On Tuesday night, the Minnesota Democrat got his first piece of legislation passed by the United States Senate via roll call vote. The amendment stopped federal funding for those defense contractors who used mandatory arbitration clauses to deny victims of assault the right to bring their case to court. It passed by a 68-30 margin with nine Republicans joining each voting Democrat. And in the immediate aftermath, Franken was granted the chance to revel, ever so slightly, in his victory.\
"The story came to my attention of Jamie Leigh Jones who, when she was 19, went to Iraq to work for [defense contractor] KBR and she was put in the barracks with 400 men and was sexually harassed," Franken told the Huffington Post in a brief interview shortly after the vote. "She complained. But they didn't do anything about it. She was drugged and gang raped and they locked her up in a shipping container. She tried to sue KBR and they said you have a mandatory arbitration clause in your contract. She tried to fight back and said this is ridiculous. She took it to court and they have been fighting her for three years."
"This bill would make it so that anybody in business with the Department of the Defense can't do this," he concluded emphatically. "They can't have mandatory arbitration on issues like assault and battery."
You'd think this kind of amendment wouldn't only get 100 votes, but somehow former Senators would storm the floor and demand that they too could offer their support for the legislation. Instead, in the culture we now have in Washington, 30 Republicans voted against this. I don't know how you characterize this other than saying that they think it's perfectly reasonable for women to be raped on Defense Department-funded American bases, left in shipping containers, and barred from bringing up charges subsequently. They actually called this a political attack aimed at Halliburton, even though the bill named no contractor specifically.
Um, what would you call the "Defund ACORN Act," exactly? And while I know that was the biggest scandal in the history of scandals, AFAIK ACORN has never protected their employees from raping someone and detaining them in a shipping container. Again, to the best of my knowledge.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention that, while the Franken amendment was nice, the overall defense authorization bill includes lots of spending for the war in Afghanistan, and would ban the transfer of any detainee at Gitmo to the United States. As Franken would say, "Oy."
Mike Bloomberg is in an election that is surprisingly tough (in single digits) despite spending around $75 million dollars, and despite his faults he's always been a strong supporter of gun control. So I'm not surprised he launched this investigation into gun show practices and released some damning hidden-camera video.
Even though private unlicensed sellers are not required to run background checks using the FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check system, it is a federal felony for them to sell guns to people they have reason to believe are prohibited purchasers (such as felons or the mentally ill). In purchases attempted on 30 private sellers, the undercover investigator showed interest in buying a gun by asking about stopping power or by dry-firing the weapon. After agreeing on a price, the undercover would indicate that he probably couldn’t pass a background check. At that point, the seller is required by law to refuse the sale – but only 11 out of 30 sellers did so. Investigators found private dealers who failed these integrity tests at every show, including two sellers who failed at multiple shows. In total, 19 of the 30 private sellers approached failed the integrity test.
The 11 sellers who terminated the sale confirmed that private sellers know the law. As one seller in Columbus, Ohio, explained “I mean even as a private citizen, I’m kind of allowed a certain latitude, but once you say that [you can’t pass the background check], I’m kind of obligated not to….I think that’s what the rules are.”
The investigation also revealed that some private sellers are in fact apparently “engaged in the business” of selling firearms without a federal license, in violation of the law. For example, one seller sold to investigators at three different gun shows and acknowledged selling 348 assault rifles in less than one year.
There are more videos at Gun Show Undercover. The gun show loophole seriously needs to be closed, and this investigation could provide that. The ATF Bureau reports that 30% of all illegal guns are coming in through these gun shows.
Media Matters wonders if this undercover investigation will tickle the fancy of outlets like Andrew Breitbart and Fox News, who have shown such an affinity for this kind of operation in the past.
There's lots of anger and frustration out there right now. The zeitgeist is as angry and negative as I've ever seen it. Economic stress almost always leads to a rise in crime. The conservatives' only answer to this problem is to allow business to exploit their customers even more than they already have and create an ever more authoritarian police capacity to "keep people in line." The real answer is to find ways to ease the economic stress and get some of these deadly weapons out of the hands of criminals. You can probably guess which way this is likely to go.
But still, there is a need to shine a light on this out of control gun industry. I'm not a gun control absolutist, but the kind of activity that's exposed in these undercover videos is far more unacceptable than somebody giving tax advice to phony pimps. This is a deadly business that's killing innocent people.
One can only hope that this legitimate undercover investigation will get the kind of attention the ACORN videos did. It's a matter of life and death.
"Some Republicans", Republican Reps. Mark Steven Kirk and Peter Roskam of Illinois and Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, a guy named Herman Benson who appears to publicly hate SEIU for a living, and James "Buddy" Caldwell, the Democratic Attorney General of Louisiana, a state where the statewide Democrats are all Democrats in name only.
That seems like a broad cross-section of American opinion, worthy of the title "some".
Eric Boehlert traces this back to the media's touchiness with any criticism from the right that they are ignoring their issues. So they go completely in the other direction and dutifully type up guilt-by-association pieces like this, and they bury the truth about who is actually leading the crusade:
Today, with the GOP increasingly irrelevant and the right-wing media, and specifically Fox News, taking over as the Opposition Party, other journalists are now taking their cues in terms of partisan news from radio talk show hosts and cable TV hosts. It's unprecedented.
In today's "Some Criticize" era, all White House opponents have to do (regardless of who they are or what power they hold) is criticize Obama and the press corps snaps to attention and starts typing up the list of grievances. So today we have the Post furthering Fox News' attempted guilt-by-association with regards to ACORN and labor power SEIU, but the Post pretends it's really the GOP that's leading the charge:
"Last week, Republican Reps. Mark Steven Kirk and Peter Roskam of Illinois and Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina urged the Census Bureau to stop allowing the SEIU to help recruit workers for its 2010 head count."
This utterly mundane partisan request suddenly qualifies as news in a Post article that's virtually barren of any actual revelations about ACORN or SEIU? Again, it's really Fox News and the GOP Noise Machine that are criticizing the "connections" between ACORN and SEIU, and it's the Post presenting that hodge-podge as news.
