McConnell is not doing well in the polls, so he’s started running ads, including one with an endorsement from Alben Barkley II, grandson of former senator and vice president Alben Barkley.
The problem is that Alben Barkley II was convicted of sexual harassment in 1981 for hitting on his secretary.
Oops!
This is a good thing. Udall has a much better chance of winning the seat than the other serious candidate, Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez.
Hopefully, Pete Domenici will be replaced by a Dem.
You remember that the vote on Mukasey was rushed, about 1/2 hour’s notice before the start of debate.
Well, now we have a reason. It appears that Reid cut a deal with teh Republicans to allow for a military funding bill to proceed without money for Iraq and Afghanistan.
I guess that they think that this will provide cover while trying to get the troops out of Iraq. It’s won’t. With George W. Bush at 26%, worse than Nixon, the Bush dogs are still going to fold like wet broccoli when he makes vague noises about “not supporting the troops”.
They still don’t get it. Any opposition to Bush on any issue is both the right thing to do and a political win.
The story here is odd. It appears that Senators received something less than an hour’s notice the the debate prior to the vote was going to start.
According to Senate sources, as the Dem Senate leadership remained in closed-door negotiations with their GOP counterparts over whether to hold the vote, Senators were getting mixed signals throughout the day as to whether the vote would happen by the end of yesterday. The actual notification that there would be a vote didn’t come from leadership until at least 6:30 or 7 PM last night — catching aides on the staffs of the presidential campaigns and on the staffs of other senators off guard.
“I had my coat on and was walking out the door when I first heard about the vote,” one staffer said.
The senators were notified that there would be five hours of debate, and that a vote would be happening at midnight, or possibly before, sources said.
Aides to one of the senators running for President said they were surprised at how adamant the leadership was that a vote would be coming so quickly — with or without them present. One aide to this senator said that his staff told leadership that they couldn’t get back for a vote until later in the night.
This is seriously odd.
Why the proverbial bum’s rush. With the goal of a vote by midnight, and 5 hours of debate, a 6:30 notification is almost no notice. What was Reid trying to do, and why was he trying to do it?
Damn.
Well, despite the best efforts of the craven Bush Dogs to kill it, Barney Frank’s mortgage reform bill was voted out of committee.
It tightens restrictions on issuing mortgages (a barn door cow thing, but still good), and gives people more options in bankruptcy.
This is why Democrats matter.
Go to Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page, and show her some love.
It now appears that the Bush Dogs are taking the side of abusive mortgage issuers over the people harmed by this fraud. Chris Bowers has it right:
It’s time to understand that Bush Dogs are part of a working conservative majority. They are not our friends, they are not our allies, they are political opponents who want to bail out wealthy investors and hurt people trapped in subprime mortgage markets. Politically, they are also the people hurting Democratic capacity to differentiate ourselves as populists and capture swing areas and exurban Republicans hurt by the housing meltdown.
I would take it further. These people are so damaging to the party, and to the country, that liberals shoule provide significant opposition to them in both the primaries and the general election.
The Democrats are going to pick up seats in 2008. If alle of these seats are foregone in order to excise Bush Dogs from the party, it would be a good thing.
Mark Klein is an American hero.
For those of you who don’t know, Mark Klein is a retired technician at AT&T, and he was responsible for running wires to a splitter for the benefit of Room 641A of 611 Folsom Street, the secret room set up by the NSA at AT&T’s offices in San Francisco. He is Now lobbying congress not to grant retroactive immunity to the Telcos over the illegal NSA spying.
“That was my ‘aha!’ moment,” Klein said. “They’re sending the entire Internet to the secret room.”
The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One fed into the secret room, the other proceeded to its destination, he said.
“This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style,” he said. “The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T’s customers but everybody’s.”
The illegal wiretapping that most telcos did on behalf of the NSA was far more extensive than previously revealed.
This was not targeted at foreign calls routed through the US. Nor was it calls where one party was overseas. The NSA is actively collecting ALL THE DATA going through AT&T internet exchange point. Everything. Every email, every google query, every music download, every IP telephone call (and BTW, pretty much all long distance telephone calls at some point use TCP/IP these days.)
They took everything.
The telcos are claiming that they need immunity, because they were just being good citizens, and that they were not clear on the law.
There is one problem with argument, as Mr. Klein noted on Olbermann, THESE ENTITIES WROTE THE LAWS INVOLVED. They were heavily involved in drafting the laws at every step of the way.
They knowingly broke the laws, and they did because they saw the example of Qwest, where the government retaliated by denying and pulling contracts, and they chose to break the law because it was profitable.
The vote was 361-54, and the Senate is expected to override too.
This bill has broad bipartisan support, and big spender Bush vetoed it because he is having to pretend that he gives a damn about the budget to reinforce his own delusions of manhood.
Why this is significant is because once he is overridden, it will become progressively easier for it to happen in the future.
There are already reports that there is an S-Chip bill that will get a veto proof majority in the works. It gets much harder for the Republicans to whip the vote when they have already helped override a veto.
I should note that it is Republican Senator Charles Grassley who is appearing to take the lead on this.
They want to see if too much of the tax exempt* money is going to fund a lavish lifestyle.
Ole Anthony, of the Trinity Foundation has been trying to get coverage of this for years, and finally went to Grassley because the press would not cover it.
