This is the lamest excuse ever for not filing a campaign finance report on time, but that is what Mississippi state senator, and Chris McDaniel’s campaign manager, is using as an excuse of not filing here paperwork on time.
Is there anything that Chris McDaniels ever did that wasn’t a fail?
He wrote a post complaining about business as usual at the Democratic Party titled, “Democrats: You suck.
His experience is that, following making a small donation to a Democratic candidate for office, he has been bludgeoned into something approaching PTSD from their repeated fund raising requests:
………
……… At least I think that’s what they’re doing; I now look at the incoming source, and if it’s the Democrats, I don’t bother to pick up. And here I am, entirely sympathetic to that party (if dissatisfied with their conservatism), and I have a conditioned aversion now.
I’ve had enough. I can learn. And the moral I have learned is to never donate to the Democratic party.
Who’s the idiot behind this campaign? Is it actually working for them?
Do Republicans do the same thing to their donors, or do they just scam them with things like gold coins and quack cures?
Dinesh D’Souza has just pled guilty to using straw donors in violation of campaign finance laws:
Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza entered a guilty plea Tuesday to a charge that he used straw donors to make $20,000 in illegal contributions to Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long in 2012, officials said.
The unexpected guilty plea came on the same day the trial for the strident critic of President Barack Obama was set to open in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The single felony count D’Souza admitted guilt on carries a maximum prison sentence of two years, but the plea agreement D’Souza’s lawyers reached with the government says sentencing guidelines applicable to the case call for a sentence of 10 to 16 months.
Judges are not required to sentence defendants in accordance with the guidelines, but usually do. Both sides reserved their rights to argue for a sentence outside that range and D’Souza’s lawyer Benjamin Brafman indicated he plans to ask Judge Richard Berman not to send D’Souza to prison.
The plea deal calls for dismissal of a second charge D’Souza faced if he went to trial: causing Long to file a false report with the Federal Election Commission. That carried a potential sentence of up to five years behind bars.
Atrios has noted that he is feeling far less schadenfreude about this than he expected, despite his being, “One of America’s Worst Humans.”
Me not so much.
This is the guy that has never grew up beyond tacky College Republican guerrilla theater that had classmate Timothy Geithner asking him, “how it felt to be such a dick.” (And that is ignoring his rather idiosyncratic marital life)
This really could not happen to a more contemptible human being.
A few years back, there was an experiment with allowing private contractors to go after people who owed taxes.
It was a failure, with abusive behavior, indifferent record keeping, higher costs, and lower performance, but the private debt collectors can make campaign donations, so the Senate is looking to bring back this clusterf%$#:
The Internal Revenue Service would be required to turn over millions of unpaid tax bills to private debt collectors under a measure before the Senate, reviving a program that has previously led to complaints of harassment and has not saved taxpayers money.
The provision was tucked into a larger bill, aimed at renewing an array of expired tax breaks, at the request of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), whose state is home to two of the four private collection agencies that stand to benefit from the proposal.
It requires all “inactive tax receivables” to be assigned to private debt collectors if the IRS cannot locate the person who owes the money or if IRS agents are unable to make contact within a year.
Some taxpayers would be spared the barrage of notices and phone calls, including innocent spouses, military members deployed to combat zones and people “identified as being deceased.”
But bereaved relatives could find themselves under siege for unpaid estate taxes under the proposal. So could people who incur a tax debt under the new Affordable Care Act — either because they owe a penalty for not buying health insurance or because the government was too generous in estimating the size of their health-care tax subsidy.
As the measure arrived on the Senate floor this week, Nina E. Olson, the nation’s taxpayer advocate, wrote a long letter to lawmakers, urging them to withdraw the proposal.
“Outsourcing the collection of federal tax debts is a bad idea,” she wrote. “It disproportionately impacts low-income and other vulnerable taxpayers, and despite two attempts [in the past] at making it work, the program has lost money both times, undermining the sole rationale for its existence.”
Moreover, “if debt collectors come to be seen as the public face” of President Obama’s health-care program, Olson wrote, “I am concerned that could make the IRS’s job” of administering the new health-insurance program “more difficult.”
But it’s back, like a bad penny.
