GOP’s election-rigging schemes can’t save them

ThinkProgress: Tuesday, as he conceded defeat in the Virginia governor’s race, Ken Cuccinelli II (R) told supporters that he had come closer than polls had indicated “despite being outspent by an unprecedented $15 million.” But while he and his conservative supporters now lament that money cost them the victory they felt they deserved, they have long been the defenders of the system of campaign finance non-regulation in Virginia and nationally.

Conservative groups like the Center for Competitive Politics have long argued that “money doesn’t buy elections.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), whose own political action committee gave $5,000 to Cuccinelli’s campaign, has for years advocated for an end to limits on campaign contributions, believing “money is speech.” While the 2010 Citizens United ruling weakened federal contribution limits, Virginia has long been one of a handful of states with no limits whatsoever. The only restriction Cuccinelli supported over his time in the state senate was on contributions from foreign nationals.

Because of the Old Dominion’s anything goes system, candidates can accept millions of dollars from any individual or corporation seeking to ensure their victory. While Governor-Elect Terry McAuliffe raised over $32 million, Cuccinelli himself reported at least $19 million in donations — including hundreds of thousands from fossil fuel companies who preferred a climate-change denier to a candidate focused on green energy.

Business donors are now fleeing the GOP and Tea Party candidates like Cuccinelli in particular. A big part of the reason for this is the GOP’s obsession over debt and deficits to the detriment of the economy and jobs. The Democratic Party is now friendlier to business than Republicans — a position they find themselves in by default, as the GOP abandons anything resembling fiscal realism.

So the Americans United decision isn’t saving them and their voter suppression schemes aren’t saving them. It seems the only way Republicans have to stop losing elections is to stop trying to tell voters what to think and instead, listen to what voters have to say. They’re not going to like what they hear, but sucks to be them.

Of course, another option would be to push for legislation allowing gun owners to use their Glorious Second Amendment Freedoms to walk into polling places and force everyone to vote GOP at gunpoint. And I wouldn’t put it passed them, because the other ways they’re trying to rig elections just aren’t working.

Social conservative extremism costing VA gov. candidate Cuccinelli donors

Bloomberg News: Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli has less than half as much cash as Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe, with a prominent list of Republican donors sitting out this year’s most competitive U.S. political contest — and in some cases switching sides.

The financial disadvantage four months before the election illustrates the difficulties confronting an attorney general who is campaigning on an economic growth plan yet is best known for his opposition to gay marriage and abortion.

“Mr. Cuccinelli’s very hard stance on some of the social issues is a concern for me,” said Virginia Beach developer Bruce L. Thompson, chief executive officer of Gold Key/PHR Hotels and Resorts, a financial backer of current Republican Governor Bob McDonnell who in May gave McAuliffe $25,000.

“I believe personally in a woman’s right to choose, but I also think from an economic development standpoint, we’re trying to attract businesses from other areas of the country, and we’re telling women that we’re going to regulate the way that they run their life? I just don’t think we can be exclusionary when it comes to women” and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals, Thompson said.

Cuccinelli, 44, had $2.7 million in cash as of the end of June, compared with $6 million for McAuliffe, 56, the former national Democratic Party chairman and fundraiser. While McAuliffe had been expected to out-raise Cuccinelli, the Republican is lagging behind where McDonnell was at this point in his 2009 race, when he had $4.9 million in cash on hand.

Granted, a some of the lag in fundraising has to come from the fact that Cuccinelli is growing increasingly rank with the smell of impending failure; the scandals of Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell threaten to pull his camaign down as well. But when donors are specifically citing certain social issues as the reason for withholding donations or even for funding the opposition, something is most definitely up there.

Cuccinelli’s been a tireless social warrior and the business community is concerned that this is the only thing he thinks about. Given the Governor’s Office, they think he’ll use it almost exclusively to wage War on Women and to fight the Homosexual Menace — which probably isn’t a bad guess. That has been his history as the state’s Attorney General.

Here’s hoping that other Republicans notice that hyping the religious-based wedge-issue politics is a fundraising loser. That would be a welcome  — and long-overdue — development.

