Another McCain scandal not noted much in the media

It seems like a special deal for a senator to go out of his way to help an investor buy a piece of government land from the Pentagon for $250,000 that a few years later he turns around as sells for - get this - $20,000,000.

Gee. Why won't MY Republican Senator give me that kind of constituent service? But then, I am sure that the investor, Donald Diamond, contributed to Cindy McCain's wealth substantially. That's probably part of the reason why - unlike Kerry four years ago - McCain hasn't released his wife's tax returns along with his own.

Of course, the supine media hasn't bothered to ask McCain to release his wife's tax returns they way they did Kerry. But McCain is a straight-talking maverick Republican! (and the media is in his pocket.)

From: The Reality-Based Community.

2007 Bush admin politics in review

I have seen several good 2007 retrospectives so far, but the first one that springs to mind is Dahlia Lithwicks' Slate article Legal Fictions: The Bush administration's dumbest legal arguments of the year. Here are just the introductions to each:

• 10. The NSA's eavesdropping was limited in scope.
• 9. Scooter Libby's sentence was commuted because it was excessive.
• 8. The vice president's office is not a part of the executive branch.
• 7. The Guantanamo Bay detainees enjoy more legal rights than any prisoners of war in history.
• 6. Water-boarding may not be torture.
• 5. Everyone who has ever spoken to the president about anything is barred from congressional testimony by executive privilege.
• 4. Nine U.S. attorneys were fired by nobody, but for good reason.
• 3. Alberto Gonzales. [See her discussion for the full list under Al's heading.]
• 2. State secrets. [This is a redefinition of what we used to call 'politically embarrassing. Musharraf is trying to apply this to Bhutto's assassination. And failing.]
• 1. The United States does not torture.

The list I like best is Paul Kiel's TPM´s Great List of Scandalized Administration Officials at TPMMuckraker. I started to try to keep a list like this last Spring, but it overwhelmed me. Here are just the categories and the number of names in each:

• Indicted / Convicted/ Pled Guilty [10 entries.]
• Resigned Due to Investigation, Pending Investigation or Allegations of Impropriety [24 entries]
• Nomination Failed Due to Scandal [5 entries]
• Under Investigation But Still in Office [3 entries]

Paul did limit the list to only those "Bush Administration officials who'd been accused of corruption and/or resigned in the face of scandal."

Most of those below were the subjects of criminal probes, but we also included officials who were credibly accused of acts that, if not criminal, were a corruption of office (like the U.S. attorney scandal). And even then, such officials were only included if their accusers had them dead to rights (which is why Karl Rove didn't make the cut). We also limited ourselves to officials who were either political appointees or whose actions were so political that they were effectively political appointees (like John Tanner).

Without those limitations the list would have been endless.

How one Republican rigged elections for the RNC

Allen Raymond, the former GOP consultant of New Hampshire phone jamming fame, is not happy about his fellow Republicans blaming the phone jamming on him. So he has written a tell-all book entitled How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Law Breaker. Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker has an advance copy and has published a few things from the book.

Allen Raymond was sent to prison for 90 days because the telephone firm he owned accepted a job from the New Hampshire GOP's executive director was hired to jam the telephone number that the Democratic party was using to arrange rides for voters who wanted to vote for the Democratic candidate for Senate.

To set the scene: Raymond got a call in 2000* from two former colleagues in New Jersey who ran a consulting shop called Jamestown Associates. They were working for Dick Zimmer, who was running against Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), the incumbent, and they were pulling out all the stops.

They'd already succeeded in getting a Green Party candidate on the ballot to drain liberal votes from Holt (a favorite GOP trick). And they had already put Raymond's firm to work calling Green-oriented households and urging them to support the Green candidate.

But what came next was "even better":

[Tom Blakely from Jamestown Associates] called me up and asked, "How do you guys find voice talent?"

"Well, I've got a whole catalog of different voices on CDs. I've got 'single Northeastern female,' I've got 'Southern belle' -- what are you looking for?"

"We're targeting Democrats of Eastern European descent using a surname select and geopolitical filter."

"Oh," I said, quickly doing the polarizing-voter math in my head. "How about 'angry black man'?"

"Yeah, that sounds good. What's his voice sound like?"

So I cued up one particular actor's CD on my computer and put the phone to the speaker. The track I played was one in which the actor was deliberately playing up a street gang character.

