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Credit: Charleston Place Hotel

The hotel has sued the SRLC and its signatory, South Carolina political operative Robert C. Cahaly over the money dispute. The Charleston City Paper wrote a long feature about the issue.

In its federal complaint, the hotel says in March it originally entered into an agreement for the booking which ran from Thurs. Jan. 19 through Sun. Jan. 22. South Carolina political operative Robert C. Cahaly, who is named as co-defendant in the lawsuit, served as the group's signatory. The contract was amended on Dec. 20, 2011.

In the complaint filed in the Charleston County Court of Common Pleas, the hotel says it has come to believe that the SRLC "was grossly undercapitalized, failed to observe corporate formalities, was insolvent, and was mere[ly] used as a façade for the operations of the defendant Cahaly." In addition it says, "Cahaly, an individual businessman, has sought to hide from the normal consequences of carefree entrepenuring by doing so through a corporate shell.

"Due to their incompetence, the defendants failed to properly plan or manage the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, and it was poorly attended," the hotel says. "The conference was so poorly attended as to cause one Republican candidate, Newt Gingrich, to cancel his appearance.

"Poor attendance caused many of the conference sponsors to leave the conference," it continues. "Poor attendance left the defendants responsible for a significant payment to the plaintiff under the terms of the contract."

The article continues by saying, "at 3:01 p.m., the time when the defendants were due to check out of the hotel, the defendants emailed [hotel] management and cancelled the meeting at which they were supposed to settle the bill." In the email, the SRLC allegedly accused the hotel of difficulties with refunds or adjustments, poor overall treatment and a hotel manager instructing an SRLC staffer to engage in illegal activity, according to the City Paper article.

Sounds more like bitterness over the poor attendance of their conference than mismanagement by the hotel.

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I know we posted the Dr. Laura Schlessinger story on C&L a few days ago, but I wanted to make another significant point, if I may. In our book, 'Over The Cliff," we talk about how the Southern Strategy was used by the Republican party and how it evolved from outright racism to using code words to get the same points across. Chapter Six:

In 1981, political scientist Alexander P. Larris sat down for an interview with an anonymous Reagan strategist who outlined for him how the strategy worked:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting
taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that.

But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

It later emerged that the strategist was a young South Carolinian and Strom Thurmond protégé named Lee Atwater, a former chief executive of the College Republicans who had worked on the Reagan campaign under political director Ed Rollins.

What we have happening now is that the extreme right wingers like Dr. Laura and Breitbart are actually throwing their dog whistles in the garbage because they figure that if they yell "nigger " enough times out loud to the world and hold their breaths then that vile word will no longer hold the same despicable meaning that symbolized Jim Crow in American history to the media and their acolytes. Cheap Labor Conservatives do hate to be called racists and they have been trying to shed their racist past, but now with the economy down, conservative propagandists are reverting to a pre-1954 mindset on racism. It's sad and sickening, but it's happening. I actually never thought that in less than two years, the right wing noise machine would be as emboldened as they are now over race. Limbaugh's openly racist rants began as soon as President Obama took office and then FOX News immediately jumped on the bandwagon to promote every phony New Black Panther type smear they could find. All Cheap Labor Conservatives better start loading up their Ipods with the top 100 songs of 1954. Can you name the number one song? It has something to do with the time of day.

And don't forget to buy our book.

Terrance Wall, a disillusioned Republican, tells about how he got screwed by his Republican opponent. What a fool.

And Digby summarises his plight thusly:

This sounds like a very nice, conservative fellow who is laboring under the delusion that the Republican party is sincere. He apparently didn't know about such recent historical luminaries as Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed or Grover Norquist. It's quite a gap in his education.(There are other gaps as well -- he also thinks that he needs to save the United States from going the way of Russia.)

I'm sure the party establishment finds him to be adorably naive.

ROFLMAO.

