Making A List And Checking It Twice

The Albany Project is all over the twists and turns of the NY-20 special election between Scott Murphy and Jim Tedisco. Both candidates have been listed as ahead today, with the latest reversal showing Murphy up by 83 votes. More important, a judge ruled that absentee ballot counting will begin Wednesday, despite a deadline for overseas ballots having been extended to April 13. The Tedisco campaign had been arguing for a delay in the counting, and Phillip Anderson speculates why:

It looks increasingly obvious what the Tedisco/Stone/Ciampoli game plan is. They are trying to delay the counting of absentee votes while they build a list of paper ballots to challenge. It will be much harder for them to challenge those ballots once they are opened and counted, so they are looking to delay that for as long as possible so that they can prepare a list of names to challenge before those ballots ever see the light of day.

Yep, that's got Roger Stone written all over it.

How are they compiling that list of names to challenge? Through polling.

A friend in Columbia County just got polled (Monday) about how he voted on his absentee.
He quizzed the pollster, and it was done on behalf if Tedisco.

Why poll? I suppose the GOP could claim either pure curiosity or that they're trying to decide how/where to target resources for their challenge. Or if the result is favorable, to create an impression of victory.

The concern would be if the poll results are NOT truly anonymous and become a basis for challenging ballots before they're opened.

Any other reports? This was in Columbia County.

UPDATE: Looks like plenty of folks have been polled about their absentee ballots. Since I posted this originally, I've received confirmations from about half a dozen folks. This message from a reader in Saratoga County is a representative example:

"I got a call on Thursday of last week about my father's absentee ballot. My father uses my address for mailing but actually lives in a memory care facility.

Anyway they asked for my father and when I told them he wasn't there but I was quite sure he had voted, they asked me if I knew for whom he had voted. I told them I couldn't disclose that (I actually don't know) but I could tell them I voted for Murphy."

So this has actually been going on since right after election day.

UPDATE: From another reader in Dutchess County:

"Funny you should mention that poll - I got polled a few nights ago.

Poll - Hi ***** how are you? We are conducting an exit poll in the 20th CD to see how people voted. Do you have a few minutes.

Me - Sure

Poll - Did you vote in the 20th CD?

Me- Yes

Poll- Did you vote in person or by absentee?

Me - Absentee.

Poll - Did you vote for James Tedisco, Scott Murphy, or Eric Sundwall?

Me - Wait - The order of your question neither makes sense alphabetically, or in order of how they appear on the ballot. You must be from Tedisco's camp

Poll - Ummmm ummmmm.

I voted for Murphy. Click."

It's possible, I suppose, that Tedisco and our pal Roger Stone have all the data they need to start challenging voters on Wednesday. I'll give them points for innovation in voter suppression, at the least.

The Guy Has Some Stones

I seriously hope that nobody is trying to rehabilitate Roger Stone as he attempts to repent over what he helped impose on the world. The guy was actively pushing the 'Whitey' tape as recently as this year's Republican convention, for crying out loud.

The capstone of Stone’s career, at least in terms of results, was the “Brooks Brothers riot” of the 2000 election recount. This was when a Stone-led squad of pro-Bush protestors stormed the Miami-Dade County election board, stopping the recount and advancing then-Governor George W. Bush one step closer to the White House. Though he is quick to rebut GOP operatives who seek to minimize his role in the recount, Stone lately has been having second thoughts about what happened in Florida.

"There have been many times I've regretted it,” Stone told me over pizza at Grand Central Station. “When I look at those double-page New York Times spreads of all the individual pictures of people who have been killed [in Iraq], I got to think, 'Maybe there wouldn't have been a war if I hadn't gone to Miami-Dade. Maybe there hadn't have been, in my view, an unjustified war if Bush hadn't become president.' It's very disturbing to me."

He doesn't regret crap. He's looking to disappear Bush like the rest of the GOP. Stone saw the opportunity to increase his power as a prize GOP ratfucker and fixer and he took it. Now their golden boy, the man the party establishment plucked from the Governor's mansion in Austin and lined up behind en masse for years, revealed himself to be an incompetent dullard with a knack for ruining everything he gets his hands on. And we're supposed to let that stain, the blot on the records of all these willing dupes who backed him, to be washed out? Hell no.

Stone voted for Bush in 2004 as well (“John Kerry was an elitist buffoon”) but he pulled no punches in his assessment of the last eight years. Stone's own political philosophy is libertarian, and he says it conflicts with Bush's penchant for expanded executive power.