After listening for a few seconds, Blakely said, "That's the guy!"

So we had the actor record a spot over the telephone saying, "I'm calling as a Democrat, asking you to vote for the Democratic nominee. We need your vote for Holt."

I'm not saying that all Eastern European whites are racists, but, no matter where or when an election is held, there is a always a cultural divide that you can rely on. The message was "I'm ghetto black calling you, racist Ukrainian guy, and scaring the crap out of you because you probably think that if you don't vote for the Democrat I'm going to come to your house and take care of some business."

The calls were extremely highly targeted, household by household, no message ever left on an answering machine. We wanted the message heard only by people whose reaction would be "I'm not voting for Holt because he uses scary black men to call my house."

We made calls to Democratic union households supporting Zimmer, taped by actors putting on thick Spanish accents, figuring union workers were the voters who felt most threatened by immigration. The objective was to get them to throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. We were just forcing those people to make a decision that was true to who they really were. If you want to question someone's character, look to the people who stayed home because of those calls.

Remember -- they were Democrats; they were supposed to be the tolerant ones.

Zimmer lost the election by 481 votes and the Green Party candidate picked up 2 percent in the polls.

This is Republican ethics.

Consider this along with the techniques of voter suppression they have practiced:

• Caging: What Bob Woodward doesn't know (or care) about Voter Suppression
  
• Another great moment in voter suppression
  
• Florida Republicans working hard to suppress minority voter registrations
  
• Vote Suppression is the issue
  
• "Caging" - an explanation of the term
  
• Where is the REAL voter fraud?
  
• More on the New Hampshire phone-jamming incident
  
• More evidence that the 2004 election was hacked for Bush

Caging: What Bob Woodward doesn't know (or care) about Voter Suppression

Recently investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Jeff Leen participated in a question-and-answer session, and one participant asked them the extent of the voter suppression technique called “caging” is. Neither investigative reporter even understood what "caging" is. Think Progress offers this description of the important voter suppression technique for the rest of us.

Caging most recently gained attention in the U.S. attorney scandal. In 2004, BBC News published a report showing that Tim Griffin, the former Rove protege who was placed as a U.S. attorney in Arkansas, led a “caging” scheme to suppress the votes of African-American servicemembers in Florida.

On Nov. 5, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Caging Prohibition Act, a bill to outlaw this “long-recognized voter suppression tactic which has often been used to target minority voters.” Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to dismiss this as “direct-mail term.” But the charges are serious enough that earlier this year, several senators called for an investigation into the RNC’s use of this voter suppression tactic. Whitehouse and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) explained:

Caging is a voter suppression tactic whereby a political campaign sends mail marked “do not forward” to a targeted group of eligible voters. A more aggressive version involves sending mail to a targeted group of voters with instructions to sign and return an acknowledgment card. The campaign then creates a list of those whose mail was returned undelivered and challenges the right of those citizens to vote — on the ground that the voter does not live at the registered address.

This is a powerful tool in the Republicans' voter suppression arsenal. Unless they are in strongly gerrymandered pro-Republican districts, it is very difficult for Republicans to get the majority of the votes of those who are eligible to vote and want to vote in the election. Voter suppression techniques like "Caging" are powerful tools used to prevent minorities and Democrats from participating in the election process.

Republicans don't hesitate to use "Caging" just because it is illegal. They are, after all, Republicans.

Republicans don't let the Constitution interfere with their corruption

We know that Congressional Republicans are a corrupt bunch. That's why Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Bob Ney are both serving time in federal prison today and several other Republican Congressmen have resigned or announced that they were not running for reelection.

But when most of those crooked politicians sold their votes to the highest bidders they at least followed the procedures written in the U.S. Constitution to conduct their payoffs to their bribers. Not Alaska's only Congressman, Don Young.

When Republican Rep. Young didn't like the way the earmark he was paid off to insert in a transportation bill was written in the bill already passed by both the House and Senate, Don Young blithely went in and changed the language to what he had promised his briber after the bill was passed but before the President signed it. Substantive changes in the language of a bill that has already been passed by both the House and the Senate and is awaiting the Presidents signature is clearly Unconstitutional.

Go watch the video at Talking Points Memo for a clear explanation of Republican Rep. Don Young's Unconstitutional behavior.