Government official registers voters by day, sells lists of voters names to Republican candidates by night

Republicans in Texas have an absolute abhorrence for voter fraud, but only one kind. They are focused on voter fraud by individuals impersonating other voters, a form of voter fraud there is almost no evidence of. Because of this obsession, the recently adjourned Texas biennial Legislative session adjourned without accomplishing much of anything on badly needed bills because the Republicans demanded that a voter picture ID law be passed over the objections of the Democrats. Democrats are aware that this unnecessary legal provision will reduce the number of individuals who can vote by about 3% without changing the chances for real voter fraud.

Because the Democrats prevented the passage of the Voter ID law in this last legislative session, the Texas Governor Perry is going to have to call the Legislature back into special session this year. Texas law has the provision that special sessions can consider only the issues the Governor lists when he calls for the session. This is going to be thirty more days of legislative session expense caused because of the Republican Party's obsession with suppressing the votes of people who legally vote but are unlikely to voter for Republicans.

Here's one reason why the Republican obsession with retaining power is just flat wrong. From the Houston Chronicle we get the news story of the Harris County associate voter registrar Ed Johnson who by day determines which individuals who request to register to vote are allowed on the voter rolls as well as which provisional ballots are considered valid after elections. By night he is a Republican consultant, selling copies of the County's registered voter list to Republican candidates for office.

Ed Johnson is associate voter registrar at the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office, where he’s worked since 1999. He’s also a paid director for Computer Data Systems, a venture started in 2003 with state Rep. Dwayne Bohac, R-Houston. The company sells the same voter information Johnson is paid by taxpayers to manage in a nonpolitical manner.

[...]

According to a recently dismantled Web site, CDS sells voter data to Republican candidates. No records indicating information was sold to Democrats could be found. Secretary of state records show Bohac as the registered agent and Johnson as a director.

Johnson’s party affiliation was not known on Wednesday, but he is known in political circles as a Republican consultant.

This stinks to high heaven. A related question is whether the voter suppression is occurring when individuals apply to be registered to vote in Harris County.

Last year, the Texas Democratic Party charged in a lawsuit that the Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office is rejecting voter applications at a much higher rate than any other Texas county elections office.

“Harris County had 70,000 voter registration applications rejected,” said Texas Democratic Party attorney Chad Dunn. “That’s exponentially higher than anywhere else in the state.”

Dunn said Dallas County rejected 1,800 for the same period, January 2006 through October 2008.

The two consultants also said they are concerned that Johnson’s role in the approval of provisional ballots may be tainted.

When voters show up at a polling place without their driver’s licenses or voter registration cards, but have proof of their addresses and insist they are registered to vote, they are asked to fill out provisional ballots. In close elections, provisional ballots are used. This past election, there were several close races in Harris County.

Cook said that while Johnson may not get the final say in deciding whether provisional ballots are used, “his office is one of the stops for provisional ballots.”

The threat of unauthorized individuals voting and swinging elections has never been documented to occur in any recent American election. Yet the problem of partisans who prevent their opponents from registering to vote or from getting to the polls in order vote have occurred frequently in recent years - actions by Republicans to suppress Democratic votes. [If there are cases of Democrats suppressing Republican votes, they are not reported in the media.]

What Johnson is doing is an example of a civil servant selling the products of his office for personal gain - pure corruption. He is also in the position to prevent people from registering to vote, which is suppression. The indication is that his office is acting to suppress votes (currently in litigation.) To this kind of fraud the Republicans are quite tone-deaf. But they know that if the public has the right to vote and is able to use it, they cannot win majorities of the votes for their programs. Pools show that the public rejects their policies. So that's why are working hard to limit the franchise to only conservative Republicans.

Hey! Why not? With Katherine Harris (Florida Secretary of State and simultaneously Co-Chair of the Bush for President campaign in Florida) scrubbing likely Democrats from the Florida voting rolls in 2000 they succeeded in holding the counted vote to such a narrow difference that the (Republican-dominated) U.S. Supreme Court was able to give the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush. The key was suppression of potential Democratic votes. They are still doing it as a policy of the party.

Another threat to the Republicans eliminated in a small plane crash.

What do Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, Ron Brown, Mickey Leland, John Tower, John F. Kennedy, Jr and Michael Connell all have in common?

Everyone of them was a threat to the Republican Party. Everyone of them died in a small plane crash just before they were to do something the Republicans did not want done.

Michael Connell? Who's he? He was Karl Rove's information systems expert who helped Rove steal the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, among others. He was also about to testify about how he stole elections for Rove in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit against Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired Connell in 2004 to create a real-time computer data compilation for counting Ohio’s votes. Under Connell’s supervision, Ohio’s presidential vote count was transmitted to private, partisan computer servers owned by SmartTech housed in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Connell’s company, New Media Communications worked closely with SmartTech in building Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among Connell’s clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com, that housed at one point Karl Rove’s missing emails. Rove’s email files have since mysteriously disappeared despite repeated court-sanctioned attempts to review them. [Snip]

At 12:20 am on the night of the 2004 election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio’s presidential campaign. The Buckeye State’s 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.

But from then until around 2am, the flow of information mysteriously ceased. After that, the vote count shifted dramatically to George W. Bush, ultimately giving him a second term. In the end there was a 6.7 percent diversion—in Bush’s favor—between highly professional, nationally funded exit polls and the final official vote count as tabulated by Blackwell and Connell.

Until his death Connell remained the IT supervisor for six Congressional committees. But on the day before the 2008 election, Connell was deposed by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count, and his continued involvement in IT operations for the GOP, including his access to Rove’s e-mail files and the circumstances behind their disappearance.

Various threats have been repeatedly reported involving Connell and other IT experts close to the GOP. On July 24, 2008, Arnebeck emailed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, stating: “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King-Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio,….”

Connell’s death comes at a moment where election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. In his pre-election deposition, Connell was generally evasive, but did disclose key piece of information that could prove damaging to Karl Rove and the GOP. Examining attorneys in the King- Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit, stemming from the 2004 election theft, were confident Connell had far more to tell.