Do you know why it is back? Because Schumer wants some local firms to to make money off the taxpayers, “$1.2 billion would be paid to the private debt collectors, potentially showering fresh cash on two companies based in Upstate New York: ConServe, of Fairport, and Pioneer Credit Recovery, of Arcade.”
To quote Declan Patrick Macmanus, “I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.”
The court ruled in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court gutted campaign finance reform:
Back in October, when the Court heard oral argument in a challenge to the overall caps – known as “aggregate limits” – on how much an individual can contribute to candidates for federal office, political parties, and political action committees, there wasn’t a whole lot of suspense. Given the Court’s recent campaign finance rulings, it seemed clear that a majority of the Justices would vote to strike down at least some of the caps; the only real question was whether they would strike down them all.
Today we got our answer from the Court, and it was a decisive “yes”: all of the aggregate limits must go. Let’s talk about today’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission in Plain English.
As I explained in my preview of the case in October, there are (at least until today) two kinds of limits on campaign contributions. The first is what is known as the “base limits” – the maximum that you can contribute to a candidate, political party, or political action committee in an election. The aggregate limits are the second kind: in a two-year period known as an “election cycle,” you can donate no more than $48,600 to all candidates combined and no more than $74,600 to political parties and political action committees.
An Alabama businessman named Shaun McCutcheon went to court to challenge the aggregate limits. He didn’t ask for the right to give more money than the base limits to any particular candidate; instead, he wanted to give money to many more candidates, but the aggregate limits prohibit him from doing so. That, he argued, violates his free speech rights under the First Amendment.
Although a lower court disagreed with McCutcheon, he found a more receptive audience in the Roberts Court, which has consistently voted to overturn campaign finance regulations. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the Court, which was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel A. Alito. (Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his own opinion saying the Court should go even further, but the Chief Justice’s opinion is the controlling one.)
………
Breyer’s dissent lamented that the Court’s decision “eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.” In his view, “corruption” is not limited to scenarios involving a quid pro quo, which he described as “an act akin to bribery.” Instead, it includes exactly the kind of efforts to use money to obtain influence and access to elected officials that the Chief Justice’s opinion characterized as “a central feature of democracy.” This is so, Breyer explained, because if people believe that elected officials only pay attention to big-money donors, they may lose faith in the political process altogether.
Breyer next contended that the Court is just wrong when it asserts that, even if the aggregate limits are removed, there is still no way to get around the base limits. Here the dissent painted a very different picture from the rest of the Court, predicting that “donors can and likely will find ways to channel millions of dollars to parties and to individual candidates.”
Whose vision of the future of campaign finance will prevail – the dissent’s apocalyptic one or the Chief Justice’s more optimistic one? You can be sure that journalists and election law experts will be paying close attention over the next few years. We can also be confident that the decision today will spawn new campaign finance challenges – including, in all likelihood, to the “base limits” themselves. Stay tuned . . . .
And if this is not bad enough, it looks like SCOTUS will overturn bans on corporate donations to candidates:
The Supreme Court, fresh from its new ruling expanding the political donation options of private individuals, faces a choice this week about its current view on campaign contributions to candidates by corporations. For weeks, the Court has been sitting on a case that would test a state’s flat ban on corporate donations, and is now set to look at that case in the wake of Wednesday’s ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.
The Court, according to its electronic docket, is scheduled to consider at its private Conference on Friday the case of Iowa Right to Life Committee v. Tooker. That case has been ready for the Court, technically, since November, but so far no action has been taken.
If the Court’s usual practice is followed, it will have at least three options: agree to hear the case to test the constitutionality of Iowa’s ban on corporate donations, deny review and thus leave intact a federal appeals court ruling upholding that ban, or tell the lower courts to reconsider based on the McCutcheon ruling.
In 2003, in the case of FEC v. Beaumont, the Court upheld the long-standing federal ban on corporations, at least so far as that provision applied to non-profit corporations. In the new case, the Iowa Right to Life Committee urged the Court to overrule the Beaumont decision, arguing that it cannot be squared with the Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC.
Needless to say, we can expect another 5-4 decision allowing rich people to double down on their influence.
We ……… are ……… f%$#ed.