The article is really a ping-pong match of charges and random associations, like a written version of The Glenn Beck Show.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress, in a far more newsworthy story than what some Republicans are saying about whatever, have introduced a bill to hold defrauders of the government Treasury to the same standard to which the House held ACORN:
Top-ranking liberal lawmaker Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) pressed her colleagues to support a legislative counterpunch to the GOP’s effort to defund the controversial grass-roots organizing group ACORN.
McCollum, a senior Democratic Whip in her caucus, challenged the 172 Democrats who supported a measure to cut off federal funds for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to endorse a similar measure geared towards private companies in business with the government.
The appropriations committee member introduced the “ACORN Act,” or “Against Corporations Organizing to Rip-off the Nation Act,” last week; it is the first formal defense against the recent GOP success in Congress to defund the left-leaning activist organization.
Democratic Reps. Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), David Obey (Wis.), Pete Stark (Calif.), Keith Ellison (Minn.), Lynn Woolsey (Calif.), Jim McDermott (Wash.) and Barbara Lee (Calif.) have co-sponsored the bill that would cut off federal agreements with private companies, nonprofits and other groups that have been convicted of defrauding the government.
If we had a media capable of dealing in an actual even-handed manner instead of the fake even-handedness they currently peddle, every Republican in the country would be asked if they support holding all corporations convicted of defrauding the government to the same standard.
Instead, we get "Some people say SEIU has cooties because it played in the same sandbox as ACORN."
In a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger dated Sept. 25, Chief Deputy Attorney General James M. Humes said the office has "opened an investigation of both ACORN and the circumstances under which ACORN employees were videotaped." The governor had asked Brown two weeks ago to look into the incidents.
The probe was sparked by a series of hidden-camera videos in which a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute are advised on how to set up a prostitution business by people identified as workers for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. The videos were taken in Washington D.C., San Diego, San Bernardino and cities in several other states.
There's at least a nod to the possibility that the videotapes were obtained illegally, although I'm not sure California law mirrors the state of Maryland, where the filmmakers clearly violated the law. But the tendency for Brown to follow Governor Headline and chase the popular story is pretty lame. Remember that the Governor specifically called on Brown to investigate ACORN because of the San Bernardino tape, which is full of holes:
Most critically, it is clear that Fox News has made virtually no attempt to verify the authenticity of the tapes before broadcasting them -- something no self-respecting journalistic organization would dare do. Consider the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the most recent video to be released. The words of ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke appear to be damning. Not only does she offer assistance to Giles and O'Keefe, but she claims that she murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse [...]
The problem, of course, is that Kaelke was deliberately lying. The San Bernardino Police Department itself has now confirmed that her claim regarding her husband was untrue. A department statement released on September 15 reads: "The San Bernardino Police Department is investigating the claims made regarding the homicide. From the initial investigation conducted, the claims do not appear to be factual. Investigators have been in contact with the involved party's known former husbands, who are alive and well."
Furthermore, Kaelke has claimed that when she made the statement, she was seeking to mislead the undercover videographers, whom she was suspicious of. "They were not believable," Kaelke is quoted as saying in an ACORN press release. "Somewhat entertaining, but they weren't even good actors. I didn't know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me."
But none of these simple facts stopped anyone at Fox from running with the story. Any cub reporter would have thought to actually call the San Bernardino police before effectively alleging that ACORN was staffed by murderers. But such an act never occurred to people like Beck, Hannity, or Carlson. (In her defense, Carlson later added that the husband was still alive, "according to ACORN," but ignored the police report.)
Let's be honest. Fearmongering about ACORN is a cover for a racially tinged agenda by ideological extremists. If the actions of a couple employees provokes a state Attorney General investigation of entire companies, I eagerly await the investigations into every company in California. But we don't have that. Instead, Jerry Brown has decided to follow the fearmongering, and legitimize it. Sad.
The Congressional Research Service took a look at the anti-ACORN rider the House passed last week, and pretty much agreed that the bill is an unconstitutional "bill of attainder":
The two main criteria which the courts would likely look to in order to determine whether legislation is a bill of attainder are (1) whether “specific” individuals or entities are affected by the statute, and (2) whether the legislation inflicts a “punishment” on those individuals. Under the instant bills, the fact that ACORN and its affiliates are named in the legislation for differential treatment would appear to meet a per se criteria for specificity.
While the regulatory purpose of ensuring that federal funds are properly spent is a legitimate one, it is not clear that imposing a permanent government-wide ban on contracting with or providing grants to ACORN fits that purpose, at least when the ban is applied to ACORN and its affiliates jointly and severally. In theory, under the House bill, the behavior of a single employee from a single affiliate could affect not only ACORN but all of its 361 affiliates. Thus, there may be issues raised by characterizing this legislation as purely regulatory in nature. While the Supreme Court has noted that the courts will generally defer to Congress as to the regulatory purpose of a statute absent clear proof of punitive intent, there appear to be potential issues raised with attempting to find a rational non-punitive regulatory purpose for this legislation. Thus, it appears that a court may have a sufficient basis to overcome the presumption of constitutionality, and find that it violates the prohibition against bills of attainder.
My guess is that Republicans don't care about the constitutionality of the statute, and that they'll just keep putting the same kind of language into every appropriations bill. That way they can say that they voted to "defund ACORN," and if it comes out their bills are all unconstitutional, they can claim that Democrats are "protecting" the organization from their good-faith efforts to defend the taxpayers from corruption, or something. I don't expect "bill of attainder" to become a household word anytime soon on the right.
The problem for Republicans is that they actually submitted language on the initial anti-ACORN statute that was entirely broad, to circumvent the constitutionality issue, and in the process opened up the Congress to deny funding to any company accused of fraud - namely practically every defense contractor in America. Alan Grayson has been taking the lead on this - C&L had him over for a live chat yesterday.
The bill, H.R. 3221, defunds every organization that has ever filed a fraudulent report with any Federal or State regulatory agency. As it turns out, this includes all 10 of the 10 largest Government contractors. To which I say, hooray. Finally, we take the fraud out of government contracting. Too bad that it was inadvertent.