[photo via Gage Skidmore]

Cuccinelli’s clownishness and the religious right’s stealth campaigns

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Goode is bad news for Romney

Washington Post:

Former congressman Virgil Goode Jr. has qualified for the presidential ballot in Virginia, the State Board of Elections ruled Tuesday, adding a potential obstacle to Republican Mitt Romney’s hopes of winning the pivotal state.

The state Republican party has already challenged the eligibility of Goode, who is the Constitution Party’s nominee, and could still get him knocked off the ballot. Goode previously served in Congress as a Democrat, an Independent and then a Republican before losing his southwest Virginia seat in 2008.

[…]

Third-party hopefuls rarely garner many votes in Virginia, but Goode’s status as a longtime officeholder — he spent 12 years in Congress and 24 years in the state Senate before that — could earn him more support than the typical candidate. Just 2 percent or 3 percent of the vote going to Goode could be enough to swing the contest.

How real a threat is Goode to Romney’s chances? This real:

If Goode succeeds [in getting on the state’s ballot], he could become a spoiler in Virginia’s neck-and-neck race between President Obama and Mitt Romney. Some Republicans fear that Goode, a lawyer who was born and raised in Franklin County, would shave votes from the former Massachusetts governor.

“If you want to see Barack Obama reelected president of the United States, do whatever you can for Virgil Goode,” said Virginia Republican strategist Chris LaCivita.

News Roundup for 5/11/12

Differently hydrated landscape

-Headline of the Day-
"Lawmakers avoid buzzwords on climate change bills."

Remember when being "politically correct" was all the rage? People weren't "handicapped," they were "physically challenged" or "differently abled" -- you know, crazy stuff like that. For everyone else it was just being polite, but to the right it was the worst thing ever!

That's all changed now and Republicans have their own version of being politically correct. Usually, it involves believing a whole passel of bullshit, but sometimes it just means avoiding certain words that suggest certain things that are happening are happening. Things like global warming.

Take the Virginia legislature, for example. According to the report, "State lawmakers ran into a problem this year when recommending a study on rising sea levels and their potential impacts on coastal Virginia.... It was not a scientific problem or a financial one. It was linguistic."

See, it turns out that if you describe rising sea levels as something obvious like "sea level rise," that's communism. So say the local Tea Party nutjobs. You can measure sea level rise, it's actually happening, and it's like super-important to a coastal state like Virginia, but admitting reality is politically inconvenient. So "sea level rise" becomes "recurrent flooding." See, that's so much better because it doesn't suggest a cause -- it's just this crazy thing that keeps happening and no one knows why. Other terms being thrown around by 'baggers are "increased flooding risk" and "coastal resiliency."

"Sea level challenged" apparently hasn't occurred to anyone. (Virginian-Pilot)


-Cartoon time with Mark Fiore-
Hey kids, Dogboy and Mr. Dan are back and they're going to explain why we keep taking out al Qaeda's number two. Yay!


Click for animation

OK, when Obama and Mr. Dan are on the same page, we've got real trouble. (MarkFiore.com)


-Bonus HotD-
"Rove group jokes Obama official who had seizure was drunk."

Because Karl's classy like that. (Raw Story)

News Roundup for 5/2/12

Newt Gingrich, economic genius

-Headline of the Day-
"Newt Gingrich $4 Million in Debt; Staffers and Creditors Fume."

It's official: Noodles is out. But while his presidential campaign will finally fold up shop, his campaign debt is going to stick around for a while.

According to the report, Gingrich "finished March with $4.3 million in debts, an alarming increase from $1.5 million at the end of February, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission."

"The campaign owes Moby Dick Airways $1.1 million for travel and charter flights.; the Patriot Group, a Virginia security company, $449,502 for helping to protect the candidate; and McKenna, Long and Aldridge, a law firm with offices in Atlanta, $183,658 for legal services, the reports show," the report goes on. Smaller businesses are getting screwed too.

"We floated quite a bit of money -- a lot of out-of-pocket costs that we covered," said Ryan Driscoll of Pro-Production Services, a stage, light, and sound company. "I am a little worried. Nobody wants to lose 32 grand."

For their part, Romney and the Republican Party have "offered to be helpful in retiring Gingrich's debt."

Would that be a bailout? I do believe it would be. Huzzah for fiscal sanity! (ABC News)


-The VP search is on-



An intriguing sign... (GoComics)


-Bonus HotD-
"Wife Of Key Legislator Behind North Carolina’s Anti-Gay Amendment Claims It Would Protect The ‘Caucasian’ Race."

