It wasn’t that he had assessed the tradeoffs and decided on balance it was still better to stay; he literally recoiled on a psychological level from the idea of departing. That sort of deep indoctrination was not at all unusual.

And people who had managed not to imbibe the Kool Aid were viewed with some suspicion. I left as a pretty junior person; the only reason I was remembered was a woman in investment banking in the early 1980s was an unusual commodity. Someone who checked out my reputation years after my departure said the party line on me was “She could have made partner, but we would have had to break her.”

(emphasis mine)

I kind of thought that it was just ordinary greed, but this revelation says a lot.

In the United States these days, we tend to try to describe everything in terms of profit and loss, with greed as a motivator.

But profit and loss do not describe anything. If they did, then the Randroid nut jobs out there would be right, and discrimination would have ended, because it interferes with the most efficient flow of commerce.

Goldman Sachs is a cult, and really do believe that they are doing God’s work.

This is so f%$#ing creepy.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

Is the Obama Administration Sabotaging the CFPB Already?

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There are increasing reports that Elizabeth Warren, largely as a result of a growing chorus among liberals to appoint her as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will be the nominee as the first chair.

Well, I figured that if they were forced, as it appears that they are, then they would play to lose the nomination: After all, how tough is it to get Republicans to filibuster someone who wants to work for the average American?

Well, if the following report is true, then they are also sabotaging the CFPB as an organization as we speak, having tasked a Federal Reserve Governor and former banking industry lobbyist to start staffing the organization:

However, a source tells FDL News that Geithner is working on this process with Elizabeth Duke, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Duke is a former community banker and the past head of the American Bankers Association, a trade lobby group. She served on the ABA’s board of directors from 1999 to 2006. The ABA opposed the Dodd-Frank bill almost entirely because of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

What’s more, Duke herself specifically opposed an independent agency in July 2009 testimony, and endorsed keeping the responsibility for consumer protection in the Federal Reserve. In fact, she went further, promoting the Fed’s consumer protection prowess despite the agency having missed the housing bubble and the predatory lending that enabled it.

………

If the reports I’m getting are true, this is the woman dealing with staffing up and organizing the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, before the director gets a chance.

The Federal Reserve has not yet returned comment regarding Elizabeth Duke’s role.

This is crucially important. There’s a lot someone in power can do to mess with a federal agency at the outset. You can hire some staffers not committed to the agency’s goals, or give them poor working conditions, or any number of things. Then the new director comes in and is immediately faced with a turf war. If a community banker dismissive of consumer protections ends up setting the vision for the consumer protection bureau, it could slow its progress out of the gate. If the Department where the agency originates is more concerned with “extend and pretend” – letting the banks get out of trouble by earning their way past the bad loans on their books, in part through inundating consumers with higher fees on their products – then that worldview of the banks being more important than the people can get embedded into the agency.

Obviously, there are conflicting reports here, but I’m inclined to believe these reports.

Obviously, David Dayen’s suggestion that Obama do the right thing and, “without delay name her to the position of interim director by hiring her at Treasury,” is a good suggestion, but this assumes a level of support of the CFPB and its core mission, and I do not believe that.

First, I believe that Obama and his economic team really do buy into neoliberal idea that markets are always smarter and better than regulators, and second, I think that they honestly believe that the banking system will collapse if they generate profits by cheating ordinary Americans.

Of course I’ve been pessimistic about Obama for about three years, so feel free to argue that I’m not hopey changey enough.

About a Lot More Than the iPhone

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The Library of Congress, which has the power to create exemptions to the DMCA, has has made just released very significant carve outs, though to read the New York Times, it’s all about the iPhone.

You see, two of the things that are now allowed under the ruling are software to “jailbreak” the iPhone, both to allow non-Apple™ App Store applications, and to use the iPhone on a non AT&T networks.

Actually, this applies to all cell phones, but this is not a big deal.

What you also have is:

  • The right to rip short videos from DVDs for the educational and criticism purposes.
  • Defeating video game encryption for, “The purpose of good faith testing for, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities”.
  • Circumventing dongles when they become obsolete or exit manufacture.
  • Allowing circumvention of technical measures on E-Books to allow them to be read aloud.

This is stunning. It is consumer friendly, good policy, and common sense.

I would never have expected any of the three things to happen with the US copyright establishment.

I must therefore assume that this was as a result of input from political appointees in the USPTO and Library of Congress, this is fairly radical for career bureaucrats, and as such we need to give the White House credit.

I will note that there is still a work around that Apple™ could use which would make non App Store applications illegal, by using the Sega strategy, which involved using a verification key (the letters S-E-G-A) which would load the banner message, “PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD,” before the program loaded (thanks for the legal research from DC at SP), which made jail-breaking the console a trademark violation.

I don’t see Apple™ doing this, I think that it would unleash regulatory and customer blow-back, but the legal precedent remains there.

Link to the official anti-circumvention rule-making.

Warren Buffett Subpoenaed

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He was invited to speak before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and politely declined, so now he has been subpoenaed to testify:

When Warren Buffett testifies before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission next Wednesday, it will be because he was subpoenaed. If you don’t know how a subpoena works, this one begins with capital letters, “YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED to appear and give testimony.”