“I think across the board he's led the party to its current position, which means losing both houses of congress and now the White House,” Stone said. “How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We're supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties. Big brother listening in on your phone calls—I got a problem with that.”

Give me a break. Not one Republican member of the House or Senate raised an objection to the illegal wiretapping program ever. Not one time. And neither did scummy operatives like Stone. Hell, Stone bragged about doing his own surveillance during the Brooks Brothers riot:

“We set up a Winnebago trailer, right over here,” Stone said when we got out of the Jaguar and walked about a block away from the Clark center, on First Street. “I set up my command center there. I had walkie-talkies and cell phones, and I was in touch with our people in the building. Our whole idea was to shut the recount down. That was why we were there. We had the frequency to the Democrats’ walkie-talkies and were listening to their communications, but they were so disorganized that we didn’t learn much that was useful.”

Oh, by the way, Stone was apparently a reluctant warrior in the recount fight. He was just paying off debts:

That Stone joins Matthew Dowd, Scott McClellan, and Colin Powell in the group of disaffected ex-Bushies shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Stone advised Donald Trump on his prospective bid for the presidency in 2000. According to Stone, he didn't even want to get involved in the 2000 race at all until the GOP's recount head, James Baker III, called him up and asked him for his help. Stone said that Baker had helped him out in 1981 by getting Reagan and Bush to lend support to New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, whose campaign Stone ran. He owed him a favor.

“In this business, if you don't pay your debts you're finished,” Stone said.

This is horseshit. And really dangerous horseshit besides. These people are running away as fast as they can from a legacy they helped create, and there is absolutely no reason to allow them to do so. Those dead American soldiers and Iraq children are YOUR children, Mr. Stone. You helped cause them, you helped send them to their deaths, and there is no way anyone should allow you to airbrush your own conscience. And in 5 or 10 or 15 years when you and the whole dirty cabal is back with some other empty suit, the REAL vessel of conservatism, we're all going to remember who you backed the last time. George W. Bush is yours. You bought him and you own him. And you can't take him to the return window.

...here's Karl Rove terribly concerned about illegal political activities inside the Obama White House, extreme use of executive power, replacing US Attorneys like Patrick Fitzgerald (!) and overly political Administration appointments.

Karl Rove is concerned about that.

It Beats Ray Jay And Kim Cardashian

I know that there's a lot of concern on the fundie right about a possible Charlie Crist Vice Presidency, not because he's a popular governor or he's young or he gives John McCain a leg up in the swing state of Florida. But could it be that McCain supporters in the conservative establishment as trying to quell these rumors by floating a make-out tape with Crist and some woman? (h/t HuffPo)

How interested is Florida Governor Charlie Crist in being John McCain's VP runningmate? So much so that veteran GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone -- who coordinated a few dirty stunts in support of Crist during the 2006 gubernatorial campaign -- is quietly peddling a so-called "Charlie Crist sex tape." That's what Stone called it during a telephone conversation. And no, it is not a tape of Crist having sex with a guy. In fact, it isn't even X-rated. The video was seemingly staged to kill the rumors that Crist is gay. Stone claims the tape -- which he discussed recently with Politics1, but didn't show to us ("I'm saving it for the national shows") -- "shows Charlie fooling around in a hotel elevator with his girlfriend ... They're making out." Adds Stone: "It was captured on a security camera in the elevator" last month. And Stone just conveniently happens to have a copy of the hotel's elevator surveillance tape, just when Crist's name is in play for the VP spot. Hmm. As for Crist's purported girlfriend -- presuming it is the same one he took as his date to the White House Correspondents Dinner in DC a few weeks ago -- she's still married (and not to Crist). Disclaimer: Always be skeptical of anything from Stone.

How would cheating publicly with a married woman - and before marriage, no less - shore up Crist's standing with the religious right? It doesn't make a bit of sense.

But Roger Stone is an odd bird. The New Yorker did a profile recently. He's still the high priest of ratfucking in Republican politics. Still trying to figure out his angle on this one, however.

Everybody Must Get Stoned

See, there's a very simple explanation for how federal investigators discovered Eliot Spitzer's secret trysts in hotel rooms with prostitutes. They were merely alerted by a series of suspicious financial transactions and thought it was a bribery case and then just stumbled upon the prostitution ring. It's all so very s-

What's this now?

