The margin is significantly less than the number of absentee ballots, and possibly smaller than the number of provisional ballots, so a final count may be weeks off, and then there will be the challenges.
IIRC, the provisional and absentee ballots will be counted in about 2 weeks.
There is a special election in the 20th congressional district of New York tonight. I hope the Democrat, Scott Murphy, wins. However, I am also frustrated that Murphy has received nearly $360,000 on Act Blue from around 2,000 donors. Given that Murphy has made it clear that he will attempt to join the Blue Dogs if he wins the election, the progressive small donor world should not have given him a single dime.
We–participants in blog and email list small donor fundraising efforts–have to completely stop raising money for Blue Dogs. We should not give a single cent to any current member of the Blue Dog coalition. We should not give any money at all to any candidate who refuses to rule out joining the Blue Dogs once in Congress. If we hope to improve Democratic behavior in Congress, this break has to be as public and as thorough as possible.
Agreed.
Scott Murphy may be the very best we can get in that district, and if that is the case, then liberal campaign contributions are better spent elsewhere.
I would “embrace and extend” his message, and include the corporatist “New Democratic Caucus” on the list of people that we should not contribute to.
This goes double for folks in safe Dem districts, which NY-20 is not, Republicans have a registration advantage there, but why pay for someone who will, when the going gets tough, shoot down your agenda?
But I still want Murphy to win, I just won’t give him my money or time.
Reid is now saying that he might drop cram down provisions from the housing bill if it threatens passage of the whole package.
Basically, this means that he is going to kill it, because everyone who wants it gone now knows that they can get it dropped by whining.
Seeing as how this was the law until about 1993, the effect on interest rates are minimal, and it’s the only way to renegotiate a mortgage that has been sliced and diced until it has hundreds of owners, cramdown is the single best thing that can be done to help with the current financial meltdown.
Honestly, even with the new poll numbers, this is a heavily Republican distract, so I my guess would be that the Republican has the advantage, particularly given the low turn out in special elections, so I would expect the ‘Phant to win in this Tuesday’s election.
In either case, Jim Tadesco (R), and Scott Murphy (D) contest is much closer than the district’s fundamentals would suggest.
There has now been testimony that Nasser Kazeminy, a close friend of Norm Coleman instructed his CFO to pay $100,000.00 to Coleman’s wife’s insurance agency for nothing in the way of services.
Now the Star-Tribune has obtained a March 19 deposition from the lawsuit that first surfaced the scandal. The deposition is from B.J. Thomas, the chief financial officer of the company that paid out $75,000 to a firm where Laurie Coleman worked as a consultant — even though he found no evidence of actual work.
Thomas was asked: “In that conversation that you had with Mr. Kazeminy, did he tell you, quote, United States senators don’t make sh#$, close quote? Or words to that effect?”
Thomas answered: “Yes, sir.”
Kazeminy is boned, unless he roles on Coleman, and Coleman is a rat, so you gotta figure so is Kazeminy.
Pass the popcorn
HR 875 is a fairly innocuous bill, trying to make sure that food, both domestic and imported, is safer, but a campaign by the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association (NIFCA), which opposes any regulation of food, and a couple of right wing conspiracy theorists, and suddenly the bill is an attempt by Monsanto to shut down every farmers market in the nation.
Well, it’s not. Go read the article for the full scoop.
And I mean this in a clinical sense, though obviously, I am an engineer, not a doctor, dammit!*
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
Hopefully, the idea of a government run option, one that can show similar efficiencies to Medicare or the VA, both of which consistently beat private insurance, will survive the conference committee.
I would offer the the caveat that one of the contributors to MSNBC’s “First Read” is Chuck Todd, who can be one of the stupidest muthf%$#ers in the White House press room,* but there is a report that the White House is “happy to have this debate out of the way” because, “sticking a finger in business’ eye wasn’t something the White House was looking forward to.”
