It seems that, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which allowed uncontrolled corporate money into elections, that (surprise!) Republicans have a huge warchest from outside actors like the Chamber of Commerce:

On the left hand side of the chart is a list of ten Republican aligned institutions, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Family Research Council. Next to it is a column listing the amount of money each group has pledged to spend by Election Day. A third column on the right details what those groups actually spent in 2008 on federal elections.

The number at the bottom delivers the key message. If their pledges are fulfilled, these ten groups will unleash more than $200 million in election-focused spending -- roughly $37 million more than every single independent group spent on the 2008 presidential campaign combined. This time around, almost every single penny will be going to Republican candidates or causes.

So, how did this happen?

First, Democrats didn't make an all out effort to torpedo either Roberts, or more reasonably, Alito. With both on the Supreme Court, decisions like Citizens United were inevitable.

Second, when given a historic opportunity to break the power of the rich and corporations by not bailing them out, Democrats bailed them out. They did not make shareholders get wiped out (as they deserved, they took the profits from housing bubble fraud, after all) and they did not let the bondholders take their losses. Be very clear, this was never about saving the economy, the trillions of dollars used to bail out these corporations could have been loaned directly to consumers and businesses which needed loans. In fact, at this point, it is entirely likely that bailouts made things worse, not better.

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Red State Values Mark A. R. Kleiman

Note that it's considered perfectly acceptable for the President of the United States to pronounce "Massachusetts" as if it were the name of something slimy he'd just turned up under a rock, but it would be considered rude to suggest that the white population of Alabama is numerically dominated by the ignorant and bigoted.

Update: A reader points out that the Alabama Christian Coalition led the charge against the amendment. When, exactly, did "Christian" become a synonmym for "bigoted"? Or, as it is written in the Gospel According to St. John, 11th chapter, 35th verse:

Jesus wept.

Exit, Stage Right GOP Wants to End Exit Polls

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wants to eliminate exit polls because he says they're not accurate, implying that the final vote was unquestionably correct. directly by major news organizations themselves. "But with the Internet today, we're kidding ourselves, aren't we, to think that everybody in America doesn't know what the exit data is showing?" he said.

He also said he was personally affected by the early reports, discouraged by what he was seeing. "But I've been through this before," he said. "In 2000 the exit data was wrong on Election Day. In 2002, the exit returns were wrong on Election Day. And in 2004, the exit data were wrong on Election Day -- all three times, by the way, in a way that skewed against Republicans and had a dispiriting effect on Republican voters across the country."

Sheldon Drobny: "There's a huge difference between polling what WILL happen and polling something that has already happened. The reliability of polling something that has already happened is highly reliable vs. predictive polls, like Gallup or Zogby, which is very risky. The reliability can be, not plus or minus 4 percent as we see with predictive polls, but rather a much more reliable plus or minus one half or one tenth of one percent with exit polls, because those are based on asking people who already voted. I would even say that if the exit polling were done in the key precincts of Florida and Ohio, which it was, then these results should be practically "bullet proof.'"

If the GOP eliminates exit polls before true verifiable voting is in place, there will be nothing left to warn us when our vote is stolen. Lastly, note that Gillespie only refers to the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections -- all the major elections since George W. Bush dropped onto the national political scene -- as "being skewed against Republicans."

From AMericablog via Newsmax

Rehnquist's Clever Boost for Bush

When Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist announced in late October that he had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, we took the news sadly.

Now that the election has taken place and the dust has settled, we think the clever veteran of the Court and Beltway politics may have timed his announcement to give George Bush a small boost before Election Day.

Rehnquist could have waited a few days, until after the election was over -- as John Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, did to announce her breast cancer.

As NewsMax reader Miguel Tuas first pointed out to us, Rehnquist's timing was impeccable.

Though Rehnquist did not say he planned to step down, many media commentators said the ailing chief justice, now 80 years old, may have to leave the court to attend to his health.

And that suddenly injected the judiciary -- and the number of Supreme Court appointments the next president may have to make -- into the presidential campaign.

Can you imagine Kerry's potential court picks: Dershowitz? Tribe? Estrich?

Thankfully, we don't have to.

Ah yes, do we have issues still The American Street

WASHINGTON — In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material off the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.

The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers from one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply.

Despite the protective shield of limited morality that the Fifty-One-Percenters used to maintain their denial of reality on Election Day, the truth will keep thwapping them in the head for weeks to come.

I’m looking forward to:

1) More details of the lousy troop support from the CiC.

