If you’ll recall, one of the criminals charged in the Louisiana Watergate scandal, Robert Flanagan, has a daddy who is an acting U.S. attorney. Well, his lawyer has started plea bargaining talks with federal prosecutors. I find this interesting because until now, the story from their pimp, I mean, master Nazi leader, James O’Keefe, was that they had done nothing illegal, and that the “truth would set them free.”
But if they all make plea deals, how’s the truth ever going to come out? They also waived a preliminary hearing that was scheduled for today. Me thinks they’re not laughing anymore. And we’ve yet to hear a single reason why U.S. attorney Jim Letten removed himself from the case the day after their arrests. We have, however, received confirmation from Oklahoma repiglican representative Mary Fallin that Flanagan was once a paid intern in her office. Fallin is still a co-sponsor of a resolution to “honor” O’Keefe for his cleverly edited videos that have led to zero charges against anyone at ACORN (because nothing illegal occurred), but stopped short of showing the ACORN folks throwing pimpy O’Keefey out of their offices.
Gotta love the way repiglicans always honor their criminal heroes. You can bet your bippy that somewhere right at this very minute, one of them is singing the “praises” of Ronnie Raygun, and how we should overlook that whole Iran-Contra thing. The repiglicans introduce resolutions to praise the likes of O’Keefe, but about the time Dennis Kucinich ever introduced a resolution to honor Michael Moore (and he should, by the way) the repiglicans would scream and kick until hell wouldn’t have it anymore.
I shouldn’t be too hard on them, though. It’s gotta be tough looking at the world through teabag-colored glasses.
Repiglican Senator David “Diaper Boy” Vitter has been blocking President Obama’s judicial nominations in Louisiana, to ensure his boy Jim Letten, a Bush appointee holdover, was guaranteed his job. While Attorney General Eric Holder never gave Vitter such assurances, Letten’s appointment by Holder to a policy committee is apparently all the proof Vitter needs. Vitter released a statement saying he will now stop blocking Obama’s nominees. You can read more about this here.
But here’s where it gets curiouser and curiouser.
Not even 24 hours after that article was published, Jim Letten, whose office should be actively prosecuting James O’Keefe and his band of merry criminals for tampering with a federal phone system, released a statement saying he had recused himself from the case last week.
So, let’s get this straight. A neocon Senator holds up the judicial system’s confirmation process, not because he feels the nominees aren’t qualified, but to strong arm a job guarantee for a fellow repiglican. Upon perceiving a sense of job security, the Senator stops blocking everything, and the person who enjoyed the Senator’s protection stops working on a case where he’d have to prosecute other repiglicans.
Is it just me, or does this stink to high heaven?
PS – ACORN has yet to be charged with ANY crime. Nothing. Nada. Zip. But can’t you imagine the hue and cry from the right wingers if Michael Moore ever concealed his cameras in the same manner O’Keefe does?
WASHINGTON U.S. Rep. Mary Fallin’s office confirmed Wednesday that Robert Flanagan, who was arrested and charged as part of an alleged scheme to gain access to a U.S. senator’s telephones, worked in her office last year.
Still, press secretary Katie Bruns said the Oklahoma Republican remains a co-sponsor of a congressional resolution honoring one of the other suspects for previous efforts to go undercover and gain information on the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, or ACORN.
James O’Keefe only managed to get a couple of low-level ACORN workers fired, but he managed to get himself and three other people charged with felonies. Let me repeat that – if convicted, this republican darling will be a FELON. He’s nothing but a two-bit criminal, and it’s hilarious watching the neocons either defend him or act like they’ve never heard of him (like they used to do upon hearing Jack Abramoff’s name).
In case you missed me laughing in your face today, let me state it again:
A conservative activist who has caused problems for the community organizing group ACORN and the son of a federal prosecutor were among four people arrested and accused of trying to interfere with phones at U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office.
Activist James O’Keefe, 25, was already in Landrieu’s New Orleans office Monday when Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel, both 24, showed up claiming to be telephone repairmen, according to U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office. Letten says O’Keefe recorded the two with his cell phone.
Federal officials did not say why the men wanted to interfere with Landrieu’s phones or whether they were successful. Landrieu, a moderate Democrat, declined comment Tuesday. She has been in the news recently because she negotiated an increase in Medicaid funds for her state before announcing her support for Senate health care legislation.
An FBI criminal complaint charging the men was unsealed Tuesday.
O’Keefe was the brains behind a series of undercover videos which have caused major problems for ACORN — the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now.
A missing envelope with 133 Minneapolis ballots might go down in history as one of Minnesota’s unexplained political mysteries.
Officials in the heavily Democratic city called off the search for that envelope Monday, bringing an end to counting in the 2008 U.S. Senate race recount and pivoting the election to its next phase. That includes canvassing the recount results and deciding on potentially thousands of challenged ballots that should determine who emerges from the recount in position to win a race that has now extended five weeks past Election Day.