This is about the most politically opportune time to do this, with the public attitude toward businesses being rather low, AIG is a symptom, not the trend.
I cannot for the life of me think of anyone in the White House who would even hold this opinion, except for economic adviser, and poster child for sex without partners, Lawrence Summers, who is on record saying that unions cause unemployment,† but even he isn’t stupid enough to mouth off to a reporter, or for that matter a co-worker, about this.
I’ll call bullsh%$ on this for now.
*Cases in point were his questions at the first two press conferences, would Obama veto something that doesn’t get any Republican votes in the interest of bipartisanship, and how Americans should sacrifice to address the financial meltdown (like millions of people out of work and losing their homes isn’t enough) because he does not understand the difference between a foreign war and a domestic economic downturn.
†Yeah, I know, with “Democrats” like him, who needs Republicans.
Case in point, Lincoln Chaffee, defeated for the Senate by Sheldon Whitehouse in 2006, and now Whitehouse is putting forward a bill to protect consumers from abusive credit card companies.
Among its provisions in his Consumer Credit Fairness Act:
Electing Democrats make a difference.
Kevin Drum just raised an interesting point about what Geithner has been doing so far
If, several weeks ago, you had charged a task force with figuring out how to successfully nationalize a big bank, what do you think they’d say you had to do? Three things, at least: (1) you have to figure out a widely acceptable way to value the toxic assets on bank balance sheets, (2) you have to set up a fair and consistent test for evaluating bank solvency based on those values, and (3) you need to make sure you have the legal authority to take over a huge, multinational financial conglomerate in an orderly way. Is it just a coincidence that these are precisely the things Tim Geithner has set in motion over the past month? I wonder.
It’s an interesting point, and just today, while testifying before Congress, Geithner called for the power to place large bank holding companies into government receivership, backed up by Ben Bernanke.
So Mr. Drum’s thought that recent activities of Geithner and Bernanke, and by extension President Obama being a ploy is a possibility, though but I’m inclined to agree with Yves Smith the proprietoress of Naked Capitalism, whose beat is economics, and who knows more about economics, and the major players the economic community, than either Drum or me, and she thinks that the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS)already has the authority to place AIG in receivership, and already answers to him.
Additionally, she notes that his request for additional power does not include any request for a receivership protocol, and concludes that this request is actually an attempt to give him more power to shovel more taxpayer dollars to the financial industry.
I would also note that Geithner, and his mentor, Larry Summers, have a history that stretches back decades, and there is nothing in what they have done, or are doing now, which would indicate that they would be inclined to do this…ever!
So, while Kevin Drum has an interesting wheels within wheels theory, I am more inclined to go with Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, and simply say that Geithner’s plan is robbing US taxpayers.
But that’s my gut, and my sense that past is prologue.
So Arlen Spector has decided to cave, again, because of his fears of being primaried, and he has announced that he will vote against cloture on the Employee Free Choice Act, and Federal Express has said that it will cancel its contract to purchase Boeing aircraft if the EFCA passes.
I am not surprised at Spector, who has never seen a principled stance that he couldn’t weasel of, though I am surprised that FedEx, which has a long history of virulent and nasty anti-union activity, put a clause in their aircraft purchase contract that allowed them to cancel if unionizing there gets easier,* is a surprise.
Needless to say, if I need to send anything, I will use the use the US Post Office or UPS, rather than those C*cks*ck*rs.
*The EFCA would change how FedEx organizes, moving it from the National Railway Labor Act to the National Labor Relations Act, which means that parts of the company could unionize, as opposed to the whole company at once.
It looks like there will be some real good coming from the AIG bonus fiasco, as Barney Frank is taking a few steps back from his idea of the Federal Reserve as the über regulator of the economy:
A proposal to put the Federal Reserve in charge of market oversight is losing congressional support after its main backer, Barney Frank, said criticism over American International Group Inc. “undercuts” his proposal.
“There’s still a need for a systemic-risk regulator,” Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said yesterday. “The argument for the Fed alone has lost a lot of political support. I think that’s now got to be re-looked at.”