There is widespread concern that this may be the reason he is now dead. This is the report from Alex Jones' Inforwars:

Michael Connell, the Bush IT expert who has been directly implicated in the rigging of George Bush’s 2000 and 2004 elections, was killed last night when his single engine plane crashed three miles short of the Akron airport. Velvet Revolution (”VR”), a non-profit that has been investigating Mr. Connell’s activities for the past two years, can now reveal that a person close to Mr. Connell has recently been discussing with a VR investigator how he can tell all about his work for George Bush. Mr. Connell told a close associate that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.”

A tipster close to the McCain campaign disclosed to VR in July that Mr. Connell’s life was in jeopardy and that Karl Rove had threatened him and his wife, Heather. VR’s attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, notified the United States Attorney General , Ohio law enforcement and the federal court about these threats and insisted that Mr. Connell be placed in protective custody. VR also told a close associate of Mr. Connell’s not to fly his plane because of another tip that the plane could be sabotaged. Mr. Connell, a very experienced pilot, has had to abandon at least two flights in the past two months because of suspicious problems with his plane. On December 18, 2008, Mr. Connell flew to a small airport outside of Washington DC to meet some people. It was on his return flight the next day that he crashed.

On October 31, Mr. Connell appeared before a federal judge in Ohio after being subpoenaed in a federal lawsuit investigating the rigging of the 2004 election under the direction of Karl Rove. The judge ordered Mr. Connell to testify under oath at a deposition on November 3rd, the day before the presidential election. Velvet Revolution received confidential information that the White House was extremely concerned about Mr. Connell talking about his illegal work for the White House and two Bush/Cheney 04 attorneys were dispatched to represent him.

Here is a report on the plane "accident" itself.

Connell was a highly experienced pilot. His crash is suspicious.

Current cover stories include the possibility that his plane ran out of fuel. But its crash was accompanied by a very large fireball explosion that burned for more than ten minutes. A trooper on the scene immediately identified Connell, but newspaper accounts say his body was charred beyond recognition.

Connell told various sources that he was being threatened by Rove. He canceled at least two previous flights due to mechanical failure. A father of four, his decision to fly from a highly restricted airport in Maryland remains a mystery. Connell reportedly did contract work for security-industrial agencies, like the CIA. Connell also openly acknowledged that he was the first IT contractor to move his servers behind the firewall of the US House of Representatves [Sic] where he oversaw the websites of the House Judiciary Committee, Intelligence Committee, Ways and Means Committee, and Administrative Committee, arguably the four most powerful committees in the House.

Is there any proof that Connell was assassinated? No, not at this time, but tipsters certainly anticipated it, warned that his plane would be sabotaged, and then he was killed in a suspicious plane crash.

But why was he killed? This article describes the vote stealing that occurred and lays out Connell's central position in the alleged crime.

4. Ultimately, however, it is the GOP's computerized control of the vote count that may have been decisive. And here is where Rove's e-mails, and the wee hours of the morning after the election, are crucial.

Despite the massive disenfranchisement of Ohio Democrats, there is every indication John Kerry won Ohio 2004. Exit polls shown on national television at 12:20am gave Kerry a clear lead in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. These "purple states" were Democratic blue late in the night, but, against virtually impossible odds, all turned Bush red by morning.

Along the way, Gahanna, Ohio's "loaves & fishes" vote count, showed 4,258 ballots for Bush in a precinct where just 638 people voted. Voting machines in Youngstown and Columbus lit up for Bush when Kerry's name was pushed. Rural Republican precincts registered more than 100% turnouts, while inner city Democratic ones went as low as 7%. Warren County declared a "Homeland Security" alert, removed the ballot count from public scrutiny, then recorded a huge, unlikely margin for Bush.

These and many more instances of irregularities and theft were reported at www.freepress.org and then confirmed by U.S. Representative John Conyers and others who researched the election.

But the most critical reversals may have come as exit polls indicated that despite massive Democratic disenfranchisement, and even with preliminary vote count manipulations, Kerry would win Ohio by 4.2%, a margin well in excess of 200,000 votes.

The key to that reversal may be electronic. It has now become widely known that the same web-hosting firm that served a range of GOP websites, including the one for the Republican National Committee, also hosted the official site that Blackwell used to report the Ohio vote count.

This astonishing conflict of interest has been reported at the epluribusmedia.org on-line investigative service. Cross-postings have come from luaptifer at Dailykos and blogger Joseph Cannon's Cannonfire.blogspot.com. They all confirm that the RNC tech network's hosting firm is SMARTech.com, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SMARTech hosts georgew.bush.com, mc.org and gop.com among other Republican web domains, in a bank basement.

Furthermore, the same hosting site that handled redirections from Blackwell's "official" site also handled the White House e-mail accounts that have become central to investigations of the Gonzales purge of eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were themselves involved in vote fraud investigations.

Conflicts of interest in programming services and remote-access capability appear throughout the RNC's computer networks, Rove's secret White House e-mail, and the electronic vehicles used by Blackwell to finally reveal his "official" presidential vote counts for Ohio 2004.

One factor may be Ohio's electronic touch-screen voting systems, on which were cast more than 800,000 votes in an election decided by about one-seventh that total. Such vulnerabilities, among other things, have been confirmed in exhaustive reports by Conyers's Committee, by the Government Accountability Office, by the Carter-Baker Commission, by Princeton University, by the Brennan Center, and by others.

But overall, the electronic record of every vote in Ohio was transmitted to the Secretary of State's office, and hosted in real time in Chattanooga. Under such circumstances, the joint hosting of the White House e-mail system and accessibility by Blackwell and Rove to the same computer networks linked to the Ohio vote count, takes on an added dimension.

Mike Connell, a Republican computer expert, helped create the software for both Ohio's official 2004 election web site, and for the Bush campaign's partisan web site during the 2000 election. The success of Connell's GovTech Solutions has been attributed by Connell to his being "loyal to my network," including the Bush family.

Blackwell shared those loyalties. Like Connell, he worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign, serving as its Ohio co-chair. He was also in control of the vote count that was being reported on software Bush loyalist Connell helped design.

It was in a crucial period after midnight on election night 2004 that these paired conflicts of interest may have decided the election. As exit polls showed a decisive Kerry victory, there was an unexplained 90-minute void in official reporting of results. By this time, most of the vote counts were coming in from rural areas, which are traditionally Republican, and which, ironically, usually report their results earlier than the Democratic urban areas.

