Alben Barkley(former Vice-President to Truman): “Finally I said to him ‘how’s politics?’ – ‘well, he said, ‘it’s pretty badly mixed’. That created some suspicion in my mind, well I said ‘well, how am I running?’ ‘Well, he said ‘it’s gonna be pretty close’. Well I said ‘you’re for me aren’t you?’ Well, he said ‘I thought I’d vote for Chandler’. Well, I said ‘my friend, how can you do that? Now don’t you remember that when you couldn’t get your allotment fixed up that I did it? ‘ He said, ‘yes you did’. ‘And when you couldn’t get your insurance I got that straightened out”’ He said ‘yes, you did’. And I said ‘and when you were injured over there in France didn’t I sit on the bed with you for an hour?’ And he said ‘yes, and I never enjoyed a mans visit in my life like I did yours.’ And I said ‘ when I came home and the Armistice came didn’t you want to get home at once and didn’t you write to me and didn’t I write General Pershing and weren’t you on your way home in a month?’ And he said ‘yes, you did that.’ And I said ‘didn’t you want a loan on your farm, and didn’t I help you?’ And he said ‘yes.’ ‘Didn’t you have a loan on your property when the flood washed it away?’ He said ‘yes, you did that’. I said ‘well, how can you vote against me?’ Well he said ‘my friend, what in the thunder have done for me lately?’
Seems the styles have changed, the methods, the dirt - but then as now, it's all about politics and the art of the horse race.
Who didn't see this orgy of media "analysis" coming? According to the media, anything at all that happens is good news for Republicans, as Atrios says.
You know how crazy it is when Bob Schieffer's making sense.
But the question is, why are Democrats such wankers? Really. We just gained two more proudly progressive seats in Congress (one of them replacing a Blue Dog), but instead they're fixated on 1) a state that has always voted for the out-of-power party in gubernatorial races, helped along by a very bad Democratic candidate and 2) another state that, like the self-destructive electorate of California, loves to vote for anyone who says they have a magic secret formula to cut property taxes. Sheesh.
Do they really not understand the point of healthcare reform? There are many reasons, but the economic argument is simple: It's so people who lose their jobs won't have to worry. It's so employers who are afraid to hire because of premium costs can afford to do so. This has everything to do with jobs - and it's their job to make that clear.
Are they really that appallingly bad at the sales and marketing of this simple idea?
Democrats on Capitol Hill began a nervous debate Wednesday about the course President Obama has set for their party, with some questioning whether they should emphasize job creation over some of the more ambitious items on the president's agenda.
The conversations came as White House officials insisted that the party's gubernatorial defeats in Virginia and New Jersey had few implications for Obama's standing or for Democratic prospects in the 2010 midterm elections.
But moderate and conservative Democrats (Editor's note: Or, as we like to call them, aspiring Republicans) took a clear signal from Tuesday's voting, warning that the results prove that independent voters are wary of Obama's far-reaching proposals and mounting spending, as well as the growing federal debt. Liberal lawmakers, meanwhile, said the party's shortcoming came in moving too slowly on health-care reform and other items that would satisfy a base becoming disenchanted with the failure to deliver rapid change in government.
Voters in both states cited the economy as by far their top concern, and many lawmakers said the outcomes were a blunt wake-up call to put the issue front and center.
"The question is, do people think we're tending to the things they care about?" said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) as he left a meeting of Senate leaders. He said there was palpable concern among his colleagues Wednesday that the main agenda items Democrats are pursuing -- health care and climate change -- resonate very little with voters focused on finding or keeping jobs.
Are they kidding me? Do they actually know any unemployed people? Because I do, a ton of 'em. And every single one over 40 talks about how they can't wait until they get some help with health care.
Why, oh why are Democrats so out of touch with reality? I guess because they don't have to worry about paying for health care or getting another job if they lose this one - they can always become lobbyists. Really, they need to sit down with some bloggers and stop listening to Beltway soothsayers.