ACORN has now decided to sue the two filmmakers who ran undercover sting operations at their satellite offices, for violating Maryland law by obtaining documentary footage without consent.
The group contends that the audio portion of the video was obtained illegally because Maryland requires two-party consent to create sound recordings.
The two employees seen in the video were fired after it was posted online. The lawsuit says the employees, Tonja Thompson and Shera Williams, suffered "extreme emotional distress."
The multimillion-dollar lawsuit seeks damages from James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the pimp and prostitute in the videos, and from conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart, who posted the videos on his Web site.
When ABC News took hidden-camera video of Food Lion workers bleaching rotten meat for resale, they sued - and won in court, to boot. The law is pretty clear on all this.
Mind you, this is the second Breitbart operation in as many weeks where he has posted illegally obtained material on his website. This nascent NEA mini-scandal uses audio from a conference call whose taping seems to violate state law.
There's also the matter of the worker in one surreptitiously taped ACORN video calling the police and reporting the couple for human trafficking. For his effort, he got fired by ACORN based on what he said in the video, regardless of the fact that he did the right thing and reported the fake pimp and prostitute to the police.
James O'Keefe, the supposedly "independent" filmmaker responsible for the ACORN sting, may be getting all kinds of cash from the conservative movement, but he'll need a lot of it, with all the state laws he appears to be breaking.
Ryan Grim has an amusing report about the unintended consequences in the conservative attempt to embarrass ACORN:
Going after ACORN may be like shooting fish in a barrel lately -- but jumpy lawmakers used a bazooka to do it last week and may have blown up some of their longtime allies in the process.
The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.
In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.
Alan Grayson is all over this, with a list of defense contractor misconduct at the ready.
So conservatives have two choices - let the ACORN bill wither on the grounds that it's an unconstitutional bill of attainder, or push it forward and open it up to about a decade's worth of Alan Grayson filing motions to deny funds to Northrop Grumman or Blackwater or whoever. The establishment would probably just prefer this gets swallowed up in conference, but from a political standpoint that would be the worst thing to do because it lets Republicans off the hook. If they really want to stop tax dollars from going to fraudulent companies, then game on.
It's not all that unusual for a production staffer to goose a crowd with the intent to make a shot look good. And certainly, the people at that protest would have been inclined to cheer for a Fox News report anyway.
The Huffington Post has confirmed that the woman in the below video — seen raising her arms to rally the crowd behind Griff Jenkins, who was reporting from the scene for Fox News — is Fox News producer Heidi Noonan.
"The employee is a young, relatively inexperienced associate producer who realizes she made a mistake and has been disciplined," Bryan Boughton, Fox News Channel Washington Bureau Chief told the Huffington Post.
Just an inexperienced employee who made a mistake and was disciplined. It's not indicative of a large news organization and their hundreds of employees. Nothing to see here, everybody move along.
How is this at all different from the ACORN story?
(My point, if unclear, is not that everybody at Fox News is hopelessly corrupt and complicit at creating news events instead of reporting on them - that's just the province of top management - it's that they feel perfectly justified in blaming events on individual staffers and taking no responsibility, while not accepting the same stance from an organization with thousands of satellite offices like ACORN.)
...in the same vein - David Vitter complaining that criminal activity is the issue with ACORN, when he has pretty much admitted to his own criminal activity regarding prostitution, which is the same supposed sin "exposed" on those ACORN tapes.
The wingnutosphere has been in high froth the last week or so about ACORN, the community organization dedicated to helping low-income Americans. The freak-out concerns a series of videos showing ACORN employees engaged in nefarious schemes (it took lots of shoots for the right-wing activists to get the footage they wanted, incidentally). This has led to the Census Bureau distancing themselves from ACORN and the Senate to block HUD funding for the group. It's interesting in and of itself that the right has decided the source of all ills in America is a relatively small community organization and not the banking and financial interests who destroyed the economy and took hundreds of billions in bailout money for good measure. But never one to miss a pile-on, the Governor has requested an investigation of ACORN:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently has been captivated by recent news stories about a conservative filmmaker who exposed misdeeds at ACORN, the national organization that serves low-income residents and has been involved in controversial efforts to register Democratic voters.
The Republican governor sent a brief memo Wednesday to Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown asking him to investigate ACORN's activities in San Bernardino. Two conservative activists have posted videos of their visits to ACORN offices around the country in which they posed as a prostitute and a pimp seeking advice.
In San Bernardino's ACORN office, a volunteer who claims to be a former prostitute is shown offering advice to the two activists on how to set up a brothel using underage girls from El Salvador. She tells them that they would be breaking various laws, but also explains ways to get around those laws. At one point, she claims to have connections to various Democratic lawmakers in the state Legislature and Congress.
It's amusing that the Governor has honed in on the San Bernardino case. Because that would be at least one instance where the guerrilla filmmakers - and now, the Governor - got totally played. John Santore explains:
Most critically, it is clear that Fox News has made virtually no attempt to verify the authenticity of the tapes before broadcasting them -- something no self-respecting journalistic organization would dare do. Consider the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the most recent video to be released. The words of ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke appear to be damning. Not only does she offer assistance to Giles and O'Keefe, but she claims that she murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse.
On September 15, Beck and Sean Hannity both broadcast Kaelke's assertion. Beck, who had reported breathlessly on the supposed confession during his radio program, added on Fox, "She never spanked her kids, but she did shoot her husband dead." Later that night, Hannity played the same clip before commenting, "Specifically, now, she goes into this scenario about her husband and the killing of him."
The following morning, on September 16, Fox News' Gretchen Carlson repeated the allegation, saying, "She killed somebody? Despite this, some lawmakers want to keep funding the group."
The problem, of course, is that Kaelke was deliberately lying. The San Bernardino Police Department itself has now confirmed that her claim regarding her husband was untrue. A department statement released on September 15 reads: "The San Bernardino Police Department is investigating the claims made regarding the homicide. From the initial investigation conducted, the claims do not appear to be factual. Investigators have been in contact with the involved party's known former husbands, who are alive and well."
Furthermore, Kaelke has claimed that when she made the statement, she was seeking to mislead the undercover videographers, whom she was suspicious of. "They were not believable," Kaelke is quoted as saying in an ACORN press release. "Somewhat entertaining, but they weren't even good actors. I didn't know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me."