Thomas Frank in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Well, over at MoJo, Kevin Drum notes that any serious analysis, “Democrats have done virtually nothing for the middle class in 30 years.”
He’s right. The Democrat Party’s record on economic for the middle class, and the poor is amazingly weak tea when compared to anyone but the Republicans:
There are two problems with the Democratic approach. First, it’s too abstract to appeal to anyone. Second, it’s not true anyway. Democrats simply don’t consistently support concrete policies that help the broad working and middle classes. Half of them voted for the bankruptcy bill of 2005. They’ve done virtually nothing to stem the growth of monopolies and next to nothing to improve consumer protection in visible ways. They don’t do anything for labor. They’re soft on protecting Social Security. They bailed out the banks but refused to bail out underwater homeowners. Hell, they can’t even agree to kill the carried interest loophole, a populist favorite if ever there was one.
Sure, Democrats do plenty for the poor. They support increases in the EITC and the minimum wage. They support Medicaid expansion. They passed Obamacare. They support pre-K for vulnerable populations. They expanded CHIP. But virtually none of this really benefits the working or middle classes except at the margins.
Democrats have been unwilling to do any more than nibble around the edges for years.
It’s all about extracting large donations from rich people, which requires that you support policies that make them richer and richer, and this money is extracted from the rest of us.
If Bernie Sanders runs for President, he has my vote:
Bernie Sanders says he is “prepared to run for president of the United States.” That’s not a formal announcement. A lot can change between now and 2016, and the populist senator from Vermont bristles at the whole notion of a permanent campaign. But Sanders has begun talking with savvy progressive political strategists, traveling to unexpected locations such as Alabama and entertaining the process questions that this most issue-focused member of the Senate has traditionally avoided.
In some senses, Sanders is the unlikeliest of prospects: an independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate but has never joined the party, a democratic socialist in a country where many politicians fear the label “liberal,” an outspoken critic of the economic, environmental and social status quo who rips “the ruling class” and calls out the Koch brothers by name. Yet, he has served as the mayor of his state’s largest city, beaten a Republican incumbent for the US House, won and held a historically Republican Senate seat and served longer as an independent member of Congress than anyone else. And he says his political instincts tell him America is ready for a “political revolution.”
I want to see someone who does more than pay lip service to liberal policies, and Bernie would do that.
I’m not sure how serious he is.
At this point, he does not even have an Act Blue page set up for the 2016 Presidential campaign.
Courtesy of Ian Welsh:
I will be frank: the West needs to stop fomenting these revolutions. Russia is not going to allow NATO to creep up to their border without taking action. You’d have to be crazy to think that Russia was going to allow the Ukraine, including Crimea, to become part of NATO, and yes, that was the West’s (or rather, America’s) endgame. (The Europeans think the Americans are crazy to be baiting the bear like this. But the Europeans need Russian natural gas.)
He also notes that since 1991, the official public spending on changing the Ukraine’s government has been 5 billion dollars.
By comparison in 2010 California Senate race Barbara Boxer Spent $29,537,796.00, and Carly Fiorina Spent $21,521,397.00, for total spending of $51,059,193.00, (Link), and California’s population is 37,253,959, so the spending was $1.37 per person.
So if you took the $5 billion that was spent over the last 23 years on the 44,573,205 residents of the Ukraine, you get $4.88 per person per year.
And this is in a place where the media market for the whole country has got to be considerably less than that of the Bay Area.
And BTW, much of this money is going to the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party and its accompanying Pravyi Sektor militia, which payed a large role in the current revolution.
We’ve seen this before.
The White House puts out a potentially significant rule, or rule change, and the right wing noise machine cranks up, and they back off.
This is why I’m dubious that their place greater restrictions on tax-exempt political groups will amount to much:
The Obama administration proposed new rules on Tuesday to rein in tax-exempt groups that have transformed the U.S. political landscape in recent years by harnessing hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous donations to influence elections.
The proposal would alter definitions in the tax code that allow limited campaign and fundraising activities by the tax-exempt groups, some of which have been at the center of allegations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny.
These tax-exempt “social welfare” groups, organized under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, mushroomed after a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that relaxed campaign finance rules. Part of their appeal is that the groups do not have to disclose the identities of their donors as long as they spend less than half their time and money on political activities.