I'm not extremely clear on how this works. Are we sure Jodie Brunstetter knows we're talking about gay marriage here? I think she might be getting her bigotries mixed up. (ThinkProgress)

Stories to Watch: 1/13/12

We have snow. Finally. Now here's the news...


I've added "Bain Capital" to the Superfeed. I try to keep the topical slots to stories that have legs and Bain is definitely something that's not going away soon. So now the two topicals are Bain and the Wisconsin Recall. The recall ought to last until spring -- depending on how it turns out, perhaps even into the summer. If the recall is successful, the next administration's first steps will be worth paying attention to.


As expected, the Citizens United ruling has Super PACs trying to buy elections.


Tennessee state Rep. Richard Floyd is an awful, awful, awful excuse for a human being.


The "Stop Romney" contingent of evangelicals and Tea Party Republicans are having a little trouble getting their act together.


Mittens is not a trustworthy fellow.


Perry, Huntsman, Gingrich, and Santorum will all be off the Virginia ballot after a lawsuit they all joined failed. You know what Republicans usually call a suit that fails? A frivolous lawsuit.


Mitt's dog Seamus finally becomes a campaign issue -- and a faux childrens' book.


Finally, House Tea Party's transition from political powerhouse to collection of irrelevant nutjobs is very nearly complete.

Related articles

• Gingrich Calls For Anti-Romney Film To Be Edited (huffingtonpost.com)
• Who's Behind The Anti-Romney Documentary? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Obama campaign attacks Romney on Bain (politico.com)
• AdWatch: Romney's first ad defending Bain tenure (sfgate.com)

Crazy for Slavery

This was too funny/sad not to post. The Huffington Post has a video summing up the right's response to Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's proclamation of Confederate History Month -- a proclamation that made no mention of slavery. In the video, various and sundry nutjobs twist themselves in logical knots trying to justify the move. Not surprisingly, they come off pretty badly.



I think I can sum all these clips up for you:

Crazy Person: The Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights!

Non-Crazy Person: States' rights to do what?

Crazy Person: To continue slavery! Ummm... wait...

"Meanwhile, why not have a Union Appreciation Day," asks HuffPo's Jason Linkins, "where people wear T-Shirts with Abraham Lincoln's visage that read, 'Tell us how our taint tastes, treasonholes?'"

There's actually a damned good question buried within that snark. The Confederate apologists say it's about history; if this is the case, why not "Civil War History Month," not "Confederate History Month?" Is it only about part of history?

Of course, it's not about history at all, it's about not being over a cause that was lost 145 years ago.

Let it go...

Griper Blade: Powell, McCain, Division, and Hate

In conversation, I've called Colin Powell a "politician in rehab." He was instrumental in bringing us to war with Iraq, despite any reservations he later claimed to have. The time to stop a disaster is before it happens, rather than after. Shaking your head in disapproval when it all goes to hell doesn't actually do anything all that helpful.

Still, Powell enjoys a measure of respect that few, if any, former Bush administration officials share. Justly or unjustly, Powell is seen by many Americans as "the good one" from Bush's first term.

So it is that Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama is seen as perhaps being more influential than most. Newspaper endorsements, celebrity endorsements, endorsements from colleagues; these generally don't do much to change people's minds. Not that they're totally without benefit -- each endorsement is a news story and all of these stories keep the endorsed candidate in TV news rotation. It counts for something, maybe a bump, but beyond that, probably not much else.

But Powell's endorsement came with an indictment. And that's what's going to hurt. He slammed McCain as erratic and scattershot, displaying no leadership during the credit crisis as he ran from gimmick to gimmick, trying to exploit it for political gain. He tore into his selection of Sarah Palin as not being prepared to become president -- which, as Powell put it, was almost the only job the VP's required to do.

But it was the ugliness of McCain's campaign that really got Powell's attention. While the press has been reporting some of it, it's hard to get them to go in depth. The media seems to believe that they have to find something just as bad from the Obama camp before they'll report on something from the McCain camp. Of course, this leads to false equivalencies and it downplays the outrageousness of McCain supporters by comparing it with things that, when you get right down to it, aren't all that bad. If some McCain supporter calls Obama a Muslim terrorist, some Obama supporter makes fun of McCain's age. Not really the same sort of thing...