But none of these simple facts stopped anyone at Fox from running with the story. Any cub reporter would have thought to actually call the San Bernardino police before effectively alleging that ACORN was staffed by murderers. But such an act never occurred to people like Beck, Hannity, or Carlson. (In her defense, Carlson later added that the husband was still alive, "according to ACORN," but ignored the police report.)
Some of the other allegations have shown what may be wrongdoing, if the tapes are legitimate and not doctored (they are certainly edited for effect, and we know they were in some cases obtained illegally and therefore inadmissable as evidence). It may even warrant an investigation. But Schwarzenegger is specifically riffing off the San Bernardino incident, in which the main offense described there has been proven to be a lie. This apparently doesn't matter. I'm wondering what other provable falsehoods have led to the Governor urging a criminal investigation.
This is at least not as embarrassing as Tim Pawlenty, who ordered agencies in Minnesota to "cancel all state funding for ACORN," when there... is no state funding of ACORN in Minnesota. But it's pretty weak nonetheless. And par for the course for a headline-chaser like Gov. Schwarzenegger. But if he wants to get in line with far-right extremists with an obvious racial agenda who want to demonize people of color and the organizations that provide help for them, go ahead. It did a lot for Pete Wilson.
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?
TOOBIN: You definitely could. No question.
COLBERT: What does it mean to individual donation? A corporation, as a person, gets to give any amount of money, but I as a person can give only $2,500.
TOOBIN: That's what's potentially the next legal challenge. Because if giving money is a form of speech, as the Court has held at various times, you can't prohibit a company from giving money. And then presumably the next step would be that you couldn't have limits on how much individuals could give either. That's the potential implication of this decision.
COLBERT: So right now, corporations would actually have more power as people than people, until people catch up with corporations.
Here's the point. Stephen Colbert, a comedian, devoted his show to arcane campaign finance law to show the power of corporations to engage in a hostile takeover of government and extract virtually any law they choose, with no consequences for any wrongdoing. Consequently, the self-described populists on the right - aided by a hapless political class - are working their minions into a frenzy over some unidentified alien "other" coming to take your hard-earned tax dollars, without the pernicious influence of rapacious corporations ever entering into it. Anonymous Liberal had a great post on this yesterday.
But even if you take these film-makers at face value and assume the worst, the reality is that ACORN has thousands of employees and the vast majority of them spend their days trying to help poor people through perfectly legal means (and receive very little compensation for doing so). Even before yesterday's Senate vote, the amount of federal money that went to ACORN was very small. This is a relatively insignificant organization in the grand scheme of things, but it's an organization that has unquestionably fought over the years to improve the lives of the less fortunate in this country.
That the GOP and its conservative supporters would single out this particular organization for such intense demonization is telling. In September of last year, the entire world came perilously close to complete financial catastrophe. We're still not out of the woods and we're deep within one of the worst recessions in U.S. history. This situation was brought about by the recklessness and greed of our banks and financial institutions, most of which had to be bailed out at enormous cost to the American taxpayer (exponentially more than all of the tax dollars given to ACORN over the years). The people who brought about this near catastrophe, for the most, profited immensely from it. These very same institutions, propped up by the American taxpayer, are once again raking in large profits.
But rather than focus their anger on these folks, conservatives choose to go after an organization composed almost entirely of low-paid community organizers, an organization that could never hope to have even a small fraction of the clout or the ability to affect the overall direction of the country that Wall Street bankers have. ACORN's relative lack of political influence was on full display yesterday, when the U.S. Senate (in which Democrats have a supermajority) not only entertained a vote to defund ACORN, but approved it by a huge margin (with only seven Democrats opposing).
Absolutely. Set aside the fact that the Glenn Becks of the world are smearing community organizations that help low-income folks, often at variance with the facts. It's the intensity of focus from the privileged on the poor, the disenfranchised, and yes, minorities, when measured against the influence and giant multinational corporations who are on the verge of buying American elections, that strikes such a discordant note. But not for the hucksters pushing the smears and the paranoids and racists who lap it up. They want to believe that black people have the power in America and they're coming for you and your children, so they can ignore the fact that they've been duped - that the ruling class has controlled the political machinery to keep them underfoot, and handed them welfare queens and illegal immigrants and all sorts of other members of the "lower orders" on which they can focus their attention. This boils down to a largely homogenous class of people not wanting their money, or anything, really, to go to people who don't look like them. "Illegals" or the undeserving poor need not apply. It's been a time-tested tactic going back to Richard Nixon's Southern strategy. And it allows a majority ruling class of whites, terrified that their stranglehold on the country is slipping away, to pretend that a race war is coming when it's the class war grinding them into the dust.
Matt Taibbi called it the peasant mentality. The powers that be get the lower classes to fight amongst themselves and split along ideological or tribal or other identifying lines, leaving room for them to prosper. For Republicans, that means painting their opponents, who are less homogenous and are made up of so-called "outsiders" of society - the poor, the disenfranchised, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, etc. - as undeserving of really anything; and painting the leaders of that party - whether it be a Governor from Arkansas or a war hero from Massachusetts or South Dakota or a multicultural community organizer from Illinois - as the head of a movement to destroy American culture. That's really basically it.
And all the while, both sides in DC studiously ignore the near-complete capture of the country by companies seeking only profit, and the corporate-owned media just follows the manufactured drama and goes mute on the critical stuff, such that it takes a comedian to shine a spotlight on this unexamined corner.
Until now the cowering in fear to the radical right was mainly a province of the White House. Never one to be left out, Senate Democrats got into the act yesterday by blocking HUD grants to ACORN.
The Senate voted Monday to block the Housing and Urban Development Department from giving grants to ACORN, a community organization under fire in voter-registration fraud cases.
If the House agrees with the Senate, ACORN could not win HUD grants for programs such as counseling low-income people on how to get mortgages.
Last week, the Census Bureau severed ties with ACORN, saying it does not want the group's help with the 2010 count. The group, which advocates for poor people, conducted a voter registration effort last year and became a target of conservatives when some workers were accused of submitting false registration forms with names including Mickey Mouse.
