Word Is Bond

Reducing the number of Americans comfortable with the nickname "Kit" in the United States Senate, Kit Bond is bailing out.

Republican Sen. Kit Bond announced Thursday that he will not seek re-election in 2010, saying he wants to go out "at the top of my game" and setting the stage for what one expert said could be a "land rush" for the seat.

Bond, 69, made the announcement at the state Capitol, shortly after Missouri lawmakers convened.

"Public service has been a blessing and a labor of love for me ... but I have decided that my Senate career will end after this, my fourth term," he said.

That immediately becomes a top target for Democrats in 2010. McCain actually pulled out Missouri slightly, so it's still a right-down-the-middle purple seat. However, at the statewide level, Democrats have prevailed in many recent elections, including Governor. If Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, with the lineage of state royalty and progressive policy chops, decides to run, she would certainly have a very good chance of winning. I met Robin at the DNC this year, and would be interested to see if she wants to run. There are plenty of Republicans who would angle for this seat as well.

Jonathan Singer has more at MyDD here and here.

Delegitimization Project, Cont'd

The GOP is so incensed about the suggestion that they would try to stop foreclosed voters from voting in Michigan that they sued the news outlet that reported it. I mean, it's ridiculous on its face! Michigan is a safe blue state; McCain pulled out. Clearly the GOP will get more mileage out of stopping foreclosed voters from voting in Indiana.

Democrats are concerned that Republican officials in Marion County and elsewhere might use home foreclosure lists as a way to challenge the residency of voters at the polls. The campaign of presidential candidate Barack Obama filed a lawsuit to keep the Michigan GOP from doing just that.

County GOP Chairman Tom John said foreclosure opens the door to a residency challenge, but he said his party has no plans to pursue such challenges. However, he wouldn't rule it out.

"We might end up challenging on that," he said. "It's entirely possible. I think it would be a solid basis for asking someone to vote provisionally."

I eagerly await the lawsuit against the Indianapolis Star.

Meanwhile, the anti-ACORN scaremongering continues in Missouri.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.

Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

If this is anything like the Nevada raid, ACORN was well aware of the discrepancies and in fact alerted election officials about them. That never seems to make its way into the lede.

I'm guessing this story won't show up on Instapundit this morning.

Tens of thousands of eligible voters have been removed from rolls or blocked from registering in at least six swing states, and the voters' exclusion appears to violate federal law, according to a published report.

The New York Times based its findings on reviews of state records and Social Security data.

The Times said voters appear to have been purged by mistake and not because of any intentional violations by election officials or coordinated efforts by any party.

That's if you believe that the Help America Vote Act wasn't designed to sow confusion through stringent standards, and create the very problems it was supposed to solve. It's a feature, not a bug.

This Is My Favorite Week Ever

In the comments of my last post at Hullabaloo, Jemand von Niemand ran through some of the week's highlights.

On May 15th, the Senate cast a near-unanimous vote to reverse the Federal Communication Commission's December 2007 decision to let media companies own both a major TV or radio station and a major daily newspaper in the same city. (freepress.net)

On May 16th... Bush used a private visit to King Abdullah’s ranch here Friday to make a second attempt to persuade the Saudi government to increase oil production and was rebuffed yet again. (NYT)

The California Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage on May 15th ... invalidat[ing] virtually any law that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. (LA Times)

On May 14th, about 100 House Republicans refused to vote for more war funding, voting 'present'... Democrats were able to increase their 'no' vote number on funding from 141 to 149; the bill failed...

Finally the GI bill passed with overwhelming margin of 256 votes in the House, including 32 Republicans... This might actually be the most remarkable piece of the votes today; conservative Democrats agreeing to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for educational benefits for veterans. (Matt Stoller)

On May 16th, Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official who never had Democratic support to win confirmation, withdrew his nomination on Friday. Bush "reluctantly accepted" von Spakovsky's request, the White House said. (sfgate.com)

Hell of a week, huh, Bootsie? And there are thirty more to come.

Not even a mention of Travis Childers' win in a Mississippi House seat that has caused Republicans to despair of a landslide loss in the fall.

Representative Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia and former leader of his party’s Congressional campaign committee, issued a dire warning that the Republican Party had been severely damaged, in no small part because of its identification with President Bush. Mr. Davis said that, unless Republican candidates changed course, they could lose 20 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate.

“They are canaries in the coal mine, warning of far greater losses in the fall, if steps are not taken to remedy the current climate,” Mr. Davis said in a memorandum. “The political atmosphere facing House Republicans this November is the worst since Watergate and is far more toxic than it was in 2006.”