Messages to Karl Rove

DC Media Girl: I’d like to remind Rove of how his buddy in bastardy, dirty politics and general scumbaggery Lee Atwater ended his days. It might be food for thought

TCF: The Conservative Confederacy

Newsie writes a letter to the YR.

Ultra-conservative Paul Ryan and Glenn Beck put their little heads together for a few minutes to let Beck's listeners know that "progressivism is a cancer" that desperately needs to be "flushed out."

About halfway through their powwow, Ryan starts rambling about how the German intellectuals in Wisconsin where he grew up were the genesis of Progressivism and so he understands just how evil it truly is, and how it "threatens the American ideal."

Paul Ryan is a Congressman who makes my teeth grind when he doesn't even try. While he smiles and plays the fresh-faced eager-beaver Alex P. Keaton type lawmaker, he's really just as deep in the tank of the teabaggers and Birchers as any I've ever seen. He champions driving a stake through Medicare, ending Social Security, and handing out undervalued vouchers so Americans can reduce the cost of health care.

Paul Ryan is driven by the almighty dollar and little else, but he's very, very good at what he does. His almost-casual mention of "German intellectuals" in his argument about why progressives threaten the American ideal has Lee Atwater snickering somewhere in hell, I'm sure.

As my friend David Badash says, cancer is cancer. Not progressivism.

(h/t StopBeck)

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Glenn Beck continued his jihad against White House Communications Director Anita Dunn yesterday on his Fox News program, focusing his rage on remarks she made earlier this year at a D.C.-area high-school graduation ceremony. Here's what he played of her remarks:

"[T]wo of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most ..."

Not content to do it once, he ran the same snippet again, exactly like that. Twice he described Dunn as saying that Mao was one of the philosophers "she turns to most".

In other words, by running the quote thus, he's making it clear that Dunn admires Mao as one of her favorite political philosophers that she turns to most.

He ran this truncated quote, incidentally, in response to Dunn's earlier explanation for the remarks:

"The Mao quote is one I picked up from the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater from something I read in the late 1980s, so I hope I don't get my progressive friends mad at me," Dunn told CNN.

As for Beck's criticism: "The use of the phrase 'favorite political philosophers' was intended as irony, but clearly the effort fell flat -- at least with a certain Fox commentator whose sense of irony may be missing."

Beck thought that by playing the truncated quote, he could prove that Dunn's characterization didn't add up -- after all, she said Mao was someone she "turned to most"!

Except, of course, that wasn't what she said. You have to hear the rest of the sentence after Beck clips it off.

Here's the full original quote, which you can see at the original full video:

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"The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa -- not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is 'you're going to make choices; you're going to challenge; you're going to say why not; you're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before."

In other words, she found their words handy to make a universal and fairly banal point about being true to one's self. That's all. No Mao-worship.

You also can hear laughter from the audience when Dunn couples Mao and Mother Teresa, so at least it's clear that some in the audience got the joke. Glenn Beck didn't.

Most of all, he doesn't get that crude and hamhanded dishonesty like this only proves Anita Dunn's point, in spades.

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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Why do the media fawn over the likes of Karl Rove? He's the heir to Lee Atwater, and his scumbag tactics are legendary.

Remember the Willie Horton ad?

Atwater's single most notorious bit of work came during the 1988 campaign, in the form of the Willie Horton ad used against Dukakis. The ad attacked a prison furlough program that Dukakis had supported while governor of Massachusetts. Horton, a convicted killer who is black, escaped while in the program and raped a woman. The ad said Dukakis was soft on crime, and made prominent use of Horton's glowering mug shot. Atwater said he was going to make Horton Dukakis's "running mate."

The ad pretty much became the touchstone for demonizing black men in political campaigning. In archival footage, we see Atwater denying that he or the Bush campaign had anything to do with the ad, insisting he'd never even seen it.