And of course, Democrats won in 2006 and 2008 thanks to 50 million big-eared human-sized mice coming to the polls and voting, right?
I thought we would want low-income Americans to have counseling on housing, but I guess if we take the community organizations out of it and let them get ripped off by predatory lenders, all the better.
More than that, this is just a pander to Glenn Beck and Fox News' whipping up of unfounded hysteria against ACORN, which they blame for everything from socialism in America to the death of Patrick Swayze. ACORN gets their own independent funding in large part, so this won't really impact them, but it's disappointing to see Democrats, in large numbers (final vote was 83-7) crapping on organizations that radical rightist forces unilaterally determine to be evil.
Meanwhile, ACORN may sure Fox News over the doctored videos they keep airing. Tell me where to send the amicus brief.
...It does go without saying that bipartisan elites in Washington fall all over themselves to distance from ACORN, but a company like Blackwater can murder dozens of civilians in Iraq and still get lucrative government contracts.
Barack Obama has released his plan for dealing with the housing crisis at FinancialStability.gov and in a speech in Phoenix. It's not a moment too soon - housing starts are at a record low, and the glut of foreclosures threatens to crash property values, bankrupt the financial institutions who relied on mortgage sales and therefore sink the economy. So clearly we need relief.
What is foremost in the plan is keeping people in their homes, which is vital, because each foreclosure costs the economy about $250,000. The executive summary of the plan explains how the White House will seek this goal:
The Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan is part of the President’s broad, comprehensive strategy to get the economy back on track. The plan will help up to 7 to 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages to avoid foreclosure. In doing so, the plan not only helps responsible homeowners on the verge of defaulting, but prevents neighborhoods and communities from being pulled over the edge too, as defaults and foreclosures contribute to falling home values, failing local businesses, and lost jobs. The key components of the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan are:
1. Refinancing for Up to 4 to 5 Million Responsible Homeowners to Make Their Mortgages More Affordable
2. A $75 Billion Homeowner Stability Initiative to Reach Up to 3 to 4 Million At-Risk Homeowners
3. Supporting Low Mortgage Rates By Strengthening Confidence in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
While I don't think low mortgage rates should really be a goal, on balance this is a good idea. Using Sheila Bair's FDIC loan modification plan as a template, it lets Fannie and Freddie refinance mortgages for at-risk borrowers at rates they can afford, and then encourages lenders to do the same through various incentives. The good framing here is that every homeowner will get a boost from this because their property values will rise. This blunts the expected rebuttal that the plan rewards bad decisions. And to be sure, conservatives will be screaming about that, even though they were demanding that something be done just a few days ago as a way to reject the stimulus. Now they'll reject the housing plan. They are rejectionists.
The plan will not aid speculators or house flippers. And it retains the option of allowing bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages in their courts, or "cram-down." This is the stick that lines up with the carrot for lenders to make the modifications themselves.
Remember that hackneyed talk about "a bailout for Main Street" as opposed to Wall Street? I have to say that this looks like exactly that. As David Leonhardt explains.
In coming weeks, his administration will begin spending $50 billion to entice banks to reduce the monthly payments of people who otherwise couldn’t afford to stay in their houses. In effect, the government will split the losses on these mortgages with banks [...]
There are some big advantages to this approach. Bailing out all underwater homeowners would be tremendously expensive. All told, about $500 billion in mortgage debt is already underwater, and it’s impossible to know in advance who is likely to walk away. So the government would have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to help millions of people who don’t need help staying in their homes.
Leonhardt is worried about the consequences of the homeowners who are "underwater" (they owe more on the home than what it's worth) walking away from their homes, which would cause foreclosure rates to skyrocket. It is a concern, but if communities can be preserved through mitigation of the most troubled homeowners, this could stabilize values and maybe even bring some houses back above water. I don't think the government should be re-inflating the housing bubble. So this seems like the best approach.
And if you combine this inside game with the increasingly successful outside game being played by community activist groups like ACORN, who are supporting families who refuse to leave their homes, and you see a situation where the banks are really unable to do anything but rewrite terms. That's going to cause some stability for millions of people. You'll still see foreclosures because of unemployment, but they will be manageable. That's the promise of this policy.
The word from President Obama's big go to China conference with House Republicans is that he "won't compromise" on tax cuts in the stimulus package.
President Barack Obama rolled into the Capitol with a clear message for Republicans Tuesday afternoon: He’s happy to talk, but he’s not compromising on tax cuts.
Obama was ready for the House Republicans to pounce, telling them: "Feel free to whack me over the head because I probably will not compromise on that part [tax cuts],” according to two sources in the room.
One conservative House Republican who attended the hour-long closed door session was asked if Obama was winning any votes: "Nope. He said he won't compromise on more tax cuts. All form - not substance."
Lord knows we haven't suffered through form without substance the past 8 years, right? But there's something funny here. Republicans are talking about Obama not "compromising" on tax cuts in the bill without mentioning the $275 billion in tax cuts THAT ARE ALREADY IN THERE, including corporate breaks designed to garner GOP support. Obama isn't compromising MORE on the bill; it already reached the House pre-compromised.
And meanwhile, GOP oppo researchers are a-huntin' for more poison pills they can create outrage with and force out of the bill without any concurrent show of support for the final package. They're just chipping away because they can, and because Obama has responded to this stimuli in the past.
Republican lawmakers are raising concerns that ACORN, the low-income advocacy group under investigation for voter registration fraud, could be eligible for billions in aid from the economic stimulus proposal working its way through the House.
House Republican Leader John Boehner issued a statement over the weekend noting that the stimulus bill wending its way through Congress provides $4.19 billion for "neighborhood stabilization activities."
What I think is going on is that Obama really craves approval from elites. The desire for bipartisanship is an elite hobby-horse, and Obama is riding it. When elites got nervous about all that "funding for contraceptive" bullshit, Obama got it taken out of the bill. He's trying to stay above the fray and triangulating between progressives and conservatives, ending up with an ineffective bill that won't do all it can for an economic revival. And Republicans are very cleverly using his rhetoric of bipartisanship against him, to extract concessions without any return of support.
