Tag: elections

Election Day November 2, 2010

Seth Anderson0 comment

No electioneering beyond this point

 

Outside my polling location. On the other side of this demarcation, a Rahm Emmanuel volunteer was collecting signatures to put Emmanuel on the ballot for Mayor.

 

Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone1

Thank you for voting

In 2008, we voted with electronic voting machines2, today, the ballots were paper: selection of a candidate was made by using a pen and connecting a line from one side to another. Wonder what happened to the electronic machines? I’m happy, actually, to use the older style ballot, seems like it would be easier to conduct a recount with this kind of document as opposed to a digital record.

Sample+Ballot+Chicago+2010-723016.PNG

Footnotes:
  1. Lens: John S / Flash: Off / Film: Ina’s 1935 [↩]
  2. even though there was some sort of paper trail [↩]

Foreign-Funded US Chamber Of Commerce Running Partisan Attack Ads

Seth Anderson0 comment

Hordes at Nadeau

If you hadn’t heard, the increasingly partisan U.S. Chamber of Commerce has become one of the biggest funders of attack ads against Democrats, thanks to generous contributions from Rupert Murdoch, and elsewhere…

The largest attack campaign against Democrats this fall is being waged by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a trade association organized as a 501(c)(6) that can raise and spend unlimited funds without ever disclosing any of its donors. The Chamber has promised to spend an unprecedented $75 million to defeat candidates like Jack Conway, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Jerry Brown, Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), and Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA). As of Sept. 15th, the Chamber had aired more than 8,000 ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates alone, according to a study from the Wesleyan Media Project. The Chamber’s spending has dwarfed every other issue group and most political party candidate committee spending. A ThinkProgress investigation has found that the Chamber funds its political attack campaign out of its general account, which solicits foreign funding. And while the Chamber will likely assert it has internal controls, foreign money is fungible, permitting the Chamber to run its unprecedented attack campaign. According to legal experts consulted by ThinkProgress, the Chamber is likely skirting longstanding campaign finance law that bans the involvement of foreign corporations in American elections.

(click to continue reading Think Progress » Exclusive: Foreign-Funded ‘U.S.’ Chamber Of Commerce Running Partisan Attack Ads.)

and the USCC is trying to wiggle past any critical news coverage with obfuscation:

In fact, neither the [Washington] Post nor the [New York] Times “refudiated” the ThinkProgress report. Both merely quoted Chamber of Commerce officials who only discussed the limited “AmCham” funds, only one of several avenues for foreign funding of the Chamber. Both articles recognized that there is no outside oversight of the Chamber’s money flow. “Money, however, is fungible,” the New York Times editorial board explained, “and it is impossible for an outsider to know whether the group is following its rules.” As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent writes, “The Chamber still hasn’t addressed in any detail the core allegation against it.”

Only Gillespie has made the “charge of illegal criminal activity.” Although it is illegal to solicit foreign funds for electioneering, the essential fact is that there are no disclosure requirements that provide oversight to know whether or not the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is obeying the law. The Chamber successfully lobbied to kill the DISCLOSE Act, which would have closed the loopholes opened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

(click to continue reading Think Progress » Gillespie Claims NY Times And Wash. Post Have ‘Refudiated’ ThinkProgress On Secret Corporate Spending.)

Supreme Court.jpg

This all stems from the Citizens United case, of course, which is going to upend politics even more in coming elections, tilt the balance even more towards the wealthy. Pathetic, but we are rapidly becoming a third world country, with crony capitalism, an eviscerated middle class, etc. etc., yadda yadda.

Think Progress has a nice visual aid of what the USCC’s policies translate into: attack ads on Democrats.

I tried to find a list of the member companies of the USCC; I’d like to know them so I could conduct my own personal boycott, but they keep this information quite secret. As if they are embarrassed, or something. Remember, not long ago, Apple, Inc. resigned from the USCC over the USCC’s wrongheaded climate change stance. Who is left? I assume corporations like ExxonMobil, Home Depot, News Corporation, but who else? Oh yeah, even Exelon quit the USCC last year.