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd and Richard Shelby, the panel’s top Republican, said March 19 they are reluctant to expand the Fed’s role, faulting the central bank for lapses leading to the financial crisis.
When one considers how opaque the operations of the Federal Reserve are, and how, of all the regulatory agencies, it was the one that failed the worst, the others being hamstrung through legislation or executive initiative, Dodd and Shelby are right to be dubious of the fed.
Just ask yourself this question: Do you want Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan to be the systemic risk regulator for the economy?
I wholeheartedly approve of the distinguished gentleman’s decision to place a hold on the nomination of Gary Gensler to be chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Gensler (along with Geithner and Summers, but those guys are water under the bridge) fought long and hard for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, first as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and then as Undersecretary of the Treasury, which deregulated derivatives and swaps, and is one of the architects of the current meltdown, and Sanders is 100% correct in objecting to his having a any role in further regulation of derivatives.
Then there is also the matter of his brother being hip deep in Wall Street too, running a fund for T. Rowe Price, and Gary Gensler himself is another Goldman Sachs alum.
Enough is enough. We need people who aren’t the ones who created the problem in the first place in charge of policing those who were.
Un-dirtyword-believable, and good for Sanders to stand up for a semblance of competence and honesty in Barack Obama’s economic team.
It appears that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd have differences in the future course of regulation.
Specifically, Frank favors giving the Federal Reserve the job of managing “systemic risk” under any new regulations, and Dodd thinks that the Fed, with its history of unresponsiveness and opacity is ill suited to the task.
Well, it now appears that much of the smear campaign against Dodd may have come from Larry Summers, who would be first in line to be Federal Reserve chairman if Obama does not reappoint Bernanke, and so he went after Dodd in order to strengthen Frank’s hand in making the Fed the chief regulator.
I’m beginning to think that anyone who has “friend of Robert Rubin” on their resume should be barred from any position of authority.
Un-dirtyword-believable.
It looks like Senate Republicans have decided to do whatever is possible to slow the AIG bonus bill.
Why?
I’m not sure, but never stop your opponent from stepping on his own dick.
So, we have the government looking to legislation giving them the authority that the FDIC does when it shuts down banks for not bank entities, such as bank holding companies and hedge funds.
And in related news, the FDIC is looking for additional authority to acutally write regulations, a function which is currently does not have.
It has strong enforcement powers, but, “but only the Federal Reserve, Office of Thrift Supervision and National Credit Union Administration can write the regulation it enforces.”
It’s about time.
Well, it appears that Senator Evah Bahy’s (DINO-IN) new moderate caucus is getting some pushback from their constituents, and they are crying like a bunch of “girlie men”, to quote the governator.
It appears that Rachel Maddow covered this, and called them “conservadems”, and they are getting some calls from voters in their states telling them to get with the program.
How many calls are they getting?
Maddow’s five-minute “conservadem” segment last Thursday provoked at least 20 calls Monday to Udall’s office and more than a dozen e-mails to Democratic Party headquarters in Colorado.
So now they are crying about how awful people are to them.
Seriously, these folks are used to obstructing progressive programs, and then getting a pat on the head from villagers inside the beltway, but now, with someone pointing them out as trying to stifle change, they get 20 phone calls and more than a dozen emails, and they are whining about how people are mean to them.
Listen, if you suck up to Wall Street, who destroyed our 401(k)s, and you suck up to large food processors, who put poison in our peanuts, because they contribute to your campaign, you deserve whatever flak that you catch.
Cry me a fracking river.
She has accepted the offer to be the undersecretary of State for arms control and international security, and this means that a line is already forming for the special election.
This is a safe Democratic district, so let’s hope that she is replaced by a member of the “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.”
Because they voted against taxing the AIG bonuses, and they are among the most right wing Democrats in the house of representatives:
Challengers, start your engines, you have an issue that they won’t be able to avoid.