Obama ought to read every single word of this article by his former employee Mike Lux. Here's a taste:
At the end of the day, the progressive things Obama wants to do will be strongly opposed by the vast majority of Republicans. Rebuilding the economy from the bottom up, fundamentally reforming healthcare so all Americans can get reasonably priced coverage, transforming the energy economy so that we save ourselves from the worst consequences of global warming, allowing unions a fair shot at organizing, and many of the other things Obama wants to do will all be opposed by 90%+ of the Republican party and conservative movement. We already see it in the reaction from Boehner and McConnell and all of the conservative columnists Obama had dinner with the other night to his economic recovery package, even though Obama has made it smaller and put more tax cuts into it than most progressives think make sense. Making the substantive changes that actually make all of the above policy goals possible will require rejecting conservative ideas and going forward boldly where they can't follow. Key to actually achieving real healthcare reform, for example, is giving all Americans the option of joining the same public plan members of Congress get, but including that option will lose you most Republican votes. Making the massive public investments in transforming out energy economy will never be supported by most Republicans, nor will placing a tight cap on carbon emissions that isn't chock full of loopholes. 95% of Republicans will violently oppose any easing of union organizing rules. Reaching out to conservative Republicans symbolically, personally, and rhetorically can strengthen Obama for the tough political battles ahead, as long as he understands that to get the important things done that we need to achieve, they will still oppose you on virtually everything that really matters [...]
In The Progressive Revolution, I quote nineteenth century abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass' great speech where he says:
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will...men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get."
Truer words were never spoken. What history shows is that nothing important was ever done; no big change was ever made, without a knock-down, drag-out fight between progressives and conservatives. Our ideas and attitudes and fundamental philosophies are just too different. One side or another gains the upper-hand politically for a while, but neither side ever gives up or goes away, and the conservatives won't this time either. We need to strike while the iron is hot, and fight like crazy to make the big changes while we can, because we will fail if we don't understand that we are still, as always, in a war of ideas.
Exactly. And the result of that struggle has to work for everyday people, or Obama will be booted out on his ass in four years, and no promises he makes will change that.
As the last of the lawsuits against ACORN gets laughed out of court, and as Republican Secretaries of State grumble about having to reinstate voters to the rolls, it's clear that, no matter what happens in the election, this insanity around voter registration and zombie lies about voter fraud has to stop. Exhibit A is the fact that John McCain's own head of his "Honest And Open Election Committee" can't name any evidence of voter fraud.
But Ronald Michaelson, a veteran election administrator and member of the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee, said in an interview that he could not name a single instance in which this had occurred.
“Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form? No, I can’t cite one, chapter and verse,” he said [...]
Asked for specifics about the dangers of fake registration, Ben Porritt, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, provided links to 13 news clips and a 2003 Missouri state auditor’s report. Eleven of the cases did not involve registration fraud. Two recounted how felons appeared to have cast illegal votes under their own names. The lone example of a forged registration leading to an illegitimate vote comes from The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, who in April 2006 wrote that a community organizer had improperly registered a noncitizen, and “someone eventually voted in [the noncitizen’s] name.”
Michaelson, who served for 27 years as executive director of the Illinois Board of Elections, said the sharp exchanges over registration fraud have undermined voters’ confidence in the electoral system.
“The fact that so many of these illegal registrations are being made public raises a perception in the minds of people,’’ he said. “That’s more of a general concern. You don’t want to perpetuate the idea that our election process is lacking integrity.”
Asked whether his own party was responsible for fostering that perception, Michaelson said, “Well, it doesn’t help. It has captured the attention of a lot of people.” Why do it, then? “Maybe it’s because there’s nothing else to talk about,” he said.
Boy, he is part of a committee with the word "honest" in it, isn't he?
This is one of those "problems" that actually has a solution, a very smart and nonpartisan solution that would be simple to implement and would eliminate a lot of unnecessary labor. Rick Hasen asks for America to nationalize voter registration.
The solution is to take the job of voter registration for federal elections out of the hands of third parties (and out of the hands of the counties and states) and give it to the federal government. The Constitution grants Congress wide authority over congressional elections. The next president should propose legislation to have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010 census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered for future federal elections. High-school seniors could be signed up as well so that they would be registered to vote on their 18th birthday. When people submit change-of-address cards to the post office, election officials would also change their registration information.
This change would eliminate most voter registration fraud. Government employees would not have an incentive to pad registration lists with additional people in order to keep their jobs. The system would also eliminate the need for matches between state databases, a problem that has proved so troublesome because of the bad quality of the data. The federal government could assign each person a unique voter-identification number, which would remain the same regardless of where the voter moves. The unique ID would prevent people from voting in two jurisdictions, such as snowbirds who might be tempted to vote in Florida and New York. States would not have to use the system for their state and local elections, but most would choose to do so because of the cost savings.
There's something in this for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats talk about wanting to expand the franchise, and there's no better way to do it than the way most mature democracies do it: by having the government register voters. For Republicans serious about ballot integrity, this should be a winner as well. No more ACORN registration drives, and no more concerns about Democratic secretaries of state not aggressively matching voters enough to motor vehicle databases.
Finally, universal voter registration is good for the country, not only because it will make it easier for those who wish to vote to do so, but because it should end controversy over ballot integrity that threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our election process. If President McCain or Obama makes this a priority, we can have the system ready in time for the president's re-election.
Of course, Republicans aren't serious about ballot integrity, and their opposition to this would prove it. They just want something to carp about and undermine confidence in elections. In addition, there's a credible concern, given how the current government has politicized the Department of Justice and the General Services Administration, that giving over voter registration to them might have dangerous consequences.
But of course, there are Republican Secretaries of State doing that politicization right now. And wouldn't it be nice to create an election system where people don't have to turn in a form or remember to vote at an old precinct if they missed the cutoff, a system designed to make voting easier instead of harder?
This is but one possible innovation in elections (like expanding early voting access, making Election Day a weekend or a holiday, instant runoff voting, a mandate for paper ballots, abolishing the Electoral College, etc., etc.), but it certainly would help to defuse this massive hissy fit we hear every four years like clockwork. I'd love to see Republicans oppose the concept of registering every American to vote.