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Now, there were dozens of close elections around the country in districts where there was a significant minority turnout, often with the help of ACORN organizers. But guess which one Bill O'Reilly considers the one most worth investigating.
The Colbert Report last night featured one of the most subversive and brutally honest half-hours of television in recent memory. It's a sad commentary that it takes a comedy program to provide more news and information on one of the most critical subjects in American politics that anywhere else in our broken media and political landscape, but I'll take this argument wherever I can get it.
Colbert spent two full segments of his show focusing on the Citizens United Supreme Court case, which could - and probably will - lead to deregulating the entire campaign finance process, allowing corporations to give unlimited money to any candidate of their choosing. This severe step backwards with enormous implications has been barely discussed in any traditional media setting, but Colbert went after it vigorously, discussing the consequences and even the flawed legal rationale, a true third rail of American politics, corporate personhood.
Colbert explained that the 1886 case (Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad) that conferred 14th Amendment equal protection rights onto corporations wasn't even in the original ruling. But when the Chief Justice made an off-hand comment that the Court wouldn't hear an argument on whether the 14th Amendment applied to these corporations (saying, "We are all of the opinion that it does"), the court reporter wrote it into the ruling opinion, and the precedent has held ever since. And that reporter of the Supreme Court didn't only have ties to the railroad barons, he used to run one.
These are subjects you just never hear about in the American media, precisely because the American media is owned by giant multinational corporations, who benefit from the corporate personhood rule and would stand to benefit more from deregulating elections so they could use their "speech" to buy candidates and fund their own with unlimited resources. And despite being on a Viacom-owned network, Colbert says, skewering the immorality and psychopathology of the corporation, "Corporations are legally people... they do everything people do, except breathe, die, and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River."
There's some backstory to that remark. Colbert actually worked with Robert Smigel on the "TV Funhouse" bits from Saturday Night Live (he's one-half of the Ambiguously Gay Duo), including the infamous episode from March 1998, Conspiracy Theory Rock. Here are some of the actual lyrics (remember this aired, albeit one time, on NBC, whose parent company is General Electric):
It's a media-opoly
A media-opoly.
The whole media is controlled by a few corporations
thanks to deregulation by the FCC.
You mean Disney, Fox, WestingHouse, and good ol GE?
They own networks from CBS to CNBC.
They can use them to say whatever they please,
and put down the opinions of any one who disagrees.
Or stuff about PCB's.
What are PCB's?
They come from power plants built by WestingHouse and GE.
They can give you lots of cancer that can hurt your body,
but on network TV, you rarely hear anything bad about the nuclear industry [...]
But the bigshots don't care.
They're all sitting pretty.
Thanks to corporate welfare.
What's that now?
They get billions in subsidies
from the government.
It's supposed to create jobs,
but that's not how it's spent.
They pulled this cartoon from the rerun broadcasts and it never aired again.
Colbert didn't just provide this lesson in corporate control of government in his "The Word" segment, but then had Jeffrey Toobin on to explain how the expected Supreme Court ruling would impact elections:
COLBERT: If this goes through, if they decide in favor of the corporations here, what's going to happen to elections?
TOOBIN: Well, they will be essentially deregulated. Corporations will be allowed to give money, corporations will be allowed to broadcast programs that are in favor of one side or another, it'll basically be no more rules about what corporations can do in political campaigns.
COLBERT: Now when I ran for President in 2008, as the Hail to the Cheese Doritos Stephen Colbert campaign for President, I was told that I actually couldn't do that, that I was breaking federal election law by being sponsored by that corporation. But if this goes through, if this court case, if they win, does that mean that I retroactively won the election?
TOOBIN: I don't think it means that.
COLBERT: But could you do that? Could I actually just wear a NASCAR suit and just have logos all over me and run for President as the sort of Gatorade Thirst for Justice campaign for President?
In the southern Afghan district of Shorabak, the tribesmen gathered shortly before last month’s presidential election to discuss which candidate they would back. After a debate they chose to endorse Abdullah Abdullah, President Hamid Karzai’s leading opponent.