Critics say the relaxed rules have opened the door to the abuse of campaign finance rules meant to curb the influence of wealthy donors in U.S. politics.
………
U.S. government officials have struggled for years to determine what qualifies as political activity. The proposed rules would more clearly define “candidate-related political activity” and also ask for public comment about how much political spending these groups should be allowed to do. The proposed rules introduce several bright-line tests that would determine when a 501(c)(4) is doing too much campaign activity and is violating its tax-exempt status.
Among these new definitions, advertising that names a candidate 60 days before a general election would count as political activity. Certain contributions that can now be made anonymously by these groups may need to be reported. Any “voter guides” that refer to a candidate would be considered political activity.
Also, any event within 60 days of a general election at which a candidate appears as part of the program would be a political event.
“This proposed guidance is a first critical step toward creating clear-cut definitions of political activity by social welfare organizations,” Mark Mazur, Treasury assistant secretary for tax policy, said in a statement.
If they implement this, it would be good first step, but I expect it to be watered down beyond recognition.
Because former Blue Dog Steve Israel has as his goal the resurrection of the Blue Dog Caucus or something very similar, even at the expense of the possibility of Democrats taking back the house:
Last week, when MoveOn and PPP released their much buzzed about polls showing how Democrats could pick up many seats, the first thing I noticed was that these were all the Steve Israel seats they had polled. I spoke with them and asked them to poll some of the districts that the DCCC studiously ignores, districts we’ve been covering here at DWT and where Blue America has some great candidates. This morning MoveOn and PPP are releasing new polling data for some of those districts.
Outstanding, at top Blue America races where Lee Rogers is ahead of Buck McKeon (CA-25), Paul Clements is ahead of Fred Upton (MI-06) and Jason Ritchie is ahead of Dave Reichert (WA-08). In other districts, like FL-27, where Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz have actively discouraged Democratic opponents, there is a clear indication that if Pelosi manned up and fired Israel and cleaned out the nest of self serving incompetents who run the DCCC, the Democrats would win back the House hands down in 2014. In many of the districts where there are no Democrats– thanks to Israel’s agenda– voters see no alternative to the GOP incumbent but there is a clear indication that a Democrat could campaign and win. In FL-27 where Wasserman Schultz has been protecting Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for years, if an election were held today, an unnamed Democrat would beat her 47-45%. ………
You can read the rest at the article, but basically, the DCCC will drop big bucks on ConservaDem long-shots, and ignore competitive races where real Democrats are running against vulnerable Republicans.
Tom Delay’s money laundering conviction was just overturned:
A Texas appellate court has overturned the conviction of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) for allegedly scheming to influence Texas state elections with corporate money.
A three-judge panel voted 2-1 to overturn the conviction, calling the evidence “legally insufficient,” according to court papers released Thursday. The decision formally acquits DeLay of all charges, but it could still be appealed by the government.
Their ain’t no justice.
So Florida Attorney General had a fundraising meeting, so she delayed an execution:
There is no graver responsibility and act of state government than an execution.
In Florida this week, a campaign fundraiser takes precedence.
Attorney General Pam Bondi persuaded Gov. Rick Scott to postpone an execution scheduled for tonight because it conflicted with her re-election kick-off reception.
“What’s going on down there? It’s ridiculous,” said Phyllis Novick, the Ohio mother of one of Marshall Lee Gore’s victims, when told Monday about the reason for the delay.
Gore, 50, raped, strangled and stabbed 30-year-old Robyn Novick in 1988 before dumping her body into a Miami-Dade County trash heap. Gore was also sentenced to die for the slaying of 19-year-old Susan Roark, whose body was found a few months later in Columbia County.
Gore was initially scheduled for execution in June, but the date was twice delayed because of legal skirmishes over Gore’s sanity.
I have mixed emotions.
I oppose the death penalty, I see a delay to an execution as a good thing, but postponing an execution so that you can raise money?!?!
Damn, that is cold.
You may remember his wankitude in the 2012 elections, when he said that Obama being mean to Bain Capital gave him a sad, but it’s worse than that.