As Buffett characterizes it, “This is an offer you can’t refuse.”

………

But ah, it was. Buffett could by then see the likely end of this argument. But he was also determined to stick to his belief that the “private interview,” followed by hearings, would neither be beneficial to anyone nor a good use of his time. So Buffett told Cohen in a phone call that he would not be volunteering to testify — and if that meant a subpoena was in the cards, let it happen.

The subpoena — that command in capital letters — came on May 25. But the continuing, urgent wish of the commission to avoid coercion was contained in an accompanying letter, also dated May 25, that “respectfully” requested Buffett’s testimony at a hearing on June 2 in New York City.

My guess is that the net effect here is that the board won’t get its private interview, and so won’t know what he intends to say until he testifies in public, which might make for some good theater.

On a more salient legal note, now that Buffet has been compelled to testify, he can say anything, and not be held liable for those statements, since it is compelled testimony, which might make it even better theater.

Personally, I think that Buffet should bring the Geico Gecko with him. (Buffet owns Geico)

Credit Where Credit is Due

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General Stanley McChrystal is now saying that Dick Cheney’s model for the army,* with contractors galore, simply does not work:

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan said April 16 that the military is wasting money by employing too many private contractors to do jobs better done by soldiers or local Afghans.

“We have created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that is greater than it ought to be,” General Stanley McChrystal told an audience of French officers and military experts at France’s defense university in Paris.
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“I think we’ve gone too far. I think that the use of contractors was done with good intentions so that we could limit the number of military. I think in some cases we thought it would save money. I think it doesn’t save money.”

This is the right thing to say, but it’s a tough thing to say, since lucrative consulting gigs follow general officers who play the game, and now McChrystal will have to work for a living after retiring.

Of course, it’s going to take years to rebuild the capabilities that Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II privatized and moved out of the Pentagon.

*In one of his worst miscalculations in a lifetime of abject failure, Cheney did this as Secretary of Defense under Bush I, where he decided to privatize everything in sight that was not a “primary military function.”

You Know that the ‘Phants are Crapping Their Pants When……

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That look in his eyes is terror

When Karl Rove is so concerned about teabagger paranoia over the census that he as recorded a PSA for the decennial survey.

You see, the numbers are coming back, and it turns out that all over the Republican heartland, people are refusing to fill out the forms, because people like Michelle Bachmann and Glen Beck are telling them that it’s all a ploy for Barack Obama’s concentration camps for white folks.

What this means is that, probably for the first time in a very long time, that the under counting of minorities and immigrants may be balanced out by non-compliance among the suburban and rural white populations, which could move a few Congressional districts to bluer states, and change the shapes, of a few more.

I know that the census is important, and I know that it should be filled out promptly and accurately, but still, my initial thought is, “Heh. Hoist by their own petard.”

Hoocoodaode?

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Michael Burry, who made millions from the collapse of housing bubble, talks about how it was all perfectly obvious that we were heading at 95 miles per hour into a brick wall:

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, proclaimed last month that no one could have predicted the housing bubble. “Everybody missed it,” he said, “academia, the Federal Reserve, all regulators.”

But that is not how I remember it. Back in 2005 and 2006, I argued as forcefully as I could, in letters to clients of my investment firm, Scion Capital, that the mortgage market would melt down in the second half of 2007, causing substantial damage to the economy. My prediction was based on my research into the residential mortgage market and mortgage-backed securities. After studying the regulatory filings related to those securities, I waited for the lenders to offer the most risky mortgages conceivable to the least qualified buyers. I knew that would mark the beginning of the end of the housing bubble; it would mean that prices had risen — with the expansion of easy mortgage lending — as high as they could go.

I had begun to worry about the housing market back in 2003, when lenders first resurrected interest-only mortgages, loosening their credit standards to generate a greater volume of loans. Throughout 2004, I had watched as these mortgages were offered to more and more subprime borrowers — those with the weakest credit. The lenders generally then sold these risky loans to Wall Street to be packaged into mortgage-backed securities, thus passing along most of the risk. Increasingly, lenders concerned themselves more with the quantity of mortgages they sold than with their quality.

He is one of many people who began to worry about an over-inflated housing market,* though he has the distinction of being one of perhaps a dozen people who actually researched it thoroughly enough to risk his, and his clients’ money at Scion Capital.

And he made a killing, to the tune of about $¾ billion.

Of course, Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan take on all this is that he was just lucky:

Since then, I have often wondered why nobody in Washington showed any interest in hearing exactly how I arrived at my conclusions that the housing bubble would burst when it did and that it could cripple the big financial institutions. A week ago I learned the answer when Al Hunt of Bloomberg Television, who had read Michael Lewis’s book, “The Big Short,” which includes the story of my predictions, asked Mr. Greenspan directly. The former Fed chairman responded that my insights had been a “statistical illusion.” Perhaps, he suggested, I was just a supremely lucky flipper of coins.