Now I'm going to have to call all my relatives. Thanks a lot, McCain campaign!
Pennsylvania will see a lot of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin next week.
The scheduling reflects McCain's tough electoral math. With some -- though by no means all -- advisers all but conceding Colorado, McCain would be forced to win a blue state in order to recoup the electoral votes. New Hampshire wouldn't give him enough, and Pennsylvania, the McCain campaign believes, is the most brittle of the remaining states. Public and private polls give Obama a double digit lead in the state, but McCain advisers believe that Obama is underperforming in the suburbs and exurban counties around Pittsburgh. Tensions between the two campaigns in the state is acute.
Pennsylvania doesn't have early voting, meaning that the McCain campaign is not starting from a deficit like in other states, and it's 82% white, a fairly high percentage, as well as one of the older states in the union (15%-plus over 65).
And so the dirtiest of dirty tricks are all manifesting themselves in Pennsylvania. The "B" lady who failed in her race-baiting effort to blame an assault on an African-American Obama supporter was in Pittsburgh. The Pennsylvania GOP - not an outside group, but the state REpublican Party - sent out this mailer aimed squarely at my grandparents:
"Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008," the e-mail reads. "Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let's not make a similar one this year!"
A copy of the e-mail, provided by Democratic officials, says it was "Paid for by the Republican Federal Committee of PA - Victory 2008."
It warns "Fellow Jewish Voters" of the danger of a second Holocaust due to the threats to Israel from its neighbors and touts Republican presidential candidate John McCain's qualifications over those of Obama.
The same spokesperson who's distancing himself from this mailer is the one who was feeding reporters the story of the campaign worker mugging.
And then, in the furthest stretches of Outer Wingnuttia, there's this:
A federal judge in Philadelphia last night threw out a complaint by a Montgomery County lawyer who claimed that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was not qualified to be president and that his name should be removed from the Nov. 4 ballot.
Philip J. Berg alleged in a complaint filed in federal district court on Aug. 21 against Obama, the Democratic National Committee and the Federal Election Commission, that Obama was born in Mombasa, Kenya.
Berg claimed that the Democratic presidential standardbearer is not even an American citizen but a citizen of Indonesia and therefore ineligible to be president.
He alleged that if Obama was permitted to run for president and subsequently found to be ineligible, he and other voters would be disenfranchised [...]
Surrick ruled that Berg's attempts to use certain laws to gain standing to pursue his claim that Obama was not a natural-born citizen were "frivolous and not worthy of discussion."
This guy was all over the map. He said Obama was born in Kenya AND an Indonesian citizen.
If you're looking for the trends reflecting the worst of the Republican Party, check out Pennsylvania for the next ten days.
... Nate Silver thinks McCain should abandon Pennsylvania as he has no shot there. Which would of course mean that he has no shot. Silver's advice is to hit New Mexico and New Hampshire hard, and defend Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio and North Carolina. The rest of the states he needs would presumably rise if his national poll numbers rose.
Josh Marshall found this gem from a news item about the early voting sites in the heavily African-American Lake County in Indiana:
CROWN POINT, Ind. (AP) — A judge weighing whether to close down early voting sites in Lake County’s Democratic strongholds questioned local officials about the absentee voting process during visits to the disputed sites.
Lake County Superior Court Judge Diane Kavadias-Schneider toured the Gary, Hammond and East Chicago satellite voting sites Monday and heard hours of testimony and arguments on whether they are legal and fair.
Republicans want to shut down the centers in the largely Democratic county on the grounds that they will increase the likelihood of vote fraud in the Nov. 4 election.
Kavadias-Schneider, who was appointed a special judge in the case by the Indiana Supreme Court, questioned county elections board director Sally LaSota on Monday about the process of early voting and safeguards against vote fraud.
LaSota assured the judge that the elections board staff ensures voters are registered and don’t vote more than once. When Kavadias-Schneider asked, “What of those who have already voted?” R. Lawrence Steele, a GOP lawyer, replied, “Maybe those votes should be discarded.”
So this is, ultimately, why the right is making ACORN famous, calling for defunding and investigations and the like. It's to cover their real agenda of trying to disenfranchise voters. It's been the GOP ground game for a long time. And every time you think you've got it tamped down, it rises up somewhere else. Particularly slippery this year has been the "lose your house, lose your vote" effort to use foreclosure lists to challenge voters. Even after it was revealed and part of a lawsuit in Michigan, where the GOP was forced to surrender its effort, it has popped back up around the country. This is in Volusia County, Florida:
Thanks to a new law passed by the Florida Legislature, she explained, groups interested in challenging voters now may do so up to 30 days before an election.
Once a voter's right to cast a ballot is challenged, McFall's office must attempt to notify the voter, and must flag the voter's name in the statewide database.
If the problem can't be straightened out at the supervisor's office before Election Day, the challenged voter will be required to vote a provisional ballot, then visit the Elections Office within 48 hours after the election to disprove the allegations of the challenge.
"One party, that we know of, is going to challenge every voter that's being foreclosed on," McFall said.
Foreclosure-related caging is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, they don't want you to vote.
Brave New Films created this great piece that everybody should take a look at. We have to recognize this pattern when we see it.
I just jumped off a conference call with some members of the Democratic National Committee and CDP Chair Art Torres about the arrest of YPM founder Marc Jacoby on suspicion of voter registration fraud. As you may know, Jacoby's firm has been "slamming" voters in the Riverside County area, telling them that they were signing ballot initiatives but actually flipping their party affiliation to the Republican Party from the Democratic Party. While the substance of the call was to talk about hypocrisy in the GOP, raising the issue of ACORN in recent weeks while blinded to the fraud their own vendors participate in, Torres was pretty unsparing in his description of YPM. "The California GOP and the RNC need to terminate their relationship with YPM immediately," said Torres. "They shouldn't wait for a conviction to distance themselves from these shady practices." It was revealed yesterday that a joint finance committee of the RNC, McCain-Palin and the Yacht Party has been paying Nathan Sproul, who owns a separate voter registration group that has been accused of rampant fraud. Said Torres, "This is a consistent pattern of bad behavior."