Sex, Drugs and Bill Clinton

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sounds like the perfect task for former President Clinton: he seems to genuinely love campaigning, kissing babies and shaking hands. The Democratic Party would be foolish not to give Clinton free reign to create a Never-Ending, Traveling  Campaign Circus. Give him a bio-fuel bus like Willie Nelson, and send him around the nation…

V O T E

[Bill] Clinton is getting credit for helping to resurrect the candidacy of Congressman Kendrick Meek, who gave up his safe seat to bid for the Democratic Senate nod. Meek was the presumed nominee for months, but then he got hit with a free-spending challenge from real-estate billionaire Jeff Greene, who made his money by buying credit default swaps that rose in value when subprime borrowers defaulted on their home loans. The “meltdown mogul”—as Meek dubbed him—pumped roughly $25 million into television and radio ads and mailings to likely primary voters. Not surprisingly, he surged in the polls.

Greene’s spending overwhelmed Meek and it appeared that another wealthy newcomer—like California Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman, California Republican Senate nominee Carly Fiorina and Connecticut Republican Senate nominee Linda McMahon—might beat a buy a nomination that had been expected to go to a candidate with more experience but less money.

When Meek was at his weakest point, however, Clinton stepped in to campaign for the congressman, stumping in a state where the former president remains extremely popular with Democratic voters.

Then came a series of revelations about wild parties on Greene’s former home in Los Angeles—complete with appearances by boxer Mike Tyson and Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss—and intoxicated romps aboard the billionaire’s private yacht.

The combination of Clinton’s campaigning—the ex-president attended five fundraisers for the congressman, sent two fundraising e-mails on his behalf, and then appeared at rallies in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties—and the sin-at-sea stories swirling around Greene shifted the dynamic of the race at the close.

 

(click to continue reading Sex, Drugs and Bill Clinton: Florida’s Ugly Senate Primary | The Nation.)

Clinton was never my favorite Democrat, but nobody can deny he is good ((usually) at campaigning.

GOP still a regional party

Seth Anderson0 comment

All the talking head blather about the upcoming mid-term elections must be taken with a peck or two of salt. Are the Tea Baggers really going to sweep out the old guard?

Intensely Secular

Nothing has changed. The GOP is still a Southern regional white people party. From the latest NBC/WSJ poll:

The GOP has a HUGE generic-ballot edge in the South (52%-31%), but it doesn’t lead anywhere else. In the Northeast, Dems have a 55%-30% edge; in the Midwest, they lead 49%-38%; and in the West, it’s 44%-43%.

And there’s this:

Consider: 60% believe the current Congress is either below average or among the worst, an all-time high in the survey; the percentage viewing the GOP favorably (24%-46% fav/unfav) is at an all-time low; the numbers for the Democratic Party aren’t much better (33%-44%, and the “very negative” for the Dems matches an all-time high); nearly six in 10 say the country is headed in the wrong direction; and 64% think the U.S. economy hasn’t yet hit rock bottom (“Recovery Summer,” anyone?).

Everyone hates everyone in DC, but they still hate Republicans the most.

(click to continue reading GOP still a regional party.)

 

Mark Kirk Is a Serial Liar

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Wonder if the Illinois Republican party wishes they could run the primary again? Nearly every thing Mark Kirk claims turns out to be a lie, which means more media scrutiny, and seemingly never ending embarrassments. Maybe Jack Ryan could take a few days off of his busy sex club schedule, and join in the race?

V O T E

CHICAGO — A leader of the church in upstate New York where Representative Mark S. Kirk of Illinois claimed he worked as a nursery school teacher said on Friday that he had overstated his role there.

The leader, Sally Grubb, a member of the administrative council at Forest Home Chapel, said Mr. Kirk, a Republican candidate for the United States Senate, had a limited role as a student while working part-time in a work-study program at Cornell University.

“He was never, ever considered a teacher,” Ms. Grubb said in a phone interview after spending two days researching the history of Mr. Kirk’s association with the nursery school. “He was just an additional pair of hands to help a primary teaching person.”