In this time span, Kerry's lead morphed into a GOP triumph. To explain this "miraculous" shift, Rove invented a myth of the greatest last-second voting surge in US history, allegedly coming from late-voting fundamentalist Republicans. No significant evidence exists to substantiate this claim. In fact, local news reports indicate the heaviest turnouts in most rural areas came early on election day, rather than later.

According to a January 13, 2005, release from Cedarville University, a small Ohio-based Christian academy, Connell's GovTech Solutions helped make the shared server system run "like a champ...through the early morning hours as users from around the world looked to Ohio for their election results."

After 2am, despite exit polls showing very much the opposite outcome, those results put Bush back in the White House.

In January, 2005, the U.S. Congress hosted the first challenge to a state's Electoral College delegation in our nation's history. At the time, the compromised security of the official Ohio electronic reporting systems was not public knowledge. But the first attempt to subpoena Karl Rove's computer files had already failed.

Now a second attempt to gain such access is being mounted as the Gonzales scandal deepens.

Congressman Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) has raised "particular concerns about Karl Rove" and his electronic communications about the Gonzales firings.

Rove claims both his own computer records and the RNC's servers have been purged of e-mails through the time the Ohio vote was being reversed. Rove's attorney, Robert Kuskin, has told a Congressional inquiry that Rove mistakenly believed his messages to the RNC "were being archived" there.

But the RNC says it has no e-mail records for Rove before 2005. Rob Kelner, an RNC lawyer says efforts to recreate the lost records have had some success. But it's not yet known whether communications from the 2004 election can be retrieved.

Nor is it known whether the joint access allowed to top GOP operatives Rove and Blackwell was responsible for the election-night reversal that put Bush back in the White House.

But there remains another avenue by which the real outcome of Ohio 2004 could be discovered. Longstanding federal law protected Ohio's ballots and other election documentation prior to September 3, 2006. Blackwell gave clear orders that these crucial records were to be destroyed on that date.

Prior to the expiration of the federal statutory protection, a civil rights lawsuit was filed in the federal court of Judge Algernon Marbley, asking that the remaining records be preserved. The request was granted in what has become known as the King-Lincoln Bronzeville suit (co-author Bob Fitrakis is an attorney in the case, and Harvey Wasserman is a plaintiff).

Thus, by federal law, the actual ballots and electronic records should be available for the kind of exhaustive recount that was illegally denied---or "rigged," as prosecutors in Cleveland have put it---by Blackwell, Bennett and their cohorts the first time around.

Ohio's newly-elected Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has agreed to take custody of these materials, and to bring them to a central repository, probably in Columbus.

This means that an exhaustive recount could show who really did win the presidential election of 2004.

It may also be possible to learn what roles---electronic or otherwise--- Karl Rove and J. Kenneth Blackwell really did play during those crucial 90 minutes in the deep night, when the presidency somehow slipped from John Kerry to George W. Bush.

There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that the Republicans stole the 2004 election in Ohio, but Mike Connell's testimony would have linked all the various suspicious events together. And Karl Rove is said to have threatened Mike Connell's life if he talked.

Krugman sees it coming. Do you?

Paul Krugman is watching the insanity that is the McCain campaign (see McCain Goes After Michelle ..., Secret Service Steps In ..., George Wallace McCain, Just a Typo, They Say, How Low Can He Go, Take #9, Playing with fire, Cause and Effect, Crocodile Tears, and so on. That's just today.) and here is what Krugman sees coming:

The crisis isn’t the only scary thing going on. Something very ugly is taking shape on the political scene: as McCain’s chances fade, the crowds at his rallies are, by all accounts, increasingly gripped by insane rage. It’s not just a mob phenomenon — it’s visible in the right-wing media, and to some extent in the speeches of McCain and Palin.

We’ve seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons — they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn’t just show up in fringe publications — it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

What happens when Obama is elected? It will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years. For sure there will be crazy accusations, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some violence.

The next few years are going to be very, very tough.

If the conservatives can't run the county themselves they will do everything they can to make America ungovernable.

Plan on it.

Republicans working to divide the Democrats

Republicans work hard to divide the Democrats and damage the unity that should defeat the Republican candidates almost every time. It was Nixon's stock in trade, and it is being used today to exacerbate the differences between Hillary and Obama supporters.

Think not? Go read Rick Perlstein. Why would a Republican who has contributed only to McCain charter PUMA PAC, a so-called "grassroots" organization even now trying to win the Democratic nomination for Hillary Clinton rather than Barack Obama? Here's a second investigation of the false-flag PUMA's.

FOX "News" is, of course, pushing the false flag PUMA "movement" for all they're worth.



Darragh Murphy certainly looks like a typical plastic stepford wife Republican woman, doesn't she? It's been clear since last Fall that the candidate that the Republicans really did not want to face was Obama. They were all set to train their guns on Hillary, and Hillary has "baggage" they could easily target. Not only is Obama a more difficult target, he puts into play potential voters that Hillary can't get to come out to vote. Now all the Republicans have left to run with are McCain, a severely flawed candidate, Voter Suppression, and fomenting division in the Democratic Party.

This is another Republican "Rat-Fuck", which our illustrious media would have easily learned if they actually practiced journalism. This is how the Republican conservatives run elections to get elected so that they can steal from the taxpayers. (That's the subject of Thomas Frank's new book, "The Wrecking Crew", due out August 5, 2008.)

"A man with a conscience" - words Bush and Cheney hate to hear

Scott McClellan appears to be a Republican with a conscience - the kind of person that I am sure Rove had hoped he, Cheney, and the Republican Congressional leadership (including Gingrich) had driven out of the Republican Party.



Not, mind you, that I don't think the money he will make from his book is negligible to Scotty. It better not be. He has burned his bridges to the conservatives. He'll never get wing-nut welfare like I. "Scooter" Libby has done since he fell on his sword and was convicted to protect Dick Cheney.

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Addendum 3:51 PM CDT
The New York Times has a good article on the reaction to Scotty McClellan's revelations. In particular, Karl Rove,political strategist; Frances Fragos Townsend, former domestic security adviser; Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush’s first press secretary, and Dan Bartlett, a former counselor to the president, are all using similar terms to describe McClellan as a disaffected former employee of the White House who appears to have been influenced by publishers to pump up sales of his book by making outrageous, untrue accusations.