Curiously, nobody seems to be talking about the bigger issue here, which is the fact that YPM was not only slamming voters, but changing their ballot status to absentee, so that when a voter goes to the polling place on Election Day, they are told that they signed up to vote by mail and cannot vote in the election without their absentee ballot. There are issues with slamming, related mainly to GOTV efforts (Democrats don't try to turn out Republicans), but the absentee situation is a pretext for real disenfranchisement. So I asked Chairman Torres about this, and he agreed. "This is designed to create confusion at the polls and force people into filling out provisional ballots. There are still hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots that haven't been counted from Ohio in 2004. This is about voter suppression, and we've seen it over and over again in California." He related it to the Dirty Tricks Initiative and the signature gathering fraud used to try and get that on the ballot.
The question, of course, is what we can do about the particular voters affected. YPM is out of business and hopefully their founder will be in jail. But there is no telling how many voters had their party ID switched or their ballot status switched. Hopefully the Secretary of State can come up with some way to verify anyone who passed through YPM's hands.
Over the weekend, we learned about YPM, the voter registration company hired by the state Republican Party which was illegally switching voters' party affiliations under false pretenses, and (this is the buried lede) changing their ballot status in a clear act of voter suppression:
Those who were formerly Democrats may stop receiving phone calls and literature from that party, perhaps affecting its get-out-the-vote efforts. They also will be given only a Republican ballot in the next primary election if they do not switch their registration back before then.
Some also report having their registration status changed to absentee without their permission; if they show up at the polls without a ballot they may be unable to vote.
Robert Cruickshank mentioned that the head of YPM has been arrested in this case and charged with voter registration fraud. In response, the Yacht Party has decided to attack Debra Bowen:
On the eve of California's voter registration deadline, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has decided to once again show her partisan colors and charge an individual for questions surrounding his own, personal voter registration stemming from 2006 and 2007.
The fact that these charges are being leveled against an individual operating in a highly-contested area of California, and the significant gap between recent allegations and the charges we've seen today suggests that this is politically motivated.
It's clear that Bowen, herself the recipient of an ACORN endorsement (still displayed on her campaign website), has elevated these issues to achieve maximum political benefit and deflect attention from the Democratic Presidential nominee's high-profiled problems and associations with the radical community activist group ACORN.
While we condemn voter fraud in all forms, it is evident that Debra Bowen is using her office to play politics with the public's perception of political parties. This is inappropriate at least, and an abuse of her office and a willing suspension of her duties at worst.
Now, let's make clear that in the original article, YPM founder Marc Jacoby cited Bowen's work - falsely - to prove his own innocence:
He also said that plainclothes investigators for Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, have conducted multiple spot checks and told his firm it is doing nothing improper.
"Every time, they gave us a thumbs-up," Jacoby said. "People are not being tricked."
But Nicole Winger, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office, said the agency "does not give an OK or seal of approval to voter registration groups."
That's an out-and-out lie, and it's completely within the purview of the Secretary of State to enforce the laws regarding voter registration. The Yacht Party is being completely disingenuous about Jacoby's illegality here ("personal voter registration" my ass), and they dredge up ACORN, which is not only unrelated to the YPM case, but a situation where paid registration gatherers were defrauding ACORN more than anything else. But it's not surprising to see the Yacht Party fan the fires of hate and use the ACORN scapegoat to answer for their own illegal activities.
And this is Yacht Party illegality. Steve Poizner paid for the YPM voter drive and put a bounty on new registrations.
This story is starting to hit traditional media. Debra Bowen did nothing but her job, and she needs to be supported. Whether you write a letter to the editor, call the Yacht Party offices (hey, here's contact information, imagine that) or just spread the word to your friends and neighbors, do something to call out Republican voter suppression today.
ACORN has gone in a mere three weeks from a community organization to the most demonized group in America, yielding death threats and vandalism from the most deranged on the far right. We know that calling ACORN a threat to "the fabric of our democracy" is absolutely absurd; this is really about the longstanding GOP tactic of voter suppression. But with the conservative noise machine ramped up and this small community group left to defend themselves, the winds were blowing in a really bad direction. Until the Obama campaign stepped up.
Charging that the FBI probe of ACORN represents an “unholy alliance” between Republican operatives and potentially illegal conduct by law enforcement targeting voter fraud, the Obama campaign demanded Friday that the U.S. special prosecutor looking into the U.S. attorneys scandal investigate the matter.
General counsel Bob Bauer sent a letter to Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey charging that coordinated “misconduct” by McCain campaign representatives and GOP officials were relevant to the special prosecutor’s work, because the activities may relate to the dismissal of seven U.S. attorneys in late 2006.
The letter requests that the special prosecutor’s inquiry “include a review of any involvement by Justice Dept. and White House officials in supporting the McCain-Palin campaign [and RNC's] systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of vote fraud.”
The FBI investigation was really the last straw. And the campaign is absolutely correct to connect this to the US Attorneys scandal - it's precisely because certain prosecutors wouldn't indict anyone on bogus voter fraud cases that they were fired. This is all the same kind of politicization. As the former head of the Justice Department's Voting Rights division said yesterday, this is "a continuation of injecting DOJ into what has clearly become a political issue... That's really not the proper role for the DOJ, and why their policies counsel otherwise." You can read the Obama campaign's letter here.
Moreover, it's important for this to have happened. The Obama campaign coming to the aid of a cog in the progressive movement is very heartening. We have to stick together.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is siding with Ohio's top elections official in a dispute with the state Republican Party over voter registrations.
The justices on Friday overruled a federal appeals court that had ordered Ohio's top elections official to do more to help counties verify voter eligibility.
Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, faced a deadline of Friday to set up a system to provide local officials with names of newly registered voters whose driver's license numbers or Social Security numbers on voter registration forms don't match records in other government databases.
Damn activist judges! Like Alito, Roberts, Thomas and Scalia! (It was a unanimous 9-0 ruling)
Looks like there's some internal pushback to the reports of FBI investigations against ACORN, too.
Today is a better day in the world of enfranchisement.
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