He is deeply and openly on the take:
The conference room in the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters of LinkedIn was packed with the stars of Silicon Valley. Top executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter gathered around a table; the billionaire Sean Parker looked on from a back row. The guest of honor: Cory A. Booker, the mayor of Newark.
The stated purpose of the gathering was to give Mr. Booker, already a Twitter fanatic, a seminar on social-networking technologies. But hanging in the air was an electrifying sense of being in the presence of an ascendant politician they believed understood the potential of the new digital world they were shaping.
“He’s part of this tide,” said Gina Bianchini, an entrepreneur who was at the meeting, in May 2009. “It feels like he’s one of us.”
Two and a half years later, some of those same Silicon Valley leaders joined forces again on Mr. Booker’s behalf. But this time, their efforts resulted in giving Mr. Booker, until then an admired outsider, the equivalent of full-fledged membership in their elite circle: an Internet start-up of his own.
Mr. Booker personally has obtained money for the start-up, called Waywire, from influential investors, including Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman. A year after its debut, Waywire has already endured a round of layoffs and had just 2,207 visitors in June, according to Compete, a Web-tracking service. The company says it is still under development.
Yet in a financial disclosure filed last month, Mr. Booker, 44, revealed that his stake in the company was worth $1 million to $5 million. Taken together, his other assets were worth no more than $730,000.
That revelation, with just a week left in Mr. Booker’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, shows how a few tech moguls and entrepreneurs, many of them also campaign donors, not only made a financial bet on the mayor’s political future but also provided the brainpower and financing to help create a company that could make him very rich.
Why is this blatant influence peddling?
Well, the tell is that Waywire hired the 15 year old son of the head of CNN and gave him stock options:(Yes, it’s NY Post, but echos the New York Times story linked above, and it is far less oblique)
He isn’t even old enough to drive — but CNN President Jeff Zucker’s teenage son has already resigned from a cushy position at Cory Booker’s closely watched Internet start-up.
After somehow scoring a seat on the advisory board of the rising Democratic star’s Waywire video-sharing site, 15-year-old Andrew Zucker abruptly quit yesterday amid questions over his qualifications.
The rich kid’s consulting career as a “millennial adviser” ended just hours after it was revealed that he had been granted stock options in the firm co-founded by Booker, the Newark mayor who polls show is a shoo-in for the US Senate after a special election.
“Despite the fact that his affiliation with Waywire was extremely limited to only an advisory capacity, in order to avoid even the perception of a conflict, Jeff’s son has resigned from the Waywire advisory board, effective immediately,” CNN said in a statement.
News of Andrew’s stock deal lit up social media yesterday, with critics on Twitter branding it a “gross nepotism alert.”
Corporate-governance experts also called his hiring highly unusual, saying they’d never before heard of anyone so young getting such a cushy gig.
Advisory boards are usually stocked with “seasoned folks who have been through the process of making that kind of a start-up work, or enhancing the capacity of a company so it can move to an IPO [initial public offering] or the next level of business,” said Eleanor Bloxham, CEO of The Value Alliance. “So you’re not generally looking in the high-school age range.”
The defense is that he got less than qualified than, “Lady Gaga’s manager.”
Seriously, the royalty of Silicon Valley is showering their largess on this guy because it’s such a good idea? For a web site that got 2,207 visitors in June?
Seriously, I got 1,457 unique visitors in June, and I’m the worst writer on the internet.™
But wait, there’s more. There is also the case of his old law firm, which continued to pay him for years while getting lucrative contracts from the city:
Cory Booker pocketed “confidential” annual payouts from his former law firm while serving as Newark mayor.
Booker, the front-runner in New Jersey’s Senate race, received five checks from the Trenk DiPasquale law firm from 2007 until 2011. During that time, the firm raked in more than $2 million in fees from local agencies over which Booker has influence.
“This was a settlement buyout for my interest in the firm,” the mayor told The Post at a campaign stop in Jersey City yesterday. “I had an equity stake, and we had a negotiated settlement.”
Booker worked at the West Orange firm for five years, leaving in 2006 when he was elected Newark’s mayor to avoid “the appearance of impropriety.”
He refused to answer how much he received in the five years after leaving.