The terminology they are all using - in concert - appears to have been crafted by White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino. It's a highly organized White House push-back against McClellan, something that he clearly knew to expect.

I'll bet those people, Bush, Cheney and Rice are all looking around them wondering who the next "person of conscience" will be. "Conscience" is clearly a word they don't recognize fondly.

Also interesting. Over at Huffington Post Arianna entitles her post "Scotty Come Lately" and asks "What took you so long" about McClellan's revelations. More interesting than McClellan's revelations, which anyone who reads the blogs knew about long ago, is the way the Inside the Beltway based media has come to attention and saluted the story which they have previously ignored.

This action on the part of the inside the beltway media seems to be a reaction to (1) hearing the story publicly from one of the premier inside the beltway individuals (Scotty) and at the same time, (2) represents a reaction to his highly credible accusations that the media didn't do its job in the run-up to the war.

The media still won't listen to anything from outside Washington, but they are clearly going to be a lot more aggressive about the administration from now on - now that it's a Democratic administration, just as they always have been.

So for the political media, this reaction is just more of their continued incompetence and general irrelevance. They are just taking advantage of Bush's long lame duckness to start early.

McCain: home of the conservative lobbyists.

Want to know who will run the government in a McCain administration? Here, from Kevin Drum, is your answer:

That brings to five the number of campaign workers McCain has had to fire recently. Here's the complete list:

• Thomas Loeffler, lobbyist for Saudi Arabia and various defense contractors. CEO of The Loeffler Group.
  
• Doug Goodyear, lobbyist for the military junta in Burma. CEO of DCI Group.
  
• Doug Davenport, also works for DCI Group.
  
• Eric Burgeson, energy lobbyist, works for Barbour Griffith & Rogers
  
• Craig Shirley, works for anti-Hillary 527 group that's not allowed to coordinate with presidential campaigns.

This is ridiculous. Except for Shirley, whose sins are a little different, all of the other four headed up or worked for big lobbying outfits. The press is reporting this as if it's just one embarrassment for McCain after another that he keeps finding out he's got lobbyists working for him, but that's not the story here. The real story is that McCain obviously knew these guys were lobbyists long before anyone pointed it out to him. You don't hire the CEO of the DCI group without knowing that the guy is a lobbyist.

There is your McCain government. All lobbyists, working for special Republican interests. These people are not working for American interests, just for their own.

Vote for McCain and you get a Republican government bought and paid for by special interests who don't give a damned about most Americans. They are with McCain to feather their own nests, nothing more. And McCain allows them into his inner circles until he and they are caught.

Vito to go. ASAP.

So much for the quaint idea that a congressional representative serves at the pleasure of his local constituents. The Staten Island Republicans want him to stay to the end of his term, but the National Republicans want him gone NOW.

Hunter S. Thompson would have understood what is going on now

As we watch the federal reserve desperately trying to save the financial markets, we get this report from Greg Palast.

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

So? Is there a connection? Palast thinks so.

How? Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and its variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chunk of these ‘sub-prime.’

Here’s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 monthly payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. The Grinnings move into their Toyota.

Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.

‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.

But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hearty – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.

But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.

Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.

Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America.

Is that realistic? Consider my previous post Elliot Spitzer; Prostitutes; Why is the DoJ involved?. It really wasn't reasonable for the Department of Justice to focus on Elliot Spitzer, but we know from the US Attorney Purge that this administration has used the criminal law to silence its critics. Why would the Bush administration be so adamant about fleecing mortgage-holders? Because that's the only place left that there has been any money for over two decades. Quoted in my earlier post "What's happened to America? Over half a century of war and the conservative movement.":

In just the past seven years, US household debt almost doubled and federal debt soared by near two-thirds, rocketing by a combined $10.5 Trillion. The total combined debt of households ($14.4 Trillion) and the federal government ($9.2 Trillion) is now 168% of GDP, far higher even than in the brief spike during World War II. All other levels and ratios of debt also have soared far beyond any past precedent.

Yet, this record-shattering explosion of debt stimulus created the weakest seven year job growth (4.4%) and one of the weakest periods of real GDP growth (18.1%) since the Depression: less than 6 million new jobs ($1.8 million of debt per job) and a mere $4 Trillion increase in GDP.
This period began with the collapse of Wall Street's stock market bubble from the late 1990s and ends now with the collapse of Wall Street's housing and other debt bubbles. That such massive mortgage and consumer borrowing, tax cuts and war spending produced such remarkably weak real economic results suggests the months and years ahead could be quite difficult.

Yet, along with Fed rate cuts for cheaper debt, the only policies seriously considered by this year's crop of Wall Street-funded political candidates is more short-term household and federal debt "stimulus." Locked into a failed, 30-year-old ideology of deregulation and debt, there is no option to compete with the remarkably effective industrial and trade policies pursued by China and others.

2008 will be the ninth consecutive year the US economy grows slower than the world's growth while China grows more than three times faster. In the past seven years of sluggish growth, the US accumulated Manufacturing trade deficits (production shortfalls) of over -$3 Trillion with full Current Account trade losses of -$4.3 Trillion; more than the entire nominal growth of GDP.

This is what the Wall Street Republican financed Reagan Revolution has brought America to. Financial collapse and Department of Justice prosecutions of political opponents who expose the failure of the conservative politicians and the Wall Street crooks bankers who have caused the collapse.

Palast makes the connection between the bailout for Wall Street and Elliot Spitzer here:

When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.

But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bailout. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.

Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.

And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.

Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, “Take him down today!” Naw, that’s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press – one was “Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer” - made clear to Bush’s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn’t Bin Laden.

And Hunter S. Thompson? He described where we are now in his slogan "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." That's where we are now.

