And it's me and my machine for the rest of the morning/ And the rest of the evening/ And the rest of my life...
- 'Millworker,' from the Studs Terkel musicial 'Working'

Every once in a while, someone will introduce me as a well-known blogger. I'm shocked if people even know who I am (or know what blogging is, for that matter), because really, I just sit in my living room and write stuff late at night, or early in the morning when normal people are still asleep. Come to think of it, I'm pretty much hunched over a computer for an average of 18 hours a day.

And I wonder why people think this is glamorous. Dear God, why?

I'm sitting here with one of those "As Seen On TV" compression socks on my right arm, because the nerves are so shot. (I cut holes in the end for my fingers.) I don't think it's so much the typing, because I did that for more than 15 years as a full-time journalist and the damage wasn't this bad. It's the damned cutting and pasting that does it, I think. Sometimes the pain is so bad, it makes me cry. (It's what makes me so succinct.)

I have an ergonomic mouse, an ergonomic chair. Thank God I have an articulating keyboard tray that one of my readers paid for because when the pain got really bad, I had to take a week off.

I'm plugged in most of the time. If I'm not home, I'm checking my smartphone. I have the TV on in the background with the sound turned off, because you never know what you might miss. It's like any assembly line job - you have to feed the content machine.

When I'm not writing, I'm reading. Looking for story leads on Twitter, on blogs, on news sites. I always prided myself on how much I read, but now my idea of heaven would be six months without reading any news. I suspect (although I can't be sure) that most of my C&L colleagues feel the same way, at least some of the time.

Because while the readers get to skip over anything that's just too upsetting, we don't. It's our job. We immerse ourselves in the muck, and we swim through it pretty much 24/7, 365 days. While you have the option of walking away when it gets to be too much, we don't. And we're still here when you decide to come back.

It's depressing as hell, diving into the dark side all the time.

And while you might say, "Hey, then go get a regular job," it's not that easy. Because you know what HR people do now? They Google your name. So bloggers' reward for the many years we've spent blogging, the years we've sifted through the news and the politics chaff for you, is to frequently get screened out as a potential employee. So here we are, delivering up a heapin' fresh platter of news and opinion because hey, it's what we do.

Continue reading »

Officials in Broward County, Florida were confronted by the annoying truth that their voting machines do in deed count votes, but they count them in the negative direction. In a story broken by the Palm Beach Post, election officials sheepishly revealed today that the software used in their county and others can handle only 32,000 votes. After that, the system continues to count votes - but in reverse!
As of today, stunned Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman was still trying to learn why a voting system would even be designed to count backward.
The problem originally cropped up in 2002. Lieberman said that ES&S told her it had sent software upgrades to Florida Secretary of State, but the office, for unexplained reasons, kept rejecting the software.
This election, the glitch affected 97,434 ballots in Broward County alone, according to Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes, a Jeb Bush appointee with ties to the White House.

The same software is used in Martin and Miami-Dade counties.
Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said all counties had been told that such problems would indeed occur if the votes got above the 32,000 mark.
Lieberman replied adamantly, "No election employee has come to the canvassing board and made the statements that Jenny Nash said occurred."
Late Tuesday night, ES&S issued a statement changing it's tune. It now claims that it found out about the problems in 2002 and said the software upgrades would be submitted to Secretary of State Hood's office next year. The company released the following statement: "While the county bears the ultimate responsibility for programming the ballot and structuring the precincts, we regret any confusion the discrepancy in early vote totals has caused."

Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software initially refused to return any calls, but as pressure mounted late Thursday, an ES&S spokeswoman sheepishly admitted she did not know whether ES&S contacted the Secretary of State two years ago or whether the software is designed to count backwards.

Crack Palm Beach Post reporter Eliot Kleinberg who broke this story locally, found that while the problem surfaced two years ago, current Broward County Elections Supervisor Snipes claimed it was under another supervisor and a different secretary of state and hence, she could not be held accountable.

In the pre-election issue of the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, an expose on Snipes revealed, " Snipes calls herself a Democrat, but Jeb Bush and local Republican power brokers like William Scherer pull the strings."
The New Times article goes on to state: "You might remember Scherer - a co-chair for the governor's campaign and a fundraising Ranger for the president's campaign. He's the charming fellow who started yelling on live television during the 2000 recount and had to be removed from the Broward County Courthouse."
"Scherer works closely with lobbyist Jim Blosser, who is perhaps the most influential Republican power broker in South Florida," explains New Times.
Snipes a black Democrat, chose Dorsey Miller to emcee her appointment ceremony, "Miller an opportunistic and oft -investigated black Republican was tapped by Jeb {Bush} to engineer Snipes' ascension." explains New Times.
More later.

Danny Goldberg writes a brilliant piece on Howie's DWT that explains the real reason Air America failed: There is no will to sustain left-wing media, talk radio or support the liberal blogosphere if it doesn't turn an immediate profit.

Right-wing millionaires realize that it takes years to develop any sort of model that works, but they also understand that making money isn't the point of their ventures. It's to get their messaging out to as many people as they can. And they are successful at it.