“It’s all been disclosed for the last seven years,” Booker said.
Not quite. Booker’s state financial disclosures from 2006 to 2011 list two sources of income — the city of Newark and the law firm. The forms mandate reporting of income over $2,000 a year, but do not require an exact sum or range.
Booker’s closed lips on the earnings fly in the face of his public stances. In 2002, he released his tax returns during his unsuccessful race against incumbent Mayor Sharpe James, and ripped James for not doing the same.
The returns “provide the only clues as to how many deals the mayor is involved in . . . and the only record of the money he’s making on the side,” Booker said at the time.
When The Post asked Friday for Booker’s recent returns, his campaign refused to turn them over.
And then there are his positions on the issues:
If he wins the primary, he is almost certain to win the general.
First, New Jersey is very blue now, and second, the Republican field is best defined as a clown show.
Bill Halter, who nearly defeated the despicable Blanche Lincoln in the 2010 Arkansas Democratic Primary, has decided to withdraw from the race for Governor, leaving the race to one of the Dlue Doggingist of the Blue Dogs, Mike Ross.
It appears that the proximate cause is anemic fund raising.
My guess is that this is payback from the Clintons, who have not “gotten over” his challenge to Lincoln. (She would have lost anyway, the polls were clear on that.)
This sucks.
Libertarian Paradise:
Sorry about the headline, but Penny Pritzker who was just approved by the Senate as Secretary of Commerce, with only Bernie Sanders voting no:
Senators pick their battles, and by Tuesday, members in both parties had decided not to have one with President Obama over his nomination of Penny Pritzker, the billionaire hotel heiress, to be commerce secretary. In a 97-to-1 vote, they confirmed her to join the cabinet.
The lone dissenter was Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the socialist independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats.
When Mr. Obama announced in May his choice of Ms. Pritzker, 54, to join his second-term economic team as head of the eclectic Commerce Department — its responsibilities vary widely and include federal business programs and weather forecasting — rumblings from the right and left suggested trouble.
Yes, virulently anti union, a bought/looted a bank, dove into subprime mortgages, and left the taxpayers holding the bag, and keeps her fortune in overseas tax havens. (Background here.)
But the is a friend of Obama, and was his his first big buck donor, so she gets to be commerce secretary.
I guess that it’s the new motto of the Obama administration cabinet, “Not quite as lame as Alberto Gonzalez.”
Senate Democrats who are upset because some incumbent are catching heat because they completely caved on gun control:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s aides met recently with staffers of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to warn them: Targeting vulnerable Democrats like Arkansas’s Mark Pryor on gun control could backfire on the party, several sources told POLITICO.
It didn’t work.
Ads from the Bloomberg-funded Mayors Against Illegal Guns are going up soon in Alaska, Arkansas and North Dakota — three states with Democratic senators who broke with the White House on last month’s background checks vote.
The group is also moving as many as 60 field organizers into about a dozen states where senators — Democrats and Republicans — voted against bill, with the goal of building infrastructure and countering gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association.
………
Bloomberg’s group has made its choice: Its radio spots in Arkansas will target the state’s African-American community, “without which Mark Pryor doesn’t have a prayer of getting reelected,” said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
………
Pryor, first elected to the Senate in 2002, claimed he’s not worried about his poor poll numbers or possible challengers, including GOP Rep. Tom Cotton, or whether MAIG or other progressive groups dump money into the race.
Shades of the contemptible Blanche Lincoln in the final graph.
When progressives decided to go after Lincoln, she already was polling lower than a case of the Clap, but somehow the primary challenge is why she lost by 20 points.
To quote Harry S Truman, “Given a choice between a fake Republican and a real one, the public will choose the real Republican every time,”and that is what happened to Lincoln, and is likely to happen to Pryor.
It’s always the same refrain in the DC incumbent protection racket, “He’s a ratf%$#, but the Republicans are scary, so we need to waste resources on a politician who wouldn’t be worth it if he were polling well.”
We know why Pryor voted the way he did, because he was running scared, and the voters of Arkansas know that too, which is why they will not be inclined to vote for him. The pander is too blatant.
Yes, I hang up on both the DSCC and the DCCC, because I do not trust them to support candidates who support Democratic Party values, and because they spend their money stupidly.