Washington Post reports on fraud at the National Republican Congressional Committee

The Washington Post provides background for the earlier report that the Financial Director of the NRCC, Christopher Ward, has apparently been embezzling money form the committee and perhaps from the campaign committees of many of the Republican Congressmen whose political fund raising committees he was director of. Some interesting vignettes:

• In the last eight years, Ward is listed as treasurer for 83 GOP fundraising committees.
• He has supervised committees that raised over "..$400 million, $368 million of it at the National Republican Congressional Committee."
• "Republican lawmakers and former committee staff members now allege that Ward fabricated audits and other financial documents for 2003 to 2006, some of which were turned over to a Wachovia Bank branch in McLean in October 2006, when the NRCC borrowed $8 million in last-minute money for congressional campaigns."
• "Rep. Peter T. King (N.Y.) ... said in an interview that he has discovered that Ward paid himself $6,000 in consulting fees from King's political action committee in 2007 -- though King believed that he had shuttered the committee early last year. Upon learning of the NRCC investigation, King said he found that his PAC remained open all of last year. Ward paid himself the fees from King's PAC, which received just three contributions and dispensed one check in 2007, FEC records show."
li>The financial problems at the cash-strapped NRCC led "...retiring Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), who chaired the NRCC for four years earlier this decade" to say "The House Republican brand is so bad right now that if it were a dog food, they'd take it off the shelf."
• "In 2005, 2006 and most of 2007, the NRCC paid Ward $80,000 to $90,000 a year, but he was one of only two full-time aides there who were allowed to work as outside consultants to lawmakers. That doubled his salary, according to a review of records compiled by CQ MoneyLine, a Web site that tracks campaign finances.
  
  In 2007, for example, Ward's consulting firm collected $100,000 from the 19 PACs and committees for which he served as treasurer. Last October, Ward left the NRCC as treasurer but remained on the payroll as a $7,500-a-month consultant."
• "Any material misstatement on a bank application is a federal crime," said Stanley Brand, a Washington defense lawyer. He said the committee probably contacted the FBI in an attempt to portray itself as the victim of a crime -- punishable by as much as $1 million in fines and 30 years in prison -- and to inoculate NRCC officials from prosecution.
  
  "They blew the whistle on themselves, which is what you'd do to protect yourself," he said.

The discovery of the fraud is one any Auditor will recognize as a classic. The fraud worked as long as the crook was in position to control all the records. Ward's reputation as a workaholic is also classic. An individual conducting a fraud cannot afford to let anyone else work on the books they are stealing from, so they do all the work themselves, rarely taking any time away from the job. Fraud requires a lot of overtime. Here is how the fraud surfaced:

The first inkling of trouble came when Conaway took over the NRCC's auditing subcommittee in early 2007. A certified public accountant himself, Conaway said in interviews that he asked for something considered routine in the corporate world: an audit of NRCC books for the previous year by an outside firm and a meeting with the auditors.

"My expectation was that that frank meeting would take three minutes," Conaway said.

Instead, Ward kept putting him off, he said. "Okay, we'll get it for the next meeting, we'll get it for you," Ward said, according to Conaway, who became suspicious of what he described as Ward's "passive aggressive" behavior.

He said Ward avoided the issue for months, until January, when Ward told Conaway that he and GOP lawmakers would meet with auditors. But Ward canceled the meeting 30 minutes before it was scheduled to begin.

Republicans called the outside firm and found out that no audits had been done since 2003. After looking at the documents Ward had given them for each year, they determined that he had fabricated them, according to Davis and other officials with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

This is why auditors want everyone working with accounting records to take a vacation of at least two weeks a year, so that someone else goes through the books while they are gone. Rep Conway, as a CPA himself, did what should always be done when someone new takes over supervision of the books. He asked to see the audit records and speak to the auditors who conducted oversight of the records. That's how fraud is either prevented or discovered.

So how did Christopher J. Ward become an embezzler? There are some clues in his career, but no obvious answers from current reports. He got his Political Science degree in 1990 and immediately began work in Republican politics, moving to the NRCC in the middle 90's shortly after the Gingrich-inspired take-over of the House of Representatives. He was good at his job. Ward was the guy that Republican Congressmen in trouble were steered to in order to help them get out of the trouble, an example being recently indicted Arizona Congressman Rick Renzi.

The cultural environment Ward worked in cannot be ignored. Ward's time at the NRCC went along with the Abramoff scandal, the Duke Cunningham scandal and the Bob Ney scandal, just to name the ones presently in prison. In a culture in which Republicans who believed they should each have the right to collect as much money as they could get their hands on flourished, and Ward was a key enabler of many of those who moved closest to being caught, he certainly must have felt that his expertise and efforts deserved as much financial reward as he could collect. It should be no surprise that his career bloomed as the Republican controlled Congress, and his fraud was discovered after the Republicans were removed from control of Congress.

It would be hard to overlook the moral lesson about Republican control of government in this fraud, but I'm sure the Republicans will be working hard to both obfuscate and overlook the lesson. Unfortunately, their opponents, the Democrats will be too polite to bring it up.

Christopher J. Ward has added his name to those representative of the control of the federal government by movement conservatives. Others in the pantheon include (in no particular order) Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Bob Ney, Mark Foley, Steven Biskupic,
Tom DeLay, Rachel Paulose, Alberto Gonzalez, "Scooter" Libby, John Doolittle, Jack Abramoff and many, many more.

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The reporting on this story by Washington Post Staff Writer Paul Kane is excellent, and he should be congratulated for it.

Elliot Spitzer; Prostitutes; Why is the DoJ involved?

OK. We all know that sex sells media advertising, and it changes votes for politicians. So when Elliot Spitzer, Mr. Clean who made his reputation as an Attorney General going after crooked Wall Street financiers and prostitution rings gets caught hiring a high end prostitute, we can expect a great deal of hullabaloo.

But that was yesterday. Now, today, is time for some questions about how his actions were exposed (leaked?) and why the Department of Justice Public Integrity Unit was after him for what is a state crime a lot less serious than the corruption that sent Congressmen Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Bob Ney to prison.

Those two were both taking bribes and gave government favors for those bribes. That's what the Public Integrity Unit investigates. Where is it in the Spitzer case? There is no allegation that the independently wealthy Spitzer used government money for his recreational activities, nor is that any allegation that he provided favors to anyone. What he did was hypocritically hire a prostitute or a series of prostitutes. As far as I know, America does not use the government to enforce morality or penalize hypocrisy. What DOES happen in the U.S. is that the DoJ under Bush investigates Democrats with the intent to destroy them politically, while protecting Republicans like Rep. Jerry Lewis and John Doolittle.