And let me give you another one to add to the list. Remember that Missouri voter ID scheme that Digby wrote about earlier in the week? Turns out the State Senate refused to consider it.

In a victory for all voters, Missouri lawmakers ended this year’s legislative session without a final vote on legislation that could have prevented up to 240,000 Missourians from voting. The proposed change would have altered Missouri’s constitution, allowing for strict citizenship and government-issued photo ID requirements that would make Missouri one of the toughest states in the country for eligible, law-abiding citizens to register to vote or cast a ballot.

“I am relieved that I will be able to vote this fall,” said Lillie Lewis, a St. Louis city resident, “I’ve been voting in every election since I can remember, but if I needed my birth certificate, that would be the end of that. I hope this is the last we hear of this nonsense.” Lillie Lewis was born in Mississippi, but the state sent her a letter stating they have no record of her birth.

Birdell Owen, a Missouri resident who was displaced by hurricane Katrina, also voiced her relief. “I should be able to participate in my democracy,” she said, “even if Louisiana can’t get me a copy of my birth certificate. I’m glad Missouri politicians had the sense to protect my right to vote.”

Oh, and Series of Tubes Ted Stevens might lose his Senate seat after 50-odd years.

We're seeing an entire political party's collapse happen before our eyes, and in many of these cases a strong citizen-led movement, aided by leadership in the political sphere, has been decisive. There are two things at work here. One, you have a conservative movement that has been horrible for the country and created all these terrible policies which have made us less safe, less economically secure, and weakened in the eyes of the world. And you have a vibrant progressive movement that has been able to broadcast these failures widely. Consider what we've learned in the last month or so:

• The Defense Department embedded "military analysts" as propaganda engines inside US media with the full knowledge of the White House, mainlining the Pentagon message directly to the public with the imprimatur of independent media voices.

• The politicized show trials scheduled to crop up at Guantanamo during the fall election have been delayed because of the amount of perversions of justice employed by interrogators. The top DoD adviser to military commissions has been barred from participating in them because of evidence of bias, and one detainee had his charges dropped because torture was used (authorized by the Secretary of Defense), making the testimony inadmissable. Meanwhile the US is planning a huge new prison in Afghanistan, suggesting that indefinite detentions of masses of prisoners will continue.

• Domestic spying in the United States has spiked at a time when actual terrorism prosecutions have decreased, a massive violation of citizen privacy with no material benefit in stopping crime.

• The US government routinely injects psychotropic drugs into detainees to keep them sedated during deportation flights. , in violation of international human rights standards.

• An official at the VA told his staffers to stop diagnosing returning soldiers with PTSD, in an attempt to lower the costs of permanent disability payments. Many leaders in Washington, including Sen. Obama, are demanding an investigation.

The Republicans are wasting away because of more than just bad branding. It's because over the last eight years they've taken the country we know and done something terrible to it. And despite media blackouts and whitewashes, Americans intuitively know this, and are reaching to alternative media sources to discover more. The historically high wrong-track numbers have a basis in economic struggles, but I believe just as much in this loss of faith in what we've become as a country in the Age of Bush. And no amount of cajoling or re-branding is going to lure people back to the GOP. Not this year. Not after all this.

It's going to take years to repair the damage, and the Republicans will be all too happy to sabotage those efforts as the opposition and pin the blame on their opponents. It's what they do. For now, however, it's time to bask in the glow of the demise of the Republican Party, and work very hard to restore America's trust in their government and the ability to move forward.

The Great Voter Fraud Swindle - Missouri in 2006

The Republican goal of pushing baseless voter fraud investigations as a means to suppress turnout, particularly minority turnout, has a long and ignominious history. They have used intimidation and fear to keep voters away from the polls, voters that have felt the force of justice administrated upon them disproportionately. The idea is to harrass, frighten, and confuse voters so that they will not want to involve themselves in the electoral process, for their own safety and personal liberty more than anything else.

This 40-year history, which includes the participation of a former Supreme Court Chief Justice and thousands of well-connected GOP operatives, have continued in the efforts of the Bush Administration's Justice Department, particularly in Missouri, where the GOP tried to save their Senate majority by using the US Attorney office and legislative arms to prosecute false voter fraud claims, maintain laws devoted to voter suppression, purge voter lists and police perfectly legal GOTV operations.

First, the history. This is from 1964:

John M Baley, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, charged today that "under the guise of setting up an apparatus to protect the sanctity of the ballot, the Republicans are actually creating the machinery for a carefully organized campaign to intimidate voters and to frighten members of minority groups from casing their ballots on November 3rd.