“While we are disappointed that the envelope containing 133 missing paper ballots (has) not been found, we take solace in the fact that the voters of this precinct will still have their votes counted, as the secretary of state has said that the canvassed and audited election night results may stand in the absence of these ballots,” said Marc Elias, an attorney for Democratic challenger Al Franken.
Despite Elias’ optimism, what happens to those votes — which city officials believe were counted at Ward 3, Precinct 1, before being placed in an envelope marked “1 of 5″ and disappearing — will be up to the state canvassing board. If the votes were not included in the precinct’s totals, incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman would gain 36 votes compared with the election night tally.
SACRAMENTO, Calif.- A former opponent of Barack Obama’s has come back to haunt him over questions regarding Obama’s citizenship.
According to a press release from the American Independent Party, former presidential candidate Alan Keyes and other members of the party have filed suit in California Superior Court in Sacramento to stop the state from giving its electoral votes to President-elect Barack Obama until documentary evidence is provided to prove Obama is indeed a natural born citizen of the United States. More here…
Mr. Keyes, this only goes to prove why nobody in America wanted you as President. Seriously, take the hint this time! -Sue
The 2008 presidential race is over, but several Senate races still remain undecided. Georgia is headed for a runoff, Minnesota for a recount — and in Alaska things just keep getting stranger.
“It looks like senator and convicted felon Ted Stevens and Congressman-currently-under-investigation Don Young will both hold onto their seats,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted on Thursday. “That said, there’s a case to be made that there’s something fishy going on up there.”
Even though the polls this year have generally been pretty accurate, they were way off in Alaska. Stevens was running between 7% and 22% behind his Democratic challenger in the polls, but now he is narrowly ahead in the vote count
Polling analysis website 538.com comments, “The emerging conventional wisdom is that there was some sort of a Bradley Effect in this contest — voters told pollsters that they weren’t about to vote for that rascal Ted Stevens, when in fact they were perfectly happy to. Convicted felons are the new black, it would seem. The problem with this theory is that the polling failures in Alaska weren’t unique to Stevens.”
The polls also consistently showed Rep. Young as losing by at least 6%, but he is currently ahead in the vote count by 8%. Even in the presidential race, where polls showed McCain leading by 14% or less, the vote count has him winning by 61% to 35% — precisely the same margin as George Bush in 2004. That represents a polling error of at least 11% to 14% in all three races.
At the same time, total voter turnout appears to be about 11% lower in Alaska this year than in 2004 — despite over 20,000 new registrations, heavy turnout in the primaries, record early voting, long lines at the polls on Election Day, and the state’s own governor being on the ballot, all of which had led to an expectation of record participation.
Maddow turned for explanations to Nate Silver of 538.com, who pointed out that tens of thousands of absentee ballots, early votes, and provisional votes are yet to be counted. However, these appear to be spread fairly evenly across the state, not concentrated in Democratic areas, so even a final tally is unlikely to jibe with the polls. “Clearly it didn’t go how the pollsters expected,” Silver commented.
At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.
Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk’s office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.
“When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain,” said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.
When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge “responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail.”
Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.
When she tried to vote for candidates running for two open seats on the Supreme Court, the electronic machine canceled her second vote twice.
On her third try, Matheney managed to cast votes for both Menis Ketchum and Margaret Workman, Democratic candidates for the two open seats.
Calvin Thomas, 81, who retired from Kaiser Aluminum in Ravenswood in 1983 and now lives in Ripley, experienced the same problem.
“When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor’s office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again.
What do the KKK, suspicious vandalism, and “Operation Wetback” have to do with this year’s election in Arizona?
What do the KKK, suspicious vandalism, and “Operation Wetback†have to do with this year’s election in Arizona?
Everything.
The Ku Klux Klan
GOP Congressional candidate Randy Graf recently garnered the support of one of the most polarizing figures in American politics – Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.
Graf is widely viewed as an extremist – so much so that the national GOP recently pulled their support of his candidacy. But, incredibly, the Arizona Republican Party continues to support his fringe agenda and his campaign for US Congress.
Help us defeat Graf, and his extremist agenda by electing Gabrielle Giffords and our other Democratic Congressional candidates. MAKE A CONTRIBUTION NOW!
“Operation Wetbackâ€
While Graf has been garnering the endorsements of white supremacists, one of his colleagues in the state legislature, Russell Pearce, announced his intention to bring back “Operation Wetback,†the pre-civil rights era program to deal with illegal immigration.
Raising the specter of reinstating this long-discredited program can only serve to polarize the state and empower the GOP’s most radical supporters.
Help us combat racism and intolerance by defeating these extremists. Make your contribution now!
Democrats Targeted for Vandalism
If all of this wasn’t enough, we learned Friday that the Democratic Party Headquarters in Tucson was vandalized and the phone lines to the call center were cut overnight. This crippled our volunteer call center and jeopardized our ability to talk to voters in Southern Arizona at a critical time in the election.
Did radical GOP supporters cut critical phone lines to Democratic offices? You decide. But whether they did or not, I can assure you that Republicans will stop at nothing to beat our Democratic candidates and push an extreme agenda for Arizona
