Stating The Obvious

I'm very pleased that Debbie Stabenow and Debbie Wasserman Schultz called out the sexism of the GOP yesterday.

The call targeted Republican gubernatorial candidates Chris Christie in New Jersey and Bob McDonnell in Viriginia, as well as Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Republicans in general.

"I think we have an outdated view, an extreme view, a lack of understanding of what women's lives are like today and the role of women in America," Stabenow said. She wouldn't, however, use the word "sexist."

The lawmakers cited Republicans' opposition to health care reform as evidence, since women are usually in charge of their families' health care, and are disproportionately hurt by current health insurance policy.

But they also called out the NRCC's statement yesterday about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, specifically that Gen. Stanley McChrystal "should put her in her place." That, said Wasserman-Schultz, is evidence of "a total lack of respect for women."

"It's perhaps understandable they wouldn't understand the needs of women," she added, saying 80 percent of House Republicans are men. (Although no one said "sexism" on the call, Wasserman-Schultz appeared on MSNBC soon after and said the NRCC comment "shows the shocking sexism in the Republican party today.)

Stabenow, who recently got into a tussle with her Finance Committee colleague Kyl, said she was shocked by the Republicans' attitude toward things like requiring insurers to cover basic maternity care.

"One of the most shocking things of the Senate Finance Committee markup was the extent to which my Republican colleagues weren't even aware of what they were saying that was so offensive to women," she said. Maternity care "is not a frill. This is not an extra for the majority of Americans who happen to be women."

In fact, it's Chris Christie's position on women's health issues, particularly mammograms, that is killing him in New Jersey. My sister-in-law, who lives in NJ, just finished her breast cancer treatments, and under Christie her health plan wouldn't have had to cover the early detection procedure that caught the tumor. Why should he care, as a white man? He doesn't need a mammogram or a papsmear.

Wasserman Schultz went further with her criticism on MSNBC:

"I think the place for a woman is at the top of the House of Representatives," said Wasserman Schultz.

"It's evidence they long for the days when a woman's place was in the kitchen. Now a woman is third in line for the presidency... But it's not surprising, coming from a party that's 80 percent male and 100 percent white," she added, referring to the composition of the House GOP conference.

We are a terrible country when it comes to female political representation, and the crap they have to go through probably enters into that. You have one political party that feels no compunction against acting like it's 1952 and women in politics are their secretaries. And that has a real-world effect on women's health and women's pay issues, among other things. Wasserman Schultz is absolutely right to push back on this.

As I was saying. When you have sexual harrassers like Bill O'Reilly leering at you every day, why would you want to deal with that? And I know he's talking to Michele Bachmann, who's in another stratosphere and clearly doesn't care, but this is the approach of the old boy's network. It's kind of sickening.

NJ-Gov: Christie Sinking

This is the first legitimate poll I've seen that puts Jon Corzine in front in the New Jersey Governor's race over Bush/Rove crony Chris Christie.

The numbers: Corzine 44%, Christie 43%, and independent Chris Daggett 4% (Daggett was not listed as a choice, but was a voluntary answer -- more on that later). This is within the ±4% margin of error, but again this is the first poll that has had Corzine ahead in a long time. A month ago, Christie led by 47%-42% over Corzine.

Interestingly, Corzine's approval rating remains in the negative zone: Approve 38%, Disapprove 50%. However, he appears to be getting enough respondents to pick him right now, if only reluctantly, due to disenchantment with Christie -- a common pattern in New Jersey elections, where Republicans often run strong right up until declining in October and November.

A half-sample of respondents were given Daggett's name as a choice. The result was was Corzine 38%, Christie 37%, Daggett 16%. Another half-sample was given a much lower-profile independent candidate as a choice, Gary Steele, and the result was not too different: Corzine and Christie tied at 38% each, Steele 12%.

There will actually be close to a dozen independent candidates on the ballot, but Corzine and Christie will be featured at the top. Given how New Jerseyites often come home to the Democrat in the final weeks, and that Daggett gives people an option to raise their dissatisfaction with Christie without giving him the Governorship, I'd guess that Corzine is in fairly good shape. He only needs about 45% of the vote to win, I would imagine. Blue Jersey has more.

VA-Gov: McDonnell's "Lie To The Voters" Strategy

This Bob McDonnell fellow is in quite a bit of trouble. His worldview has been exposed and it's not pretty. It's way far out on the extreme fringes of society, anti-woman, anti-contraception (!), holding the Garden of Eden above the US Constitution, and more. What's more, he actually acknowledges that his own views are unpopular.