The tribal leaders prepared to deliver a landslide for Abdullah – but it never happened. They claim Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother and leader of the Kandahar provincial council, detained the local governor and closed all the district’s 46 polling sites on election day.
The ballot boxes were taken back to the district headquarters where, tribal leaders allege, they were stuffed with ballots by local policemen. A total of 23,900 ballots were finally sent off to Kabul, the capital – every one of them a vote for Karzai.
The alleged fraud, which Ahmed Wali Karzai denies, was the most blatant example among hundreds of incidents that have threatened to make a mockery of the election.
The sheer scale and audacity of the cheating, which includes supposedly “state-sponsored” ballot-stuffing, vote burning, intimidation and the closure of polling stations in antigovernment areas, has overwhelmed the country’s fledgling Electoral Complaints Commission.
Its staff are battling with more than 2,600 reports of vote-rigging, including at least 650 deemed serious enough “materially” to influence the result.
“This is a blatant violation of the procedure and I think it is stealing in daylight,” Abdullah said yesterday.
His aides say privately that if Karzai wins the 50.1% of votes needed for victory in the first round, they won’t accept the result. Abdullah said he intended to use all legal means to challenge any Karzai victory; his supporters talked menacingly of “Iran-style protests with Kalashnikovs”.
So this is the test: do we really care about bringing democracy to Afghanistan?
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Even after admitting that Tom Ridge's revelations that he felt the terrorist threat level was being used for political purposes was pretty stunning, Matthews and his guests go on to just diminish this as politics as usual and some kind of running joke they were all in on. Too bad the media didn't treat it as such when it was occurring instead of doing their part to help scare the crap out of gullible Americans who didn't see right through this stuff. And this is not politics as usual. It's criminal. But our media treats the criminal as politics as usual, so sadly their reaction isn't surprising.
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This absolutely must be heard to be believed. Chuck Todd is more than mere Villager in this interview with the, ahem, Constitutional scholar Glenn Greenwald, he is defender of the Bush Administration, and any administration's ability to make up their own rules. In Todd's Politics Uber Alles worldview, losing an election is the best/worst punishment for any Presidential wrong-doing. This is the line Cheney has used, as well: that because Bush "won" two elections, their power was absolute and inviolable for at least the term of office, and now it appears, beyond.
Audio from Salon Radio, where the full transcript is also available.
Glenn Greenwald: So what do you think happens - I think what has destroyed our reputation is announcing to the world that we tolerate torture, and telling the world we don't --
Chuck Todd: We have elections, we also had an election where this was an issue. A new president, who came in there, and has said, we're not going to torture, we're going to do this, and we're going to do this--
GG: What do you think should happen when presidents--
CT: Is that not enough? Isn't that enough?
GG: When, generally, if I go out and rob a bank tomorrow, what happens to me is not that I lose an election. What happens is to me is that I go to prison. So, what do you think should happen when presidents get caught committing crimes in office? What do you think ought to happen?
CT: You see, this is where, this is not - you cannot sit here and say this is as legally black and white as a bank robbery because this was an ideological, legal --
GG: A hundred people died in detention. A hundred people. The United States Government admits that there are homicides that took place during interrogations. Waterboarding and these other techniques are things that the United States has always prosecuted as torture.
Until John Yoo wrote that memo, where was the lack of clarity about whether or not these things were illegal? Where did that lack of clarity or debate exist? They found some right-wing ideologues in the Justice Department to say that this was okay, that's what you're endorsing. As long the president can do that, he's above the law. And I don't see how you can say that you're doing anything other than endorsing a system of lawlessness where the president is free to break the law?
CT: Well, look, I don't believe I'm endorsing a system of lawlessness; I'm trying to put in the reality that as much that there is a legal black and white here, there is a political reality that clouds this, and you know it does too.
Glenn Greenwald is too much of a class act to point out that the "political reality" Todd is defending is about a group of Washington insiders who KNOW that they attended cocktail parties with those who knew about and permitted torture and murder of prisoners of war under the aegis of the United States Government. That unpleasant political reality is something the Georgetown Power Set, a group for whom Todd curries favor, does not want to acknowledge for fear it will sour their bipartisan seven-layer dip.
