Month: July 2012

There was a time, not long ago, when Republicans aggressively accused Democrats of being in cahoots with the Chi-coms, and the press ran around like puppies scarfing every scandalous morsel without even stopping to look at it. Here’s one:

Johnny Chung, a struggling businessman whose eager giving to national Democratic candidates turned him into a leading figure in the investigation of campaign finance abuses, was charged here today with four counts of bank fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy and will plead guilty and cooperate with the authorities.

Mr. Chung is the fourth person in five weeks to be prosecuted by the Justice Department. On Jan. 28 a former restaurateur in Little Rock, Ark., and good friend of President Clinton, Yah Lin (Charlie) Trie, was charged in a 15-count indictment with obstruction of justice and other crimes related to fund-raising. Antonio Pan, a Democratic fund-raiser, was also charged in the indictment. Maria Hsia, a Democratic fund-raiser from Los Angeles, was indicted on Feb. 18 on charges of laundering campaign donations.

Mr. Chung is scheduled to enter his guilty plea on Monday morning in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, a few miles from a 1995 Clinton/ Gore ’96 fund-raising event in a Century City hotel where Federal officials said he used phony or ”conduit” contributors to illegally give the campaign $20,000, $19,000 more than permitted for one person under the Federal Election Campaign Act, according to the charges filed today.

The wingnut fever swamp managed to convince a good portion of the public that this was good evidence that Bill Clinton was a Chinese agent — and the press was so hysterical by that point that they seemed to believe it too.

Imagine if now were then, and this donor was a Democrat:

A decade ago gambling magnate and leading Republican donor Sheldon Adelson looked at a desolate spit of land in Macau and imagined a glittering strip of casinos, hotels and malls.

Where competitors saw obstacles, including Macau’s hostility to outsiders and historic links to Chinese organized crime, Adelson envisaged a chance to make billions.

Adelson pushed his chips to the center of the table, keeping his nerve even as his company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in late 2008.

The Macau bet paid off, propelling Adelson into the ranks of the mega-rich and underwriting his role as the largest Republican donor in the 2012 campaign, providing tens of millions of dollars to Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and other GOP causes.

Now, some of the methods Adelson used in Macau to save his company and help build a personal fortune estimated at $25 billion have come under expanding scrutiny by federal and Nevada investigators, according to people familiar with both inquiries.

Internal email and company documents, disclosed here for the first time, show that Adelson instructed a top executive to pay about $700,000 in legal fees to Leonel Alves, a Macau legislator whose firm was serving as an outside counsel to Las Vegas Sands.

The company’s general counsel and an outside law firm warned that the arrangement could violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It is unknown whether Adelson was aware of these warnings. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bars American companies from paying foreign officials to “affect or influence any act or decision” for business gain.

Federal investigators are looking at whether the payments violate the statute because of Alves’ government and political roles in Macau, people familiar with the inquiry said. Investigators were also said to be separately examining whether the company made any other payments to officials. An email by Alves to a senior company official, disclosed by The Wall Street Journal, quotes him as saying “someone high ranking in Beijing” had offered to resolve two vexing issues — a lawsuit by a Taiwanese businessman and Las Vegas Sands’ request for permission to sell luxury apartments in Macau. Another email from Alves said the problems could be solved for a payment of $300 million. There is no evidence the offer was accepted. Both issues remain unresolved.

That’s from a Frontline Investigation and there’s so much intrigue, corruption and vast amounts of money it sounds like it has to be fiction. I urge you to read the whole thing — and then contemplate how we can possible have a democracy when people like this are allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the government. The scope of the corruption is mind-boggling.

Romney’s big contradiction

by David Atkins

The political world is buzzing about Romney’s recent difficulties and Democrats’ newfound fighting stance, as everyone argues back and forth over how much involvement Romney had or didn’t have with Bain Capital from 1999-2002.

The reason it matters is that Bain Capital was involved in some significant outsourcing and offshoring of jobs from 1999 and 2002 that Romney doesn’t want to take the blame for. Romney wants the world to believe that even though he was the CEO of the company and took a six-figure plus salary, he wasn’t involved in the company’s operations. That’s going to be a tough sell.

So the merry-go-round of politics will spin round the question of what “involvement” means, why Romney was paid a big salary for doing what he himself says was no work, and so on.