Almost four months before Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer ''used the services of high-priced call girls'' while in Florida.
The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Miami Beach resident Stone learned the information from ''a social contact in an adult-themed club.'' It offered one potentially identifying detail: The man in question hadn't taken off his calf-length black socks ``during the sex act.''

Stone, known for shutting down the 2000 presidential election recount effort in Miami-Dade County, is a longtime Spitzer nemesis whose political experience ranges from the Nixon White House to Al Sharpton's presidential campaign. His lawyer wrote the letter containing the call-girl allegations after FBI agents had asked to speak to Stone, though he says the FBI did not specify why he was contacted.

''Mr. Stone respectfully declines to meet with you at this time,'' the letter states, before going on to offer ''certain information'' about Spitzer.

''The governor has paid literally tens of thousands of dollars for these services. It is Mr. Stone's understanding that the governor paid not with credit cards or cash but through some pre-arranged transfer,'' the letter said.

So a well-known Republican ratfucker with a history of making threatening phone calls to Spitzer's father in the middle of the night, is contacted by the FBI, in reference to God knows what, and he refuses to talk to them, but through his lawyer he leaks a bit of oppo research he picked up in a sex club, which he's been known to frequent. The Miami FBI apparently TAKES NO FOR AN ANSWER, and may have forwarded the information to the FBI in New York (they would not say whether or not they received the letter). A month later Stone goes on Michael Smerconish's radio show and says unequivocally that "Eliot Spitzer will not serve out his term as governor of the state of New York." A couple months later Spitzer is picked up on a wire and you know the rest. Immediately Stone is interviewed by Newsday, and you can almost smell the smugness.

"I didn't make him go to a prostitution ring," said the most famous and ruthless Republican dirty trickster who still walks the earth. "He did that all on his own."

Stone said that even before I asked if his hand was somehow in Spitzer's latest trouble. I figured, somehow or another, it had to be.

"No comment on that," Stone said. "I will say I knew it was coming. That's why I wasn't too upset about the results of the special election," where a Democrat grabbed a supposedly safe Republican State Senate seat, leaving Democrats just one vote shy of control.

Conversations with Stone often go like that. Always cocky. A little cryptic. Leaving you wondering about more.

Yeah, I'm wondering why some slimy political operative is all but managing federal investigations in the Bush Justice Department.

Scott Horton at Harper's has some more, including this new article from the New York Times.

The Justice Department used some of its most intrusive tactics against Eliot Spitzer, examining his financial records, eavesdropping on his phone calls and tailing him during its criminal investigation of the Emperor’s Club prostitution ring. The scale and intensity of the investigation of Mr. Spitzer, then the governor of New York, seemed on its face to be a departure for the Justice Department, which aggressively investigates allegations of wrongdoing by public officials, but almost never investigates people who pay prostitutes for sex.

A review of recent federal cases shows that federal prosecutors go sparingly after owners and operators of prostitution enterprises, and usually only when millions of dollars are involved or there are aggravating circumstances, like human trafficking or child exploitation. Government lawyers and investigators defend the expenditure of resources on Mr. Spitzer in the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. case as justifiable and necessary since it involved the possibility of criminal wrongdoing by New York’s highest elected official, who had been the state’s top prosecutor.

So the Justice Department, under the direction of Roger Frickin' Stone, at least from the outside, deployed massive resources to capture the bad actions of a sitting Democratic governor, while in the analogous case of the DC Madam they expended no energy entrapping David Vitter or Randall Tobias. And we know the Bush Administration has a history with going after Democratic governors and even putting them in the slammer.

Eliot Spitzer did what he did; there's no getting around that. The selective prosecution and politicization of justice, however, continues to magnify in this case.

Rudy's Newest Supporter

Roger Stone, a GOP operative who was just dumped from the New York State GOP for making a threatening phone call to Eliot Spitzer's father (here's the audio); who has actually tried to claim in his defense that "unnamed Spitzer operatives broke into his New York City apartment, presumably with a voice impersonator, and placed the threatening message to Spitzer's father from Stone's phone"; a man who is one of the all-time dirty tricksters in the Republican Hall of Shame; whose past includes allegations that he routinely placed swinger ads looking for "muscular, well hung, single men" to party with him and his wife...

...makes the case for Rudy Giuliani today.

He joins such upstanding citizens as racketeer Bernie Kerik, coke dealer Thomas Ravenel, child molester Monsignor Alan Placa, and others in the new 527 "Moral Lepers for Rudy."