Is this another case of the Republicans using the Department of Justice to destroy a successful Democratic politician like they did Alabama Governor Don Seigelman?

Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake asks some questions that really need to be answered here.

1. Why would the bank tell the IRS and not Spitzer himself if there was a suspicious transfer? Spitzer is a longtime client, a rich guy and the governor. We're talking thousands of dollars here, not millions. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that they spotted a "suspicious transfer" made by the governor, and that this is how things began. It's possible it was just ordinary paperwork the bank had to file with the government whenever some particular flag was raised, but if that's the case, why did the DoJ go to DefCon 3?
2. What is a USA doing prosecuting a prostitution case? This isn't normally what the feds spend their time with.
3. Mike Garcia is a Chertoff crony. Sources familiar with the investigation say that he sent a prosecution memo to DC two months ago asking for authority to indict a public figure (Spitzer). Which means they had their case made long before the wire tap of February 13. Why did they then include this line from that conversation in the complaint?

   LEWIS continued that from what she had been told "he" (believed to be a reference to Client-9) "would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe -- you know -- I mean that...very basic things...."Kristen" responded: "I have a way of dealing with that...I'd be like listen dude, you really want the sex?...You know what I mean."

   This salacious detail does not seem like it's necessary to make their case, and appears to be added for no other purpose than to destroy Spitzer's career.

4. How did Spitzer's name get leaked to the media, and who did it? Didn't happen to Dave Vitter.
5. Why did Mike Bloomberg suddenly start talking about running for governor recently? And why did he give $500,000 to Joe Bruno? He's good buddies with Mike Mukasey. What did he know and how did he know it?
6. The Mann Act? Are you kidding?
7. Spitzer's been in the line of fire of the GOP hit squad for a while. Roger Stone, Roger Stone, Roger Stone.

There are all kinds of things about this that just don't pass the smell test.

This isn't a totally fraudulent federal prosecution for political purposes like the one Wisconsin U.S. ATtorney rammed through in oder to get of the list of U.S. Attorneys to be fired (see:

• Wisconsin US attorney rammed through fake corruption case of Democrat before last Governor's election.,
• US Atty Biscupic (Wisc) saved his job by prosecuting Georgia Thompson and


• US attorney Biscupic (Eastern Wi.) again reversed by Appeals Court - can't convict for no crime.

) but it is awfully close. There is no federal crime here. Not even an allegation of one that could be prosecuted effectively. There is clearly no political corruption, which is what the DoJ Public Integrity Unit is designed to investigate and prosecute - ans which they have failed to do in the cases of Rep. John Doolittle and William Jefferson.

Elliot Spitzer does appear to have pulled off a real political screw-up, but a crime? It's not one the DoJ's Public Integrity Unit was set up to investigate or prosecute. Given the history of the Justice Department as a tool of political assassination for the Bush administration and the Republican Party, this Spitzer situation is highly suspicious.

Once again the Bush administration is using public money and resources to maintain their power. I'd watch for Bloomberg to run for NY Governor as a Republican next election myself. This case stinks to high heaven of Republican corruption. It's what they do.

NRCC - More Republican business as usual - crooked

The other shoe has dropped. And to be honest, the problem was surfaced by a Republican Congressman, Mike Conway, a CPA in real life, who tried to speak to the auditors who had audited the NRCC (National Republican Campaign Committee - the Republican organization of Congressmen who work to get more Republicans elected to Congress.) Mike was having trouble even getting a copy of the audit report from Christopher Ward who was the NRCC's treasurer. There was a good reason why Mike was having trouble getting the audit report. There was none.

As Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker reported, Christopher Ward has been forging an audit report for several years. Since Rep Conway wanted to speak to the auditors, that wasn't good enough. There were no auditors to speak to.

The New York Times reports this morning that the FBI is now investigating because "...hundreds of thousands of dollars are missing and presumed stolen" from the NRCC. Chris Ward is no longer employed by the NRCC, and is the target of the FBI's investigation.

For decades now the Republican free traders have been reducing oversight on various financial and non-financial activities by making regulations less explicit and by reducing oversight. The results have been increased danger to consumers (lead in children's toys), increased environmental destruction, incompetent and even crooked mortgage lending, and frauds like this one perpetuated on the NRCC itself. While most people are honest in most ways, they cannot be trusted to be honest if they are not checked on. There has to be oversight.

Without audits, taxpayers will not pay their taxes or keep honest books. This is just one more example of the wrongheadedness of the Reagan Revolution's complaint of "Get the government off our backs." That complaint was primarily started by people who did not want to put in the effort of doing their job accurately and keeping good records, a characteristic (in my opinion) of many otherwise excellent salespeople.

Now the Republican complaint of "Get government off our backs" has come back to bite the Republican Party in the rear end - again.

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My earlier post on this subject can be seen here along with a link to an earlier report by The Politico.

Rove lied when denying the 60-Minutes accusations

As we know, 60-Minutes presented a story saying that Karl Rove was an instigator of the trumped up Department of Justice charges that caused the Democratic governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman, to be removed from office and imprisoned on charges that did not reach the level of any kind of crime. The contents of the 60-Minutes story have been well-leaked in advance, and widely discussed.

A key witness against Karl Rove is Jill Simpson who has testified that she heard discussions among Alabama Republicans that Rove was pushing the Department of Justice to bring charges against Governor Siegelman, and particularly Ms. Simpson has testified that Karl Rove specifically asked her to "find" evidence that the Governor was unfaithful to his wife. Rove wanted her to get compromising photos of Siegelman having sex with one of his aides, something she says she was unable do. She states that she was unable to ever find any evidence supporting the charges that were brought against Governor Siegelman and that the charges which were brought against him were trumped up for political purposes.

This was written about in an Associated Press story Thursday, Feb 21st. The author of that story, Ben Evans, contacted Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, for a comment and was told:

"Mr. Rove never made such a request to her or anyone else," Luskin said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "Had '60 Minutes' taken the trouble to contact Mr. Rove before circulating this falsehood, he would have told them the same thing."