Then Forbes cuts to one of Atwater's friends describing how, before the ad was ever aired, Atwater called him into his office, showed him the ad, said he was going to set it up as the work of an independent committee (and thus, with no fingerprints) and asked what he thought. The friend says that he told Atwater it was appalling, racist and that it was going to "follow you to your grave."

--

What is clear, from watching this talented man and his view of politics and America, is that his corrosive vision has seeped into the nation's political groundwater.

That's the man Rove learned from, and he is his prize pupil. With Rove's help, Atwater turned politics into a smear contest. Eventually, they all helped lead this country down the drain with their boy Bush.

Still, Karl Rove is treated with reverence, and it's sickening. On Bill O'Reilly's show earlier this week, he was saying that Cheney and the CIA should never inform Congress of what thy are doing because it won't remain a secret so, hey, screw them and the law.

Think Progress has more:

Rove then appeared to make the argument that executive branch should not inform Congress of what it is doing:

ROVE: Look, it’s interesting. The CIA briefed Congress to this, I guess, in June. And the Congress immediately leaks it. That, itself is, a violation, I think, of several statutes and indicative of why it is so dangerous to give Congress information.

To clarify, Congress did not “leak” details of the secret program. The Wall Street Journal cited “former intelligence officials familiar with the matter” in its report. But Rove’s comment seems to confirm the Bush administration’s motives for routinely attempting to hide information from Congress.

Rove lies about what happened when the facts are clear as a bell. And he conveniently forgets that the Bush administration leaked the name of a CIA operative named Valerie Plame just to smear her husband Joe Wilson because he told the truth about their lies.

Here's a newsflash to this pompous ass: The CIA is required by law to inform Congress on what they are doing. Period. There are no exceptions.

Glenn Greenwald finds a typical MSM story regarding Dick Cheney's lawbreaking. Are any of you surprised?

Dirty tricks, wedge politics, class warfare. Push polling and playing to racist instincts of voters. All's fair in political battles. If reading those things makes you think of Karl Rove, then you have forgotten the godfather of those tactics: Lee Atwater. Atwater was the originator of the winner-takes-it-all tactics, something that still reverberates today within the Republican Party. Wikipedia:

Harvey Leroy "Lee" Atwater (February 27, 1951 – March 29, 1991) was an American political consultant and strategist to the Republican party. He was an advisor of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. He was also a political mentor and close friend of Republican strategist Karl Rove. Atwater invented or improved upon many of the techniques of modern electoral politics, including promulgating unflattering rumors and attempting to drive up opponents' "negative" poll numbers with the aggressive use of opposition research. He has been characterized as the "happy hatchet man" and "Darth Vader" of the Republican Party. In spite of criticisms of Atwater's tactics as unethical and dirty tricks, he was widely regarded as a near-brilliant political operative who helped candidates to win.[..]

Atwater rose during the 1970s and the 1980 election in the South Carolina Republican party, working on the campaigns of Governor Carroll Campbell and segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond. During his years in South Carolina, Atwater became well known for running hard edged campaigns based on emotional "wedge issues".

Atwater's aggressive tactics were first demonstrated during the 1980 congressional campaigns. He was a campaign consultant to Republican incumbent Floyd Spence in his campaign for Congress against Democratic nominee Tom Turnipseed. Atwater's tactics in that campaign included push polling in the form of fake surveys by "independent pollsters" to "inform" white suburbanites that Turnipseed was allegedly a member of the NAACP.[4] Atwater also highlighted that Turnipseed had been "hooked up to jumper cables" as a teen undergoing electroshock therapy for depression.

In 1990, Atwater was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. On his deathbed, Atwater had a famous epiphany where he renounced and apologized for his toxic contribution to politics:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul

.

The Emmy-nominated filmmaker Stefan Forbes is here to discuss his new documentary, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, still playing in limited release around the country and available on DVD.

Please join me in welcoming Stefan and learn how the ghost of Atwater still haunts the Republican Party.

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