It is also becoming clear in modern culture that the voting American mainstream is not willing to accept a true pro-family ideologue...Leadership, however, does not require giving voters what they want, for whimsical and capricious government would result. Republican legislators must exercise independent professional judgment as statesmen, to make decisions that are objectively right, and proved effective. (pg. 61)

That's an amazing statement, as Markos notes. He's saying that the ideal state for a Republican is to lie to voters during the campaign and governing as an extremist afterwards.

McDonnell spent 80 minutes on a conference call with reporters doing damage control yesterday. That's how serious they are taking this. But none of it should mean a thing, thanks to that paragraph above. McDonnell is not to be trusted - he told you that himself. And once a candidate loses trust, he doesn't have much left.

Creigh Deeds, who won late in the Democratic primary, was inching back into the race even before this revelation. I'd imagine things have tightened even more now. McDonnell is flat-out scary to a large portion of the electorate.

P.S. I am surprised that the Christie-Corzine race hasn't tightened up in some of the bigger polls. That's the other big gubernatorial race in November. The polls appear to be all over the place, and the impact of Christie's bad month may have not hit voters yet. I still believe Corzine can turn things around.

The Problem With The Republican Revolution Redux: It's The Crazy, Stupid

I keep seeing these expert handicappers arguing that Democrats will take significant losses in 2010. And I think they could be right, especially if the President doesn't take control of the debate on a number of issues and deliver the policies Democratic partisans thought they voted for last November.

But in the back of my mind, I have this nagging feeling that Republicans are simply too completely crazy to compete seriously with any halfway decent political party for the votes of independents. People have short memories, but not that short, and they well remember the disaster of the Bush years. And the Republican bench is filled with avowedly insane or unspeakably corrupt people.

Take the Virginia Governor's race, for example. GOP candidate Bob McDonnell, who until now had been atop the polls, is a Regent University type (Monica Goodling's alma mater) whose worldview in his mid-30s was completely out of the mainstream of American life (but right at home in the Republican Party):

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

The 93-page document, which is publicly available at the Regent University library, culminates with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families -- a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

During his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family. In 2001, he voted against a resolution in support of ending wage discrimination between men and women.

The campaign for Creigh Deeds, the Democrat in the race, is all over this document and for good reason. It wasn't a youthful indiscretion, but a blueprint for radical theocratic governance, upon which McDonnell acted in the House of Delegates.

Another example: New Jersey GOP candidate Chris Christie, a Rove protege who used his US Attorneys office in New Jersey for partisan ends and held himself to a different standard of ethics than those he prosecuted:



My point is this: Republicans can't hide their crazy. In fact, they have to let little bits of it out to win their primaries. And yet these ethical lapses and statements of radical views massively turn off independent voters. In the abstract, on the generic ballot, Republicans might look good to those swamped by the anti-Obama lies of the noise machine. Up close, Republicans still have major problems with the electorate. So I'm not convinced that the losses next year will even hit double digits in the House, especially if Democrats get their act together and do something tangible for the American people.

...That said, I do think the Democrats will lose seats next year, mainly because most Presidents lose seats.

NJ-Gov: Not Going Away

Michele Brown, who took that loan from GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie at a time when he was her boss in the US Attorney's office, just resigned from that office, citing the distraction the loan has become. However, the loan itself will continue.

The Republican challenger in the New Jersey governor's race said Tuesday he won't ask a federal prosecutor to end the 10-year mortgage loan he took out for her even if he is elected governor.

Chris Christie said Michele Brown would have to decide whether to repay the $46,000 loan early.

Christie said he and his wife lent Brown the money in 2007 after Brown's husband lost his job and the couple's credit card debt ballooned. Christie was Brown's supervisor in the U.S. Attorney's Office at the time.

Christie said Brown is fulfilling her end of the deal by making $500 monthly payments. The loan goes through 2017.

