Month: October 2014

Big Media Companies, “What are they afraid of?” 


By Spocko

For Halloween I’m reminded of a book reading I attended in San Francisco where I asked Matt Taibbi what companies like Goldman Sachs were afraid of. His answer was, “Not journalists!” then he laughed. Next he said, “They are worried about a few left over SEC regulations that they haven’t bought off yet.”

Yesterday I read that Matt Taibbi has left First Look Media before the launch of the Racket, the digital magazine he was hired to create seven months ago. The Intercept did a story about what they say happened.  Of course I’m waiting for the disgraced Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz to comment on this so I can hear from the other side. I’ll bet “the truth lies somewhere in the middle” and he will “leave it there.”

As I read the Intercept story I wondered if people at various companies that were to be the subject of the Racket are breathing a sigh of relief. Are they laughing? It appears that Taibbi leaving was a combination of a personality misfit with “the corporate form” and the need of Silicon Valley folks to always be thinking about ROI.

The damage control people at these companies might want to hold off on the champagne popping. Taibbi will find an outlet to write for and the Racket isn’t dead, but it has serious labor pains.  These things happen. Remember the News Corp iPad Online venture The Daily?  Murdoch dropped $60 million on it and it was shuttered after two years.

If ROI is in Omid’s Silicon Valley start-up DNA he should have thought outside the box (or law) like Rupert Murdoch. He could have used his knowledge of the upcoming stories on companies to short their stock before the story dropped. Hmmm, would that be illegal? Not if he told his congressperson about it and he makes a trade on the info. It’s good to have happy congress people as your allies.

If only Omid understood that to mold national attitudes, topple dynasties and pressure politicians you have to lose lots of money for a long, long time. If you want to have your parent corporate entity make money, use other sub-entities known to create revenue like cartoon shows, test prep companies or a businesses that sells stuff on-line. But Murdoch’s goals aren’t the goals of everyone who gets into the media business.

The Public Interest, RIP

Expecting the media to “serve the public interest, convenience and necessity” is out. The marketplace rules are in. The TV and radio spectrum, as well as the Internet we created, aren’t considered under the trusteeship model anymore because the lobbyists argued a broadcaster’s commercial success would be indicative of the public’s satisfaction with what they are delivering.

Under that model First Look Media should be using their news reporting and constitutionally granted 1st Amendment power to generate revenue for shareholders, just like Roone Arledge taught ABC and the rest of the networks to do. Suddenly news divisions weren’t a cost center anymore, but a profit center. Everyone loves profit generators, and by everyone I mean Wall Street and corp execs whose bonuses are tied to revenue or stock price.

If you look at what the big media companies are afraid of it hasn’t been getting busted for failing to serve the public interest for decades. They know they aren’t going to lose an FCC license. They might get a fine, but it’s just a Cost of Doing Business in the short term and something the lobbyists will fix in the long term.

FTC problems might cramp their style when it comes to ad revenue, so they pay attention to that.  SEC regs could be a problem, if anyone at the SEC actually started prosecuting people. It’s hard to believe that the SEC would go after someone who buys their pixels by the barrel and hires lawyers by the trainload, but maybe someone at the SEC will notice some problems they need to be addressed.

What makes the parent companies nervous is if the people working in the news divisions start thinking they have to actually follow left over rules and regulations. Or that they are journalists who have to ‘serve the public interest’ vs. make money on their specific programming.  Murdoch can explain to the media entities parts of the bigger companies that a parent company loosing 100’s of millions on something like the New York Post is a smart business move because of his big picture. Because of that, they don’t worry about generating standalone revenue.

They are also afraid that the big investors might think the parent company doesn’t have their journalists and news divisions under control. If the parent company gets a whiff that someone in the media group is trying to dig too hard or isn’t playing ball, they will get a Arthur Jensen to Howard Beale call where it is explained how the world really works.

For example, if your biggest sponsor makes cars, you really shouldn’t be doing stories that make them look bad, even if the cars kill people. But sometimes you can’t ignore the truth, so you wait for an excuse like a settlement lawsuit where someone else makes the case. “Hey I wasn’t the one calling them “killer cars” I’m just reading the court transcript!”

Luckily during that period of reporting the hard truth, before the pull back into the quest for profit, some sunlight can shine through the cracks. There are still good people in the media who believe in a better “Big Picture” than Murdoch’s. It takes courage and support from others who also see the problems and want to help. Other times journalists “embedded” in the MSM need an excuse to do a good job in the face of the howls for quarterly profits or fear of offending advertisers.