The Methodist church in Ithaca, N.Y., has been trying to determine whether Mr. Kirk worked there after The New York Times reported on Thursday about the brevity of Mr. Kirk’s teaching experience. Eight longtime members of the church, including two former pastors, said in interviews this week that they did not recall having a male nursery school teacher in 1981, when Mr. Kirk said he had worked there.

“I don’t remember any men who worked there,” said Thomas V. Wolfe, a former pastor at the church, who is now the dean of student affairs at Syracuse University. “It was a team of women. I used to go over every morning and have coffee with them. I don’t remember him.”

(click to continue reading School Says Representative Kirk Never Taught There – NYTimes.com.)

Why would Mark Kirk lie about something so minor like whether he taught in a nursery school or not? There is something very wrong with his brain, which means he’ll probably become fast friends with Joe Barton and his ilk.

Alvin Greene – Mystery Candidate in South Carolina

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sounds like a B movie plot, actually, but who knows what happened. Does South Carolina still use Diebold1 voting machines?

Carryout at 17 East Ohio

As you may have heard, last night had a big surprise in the Democratic Senate primary in South Carolina. Probably no Democrat would have much of a chance against Sen. Jim DeMint (R) this year. But the main candidate was Vic Rawl, a judge who’s also served four terms in the state legislature. He’d raised $186,000. Against him was Alvin Greene, a rather unorthodox candidate. And Greene won. (The best theory people have come up with is that no one in the state had really heard of either guy and Greene’s name came first on the ballot; and that gave him an advantage.)

Greene’s unemployed, recently out of the Army and living with his parents, and has an outstanding felony arrest from last year for showing obscene photos to a college student.

Back in March he walked into the state Democratic headquarters with a personal check for $10,400. That’s the filing fee. The party people said they weren’t allowed to take a personal check. It had to come from a campaign account. So a few hours later he came back with a check from a campaign account. And he signed up to run.

And that was it. He held no events. He never campaigned. He didn’t go to the convention. He never filed any money filings. He never raised any money. He didn’t even have a website. In other words, by every conceivable measure he never actually mounted a campaign. When Mother Jones called him shortly after his victory and asked him what was up, he seemed hard pressed to explain why he had run or really anything about what was going on other than to insist that the ten grand was his money.

(click to continue reading This is Real Fishy | Talking Points Memo.)

If running for election was so easy, more non-politician non-lawyers would run. But it isn’t. So what’s the story? Very interested in how this happened, and who the frack is Alvin Greene? Jim DeMint is an utter asshole, but South Carolina apparently likes racist Republicans, and DeMint will probably win easily.

 From Mother Jones article based on an interview with Mr. Greene:

Little Green Man - Shamrock Shuffle

An unemployed 32-year-old black Army veteran with no campaign funds, no signs, and no website shocked South Carolina on Tuesday night by winning the Democratic Senate primary to oppose Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Alvin Greene, who currently lives in his family’s home, defeated Vic Rawl, a former judge and state legislator who had a $186,000 campaign warchest and had already planned his next fundraising event. Despite the odds, Greene, who has been unemployed for the past nine months, said that he wasn’t surprised by his victory. “I wasn’t surprised, but not really. I mean, just a little, but not much. I knew I was on top of my campaign, and just stayed on top of everything, I just—I wasn’t surprised that much, just a little. I knew that I worked hard and did,” Greene said in an interview.

Greene insists that he paid the $10,400 filing fee and all other campaign expenses from his own personal funds. “It was 100 percent out of my pocket. I’m self-managed. It’s hard work, and just getting my message to supporters. I funded my campaign 100 percent out of my pocket and self-managed,” said Greene, who sounded anxious and unprepared to speak to the public. But despite his lack of election funds, Greene claims to have criss-crossed the state during his campaign—though he declined to specify any of the towns or places he visited or say how much money he spent while on the road.

“It wasn’t much, I mean, just, it was—it wasn’t much. Not much, I mean, it wasn’t much,” he said, when asked how much of his own money he spent in the primary. Greene frequently spoke in rapid-fire, fragmentary sentences, repeating certain phrases or interrupting himself multiple times during the same sentence while he searched for the right words. But he was emphatic about certain aspects of his candidacy, insisting that details about his campaign organization, for instance, weren’t relevant. “I’m not concentrating on how I was elected—it’s history. I’m the Democratic nominee—we need to get talking about America back to work, what’s going on, in America.”