But what is often lost is the larger context. Romney’s entire campaign is based on his economic experience with Bain Capital. Sure, he was governor of Massachusetts for a while, but he can’t exactly run on that because his signature accomplishment, Romneycare, is a significant political liability for him against the President. It shouldn’t be, but because the GOP base would rather that the poor die than receive decent healthcare, Romney can’t run on his record as Massachusetts governor. That and that the fact that the Massachusetts jobs picture didn’t do so well under his tenure.

Bain Capital, then, is Romney’s entire rationale for being President. He’s supposed to be the businessman who knows how the economy works. To run away from Bain Capital for any reason, then, isn’t just to attempt to deny an embarrassing set of circumstances from the candidate’s past. For Romney, to run away from Bain is to run away from the very rationale for his candidacy. To demand that opponents stop talking about your record on the subject that constitutes his sole argument for being president comes off as both laughable and weak.

Of course, the nations’ political divide is such that Romney’s near catastrophic troubles only cost him marginally at the polls. But in a close contest, that marginal difference is more than enough to be decisive.

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They’d rather die

by digby

James Dobson’s family research council has about half a million dues paying members and countless others who listen to and read its various programs and newsletters.

Here’s what it’s saying about the ACA:

Many historians point to the Stamp Act of 1765 as catalytic to the War for Independence. Passed by the British Parliament, the Act placed a small tax on nearly every kind of document produced in the colonies, including newspapers. It was omnipresent. Protests broke out; colonial legislatures adopted resolutions opposing the Act, and businessmen joined to boycott British goods. It took only until March, 1766, for Parliament to repeal the law, so loud was the protest, coupled with serious pressure from British businessmen.

Obamacare is much farther reaching than the Stamp Act, impacting every American’s personal health care from before the cradle to grave; mandating a huge tax: the expenditure of tens of thousands of dollars annually for many families and huge fines on businesses and individuals who refuse to submit; and employing tens of thousands of new IRS agents to exact obedience and levy fines on the American people.

Obamacare is tyranny, heretofore unimagined in the U.S. Advocates laugh off the House vote to repeal, insisting that the law – affirmed by the Congress, the President and the Supreme Court – is a done deal. But they underestimate the power of prayer and the determination of the American people to remain free. Some are willing, for the false security of government-run health care, to help create an over-reaching, overly powerful federal government that will use unlimited federal debt and oppressive tax and enforcement to finance it; others are not! Even if it appears to be flickering, there is still a flame of liberty burning in America. There are still God-fearing American patriots among the American people, who, like Patrick Henry, would rather die than allow it to go out.

Sometimes it’s very hard to remember that they are talking about health care.

They start them young in Texas

by digby

Within this comprehensive list of Texas donors to the Romney campaign, Wayne Slater notes this:

Among deep-pocket Texas donors to Romney Victory were a host of Dallasites — Peter and Edith O’Donnell ($50,000), T Boone Pickens ($50,000), tax-reduction adviser Brint Ryan ($50,000) and high school junior Preston Troutt – son of Excel Communications billionaire Kenny Troutt. The younger Troutt gave the maximum-allowed $75,800, according to the new filings Monday. His father Kenny Troutt is a major Republican donor who supported Rick Perry and Rick Santorum earlier in the GOP presidential sweepstakes. Kenny Troutt gave $150,000 to the pro-Perry SuperPAC Make Us Great and, when Perry stumbled, gave $150,000 to the pro-Santorum Red, White and Blue PAC. Troutt is also a $500,000 donor to Karl Rove’s GOP SuperPAC American Crossroads. The younger Troutt is a high school basketball phenom at Trinity Christian Academy who appears to be making his first foray into politics as a big giver.

Isn’t that sweet? A little high school junior making a contribution to a GOP political campaign in an amount that equals more than twice the average income of 90% of the American people.

Proving Vote Suppression

by digby

I see that Nate Silver has published a reassuring piece on Voter ID laws indicating that we needn’t worry too much about it affecting the outcome. I’m sure this will make all the serious people feel much better about the voting issues. It’s a tough problems to solve and it would be nice if we didn’t have to.