Mr. Greenspan said that he sat through innumerable meetings at the Fed with crack economists, and not one of them warned of the problems that were to come. By Mr. Greenspan’s logic, anyone who might have foreseen the housing bubble would have been invited into the ivory tower, so if all those who were there did not hear it, then no one could have said it.

If Greenspan had no naysayers talking to him, it was because, as Paul Krugman so ably notes, it was, “Because Greenspan insulated himself from people who told him what he didn’t want to hear.”

Krugman notes a number of people, Dean Baker, Robert Shiller, himself, etc., and notes that Greenspan’s alibis are an artifact of his lack of menschlichkeit (integrity).

I would actually go further: He actually had a political and electoral purpose to his policies, which was that he held, and kept rates low, and encouraged things like exotic mortgages, because he wanted the Republicans in general, and George W. Bush in particular, to implement policies that he supported, such as the dismantling of Social Security, and by propping up the economy, he put the wind at their backs.

The independent Federal Reserve is largely a myth, and treating it as such leaves us with people like Alan Greenspan running the show to the detriment of everyone else.

*Hell, I was issuing dire warnings on the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS regarding what I thought was, and is, an over valued US dollar and increasing interest rates KOing the housing market in 2004, so I was right about there being a housing bubble, and the effects of low interest rates, but wrong, at least so far, as to the mechanism for the collapse of it all.

Are There Republican Moles in the Lay-Staff of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops?

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I was listening to NPR this morning, and they were talking about the position of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops regarding healthcare reform and abortion.

Any time that anyone talks about their position, this morning, it was a law professor, the consensus is that the position of the Bishops is coming from somewhere in the Twilight Zone: There is simply no basis in realities of law, precedent, legislation, or the manner in which regulation is derived from statute to suggest the Senate language will allow for federal funding of abortion.

This raises an obvious question: Why does the professional staff of the Conference hold a position at such extreme odds with every lawyer, and almost every other Catholic organization out there, most recently the Catholic Health Association and 59,000 nuns?

The only answer that I can come up with is that the professional staff working in their offices have been captured by partisan Republican operatives.

Either there are Republican operatives working and generating legal and legislative opinions, or the staff has been browbeaten by the loud right wing lay activists, most notably Bill Donohue and his Catholic League, and so the staff is taking its talking points from Republican operatives.

In either case, it is clear that the staff is NOT providing competent or good faith advice.

Perhaps a look at the senior lay staff at the organization, and their backgrounds might be warranted by some news gathering organization. (I sent an earlier version of my theory to Josh Marshall, if you know of any other investigative organizations, please forward this to them.)

Note that I am not suggesting that the Bishops themselves are operating as partisan political operatives, simply that their staff may be operating as such.

What MinistryOfTruth Said

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Click for full size


Only Homer Actually Votes ‘Phant

I think that, “the Democratic Establishment can kiss my DFH* a$$ too.”

She* muses on mad scramble to support Blanche Lincoln in her primary bid, despite the fact that she has absolutely no chance of winning in the general, most notably one William Jefferson Clinton:

Instead of working to support the current President against the Corporatist lies from the right what does Bill Clinton do? He throws his support behind one of President Obama’s chief roadblocks within his own party. Of course.

Note here that Blanche Lincoln has made a habit of lying through her teeth during the election, and then knifing those who supported her, as with labor and the EFCA, she lied about her support for the public option, and her reversals on abortion have been so blatant that one of the most establishment political organizations in the Women’s movement, Blanche Lincoln, has decided not to support her in the election, as evidenced by the following statement from the Chair of the organization:

As I travel around the country, I’ve been asked repeatedly about Senator Lincoln’s political troubles and what, if anything, EMILY’s List will be doing to help her win a third term in 2010.

My answer? Nothing.

In 1998, EMILY’s List helped elect Lincoln to the U.S. Senate. We believed her when she told us that that, if and when the Senate took up right-wing Senator Rick Santorum’s bill to ban what he called “partial birth” abortion, she would insist on a health exception that protects women.

Our members gave generously to her campaign, believing that she would steadfastly stand by the pledge she made to us to protect women’s reproductive freedom.

She took our members’ hard-earned money to get elected. Unfortunately, when the Santorum bill came up for a vote, Lincoln voted for it even though it provided no exception to protect women’s health.

EMILY’s List members are deeply committed to electing pro-choice Democratic women whom we trust to stand up for our rights, treat us honestly, and make us proud. Our candidates fight for us every day. Blanche Lincoln failed to hold up her end of the bargain.

Since she wasn’t there for us, we won’t be there for her.

You know, she has a charismatic primary challenger, and Emily’s List dumped her, and right now she’s polling horribly, so I guess that it sucks to be her.

Of course, it sucks worse to be represented by her, which is why she is losing right now.

And then while we’re at it, the DSCC is continues to do their best to discourage candidates who actually inspire people, such as Rodney Glassman in Arizona, even though there appears no other Dem interested in running right now, because, I guess no one actually knows him, even though the Arizona Democratic Party chairman asked him to run.

As MoT notes, the imperative in the Democratic Party establishment is, “PUNCH THE HIPPIES.”

</rant>

*Dirty F%$#ing Hippy

[on edit]My bad, MOT is a he, not a she. No offense was intended.