2) More photos and statistics of the country we’re destroying to save it for a semblance of patriarchal strong-man democracy.

3) An end to the 15 month coverup of the Valerie Plame outing.

4) The rest of the Abu Ghraib picture show that’s being hidden.

5) Oil at $62-$63/bbl, within 7 months.

6) More intel insiders exposing the stuff Porter Goss is now covering up.

7) Any evidence at all that our hundred billion dollar Homeland Security Agency can deliver anything useful besides their stupid Crayola Alerts.

I’m not looking forward to:

8) The denial that will come when global terrorists attack again, that Bush bears any responsibility for at least two coordinated attacks on American soil. The other 42 presidents don’t bear that on their records. But I believe Bush will. And I believe the Fifty-One percenters will deceive themselves and say “God did this because some terrified teenager refused to carry her baby to term. God bless George Bush.”

Then they’ll demand that we nuke half the world as payback agains all the heathens.

I never would have dreamed that last one up on my own. God spoke to me and told me this was coming. He said: “Beware the False Prophet Number Forty Three; he shall surely lead the sheep to their slaughter.”

FILM SCHOOL: This should be re-created all across the country in every swing state:

"Filmmaker Michael Moore plans to have hundreds of cameras outside polling places in Ohio and Florida on the U.S. election day to watch for attempts to suppress voter turnout.

The director of the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 announced Saturday a total of 1,200 professional and non-professional cameramen, filmmakers and videographers will bring their cameras to polling places in the two presidential battleground states, especially in minority communities.

"I'm putting those who intend to suppress the vote on notice: Voter intimidation and suppression will not be tolerated," Moore said in a statement."

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Isn't it interesting that Cokie Roberts spends her Monday morning segment on NPR talking about two admittedly disgraced Democrats who will not be holding their positions come Election Day.

Charlie Rangel and David Patterson are an admitted embarrassment to the Democrats. Rangel, like much of Congress, is long overdue for retirement, and Patterson's made such a mess of his career the sooner gone the better.

But why other than pure partisan hackery would Cokie Roberts spend her Monday morning spot talking about them and not mention that Ensign, Vitter, and Sanford still have jobs? Ensign paid off his mistress's family, Vitter was involved with a prostitute, and Sanford was MIA from his job for days on end. These guys still have the backing of their party? Family values much?

Cokie can always be counted on to live up to the old joke by Driftglass:

Dick Cheney is caught setting kittens on fire and throwing them at homeless veterans. What are the first three words out of Cokie Robert's mouth?

"But the Democrats..."

Next she'll be explaining how much Republican scandals help Mitt Romney. Sigh.

I wrote a post on election day which talked about the politics of personal destruction that Lee Atwater created and used in the most vile way imaginable. It was so successful that it spawned his heir apparent, Karl Rove who has carried the mantle proudly. They play on the prejudices of Americans in such a way as to bring out the dark underbelly of society. I said that if Obama had won the election then not only did America rise up to vote for the better man, it also repudiated the Lee Atwater school of campaigning, at least for now.

Has a real crisis beaten the Lee Atwater school of smear politics?

So today is the day we all get to find out if the Lee Atwater school of politics has been defeated by the reality of our economic situation.

It has taken a real crisis to combat the very successful campaign strategy that Atwater championed to win George H.W. Bush the White House in '88. The same techniques that Karl Rove mastered and implemented in beating McCain and then Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. Will truth and reality finally win out?

I wish I could tell you that Americans henceforth will never be influenced by scurrilous personal attack ads and campaign smears in the future, but my hope today is that finally this great nation has been shocked into actually using their brains to decide who should lead us out of the wilderness that came upon due to the negligence of Conservatism. I think Americans unfortunately have a short memory span and these dirty tactics will always be with us. If Obama wins, then I do think that America have no excuses any more if they do get taken in by these cowardly tricks. So I say to you now:

Yes, We Can.

I believed that it wouldn't end with Obama's election and those who thought so were a bit naive. Well, now it's come back with a vengeance and it's sick and it's ugly, but it's real. Everything that has come out of the mouths of the conservative movement and transmitted by their conduits to the public has been targeted at racial elements in our society.

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Open Thread below....

Anyone want to take odds on just how low gas prices will drop by Election Day? After all, the day before Election Day 2006 saw the lowest gas prices of that entire year, with prices dropping an average of EIGHTY CENTS a gallon between August and early November. Coincidence?

Open thread below.