Danny Goldberg:

Conservatives believe in doing whatever it takes to promote their ideas. Richard Viguerie, viewed as one of the architects of the modern conservative movement, wrote a book in 2004 called America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media To Take Power, in which he explains how the right wing used talk radio among other tools. Viguerie stresses that conservatives understand that ideological change does not usually occur over night, that it takes patience and long term thinking to build a movement.

In the early nineteen seventies the Washington Post and New York Times were instrumental in helping expose the Watergate scandal and publishing the Pentagon papers. Conservatives felt that liberals had an advantage in setting the agenda because of the influence of New York and D.C. newspapers on the national media. In 1976 Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post and it has lost money every year since, the total loss estimated to be more than half a billion dollars. In 1983, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon created the Washington Times, which has also lost money every year. Widely published reports place Moon’s losses at over $1 billion on the Times and other political media including a purchase the venerable wire service UPI. These money losing properties have put dozens of conservatively slanted stories onto the national radar screen, altered the framing of every important political issues, and nurtured virtually every right wing pundit who now thrive as TV talking heads.

More recently, Phillip Anschutz bought the money losing Weekly Standard from Murdoch and announced plans to invest in more conservative media and his fellow billionaire and former Republican Treasury Secretary Pete Petersen started a digital news service called The Fiscal Times.

The fatal flaw in Air America’s genetic code was the pretense that liberal talk radio was a great business opportunity, that progressives could have their cake and eat it too, do well by doing good, make big salaries and get a great return on investment while also pursuing an ideological agenda. Sure, every once in awhile political media like Michael Moore’s movies or Rush Limbaugh’s radio show will make money, but for those interested in influencing public opinion, media in all venues is vital whether they make money or not.

Air America scared the bejeezus out of conservatives because they had never seen such an enterprise before, and that's why Bill O'Reilly and Fox News did everything they could to smear them from its inception. The liberal blogosphere is in the same predicament. We need funds to survive and thrive and with a bad economy, ad revenues dropped off considerably in 2009.

Readers do not like to see ads on blogs for the most part, but without them C&L could not survive and neither would most highly trafficked sites. Corporations are sinking in millions of dollars at a shot to try and buy their Internet real estate while most of us already have an imprint that is virtually impossible to find without multimillion-dollar investments.

I'm trying to create jobs for bloggers and expand to combat the right-wing noise machine, but I need help to do it. I've talked to several very wealthy people who are really incredible progressives and they don't know that much about blogs even at this point in time. The wealthy progressive collective needs to rethink their positions on media and invest in the future for America if the left will have a chance to match the right. We are seeing an erosion of the MSM right in front of our eyes, and men like Coors, Murdoch and Scaife are just giddy, as news turns into opinion warfare and propaganda instead of real investigative journalism.

Air America should have had access to funds regardless of what type of profit margin it made in its first few years. In a short time, Air America delivered our country a U.S. Senator named Al Franken and a superstar TV anchor named Rachel Maddow, and the right loathed the prospects of even more good voices for the left having a place to develop. In time the influence of progressive talk radio on the AM dial would far outweigh their profit projections.

Murdoch and Moon and many others on the far right easily write off the NY Post and Washington Times as a necessary investment to the future of the conservative movement. I understand that those same resources aren't available to the left -- after all, the right tends to be about the preservation of money and power -- but there is certainly enough to build radio infrastructure and help fund the liberal blogosphere that had so much to do with the resurgence of the progressive movement in 2006 and 2008. We really need the same commitment from the left. I hope the powers that be are listening.

So someone from Minneapolis donates one dollar to the GOP Senate Campaign Committee and puts down an expletive taunt as his name. We at Crooks and Liars do not endorse this kind of silly hooliganism. This guy had to donate a dollar to the Republicans to say the Eff Word? Really.

What's totally newsworthy about this contribution is that the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee's website posted the "thank you" above (minus the asterisks we added because guess what? We have editorial standards regarding that sort of thing.) and left it up at their website last night for at least 20 minutes (C&L staffers refreshed the site from 12:32 to 12:55 am Eastern Time and it was there the entire period) perhaps until the next contribution bumped it. [Jamie at Intoxination has the screenshot.] Who knew you'd need to install a net-nanny to protect your children's eyes from a GOP fundraising site? Well, everybody knows now!

I hate to let you in on any of our internet secrets, Mister Steele, but there are filters for that and other dirty words out there. Maybe if someone in your party knew how to use the Google other than to pick a Vice-Presidential candidate, you'd save yourself some family-values embarrassment.

You stay classy, Arlen:

So cancer survivor Arlen Specter set up a website to promote his cancer research initiative.

Awesome!

Guess where the money goes when you donate to this worthy cause?

The Arlen for Senate campaign.

We have to convince Joe Sestak to primary this joker.

UPDATE: Turns out that after denying it was a scandal, Specter quietly changed the cancer research site. Adam Green at DKos has the full story.