Memo to Chuck: Glenn soured the dip and drank your milkshake. Go find that copy of the Constitution you didn't read before you dropped out of college. Really.
If the conventional wisdom were to shift on torture, say if a different administration and their allies in the village decided that it was important for America's image that these investigations take place, Todd would be right on board with it. (This was, in fact, why I thought the Obama administration would legitimately want to pursue these investigations and Todd's bizarre repetition of the talking point that torture investigations will harm America's image abroad is quite telling. You can be sure he didn't come up with that all by himself.) He has no independent judgment and zero insight into his role in the political process.
I would just write him off as another fluffy spokesmodel except he's got a real job as political director at NBC news. As shocking as it seems, he's really quite powerful. His shallow understanding of the issues at stake --- the reduction of absolutely everything, (even torture and murder) to the insider political parlor game are the most important requirement for advancement in the beltway press and he has that function totally mastered.
Heather: Below is Chuck Todd's appearance on Morning Joe, where he decries torture investigations as political "catnip". This appearance precipitated the interview above.
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Wow, Iran is actually more like America than I thought! I wonder when the president's going to send in his thugs to shut down the vote count?
TEHRAN, June 13 -- Iran's election commissioner declared Saturday that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a decisive victory in most of the country's electoral districts in Friday's presidential election, but the incumbent's leading challenger protested the results, charging widespread vote fraud and vowing to resist a "dangerous manipulation" of the balloting.
Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who waged a heated campaign against Ahmadinejad's bid for reelection, urged his supporters to reject a "governance of lie and dictatorship."
"I'm warning that I won't surrender to this manipulation," Mousavi said in a statement posted on his Web site Saturday. He said the announced results were "shaking the pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran's sacred system" and represented "treason to the votes of the people." He warned that the public would not "respect those who take power through fraud."
Mousavi made the comments after Iran's election chief, Kamran Daneshjoo, said on state television that Ahmadinejad received nearly 21.8 million votes, or more than 63 percent, of the nearly 34.4 million valid votes cast in 346 of Iran's 366 electoral districts. He said Mousavi received 11.7 million votes, or 34 percent.
However, officials delayed without explanation an expected announcement of the complete results, which news agencies said suggested intervention by Iran's Islamic authorities to tamp down a potentially volatile situation.
Riot police cordoned off the Interior Ministry, which directed Friday's voting, and stood guard around key government buildings.
Plainclothes officers fired tear gas to disperse a cheering crowd outside Mousavi's campaign headquarters after the pivotal presidential election ended in confusion, with both sides claiming victory.
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario – The U.S. on Saturday refused to accept hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim of a landslide re-election victory in Iran and said it was looking into allegations of election fraud.
"We are monitoring the situation as it unfolds in Iran, but we, like the rest of the world, are waiting and watching to see what the Iranian people decide," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said at a news conference with Canada's foreign affairs minister, Lawrence Cannon.
Minutes after Clinton spoke, the White House released a two-sentence statement praising "the vigorous debate and enthusiasm that this election generated, particularly among young Iranians," but expressing concern about "reports of irregularities."
Has the Republican party become the party that wants to take every election to the courts? As Digby has said: The fact is that in close elections, the Rove method is very explicit. This is Republican Election Theft 101.
The campaign of Republican Jim Tedisco is preventing the absentee ballot of the district’s most famous resident from being counted.
Tedisco’s campaign challenged the legality of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s absentee ballot today because she appeared in the district at Murphy’s post-election party, which they argue prohibits her from casting a legal absentee ballot.
Gillibrand, who lives in Columbia County, represented the district before being appointed to the Senate earlier this year.
The Tedisco campaign has been challenging a significant number of ballots in Columbia County, which Murphy carried on Election Night.
Today the Republicans stooped to a new low by challenging my ballot. The Republican’s challenge is frivolous and without merit.