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Griper Blade: McCain's Legacy

Pretty nice photo, huh? That's Barack Obama at Madison's Monona Terrace Convention Center last fall. Monona Terrace was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, so it's hard to ignore the architecture when you're shooting in there. But this photo does just that -- it could've been taken anywhere. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on what's right about this photo, so let's just say the composition is pretty nice. Balanced from corner to corner, it's a great example of a photographer thinking on his feet and using the golden section.

But, of course, it's not my intention to write about what a great portrait of Barack Obama Joseph W. Jackson III took for the Wisconsin State Journal. It's the accompanying article that's the newsworthy item -- the photo just jumped out at me and I thought it was worth mentioning. The bigger news is that one of my local papers has endorsed Barack Obama.

I can't remember the last time WSJ has endorsed a Democrat -- perhaps never in my lifetime. Until recently, there were always two print papers in the city, The Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal -- the Journal was the conservative paper. Losing money as the evening paper, the Times ended their print edition and moved to a web-only format. WSJ's endorsement of Obama is kind of a big deal...

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McCain Volunteers Instructed to Accuse Obama of Terrorism

clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com According to Time, McCain campaign staffers in Virginia are teaching volunteers to see Barack Obama as having terrorist 'friends,' and then providing these volunteers with arguments for persuading voters that Sen. Obama, like Osama Bin Laden, shares responsibility for bombings of the Pentagon. The report from inside the McCain campaign brings to light an alarming fact: while McCain tells his supporters publicly to refrain from violent rhetoric,  he continues to teach his volunteers rhetoric designed to elicit violent responses. The report confirms that the McCain campaign has staked its chances of winning the Presidency on convincing the public that Barack Obama is on the wrong side of the 'War on Terror' and, therefore, his victory in the Presidential election would put the power of the White House in the hands of terrorists.

The Time article tells us:

With so much at stake, and time running short, [VA state GOP Chairman Jeffrey M. Frederick] did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points -- for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: "Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon," he said. "That is scary." It is also not exactly true -- though that distorted reference to Obama's controversial association with William Ayers, a former 60s radical, was enough to get the volunteers stoked. "And he won't salute the flag," one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, "We don't even know where Senator Obama was really born." Actually, we do; it's Hawaii.

Obama Makes Gains in Battlegrounds

clipped from politicalwire.com The latest CNN/Time polls in five crucial battleground states suggest that Sen. Barack Obama is making some major gains over rival Sen. John McCain. Florida: Obama 51%, McCain 47% Minnesota: Obama 54%, McCain 43% Missouri: Obama 49%, McCain 48% Nevada: Obama 51%, McCain 47% Virginia: Obama 53%, McCain 44% A Quinnipiac poll released earlier today shows Obama ahead in the three big battleground states: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

McCain's constant stunt-politicking fails to pay off. In fact, it has the opposite of the desired effect. Can Sarah Palin pull this out of the dumper tomorrow night?

You're kidding, right?

Griper Blade: Senate GOP Going Down the Series of Tubes

Yesterday turned out to be a bad day for Republicans in Washington. Alaska Senator Ted Stevens found himself into a little trouble. Stevens, who'd made himself famous with a bridge to nowhere and his assertion that the internet is "not a big truck. It's a series of tubes," was indicted on seven felony counts of concealing $250,000 in gifts and services given to him by an oil company.

"This is very bad for the party," a retiring GOP Senator told Politico. "The timing on this couldn’t be worse." According to Politico's piece, "Now, there’s an arrest warrant out for the 84-year-old senator. He’s been stripped of his top committee rankings. His iconic career is crumbling. His hopes for reelection are in serious doubt.

"And Senate Republicans have no idea what to do about it. "

Of course, the "what to do about it" question isn't so much about pulling Stevens' fat out of the fire, it's about their own political careers. Republicans, never ones to embrace the "we're all in this together" mindset, have adopted as their motto "every man for himself!"

The indictment pretty much pounds the final nail in the coffin containing Stevens' reelection prospects. He was nine points down in polling against rival Mark Begich, Mayor of Anchorage, before the indictment. To give you an idea of how far Ted has fallen in public opinion, Stevens was reelected six years ago with a nearly unheard of 78%...

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