But Ed Kilgore reminds us that it isn’t just a matter of demanding photo IDs:

But before expressing any relief, it’s important to remember that what we are all calling (in a term mostly popularized by Ari Berman in his reporting on the subject in The Rolling Stone and The Nation) “the war on voting” has many, many elements, some of which won’t be apparent until just before or even on and after Election Day. There are ex-felon disenfranchisement initiatives, which have already gone into effect in Florida and Iowa. For one thing, voter ID requirements already in place before the 2008-2012 window that Nate is looking at may have a much greater impact under Republican administration. There are restrictions on various forms of “convenience voting,” such as early voting opportunities. As we get closer to Election Day, we will almost certainly see, in jurisdictions controlled by Republicans, shadowy purges of voting rolls to get rid of people whose addresses have changed, and late and poorly advertised alterations in (or restrictions of) traditional polling places. And on Election Day itself, we always see voter intimidation efforts, and my personal favorite, poorly staffed and incompetent balloting administration producing long lines and discouraged voters, with all this chicanery concentrated on areas likely to produce large Democratic votes (i.e., minority neighborhood and college towns). And then there are the vote-counting irregularities Florida made famous in 2000.

And even where these maneuverings don’t affect the presidential contest, they could well change the outcome of down-ballot contests, and also create precedents affecting future elections. On top of everything else, conservative activists will spend Election Day in some locales trying to generate “voter fraud” and pro-Democratic “voter intimidation” stories that will serve as the justification for future assaults on voting rights.

I would just add that when people think they are being targeted by hostile Republicans, many just figure it’s the better part of valor to avoid the confrontation. This would apply to someone who’s had brushes with the law (not convicted felons) and don’t want to call attention to themselves. But also citizens of foreign birth who might just figure it’s not worth it to endure the hostility and suspicion they’d have to go through. I realize they should all tough it out for the good of God and country, but you can’t really blame them for not thinking it’s worth it.

I’ve been writing about this since I started blogging and it’s not a new phenomenon, by a long shot. We all know about the Jim Crow laws that spurred the Voting Rights Act in the first place. I hope people also remember that these laws didn’t just outright deny the vote to African Americans. It just made it impossible for them to exercise their right to do it, through onerous tests and taxes. And once the Act was passed, the people who wanted to deny them their rights didn’t just stop doing it. They came up with subtler methods of getting the job done.

They have been particularly worried about voter registration, which started in the wake of the Jesse Jackson campaign in the 80s:

Democratic activist Donna Brazile, a Jackson worker and Albert Gore’s campaign manager in 2000, said “There were all sorts of groups out there doing voter registration. Some time after the ’86 election, massive purging started taking place. It was a wicked practice that took place all over the country, especially in the deep South. Democrats retook the Senate in 1986, and [Republican] groups went on a rampage on the premise they were cleaning up the rolls. The campaign then was targeted toward African-Americans.” As in the past, Republicans justified the purges in the name of preventing the unregistered from voting. But Democrats charged vote suppression.

It didn’t end in the 80s. The most recent victory in that regard was the destruction of ACORN (with the inexplicable help of the Democrats!)

It will be hard to muster the empirical evidence that vote suppression turned an election so very serious political observers will dismiss it as being an hysterical overreaction on the part of the losers. And in a big sweep election it obviously would be. However, we are living in a polarized political world in which some elections are going to be very close. When that happens, these vague (and not so vague) pressures on the franchise could very well make the difference. But we won’t be able to prove it. And that’s the beauty of it.

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Please stop trying

by David Atkins

The President speaks:

As senior aides for President Obama and GOP rival Mitt Romney stepped up their political attacks, the president said he was frustrated that he had failed to change the toxic political atmosphere in Washington after he was elected in 2008.

“Washington feels as broken as it did four years ago,” Obama said Sunday in a taped interview on the “CBS This Morning” show.

“And if you asked me what is the one thing that has frustrated me most over the last four years, it’s not the hard work. It’s not the enormity of the decisions. It’s not the pace. It is that I haven’t been able to change the atmosphere here in Washington to reflect the decency and common sense of ordinary people – Democrats, Republicans and independents – who I think just want to see their leadership solve problems.”

He added, “There’s enough blame to go around for that.”

The President is a smart man. By now he must know that what is broken about Washington’s politics cannot be fixed by goodwill, common sense, heart-to-heart meetings, or a transformative charismatic figure.

Washington is broken because corporations can bribe and intimidate even good legislators with unlimited amounts of money, because the media is more interested in balance than truth, and because about 30-40% of the country truly believes that the government’s primary job is to deliver the cosmic justice of divine punishment to those lesser humans who didn’t work hard enough enough to be wealthy, male, or white.

Sure, people want to see leadership solve problems. But two halves of this country tend to have very different and diametrically opposed perceptions of what those solutions should be.