Scott Horton wrote a piece, published February 22 by Harper's which states that he personally knows that what Luskin said in Rove's defense is false.

First, Scott Horton reports that he has personal knowledge that Ms. Simpson had previously made those same statements about Rove attempting to manufacture evidence against Governor Siegelman. He takes Ben Evan's reporting to task:

Ben Evans writes: “She has never before said that Rove pressed her for evidence of marital infidelity in spite of testifying to congressional lawyers last year, submitting a sworn affidavit and speaking extensively with reporters.” Evans is dead wrong on this. If he had written “It has not previously been reported that she said that Rove…” he would be fine. I interviewed Simpson in July and she recounted this to me; and I believe she recounted it to two other reporters as well, one with another major national publication, but I’ll let them speak for themselves. She requested that I not write it up or report it without her prior okay, and I abided by her request. My understanding is that she also gave this information to congressional investigators when they initially interviewed her. So Evans is incorrect.

Then Horton points out Luskin's falsehood and its apparent genesis from Rove himself:

In fact, Rove was contacted by CBS and did speak with CBS about the allegations. Rove insisted that his comments could not be used in any way without his prior permission.

I have no idea what Rove said in that discussion, but I do know that the discussion occurred.

So I’m wondering: did Rove mislead his lawyer about what happened? As we enter the coverage of the Siegelman story with the CBS exposé, much will turn on Rove’s truthfulness. And he has started the process with a predictable pattern: he lies when he thinks he can get away with it, or even better, he has others lie in his stead.

So, has Karl rove committed perjury in his own sworn Grand Jury testimony?

I doubt that we will know as long as the Bush administration controls the Department of Justice. The question is, will the Democrats have to cojones to continue the investigation after taking over the White House in January of 2009?

The history of Democratic leadership wimpihood does not give me any real reason to hope for justice in this case, which would basically mean releasing Siegelman from prison with an apology and putting Rove in to replace him.

One thing that this morning's announcement by Ralph Nadar that he is again running for President did point out is that there really is very little difference between the Republicans and the Democrats in their leadership and their policies. What is different is that the Republicans are willing to take unreasonable risks and then lie about it, assuming they will never be caught, while the Democrats seem to think that as long as they let the Republicans get away with their corruption and lies then the Democrats will get to keep their cushy power jobs for life. Governor Siegelman's imprisonment is apparently just a bit of collateral damage as the leaders of both major parties carefully watch out for their own personal well-being and ignore the American people.

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Addendum01 Feb 25, 2008 10:45AM
Go watch the 60 Minute story at TPM Muckraker. Notice that:

• The two most prominent on air accusers claiming that the prosecution of Governor Siegelman was a political prosecution trumped up by the Bush Republican politicized Department of Justice are, themselves, Republicans.
• The Department of Justice is stonewalling. They are not announcing any investigation and are refusing to turn over any documents which have been requested, with no reason giving.

Stonewalling implies guilt, and the natural allies of the Republican Department of Justice are among the accusers willing to present their story to the public.

This story isn't going away, and this is a Presidential election year.

Congressman Rick Renzi (AZ-R) indicted for Fraud, money-laundering

This case sure took long enough to percolate up into an indictment. Rep. Rick Renzi has been indicted for fraud and money laundering. According to TPM Muckraker the fraud was using his Congressional office to promote the purchase of land from his buddy, James Sandlin, that the buyers could then swap for more valuable government land. The money laundering charge is based on the way Renzi got his kickbacks through a series of obscure transactions designed to hide the fact that the money he received indirectly from Sandlin was in fact illegal kickbacks.

• Here is the indictment.
  
• My previous post, summarizing the activity on the Renzi case up to last September can be found at " Rep. Renzi (AZ-R) expects to be indicted."
• Laura Rozen adds some background on Rep Renzi's "lost" twenty years of personal history with the DoD. Was he a "spook"? If so, does this dovetail with the Duke Cunningham - Dusty Foggo/Brent Wilkes - Thomas Kontogiannis set of cases?
  

The Bush Department of Justice has been slow-walking the Renzi investigation and indictment, much as they have the investigation of California Rep. Doolittle, but apparently they couldn't keep it under wraps any longer.

The Washington state Republican caucuses.

The way the conservatives tried to manipulate their own caucuses in Washington State is quite unbelievable - or it would be if they weren't conservatives. Here is what Sam Boyd had to say about it:

...they ran the caucuses contrary to their own rules, possibly fiddled with the results of those caucuses (remember the party ran this election not the state) and then just stopped reporting the results at all once they had their desired result. And we wonder why conservatives have trouble governing...

More details will appear soon, I am sure.

But will they appear in the national media? The New York Times has yet to publish a story on this clear effort to rig the Republican caucus. Similarly, the Washington Post provided a brief report on Huckabee's complaint about how the Republican Party just stopped counting votes, but the report came out Monday. They missed the story when it happened Saturday, and haven't gone beyond a short Reuters wire report of Huckabee's challenge on Monday.

Who are the media afraid of embarrassing? John McCain or the Republican Party in general? One thing is clear, though. They've missed the real story and embarrassed themselves.

Republicans vs. Truth and Honesty - no connection

What do they have to hide? Why is the National Republican Congressional Committee handing out a fake audit report? From The Politico:

Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), a certified public accountant, had pushed for months for an internal audit of the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to GOP members, but the committee’s treasurer at the time was reluctant.

Finally, at a recent meeting, the now former NRCC treasurer, Christopher J. Ward, relented, giving Conaway what was supposed to be an official internal audit from 2006. That document was a fake, the GOP members said. Even the letterhead on which it was sent was a forgery.

Revelations about the falsified document touched off an unfolding scandal that has rocked the NRCC and spurred a criminal investigation by the FBI into the committee’s accounting procedures.

Fearing the fallout from the discovery, the NRCC informed its principal lender, Wachovia, of potential accounting problems. Wachovia, which declined comment Thursday, had lent the committee $9 million in 2006, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Knowing the bank was required by law to notify federal investigators of any “suspicious activity,” the NRCC also alerted the FBI, Republican insiders confirmed.

At the same time, NRCC officials notified the FEC that the committee may have filed inaccurate disclosure statements.

If it were anyone except the Republican Party in Congress, this would be beyond belief, but for those guys this is just standard operating procedure.