--
Their latest move to challenge my ballot is part of a much larger attempt to disenfranchise legal Democratic voters and delay Scott Murphy’s inevitable victory in the 20th.
National Republicans are trying to turn the 20th District of New York into the next Minnesota. It is wrong.
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.
The majority of Iraq has voted in provincial elections today, with a very minimum of violence, as I had hoped. Which is great news but unsurprising given the massive security lockdown mounted for the event. Razorwire cordons, security checkpoints, closed airports and a total ban on vehicular traffic in cities - all just to have an election. Still, that it happened at all is encouraging, even if far from the shining victory the American right are hailing it as. I hate to rain on their victory parade but there are a couple of flies in their Mission Accomplished" ointment.
Not least, of course, that such elections might never have happened at all if the Bush administration had had its way. Despite the popularity nowadays of the conservative meme that Bush wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, Paul Bremer, head of the CPA, had wanted to simply keep US-appointed tame politicos in power. But Ayatollah Sistani demanded real elections with thinly veiled hints of a general Shiite insurrection to go with the Sunni-led insurgency if no elections were held, and a quick historical revision swifty ensued.
But there are still deep-seated problems in Iraq which these provincial election's won't touch, or will actually make worse. The Kurdish North didn't participate and neither did the disputed region of Kirkuk. Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga have already faced off there a few times and most analysts see Kurdish aspirations as the primary future source of violence. Then there's the resurgent Sunni minority, where the old and entirely undemocratic tribal power structure is set to be the election winner. And among Shiites, factional infighting which has fractured Maliki's own coalition heavily, looks to be another potential source of future violence. We may not know the full results for a month or more and there are going to be divisive allegations of intimidation, vote-rigging and double-crossing to navigate.
These elections are a good thing, but they're not a universal panacea. Still, the American Right wants to have its cake and eat it. They want to pretend that provincial elections mean "victory" while getting ready to blame only Obama if Iraqi social fractures ignored by Bush for so long lead to more violence later.
Iraqi elections: Elites to fight for power and oil.
(RealNews.Net talks to Leila Fadel, McClatchy's Baghdad Bureau Chief. Dec 15)
I really hope the Iraqi provincial electionstoday NEXT WEEK (I misread the link) go well - free, fair and non-violent. Both the vote itself and the way it is conducted will be important indicators of the way that nation is going, whether towards reconcilliation or towards entrenched factional splits and thus eventual outbreaks of violence again. There's already a huge fly in the ointment - elections in Kurdish Iraq won't happen today because of power-sharing turf fights. That such massive security measures are required just so that "the people" can exercise their democratic voice isn't a great sign either.
A credible election without significant violence would show that the security improvements of the past 18 months are taking hold. The outcome will also show which parties stand the best chance of success in parliamentary elections expected by the end of the year.
However, a deeply flawed election, marred by violence and allegations of widespread fraud, would cast doubt over Iraq's future and could influence President Barack Obama's decision on how fast to remove the 142,000 American troops.
Obama pledged during the presidential campaign to end America's role in the unpopular war and has ordered his national security team to prepare plans for a responsible withdrawal. U.S. officials warn that a hasty pullout could threaten Iraq's fragile security.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, says the Pentagon is closely watching the elections because their outcome "will, I think, be a big indicator for 2009, which is a big year."
U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned extremists may try to disrupt Saturday's vote and are planning heightened security, including banning vehicles on election day and closing airports and land borders. But officials expect a strong turnout — possibly more than 70 percent of the 15 million eligible voters.
We're not going to know who the "winners" are for months, as deals and coalitions come and go. A lot of those fractures in Iraqi society are going to be stressed. By the end of it all, we'll know far more about how well "we broke it, we should fix it" is going.
In his opening statement at Grover Norquist's RNC Chairman debate, Ken Blackwell proclaims that he "knows how to win elections". I would digress Mr. Blackwell and say that you've instead shown a willingness to help steal them. And what is one of his solutions for future Republican victories? Redistricting. Good old Republicans. If you can't win fairly win by hook or by crook.