While Brown remained in the US Attorney's office, you were talking about someone with the ability to prosecute in a financial relationship with someone who could be Governor of the same state, a completely untenable and ethically dubious scenario. Now that she's left the office, you still have the matter of the loan never being disclosed anywhere, neither on ethics disclosure forms nor Christie's own taxes. The Christie campaign is trying to turn around the narrative by claiming that Jon Corzine smeared Brown, but this rings very hollow:

"It is despicable that Jon Corzine has stooped so low to try to win re-election that he's aimed the negative attacks of his hired guns on a dedicated public servant who made it her life's mission to serve the people of New Jersey as a corruption-fighter. As candidates willingly running for office, we expect this kind of mudslinging, but we don't expect it to be aimed at someone who has made a career serving both Democrats and Republicans in the best interest of the public good. Jon Corzine should be ashamed that he has smeared a respected federal prosecutor's name and forced her to end an acclaimed career in the sole interest of scoring petty political points."

Good luck with that line of argument, Mr. Christie. The bloom of a "corruption fighter" is most certainly off the rose.

UPDATE: Here's a fun one:

In 2005, New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie (R) was issued traffic tickets for speeding, driving an unregistered vehicle and driving without insurance but was allowed to drive the vehicle home, reports Millennium Radio.

The three tickets had the words "no deal" written on them. Christie later pleaded guilty, paid a large fine and signed an affidavit.

A spokeswoman for Christie acknowledged that "the fact that Christie was U.S. Attorney did come up."

NJ-Gov: Confirmation Of Christie's Nosedive

The first poll since Chris Christie has faced hit after hit in the New Jersey Governor's race shows essentially a dead heat, after several polls showed double-digit leads for the challenger.

A new poll of New Jersey from conservative strategist Rick Shaftan finds that the New Jersey gubernatorial race, where Republican former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie has held a strong lead over Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine in most surveys, could now actually be a dead heat.

While most polls have shown Christie with roughly a ten point lead, the new poll shows he takes 39% support to Corzine's 36%, plus independent candidate Chris Daggett at 6%, with a margin of error of ±5.49%. A key finding is that both major candidates have negative net favorable ratings -- Corzine is at 23% favorable to 46% unfavorable, but Christie is also at only 20% favorable to 27% unfavorable.

"Yeah, I was really surprised at it myself," Shaftan, who most recently worked for Christie's primary opponent, told TPM. "The Corzine people have managed to convince people that Christie is dirty."

A 23/46 favorable split is hard for an incumbent to surmount, but the pollster makes the key point - Corzine's campaign brought Christie down into the mud, with an assist from Christie himself. Christie's entire campaign has been predicated on this idea that he's a law-and-order conservative with impeccable ethical credentials. It's not true, and now all of New Jersey knows it. So his image is tarnished, and now he has to hope the teabag coalition can be big enough for victory. I'm not betting on that.

And it'll just get worse. For example, check out this account of a Christie press conference that turned into the candidate having to continually defend himself over charges that he gave a loan to his employee in the US Attorney's office, Michelle Brown, which he never disclosed. Once the image you try to create as a candidate is punctured, you can go nowhere but down.

NJ-Gov: Christie Melts In The Dog Days Of August

At Netroots Nation I saw Gov. Jon Corzine speak on a panel about the 21st century economy. Corzine is a former head of Goldman Sachs, so I'd lose my membership in the Matt Taibbi fan club if I said "go out and support the vampire squid," but you don't see Wall Street types saying "tax policy is completely biased to capital versus labor" and "we need green job-focused unions" and the like. He's one of the better ones. And his opponent in this campaign is truly a piece of work.

It's not just that Chris Christie definitively spoke to Karl Rove about running for the Governor of New Jersey while still holding the job of US Attorney for the state, which is against the law. Corzine, in fact, went ahead and called him a lawbreaker in that instance. But there's much more here. Christie consistently used his perch at the US Attorney's office to punish Democrats for partisan ends, most notably in the case of Robert Menendez, who Christie subpoenaed for no particular reason right before the 2006 Senate race. And at a time when Christie is painting himself as a paragon of ethics and a hammer for law enforcement, stories like this will not help that image:

He billed himself as a corruption fighter, questioned the ethics of those in power and promised to put an end to no-bid contracts for the politically connected. But when Christopher J. Christie was elected and his reform proposal was voted down, he gave up the fight and went on to approve hundreds of such contracts, including more than 50 for contributors to his campaigns [...]

His strategy is vintage Christie: A look at his career shows he has repeatedly used the whiff of corruption as a cudgel against political opponents. But his short-lived attempt to ban no-bid contracts as a freeholder raises questions over whether his zeal for an ethics overhaul is more than just campaign hype and would last if he became governor and met resistance from lawmakers he could not control.