But following the discovery of a complaint filed by his ex-wife for trespassing at her home, the national GOP is pulling out all resources from his campaign:
National Republicans are pulling the plug on Mark Sanford’s suddenly besieged congressional campaign, POLITICO has learned — a potentially fatal blow to the former South Carolina governor’s dramatic comeback bid.
Blindsided by news that Sanford’s ex-wife has accused him of trespassing and concluding he has no plausible path to victory, the National Republican Congressional Committee has decided not to spend more money on Sanford’s behalf ahead of the May 7 special election.
“Mark Sanford has proven he knows what it takes to win elections. At this time, the NRCC will not be engaged in this special election,” said Andrea Bozek, an NRCC spokeswoman.
Sanford is facing Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a Clemson University administrator and sister of comedian Stephen Colbert, in a race that has grabbed the national spotlight.
The NRCC’s move comes hours after Tuesday night’s report by the Associated Press that Sanford’s ex-wife, Jenny Sanford, filed a court complaint accusing him of trespassing at her home in early February – which would be a violation of the terms of their divorce agreement.
Republicans said they were caught off guard by news of Jenny Sanford’s complaint. They worry other damaging revelations about Mark Sanford’s personal life that they aren’t aware of could come out in the coming weeks.
The calculus here is simple: The district is pretty red, and any money that they spent on Sanford now they would also have to spend in 2014 if he won, so it is better to let Colbert-Busch to have a few months in Congress, where her vote won’t count.
That way you do not have Mark Sanford around your neck like a corpulent albatross.
Donating to the DCCC means helping Dems who vote like Republicans:
The DCCC is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the group of congresspeople and staff supposedly responsible for electing House Democrats. It’s led by “ex”–Blue Dog and New Dem Steve Israel, Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked choice for the job.
We’ve written about Israel before. To the world his job is simply to elect Democrats, but to the moneymen and -women behind the corporate wing of the party, his job is to:
- Elect corporate Democrats to the House
- Keep progressives out of office
- Make sure pro-corporate Republican leaders like Cantor and Paul Ryan never face credible challenges
Seriously. So long as the national Democratic Congressional election infrastructure, and Congressional election fundraising is dominated by corporatocrats, don’t give to them.
Pick and choose your candidates. Don’t let these corporate ratf%$3s make that choice for you.
FWIW, I would give similar advice to Republicans too.
It’s really pretty basic, do your homework, and chose whom you support, don’t let the Beltway crowd make your choice.
It was nice when the last remaining New England Republican, Christopher Shays, was defeated.
Unfortunately, he was by former Goldman Sachs executive Jim Himes, who is doing his level best to gut the most effective provisions of Dodd Frank: (See also here)
Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes said a provision in the Wall Street reform legislation aimed at limiting taxpayer exposure to risky elements of financial products sold by banks goes too far and must be changed.
Himes, a Greenwich resident and member of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, joined with Republicans from North Carolina and Illinois and a fellow Democrat from New York to introduce the Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act this week that would amend the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. A similar bill has been brought forward in the Senate. An attempt to amend the provision last year failed.
………
As part of the Dodd-Frank Act, banks with access to the Federal Reserve’s overnight lending program and insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would be required to set up independent subsidiaries in order to continue selling the financial instruments, called swaps.
Underfunded swap positions among big banks and other financial institutions were a major reason for the 2008 financial disaster. Swap trades were not made on any exchanges and many of them were based on mortgages. Fearing bank failures of staggering proportions, Congress bailed out the largest institutions.
So, he’s trying to put tax payers on the hook for the gambles at the big casino yet again.
So, what does this mean? It means that the Democratic leadership will make him head of the DCCC finance committee for the 2014 elections:
Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut will be the new national finance chairman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 2014 cycle, according to two well-placed Democratic sources on Capitol Hill.
Officials announced the new position for Himes, a three-term Democrat from Connecticut, at a morning meeting for members.
Jeebus. The Vampire Squid owns us all.
Simon Johnson was right when he said that the first step in recovery from the implosion of your finance system is to break grip on power of the elites who f%$#ed us like a drunk sorority pledge. (I’m paraphrasing)