The GOP media machine openly questioned whether it was appropriate for President Barack Obama to travel to Los Angeles this week, when his "business" should be on the economy, the implication being that Obama was not capable of multi-tasking. It's an easy mistake, given the previous president could not watch TV and chew pretzels simultaneously. However, American News Project producer Harry Hanbury decided to take a look at the real business of Congress: fundraising. Collecting as many invitations as he could find, Hanbury found no less than two dozen fundraisers taking place over the course of a single day in DC and tried to visit them all:

Fundraising parties seem to be proliferating--possibly as an unintended consequence of the otherwise laudable post-Abramoff reforms of 2007, which banned gifts from lobbyists to members of Congress, restricted the use of corporate jets by members, and curbed junkets like Abramoff's notorious Scottish golfing trip. In his new book, So Damn Much Money, Robert Kaiser quotes the prominent lobbyist Lawrence O'Brien III, who says the latest reforms "have shifted the emphasis over to political fundraising. Now writing checks and raising money is the simplest pathway to completely legal personal face time with members and their senior staff."

It all may be "completely legal," but campaign finance advocates wonder what deals get cut along with all the big checks. After all, just before his sentencing no less an authority than Jack Abramoff reportedly said, "I was participating in a system of legalized bribery. All of it is bribery, every bit of it."

It may take time to dismantle what Kaiser calls "the culture of money, lobbying, and self-dealing that has metastasized over four decades." But a surprising alliance of good government groups, lobbyists, and business leaders believe this is the moment for sweeping campaign finance reform. They are rallying behind bills that would publicly fund races for the House, Senate, and the presidency. That would certainly throw a wet blanket over D.C.'s party circuit. But would it really be so a bad if members of Congress no longer felt compelled to spend a quarter to a third of their time raising campaign cash?

The numbers we're talking about are staggering. Yet, Eric Cantor--so concerned with Obama's ability to talk to Americans and handle the economic crisis--has no problem with his ability to take funds from PACs and supporters and obstruct the economic solutions the Obama administration proposes.

As a final note, think about how much good the $40,000 that Woolsey aide Stephanie Kenny (the only candid person in the video) mentions at the end of the video would benefit the students of Valley Academy High School, many of whom are so impoverished that the only decent meal they get every day is their school lunch.

Is there a better argument for public financing?

After yesterday, is anyone surprised?

You know I'll miss ya.

Today, McCain economic adviser Carly Fiorina bluntly stated that neither John McCain nor Sarah Palin were capable of running a major corporation (she said the same of Barack Obama and Joseph Biden). A top campaign adviser said Fiorina will be punished for her candid opinions:

"Carly will now disappear," this source said. "Senator McCain was furious." Asked to define "disappear," this source said, adding that she would be off TV for a while - but remain at the Republican National Committee and keep her role as head of the party's joint fundraising committee with the McCain campaign.

Fiorina was booked for several TV interviews over the next few days, including one on CNN. Those interviews have been canceled.

Jake Tapper at ABC:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin sent out a fundraising solicitation today that charged that "the Obama/Biden Democrats have been vicious in their attacks directed toward me, my family and John McCain."

I asked spokespeople of the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee just which "Obama/Biden Democrats" they're referring to.

The response I got was that Obama spokesman Mark Bubriski erroneously attacked Palin as a supporter of Pat Buchanan.

That's it. That's the evidence.

An attack on Palin herself.

In other words, they can't name one person affiliated with the Obama-Biden campaign who attacked the Palin family.

This whole Culture of Victimization of the Republican Party makes me ill. As Tapper points out, McCain said heartless things about the adolescent Chelsea Clinton but any little scrutinization on them has them crying like WATBs.

"The communications director for Bush-Cheney, Nicolle Devenish, said Kerry miscalculated the impact of his remarks and now is "backpedaling from what is a crass, below-the-belt political strategy to attack the vice president's daughter."

"We're all God's children," he said. "And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was. She's being who she was born as. I think if you talk to anybody, it's not a choice." -- John Kerry, 3rd Pres. debate.

Andrew Sullivan (here and elsewhere) and his correspondent, Marshall Wittman (here), say what needs to be said about the GOP's odd treatment of Mary Cheney's sexual orientation as something to be ashamed of, and its hilarious offensive against John Kerry as an apparent homophobe.

Sullivan's site also has a wonderful run-down of all the conservatives who have suddenly become charter members, so to speak, of the Human Rights Campaign. It's obvious what's going on here: The only way to salvage a "win" out of Wednesday's debate is to recast it as an occasion where Kerry made a horrendous gaffe. And the Bush surrogates in the right-wing press are doing everything they can to make that happen.

Alas, they seem to be doing a very effective job of it. Not one reporter writing a story about this blow-up seems willing to ask the Bush campaign or the Cheneys why it's offensive of Kerry to describe Mary Cheney -- in a positive sense -- as a lesbian. At least Gary Bauer is honest enough to admit that it will hurt Bush among rural conservatives for them to know a member of the Republican ticket fathered a daughter who plays for the other team.