(click to continue reading Who Is Alvin Greene? | Mother Jones.)

 

Footnotes:
  1. or whatever they’ve been re-branded as [↩]

Reading Around on June 15th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading June 15th from 18:15 to 19:26:

  • Iran’s Disputed Election – The Big Picture – Boston.com – re Iran’s Presidential Election, Tehran and other cities have seen the largest street protests and rioting since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Supporters of reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, upset at their announced loss and suspicions of voter fraud, took to the streets both peacefully and, in some cases, violently to vent their frustrations. Iranian security forces and hardline volunteer militia members responded with force and arrests, attempting to stamp out the protests – meanwhile, thousands of Iranians who were happy with the election outcome staged their own victory demonstrations. Mousavi himself has been encouraging peaceful demonstrations, and called for calm at a large demonstration today (held in defiance of an official ban), as Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has just called for an official inquiry into accusations of election irregularities. (Update: several photos of injuries from gunshots at today’s rally added below)
  • The Fiery Judge | Mother Jones – comparing the substance and tone of her questions with those of his male colleagues and his own questions.

    “And I must say I found no difference at all. So I concluded that all that was going on was that there were some male lawyers who couldn’t stand being questioned toughly by a woman,” Calabresi says. “It was sexism in its most obvious form.”

    And what if such criticism came from a woman lawyer? Well, says Calabresi, women can be just as sexist as men in their expectations of how a woman judge should act.

    NPR played a couple of snippets of Sotomayor in its piece so listeners could judge for themselves. Ann did: “Listening to the clips, Sotomayor sounds an awful lot like John Roberts — who did not face any concerns about his ‘fiery temperament’ during his confirmation hearings. Totenberg exposes this talking point for what it is: straight-up sexism, with some racism mixed in for good measure.”

  • Daily Kos: Obama: Iranian people “should be heard and respected” – “What I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was. And they should know that the world is watching.And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.”

  • Twitter Blog: Down Time Rescheduled – A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran

  • Competition For Dummies by digby Just think. This… – “Sadly, this is the result of misguided American exceptionalism (and years of convenient Republican gibberish.) Even people who by all rights should be well informed about the issues of the day just simply can’t wrap their minds around the fact that our health care system is not only bad by our own measurements but that it is far worse than the systems in other industrialized countries. Foreigners cannot possibly have better health care than America. This is the greatest country the world has ever known or ever will know! It’s impossible!

    Except it’s true.”

Reading Around on April 17th through April 24th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected April 17th through April 24th:

  • FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Messing with Texas – “What Texas could choose to do, however, is to divide itself up into as many as five states, a privilege given to it as a condition of its annexation to the Union in 1845. What would Texas look like if it chose to do this? Would dividing a large, red state into five smaller, reddish states benefit Republicans in the Senate? In the Electoral College?The answers are not so clear. But first things first, we need to come up with a logical way to divde Texas into five parts.”

  • Fritinancy: Ms. Dowd Interviews the Inventor of the Telephone – MoDo “sat down with Mr. Bell, 39, and his assistant Thomas Watson, 22, and asked them to explain why they shouldn’t be condemned to a slow, painful death.

    ME: The telephone seems like letter-writing without the paper and pen. Is there any message that can’t wait for a passenger pigeon?

    BELL: Possibly the message I’d like to deliver to you right now.”

  • Gapers Block : Drive-Thru : Chicago Food – Wait, No Need to Soak Those Beans – “One revelation, to me, was the idea that beans need not be soaked before cooking–provided that they are cooked slowly for a long time. In a recipe called Gloria’s Pork Ribs and Red Beans, the red beans are rinsed, and are thrown right into the pot. The beans slowly rehydrate as they cook with the other ingredients, for about 2 hours.”

    This recipe looks quite tasty: I’m making a variant as soon as I can get into my kitchen.