Month: April 2009

Tedisco Inferno

by dday

In case you missed it, the race in NY-20 yesterday wound up with Murphy up by 65 votes out of over 154,000 cast. There are roughly 6,000 absentee votes to be counted, with potentially more on the way in the next few days (they have to be postmarked by today). As I mentioned yesterday, Tedisco had already filed a complaint to contest the election results before the polls even closed.

What will be interesting is to see what vermin come out of the woodwork to try and overturn the election in Tedisco’s favor:

The guy who held this seat before getting beat by Kirsten Gillibrand is John Sweeney, who led the famed Brooks Brothers riot in the 2000 election. If things get tough in this recount, Republicans may bring in a lawyer named Tom Spargo, who reportedly helped Sweeney with the Brooks Brother riot and other stuff in Florida. Spargo is also a former judge who got indicted for bribery a few months ago.

If this gets really tight—and it probably won’t, this stuff is usually orderly in NYS —we could see a whole cast of NYS crazies come out of the woodwork.

I’m telling you, that Brooks Brothers riot was like a nationwide American Idol casting call for GOP leaders. Ben Ginsburg, who ran Bush’s legal team during the recount, has popped up in Minnesota to run Norm Coleman’s recount.

Meanwhile, the NRCC, in a clever inversion tactic, is already raising money for the recount in an email entitled “Don’t Let’em Pull a Franken”.

We need your support to ensure we can overcome the Democrats’ legal maneuvers.

Democrats have almost succeeded in stealing the election in Minnesota and seating Al Franken. We cannot allow them to manipulate electoral results to seat another tax-troubled liberal.

We need your support to make sure the will of the residents of New York’s 20th district prevails in the final outcome.

I’m not so much interested in the outcome as I am seeing to what lengths the Republicans up there will go to win this thing. Clearly they blew this one on the ground in a district they should have won, given the matchup, and now they’ll try to fake their way to victory. They’ve learned well from the Coleman debacle, too.

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CNN’s Take On An April Fools Joke

by tristero

CNN:

A key Democratic senator said Tuesday that he’s not ruling out a controversial budget procedure to speed passage of President Obama’s health care and global warming legislation.

The House and Senate are expected to pass separate versions of the budget by the end of the week.

‘It could happen,’ said Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, despite his repeated concerns that doing so would damage bipartisan cooperation in the Senate.

”

ROTFLMAO!

Assault On Children

by digby

In the great tradition of Republican leaders Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh, Governor Mark Sanford has put both feet in his mouth and bitten down hard.

Here’s Joan Walsh:

Remember Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the Dillon, S.C., girl who asked Congress for stimulus funds to rehab her dilapidated middle school? I thought she was an inspiration for America; wingnuts at the Washington Times thought she was “irresponsible” for asking government to solve her problems.Now her governor, Mark Sanford, has taken that line of thinking one step further: He told Fox’s great poet Glenn Beck that taking stimulus funds to fix schools like Bethea’s would be “fiscal child abuse,” while rejecting the funds helps kids. No, I’m not kidding.The folks at Think Progress have the video.

As Joan points out, it’s pretty hard not to wonder just how much race plays into this decision. There’s no doubt that the poorest kids in South Carolina tend to be African American.

Mark Sanford is going to run for president on the fiscal responsibility ticket. And it may just work. If the economy is better, he and his ilk will rant and rave about debt. If it’s worse, he’ll say the spending did no good. And who knows what the media narratives will be?

But he’s going to hell no matter what happens. Poor people in his poor state are going to suffer for his cynical political posturing and is sickening.