Nothing much can be done about that, so it would be nice if the President would stop trying. As the President proved with the Ledbetter Act and the Affordable Care Act, you don’t need to fix Washington’s culture to impose your will on it. You just need a bare minimum of legislators to pass the bills. All the attempts to achieve compromise with the other side of the aisle were functionally useless. A lot of nasty concessions had to be made to various corporate interests just to get to 60 recalcitrant Senators to pass the Affordable Care Act. We might even have been able to enact single-payer if all we needed were 50 Senators.

Right now the biggest roadblock to reform is the filibuster. No matter who controls the Senate, start by killing the filibuster. It hurts us in the long run much more than it helps. Sure, it might allow some crazy Republican bills to pass, but that’s a good thing. Let the people see what Republicans really do when they get the wheel. And then make the wheel just as easy to turn back in the other direction. Government would be less stable, but much more responsive. Over the long term, the Senate itself is a dysfunctional, anti-democratic institution that should probably be weakened if not gently discarded.

Once the filibuster is gone, work on campaign finance and disclosure laws to reduce the power of corporate threats and bribes. Do as much good work as possible while waiting for the older racists and misogynists to pass into the great beyond.

That would go a long way toward fixing what’s wrong with Washington.

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Rats overboard

by digby

Unless this is all an elaborate ruse and all these people know that there’s nothing in Mitt’s tax returns to give anyone pause, this sounds to me like a bunch of people who already pretty much know they are going to lose and are pre-emptively distancing themselves from the loser:

To politicos across the ideological spectrum, Romney’s unwillingness to release anything beyond these two years raises the question: if it’s worth the bad press to keep the tax returns private, they must contain something worse.
“The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” said conservative columnist George Will, on ABC’s “This Week.” “Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”

On the ABC roundtable, Republican strategist Matthew Dowd had a similar take.

“There’s obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say, ‘Have at it,’” Dowd said. “So there’s obviously something there that compromises what he said in the past about something.”

“Many of these politicians think, ‘I can do this. I can get away with this. I don’t need to do this, because I’m going to say something and I don’t have to do this,’” Dowd said. “If he had 20 years of ‘great, clean, everything’s fine,’ it’d all be out there, but it’s arrogance.”

In the last week, several Republicans have advised Romney to release his returns. That list includes former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former RNC chairman Michael Steele and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, who called for “total transparency” and said he releases all his tax returns. On “Fox News Sunday,” the Weekly Standard’s editor Bill Kristol added his voice to the list as well, calling for Romney to “release the tax returns tomorrow” and “take the hit for a day or two.”

I’m pretty sure that if Mitt loses it won’t be spun as being due to his career as a vulture capitalist. It will be because he was too moderate. But they have a while to let that marinate.

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The name’s Paw, T-Paw

by digby

What with Mitt’s inner wimp on display for all to see, there’s an awful lot of talk about a VP nod for Tim Pawlenty these days allegedly because he’s such a good attack dog.

I don’t know about that, but I do know that he’s muy, muy macho:

Oh baby. Plus there’s the “red-hot smokin’ wife.” I’m shocked they would even consider putting him on the ticket — his awesome manliness will just make Mitt look smaller by comparison.

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The Village’s beautiful and fragile glass house

by digby

Village media elder Steve Roberts is very upset with the blogosphere. It seems it’s been behaving very irresponsibly with this whole Condi Rice for VP rumor:

Former New York Times reporter Steve Roberts, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, is critical—like others who covered news in the non-digital age—of the principles that guide too many websites: “We’re not telling you this is true, we’re just saying other people are reporting it.” He calls the process “highly unethical.”

Oh yes, what could be worse than that? If only we could go back to the good old days when nobody ever did such things.

I can’t help but be reminded of something I like to call Cokie’s Law, after Steve Roberts wife. It comes from the Village maxim, “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s out there,” which was based upon this quote from Cokie Roberts back in 1999:

“At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

In order to truly appreciate how depraved this was, you need to see the entire context:

Did Not! Did Too! Wanna Bet?
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 5, 1999; Page C01

“His mother? His grandmother? . . . They’re the ones responsible for Bill Clinton’s bad behavior?” say Cokie and Steve Roberts. “Please!”

“Here we have her blaming the mother-in-law, essentially, for her husband’s philandering,” says Tony Blankley on CNN.

“Hillary Clinton should stop playing Dr. Laura,” says “Crossfire” co-host Bill Press.