When every major institution in the Republican Party demands no oversight by anyone and operates entirely in secret, then you know they are crooks rapidly carrying off as much as they can before the light of day catches up to them. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Bob Ney and Jack Abramoff may soon have a lot of company in the federal penitentiaries. There will never be an adequate accounting of all the criminality of the Republican Party during the Bush 43 years.

Washington state Republican caucus - vote rigged for McCain?

It looks like the Republicans may have gone too far in vote stealing. It's bad enough when they steal votes and elections from Democrats, but this time the establishment Republicans may have tried to steal the Washington state caucuses yesterday from Huckabee for McCain. Here, from The Seattle Time's David Postman is what Huckabee's campaign manager, Ed Rollins, has to say:

“The Huckabee campaign is deeply disturbed by the obvious irregularities in the Washington State Republican precinct caucuses. It is very unfortunate that the Washington State Party Chairman, Luke Esser, chose to call the race for John McCain after only 87 percent of the vote was counted. According to CNN, the difference between Senator McCain and Governor Huckabee is a mere 242 votes, out of more than 12,000 votes counted—with another 1500 or so votes, apparently, not counted. That is an outrage.

“In other words, more than one in eight Evergreen State Republicans have been disenfranchised by the actions of their own party.

I'm sure the Washington state establishment Republicans have a good reason for calling the election for McCain when only 87% of the votes were counted and the difference between McCain and Huckabee was a mere 242 votes. Like, for instance:

"What? You mean that Huckabee voters are Republicans, not Democrats? Are you sure?" or

"McCain is going to win anyway. We have our orders." or

"We just figured the Huckabee social conservatives would shut up and follow orders for the good of the Party. They always have in the past." or

"Huckabee? You mean that's not a joke name, like Mickey Mouse, that some prankster added to the ballot when they were being printed? We just assumed it was a joke." or

"Don't get your knickers in a twist. We'll count the rest of them along with the Florida 2000 ballots - someday." or

"We're just practicing for the general election."

I'm sure there are hundreds of similar good reasons. Has the Republican National Committee weighed in yet?

The fine art of extortion as practiced by Bush's HUD Secretary

Apparently Bush's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development learned his management skills from the Mafia. Demand what you want for your friends, and if the people whose property you are trying to have transferred to your friends refuse, then punish them every way possible.

The Washington Post has the story.

What's the difference between the Bush administration and a criminal cartel?

About the only thing noticeable is that most criminal cartels have higher standards of personal honor and aren't as dependent on military power.

The results of an unregulated financial market* is boom, bust, ending with government bailout for the wealthy*

Aw, poor bankers. They worked so hard to qualify so many people to lend money to, and look what happened? Now the borrowers can't pay the money back, and they will go into default on their mortgages.

But it's all the fault of greedy borrowers who wanted to act rich and got overextended, right? Someone has to save the poor bankers because when they go bust they take the entire economy with them.

Crap.

This is the direct result of the Reagan Revolution. First the Reaganites created the Savings and Loan Crisis because their deregulation of interest rates had made America's home lenders unable to attract enough funds to use to issue mortgages, so they "solved" that problem by deregulating the S & L's. The resulting failure of the entire industry required a massive government bailout using taxpayer funds to save the economy.

Let's not forget that St. Ronnie appointed Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve chief in 1987 as much of the S&L disaster was being worked out. The government bailout made a lot of investors extremely wealthy while many other people, those without great wealth to start with, lost everything. This was a part of the Reagan Revolution to make the wealthy even more wealthy and to put pressure on the middle class. It was written into law in the Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA). The bank failures and government handouts had a lot to do with creating the recession of 1991 and 1992 that was a key element in the defeat of George H.W. Bush by Bill Clinton and also may have created a moral hazard that encouraged the poor lending practices that have created the current subprime lending disaster.

The certain pattern of an unregulated financial market is always a boom, then a bust, and then a demand that the government bail out the biggest banks and other culprits to save the economy. The middle class always gets hurt, while the most wealthy get even more wealthy.

Remember also that without an inheritance tax on great wealth, that wealth is passed down through families through inheritance to people who did nothing to earn it and usually could not do anything other than shepherd and defend their family wealth. Inheritors of great wealth are generally very conservative with aristocratic views of society who practice politics that itself damages the general productivity of the economy. An example is Richard Mellon Scaife who funded many of the conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, used millions just to attack Bill Clinton, and later created a sinecure as Dean of Pepperdine Law School for Ken Star's services in behalf of the Mellon fortune.

The inheritors of great wealth are so busy defending that wealth and their social position that they have no time or energy to add to economic productivity. That's because economic productivity is a result of the middle class. It is simply not something the inheritors of great wealth do.

The Reagan Revolution has been all about building up great fortunes while damaging the middle class. It was a system. It involved deregulating financial activity, eliminating the power of workers to organize and effectively negotiate for their share of the rewards from their own productive efforts, creating a boom and bust economy of the same kind that led to the Great Depression, and changing government rules so that big businesses were able to get government to tax the working and middle class and transfer the resulting wealth to the very wealthy. (See David Cay Johnston's excellent expose Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) for the details. Also see Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.)

It's time to stop the wealthy from their power grab and return America to the middle class to whom this nation has always belonged.

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* This is true of the financial economy, but Different rules apply to the real economy in which true competition can exist.

2008 will be the nastiest election in memory

Right now we are looking at Iowa with a bit of amazement to see who will survive it and move forward to New Hampshire, but the real primary is coming when 24 states hold primaries on February 5th. We will know the nominees after that.

Then it is going to get really nasty. The right-wingers are going down in November, and they already know it. They hate that. Digby describes what is going to happen between Feb 6 and Nov 4, and maybe after.

The right is fully prepared to run against either The Bitch, O-Bambi, or The Breck Girl (and in case he makes a sprint for the finish, Bill "Anchor Baby" Richardson) with the most hideous misogynist/racist/quasi-homophobic/xenophobic campaign in history. They know they are probably going to lose --- but they'll let the neanderthals on the bench have some fun in the second half to sharpen their skills.

Plan on it. There will be lies, slime, criminal activity and just plain nastiness and almost all of it will come from the crazies on the right.

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.