My guess is that part of the reason for the lack of press coverage is a fear of being attacked by the religious institutions, and the other reason is because churches are allowed to conceal their financial dealings in ways that other non-profits are not,‡ which makes it tougher for the average reporter to get the information they need to make a story.
With the threat of congressional subpoenas, the information that Grassley gets should be more complete.
*I actually have some experience with laws involving tax-exempt religious and educational institutions, section 501(c)3 of the tax code. In 1990, I incorporated a group that put on a literary conferences, Arisia as a Massachusetts non-profit and a federal 501(c)3†.
†Truth be told, in a sane world, it would have had to incorporate as a 501(c)7, a membership organization, but the 501(c)3 code is lax enough to slip it in, and we needed the low postage rates available for a 501(c)3, but not a 501(c)7. It was legal, as to the ethics, I try to think about Arisia as little as possible for any number of reasons.
‡BTW, one of the problems about getting information about how churches are run is that unlike other tax exempt organizations, churches are not required to file form 990s, which are public documents with fairly full financial disclosure.
Brent Wilkes is guilty of all 13 counts in the Randy “Duke” Cunningham bribery trials.
One hopes that he decides to sing now, because Duke is an idiot savant. Great pilot, lousy everything else, and he could not have been effective without the knowing support of other Republican members of congress.
There are a number of states in which the pig felching greedheads in the phone companies have managed to make municipal broadband and WI-Fi illegal, and a number of other states where they are trying to.
We have good news, the Senate Commerce Committee has passed a bill out to the floor that overturns these laws with broad bipartisan support.
Bad news is that there is no similar effort right now in the house, so call your congresscritter, and tell them to support the Community Broadband Act.
Go to Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page, and give to Donna Edwards.
It’s a 70+% Dem district, there is no need to support this Wynn.
Just so you know Wynn is claiming that the bankruptcy bill that he voted for is good for you.
Wynn, and the whole PG County machine need to be sent to the private sector.
H/T Atrios.
He had previously ruled it out, but now appears to be considering a run. As Domenici is retiring, this is a possible pickup, and it becomes a much more likely pickup with Udall in the race.
If he is half the man his father one, the only one eyed ex-NBA player ever in to serve congress, he’ll be one of the best guys in the senate.
Read Mo Udall’s autobiography, Too Funny to Be Presiodent.
It appears that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has decided to target Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Good. When the Republicans decided to target Tom Daschle in 2004, it crossed a line, and payback is not about making anyone feel good, it’s about making sure that when these lines are crossed, the people get slapped down.
As Sean Connery once said, They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!
You cannot make nice with these folks. If you want them to visit your grave every months, the only way to do that is because they are afraid that you will come up again.
This needs more than money, it needs balls. It needs to be nasty, and that includes a whispering campaign about the fact that McConnel separated from the army after 10 days, allegedly for giving another guy a hand job in the shower.
Republicans will never respect anyone else, but they are at their core cowards, and they can manage fear.
This comes as no surprise. After all, as much as pukes like Joe Lieberman would have us believe it, being a Bush dog is not a statement of strength, but a statement of weakenss, so with dear leader at 26 percent, the Republicans are threatening attack ads, because they might support investigations into Bush wrongdoing.
This is cowardice, and when these folks act this way, it depicts the entire Democratic party as a bunch of cowards who can’t be trusted. That is why they are a liability that needs to be minimized.
This isn’t Dan Burton and his watermelons. This is an investigation into turning the Justice Department into a wing of the Republican party. It is worse than anything Nixon ever did.
Message to Bush Dogs, stand up for your country and grow a backbone. This isn’t politics, this is the country that you have to say.
To quote REPUBLICAN Dick Thornburgh, George Herbert Walker Bush’s Attorney General:
“The citizens of the United States must have confidence that the department is conducting itself in a fair and impartial” manner, “without actual political influence or the appearance of political influence.
Unfortunately, that may no longer be the case,” Thornburgh said.
It appears that Democrats are considering this a potential pickup. If this is a Democratic Pickup, I’m Hillary Clinton.
While Mississippi might potentially be driven in a Democratic direction in the right year and with the right candidate, the fact is that the Democratic fund raising apparatus in that state was destroyed by political prosecutions.
Attorneys do not donate money to Mississippi Dems any more, because they know that if they do, they will suffer the fate of Paul Minor, and be in jail for the next decade or so.
Thera are reports that the House leadership will be moving toward a vote on contempt citations against Harriet Meirs and Josh Bolton for their refusal to testify on the US Attorney firings scandal.
I hope that they have the balls to go through this, but I doubt it. An interesting note, contempt of congress is a crime against the congress, not against the republic, and as such is NOT covered by presidential pardons.
It appears that Mukasey’s non answer to whether waterboarding is torture may derail his nomination as attorney general.
It appears that Senators Leahy, Reid, Durbin, and Whitehouse will not support his nomination unless and until he clarifies his position.
Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has yet to schedule a vote because of this issue.
The original troubling exchange, coming after Mukasey said that torture was never constitutional on the first day of his testimony is the his response to Senator Whatehouse’s question as to whether waterboarding is torture:
“That’s a massive hedge,” Whitehouse responded incredulously. “It either is or it isn’t.”
“If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional,” Mukasey answered.
“I’m very disappointed in that answer,” Whitehouse said. “I think it is purely semantic.”
What is clear is that following his comdemnation of tortrue on the first day of testimony, someone representing Bush and His Evil Minions&trade got to him and told him that he needed to weasel.