Hold on! James Carville, the president’s pit-bull spinmeister, says the first lady never said what the media are ridiculing her for saying. And Carville is wagering $100,000 that he’s right.

He will put classified ads in Sunday’s New York Daily News and Washington Post, offering the six-figure sum “to any reporter who can show me that Hillary Clinton linked the president’s sexual misconduct with his childhood,” Carville said yesterday. The offer came after he consulted with White House strategists and Clinton allies who are increasingly worried about calming the summer squall.

“The press corps are savages,” Carville added. “This is the worst bull I’ve ever seen. People don’t know that she never said it. . . . You can’t misreport what she said.” At worst, said Carville, the first lady “alluded to these two things.”

Semantically speaking, Carville has a point. In the Talk magazine interview that triggered this week’s uproar, Clinton was speaking about her husband’s “sin of weakness” and how he “lied” to “protect” her. She also observed that the president “needs to be more responsible, more disciplined.”

In the next paragraph, writer Lucinda Franks said she mentioned having read about Bill Clinton’s chaotic childhood in his mother’s autobiography. “That’s only the half of it,” the first lady said. “He was so young, barely four, when he was scarred by abuse that he can’t even take it out and look at it. There was terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother. A psychologist once told me that for a boy being in the middle of a conflict between two women is the worst possible situation. There is always the desire to please each one.”

That was it. The word “abuse,” in that context, fueled a media frenzy. And many journalists aren’t buying Carville’s she-never-said-it argument.

“I read the article closely–she seems to say that,” said ABC’s Cokie Roberts, who pens a syndicated column with her husband. “The whole tone and tenor is ‘poor baby. He had a rough time, it’s remarkable he’s turned out as well as he has, he has a weakness.’ “

Chris Matthews, host of CNBC’s “Hardball,” said that “Mrs. Clinton is trying to be candid” and “grapple with something very difficult,” but that “the White House big shots bigfooted her and said this psychological explanation is not going to work.” He said the White House had gone “back into cover-up mode,” a move that was “pushing this story into even higher levels of importance.”

“I’m on Hillary’s side,” said Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor” and usually a conservative critic of the Clintons. “I didn’t see the article as an attempt to excuse his behavior. . . . She was explaining why she stood by her husband.”

Why, then, did O’Reilly begin his Tuesday show by talking about “Hillary Clinton’s assertion that her husband’s upbringing is responsible for his irresponsible sexual behavior”? “That’s just a tease,” he said. “Basically, I was headlining what people were talking about.”

Back on the Senate campaign trail in New York yesterday, Clinton said the article’s message is that “everybody is responsible for their behavior,” but declined to discuss the topic further. That did little to quiet the debate, with MSNBC’s Linda Vester describing it as “a little post-revelation spin.”

Franks said Tuesday on “Larry King Live” that she thinks “it’s very clear that Hillary sees her husband’s childhood as influencing his behavior.” On Fox News Channel yesterday, though, Franks said people are misreading her piece and that the first lady “did not link his abuse to his infidelity.”

“But she put it out there for people to chew on,” countered anchor Paula Zahn.

Carville, for his part, says he will “name names” of journalists who misreported Clinton’s comments and invite them to sue him for the 100 grand. But he may be too late.

“At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

You can see why they feel so strongly about preserving their journalistic ethics.

This went on for eight years, with Steve and Cokie among the very worst offenders. From Whitewater to “Chinagate” to the Lincoln Bedroom to Monica madness, it was non-stop unsubstantiated gossip masquerading as news. At the end of that run, Drudge was a big part of it. But he didn’t invent it. The so-called journalists of the political establishment were waaay ahead of him. They taught him the trade.

Update: Also too, Howie Kurtz, author of the above and here today:

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“You owe me”

by digby

Here’s Chris Hayes’ interview with Edward Conard in which he explains that Romney stayed on at Bain from 99-2002 because he was holding up his partners for as much as he could get.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Asked if Romney was driving a hard bargain during the negotiations, Conard said, “In part, yes, of course.” Romney legally remained the CEO and sole owner of Bain Capital until 2002, Conard added, because he was intensively negotiating his exit deal with the partners at the firm. Conard summed up Romney’s position this way: “’I created an incredibly valuable firm that’s making all you guys rich. You owe me.’ That’s the negotiation.”

I guess they must figure that’s a better way to explain it than having to answer why he would have been involved with a fetus disposal company.

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