This goes along with subsequent deliveries of no-bid contracts to Bush Administration officials like John Ashcroft.

Worst of all, we have the latest story, broken by NJN News, about a $46,000 loan Christie gave to one of his employees:

Chris Christie, the former U.S. Attorney and current Republican nominee for Governor of New Jersey, is now getting a new headache over a story that was broken last night by New Jersey Public Television -- that in 2007, Christie made a $46,000 personal loan to an assistant of his in the U.S. Attorney's office, which is still being paid off in regular installments:

Christie said he did not view this as an improper financial relationship: "I just believe that if you have friends who are in need, that you help them, whether they work with you or whether they're friends of yours from outside the work realm. We were happy to be able to help, and they've been great about repaying the loan."

Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine's campaign has pounced on the report, saying that a candidate for governor should not have an ongoing financial relationship with someone who is still working in the U.S. Attorney's office. "This raises more significant questions and legal issues for the Christie campaign," said Corzine spokesman Sean Darcy. "Are they still in contact? Have they been discussing this campaign? What impact has their ongoing financial relationship had on the gubernatorial campaign?"

Christie never disclosed this loan, in violation of state and federal laws.

Basically, the default position of New Jersey voters is that their elected officials are horribly corrupt. All things being equal, at the statewide level they go with the Democrat. Christie has tried to cultivate an image of an honest crime-fighter, but these revelations have really made that image fall apart. If this is the typical "we hate all our politicians" New Jersey race, suddenly Corzine looks like he's back in it, especially if the job numbers start turning around there.

Blue Jersey will have the best coverage of this race.

...the AFL-CIO has set up an attack website about Christie detailing his issues on working families. Union membership is relatively high in New Jersey, so if they can be mobilized, Corzine has a better shot.

...The Rove-Christie relationship goes back at least to 2003.

Woke Up This Morning...

I think Tony Soprano would blush at the widespread corruption ring busted up in New Jersey yesterday, involving mayors, cabinet officials, and a box of Kellogg's Apple Jacks with $97,000 in it:

Federal agents swept across New Jersey and New York on Thursday, charging 44 people -- including mayors, rabbis and even one alleged trafficker in human kidneys -- in a decadelong investigation into public corruption and international money laundering.

The key to the investigation: a real-estate developer who became an informant after being arrested on bank-fraud charges in 2006, according to a person familiar with the case. The developer, Solomon Dwek, wore a wire for the Federal Bureau of Investigation while offering to bribe New Jersey mayors and other public officials, that person said.

While the state has a long history of dirty politics -- in Newark alone, three ex-mayors have been convicted of crimes unrelated to the latest sweep -- the scale of the allegations shocked veterans of New Jersey's political crises.

"This is not only a black eye, but this fans more cynicism," said Gene Grabowski, a crisis manager who has represented New Jersey clients in graft probes. "It validates this idea that New Jersey is a setting for 'The Sopranos.'"

Court documents read like a pulp crime novel. At one point, Mr. Dwek (described as a "cooperating witness" in criminal complaints) is quoted saying to an alleged money-launderer: "I have at least $100,000 a month coming from money I 'schnookied' from banks for bad loans."

Another time, Mr. Dwek gave one of the alleged co-conspirators a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000 cash, the documents say.

The bad, bad news here for national Democrats is that I think this delivers a fatal blow to the already-flagging Jon Corzine re-election campaign. Chris Christie was a US Attorney who can credibly claim to have put corrupt public officials in jail, and he did so in a TV ad up today. Now, it turns out that a lot of his cases were politically motivated (he was a Bush-appointed US Attorney, after all) and he has lots of serious problems, and New Jersey is a Democratic state. But he's led comfortably throughout this, and he'll probably strike the reformist law-and-order pose all the way until November. What's more, one of the people caught up in this probe from yesterday was a member of Corzine's Administration.

If I were the national party or the Democratic Governor's Association, I'd put my money in the short-term into the Virginia governor's race. I think New Jersey is a long shot for the time being.

You Go To Court With The Loyal Bushies You Have

Steve Benen finds more evidence that the real scandal with the fired US Attorneys were the ones who were allowed to stay.

Federal judges Thursday ruled that former state purchasing supervisor Georgia L. Thompson was wrongly convicted of making sure a state travel contract went to a firm linked to Gov. Jim Doyle’s re-election campaign and freed her from an Illinois prison.