"'Let's get this straight,' Bailey added, 'the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confience in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration.

"'But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. it is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.

"'We intend to see to it that the rights of these people are protected. We will have our people at the polling places--not to frighten or threaten anyone--but to protect the right of any eligible voter to cast a secret ballot without threats or intimidation.'

Bailey said the Republican program, called "Operation Eagle Eye," is really "a program to cut down the vote in predominantly Democratic areas by harassing, frightening, and confusing the voters."

This is from 2006:

Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove. And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.

Before last fall's election:

• (Bradley) Schlozman, while he was acting civil rights chief, authorized a suit accusing the state of failing to eliminate legions of ineligible people from lists of registered voters. A federal judge tossed out the suit this April 13, saying Democratic Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan couldn't police local registration rolls and noting that the government had produced no evidence of fraud.

• The Missouri General Assembly - with the White House's help - narrowly passed a law requiring voters to show photo identification cards, which Carnahan estimated would disenfranchise 200,000 voters. The state Supreme Court voided the law as unconstitutional before the election.

• Two weeks before the election, the St. Louis Board of Elections sent letters threatening to disqualify 5,000 newly registered minority voters if they failed to verify their identities promptly, a move - instigated by a Republican appointee - that may have violated federal law. After an outcry, the board rescinded the threat.

• Five days before the election, Schlozman, then interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, announced indictments of four voter-registration workers for a Democratic-leaning group on charges of submitting phony applications, despite a Justice Department policy discouraging such action close to an election.

• In an interview with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt a couple of days before the election, Rove said he'd just visited Missouri and had met with Republican strategists who "are well aware of" the threat of voter fraud. He said the party had "a large number of lawyers that are standing by, trained and ready to intervene" to keep the election clean.

I want to focus in on Bradley Schlozman and his efforts to continue the voter suppression in Missouri that he began in the civil rights department of the DoJ. The indictments of the ACORN recruiters five days before the election is a violation of Justice Department rules, which explicitly state that USAs should not bring election-related cases to an indictment directly preceding an election. The case was about ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) registering minority voters in Kansas City during 2006. There doesn't seem to be much to the allegations that this was in any way wrong, other than the fact that they were registering minority voters. Registering fake voters is a crime, but those fake voters are not in any way able to vote, and there is no evidence that anyone has used any of those names at the polls. And in fact, the lead investigators on any potential fraud was ACORN itself:

According to Elyshya Miller, ACORN's head organizer for Kansas City, ACORN identified certain forms as potentially fraudulent and turned them over to prosecutors in late October; four organizers were responsible. A week later, all four organizers were indicted by a grand jury.

But in their evident haste to indict, the prosecutors made a mistake -- they indicted the wrong person. Three weeks after the election, Schlozman's office dropped the charges against one of the defendants, Stephanie Davis, admitting that her identity was used without her permission. It was not until January of this year that Schlozman's office finally indicted one Caren Davis, who was apparently the person they were really after. Caren Davis' lawyer Dana Altieri told me that Davis is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether she is competent to stand trial.

But let's look at the indicted crimes themselves. The four defendants were accused of forging the registration forms for a grand total of six voters (Caren Davis was responsible for three). In some cases, the defendants simply made people up; others forged the registrations for real people.

Schlozman claimed this was a "national investigation," but he was the only US Attorney in the country to bring charges in 2006. He was appointed using the Patriot Act provision that circumvented Senate confirmation, replacing a USA that was previously on DoJ purge lists. Schlozman was installed to push voter fraud investigations and intimidate minority voters; but also there's the additional tidbit that his predecessor Todd Graves was investigating Medicare fraud cases, and Schlozman put a stop to that. Elsewhere, attempts to look into a particular Medicare-fraud case, involving Novation LLC, ended with a series of mysterious accidental deaths.

With Schlozman's job done after the election (and unsuccessfully, I might add), he went right back to the DoJ, to become an "attorney in the Counsel to the Director staff at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys." By the way, Schlozman's replacement, John Wood, is a former OMB general counsel, as well as ICE head Julie Myers' husband. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

When we look back at the events in Missouri - especially the mystery USA that swooped into town, investigated all kinds of voter fraud investigations, and then just as quickly swooped out - you can only conclude that this is the continuation of 40 years of suppressing minority voters to dampen the Democratic vote. In Missouri it was the US Attorney's office, but also the entire GOP delegation in the state, who publicized voter fraud allegations, created photo ID laws designed to suppress the vote, and did everything they could to stop minorities from casting a ballot. This is the nub of the entire US Attorneys scandal - it was a political plan to create a Republican majority.