The three-judge panel in Chicago acted with unusual speed, ruling after oral arguments by Thompson’s attorney and the U.S. attorney’s office.

During 26 minutes of oral arguments, all three judges assailed the government’s case, with Judge Diane Wood saying at one point that “the evidence is beyond thin.”

During a news conference later Thursday, Doyle, a former state attorney general, said the three judges did an “extraordinary thing” by entering an order finding Thompson innocent and ordering her immediate release.(emphasis added)

The man who wrongly convicted Ms. Thompson on the basis of such thin evidence was U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic. This indictment of Thompson occurred a few days after Jim Doyle's unsuccessful Republican opponent Mark Green jumped into the race and won the GOP nomination. Here's Benen's summary of the case:

I’ll spare you the minutiae of the case, but here’s the story in a nutshell: Thompson, who was originally hired under Doyle’s Republican predecessor, awarded a state contract to Adelman Travel, which became controversial because two of the company’s officers had donated the state maximum to Doyle’s re-election campaign.

There was no evidence that Thompson personally profited from the contract and nothing to suggest she approved the contract for political reasons. Biskupic brought charges anyway and managed to win a conviction, which was thrown out swiftly yesterday.

Steven Biskupic is obviously not the only sitting US Attorney with a cloud over him. We know that New Jersey's USA Chris Christie has investigated Democrats at a rate 3-4 times higher than Republicans, and that he stepped into the Menendez-Kean Senate race last year to push investigations into Sen. Menendez that were dubious. And today we hear about US Attorney for Minnesota Rachel Paulose, four of whose staff voluntarily quit:

It’s a major shakeup at the offices of new U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose.
Four of her top staff voluntarily demoted themselves Thursday, fed up with Paulose, who, after just months on the job, has earned a reputation for quoting Bible verses and dressing down underlings.

Paulose was appointed before the 8 U.S. Attorneys were given their pink slips, but she has deep connections to the scandal.

She was a special assistant to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, worked as a senior counsel for deputy attorney general Paul McNulty and is best buds with Monica Goodling – the assistant U.S. Attorney who recently took the Fifth rather than testify before Congress.

Add to the suspicions the fact that Minnesota’s former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger stepped down just as the White House was developing its hit list.

And Steve Benen mentions a few more cases that are more than a little odd:

* In New Hampshire, Democrats want Congress to investigate whether prosecution of a Republican phone-jamming scheme on Election Day 2002 was intentionally delayed until after the presidential election two years later.

* Did the U.S. Attorney’s office in Pennsylvania intentionally target Bob Casey allies to undermine his Senate campaign against Rick Santorum?

* Why was the career U.S. Attorney in Guam removed in 2002 after he started investigating disgraced GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff?

* Why has Western Pennsylvania’s U.S. attorney, Mary Beth Buchanan, spent a disproportionate amount of her time launching public-corruption investigations against Democrats, while overlooking Republicans?

* In July 2005, the U.S. Attorney in Denver decided not to pursue a matter in which bouncers at a Bush event impersonated Secret Service agents to throw out three law-abiding ticket-holders because of their bumper sticker (the Denver Three controversy). Did politics dictate the decision?

I would add the case of Debra Wong Yang, who, after opening an investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis, was bought out for $1.5 million dollars and hired by... the law firm representing Rep. Lewis.

Now, Alberto Gonzales is hemhorraging support on Capitol Hill, and his initial testimony to clear his name has been delayed to twist the knife even more and give the Senate Judiciary Committee more time to investigate all these threads.
But the real result of this scandal is that it has irreparably damaged the credibility of the Justice Department and its field offices, both in the public eye and potentially in court cases. Nobody can look at US Attorney indictments without a jaundiced eye; this latest case in Wisconsin proves it. And a record is now being built of politically motivated corruption cases, so that when an actual corrupt Democrat comes before a court, his lawyers can credibly argue that this was a political witch hunt and as a result the case should be dropped.

This is a cancer to the legal system that will be difficult to wash out, even with a Democrat in the White House and the Justice Department. You know that you can see freshly-scrubbed Federalist Society lawyers arguing in court that all corruption cases they defend are political witch hunts. Of course, we see that already. But now there's evidence that this was the case. Having politics creep into the administration of justice is terribly damaging for the future of the country.