After talking to Taibbi I started asking a similar question of people who have been covering corporate corruption and personal mendacious acts that hurt Americans. “What are they afraid of, and how can we make those fears come true?”

I’m sorry for these media labor pains, but I look forward to future sunlight from Taibbi, First Look Media and the Racket, because we all know what sunlight does to vampire(squid)s.

Happy Halloween!

Working us into an early grave

by digby

This is an excellent piece by Esther Kaplan about the effects of our new American workplace hich is looking more and more like the workplace of old — really old. Like “before there were labor laws” old. She tells a number of individual stories but this gets to the underlying theme:

American workers do work longer hours than we did a generation ago, according to some analyses, and hundreds more per year than our counterparts in France or Germany—the equivalent of six to eight extra weeks a year. We top the Eurozone nations in productivity by 18 percentage points. “Every month the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] releases its worker-productivity numbers, which measure output per labor hour worked,” says Celeste Monforton, a former Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) staffer. Montforton, now at the George Washington University School of Public Health, points out that the numbers “go up every month. And that’s because businesses are not hiring new workers; they’re just expecting the old workers to work more, and spitting them out after they get injured.” Some of these gains come from the adoption of new technologies, but others just come from pushing workers harder.

A 2013 survey of its own union reps by the United Steelworkers, which represents such blue-collar industries as oil and steel, found that production pressures, the increased pace of work and increased workloads topped workplace health concerns—outstripping more obvious risks such as poorly maintained equipment. When the reps were asked to give an example of a health or safety problem that had gotten worse over the past year, understaffing led the list. The jobless recovery, in other words, is sustained in part by aggressively overworking those with jobs.

I think this is a trend that’s been around a while that’s accelerated in the past few years. I recall in the early 2000s during that first wave of layoffs after the dot com bubble burst that companies I consulted for just pushed the workload of the laid off people onto the survivors and refused to hire anyone when profits rebounded. People just worked more, took less vacation and company culture changed in a dozen different ways.

Like this:

One of the subtle effects of having such a long period of high unemployment is the way it infuses this idea into the bloodstream of the workforce that you have to work beyond your agreed-upon hours. People will do whatever they have to do to keep their jobs in a bad economy. And it’s going to take a long period of low unemployment to convince people that they have rights in the workplace again.

This is what that lovely fellow Andrew Mellon meant when he said at the outset of the Depression that having a great big crash would be good for the nation and

…purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.

See? It’s all good. For everyone but the worker. But then he’ll be very busy so he won’t really notice. Busy working.

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A Cupp full of nonsense

by digby

S.E. Cupp is on a tear. She’s offended that editor of the Nation Richard Kim tweeted that nurse Kaci Hickock a badass and a political prisoner. She says this is so absurd he might as well have been speaking in tongues. Or something. Because she isn’t a badass, she’s a very disobedient little subject who refuses to blindly obey cretinous politicians who are acting like we live in the 14th century. Whatever. Fear is their name and panic’s their game …

She explains why this is wrong:

[P]olitical prisoners are imprisoned for their political beliefs. She is being (unsuccessfully) quarantined because she may have a deadly infectious disease. A political prisoner is a real thing. It’s serious. Think North Korea or Tibet. Not Maine.

Equating Hickox to a political prisoner is like calling Paris Hilton a POW because of that one time she was placed under house arrest for drunk driving and that’s sort of like the war on drugs or something.

Hookay. Except drunk driving is a crime. Going to West Africa to treat Ebola, unless things have changed in the last couple of hours, is not. She has no symptoms. Epidemiologists know for a fact that she’s not contagious if she’s not symptomatic. Therefore, this quarantine is bullshit on a scientific level and they’re doing it to appease pants-wetters who would burn her at the stake if given half an excuse.

Moreover, political prisoners are imprisoned because of their beliefs, period, and especially so when it’s done to people who are critical of the government’s behavior. Hickox’s belief is that we should follow the scientific protocols instead of letting Tea bagging morons and blustering misogynists make them up for political gain and she challenged that. Considering the commentary we’ve seen in recent days from Cupp’s right wing cohorts about jailing her (and presumably anyone else who refuses to comply with nonsensical orders designed to appease a bunch of panic artists for no good reason) she certainly qualifies as political at this point.

But for some reason Cupp also seems very concerned about the state of liberalism which she goes on about for more than half the screed:

I’m sure Kim is a smart man. I bet he knows many words. Why he chose these specific ones speaks to the dire straits of the liberal movement’s current political status. It’s a few days before midterm elections, Republicans are poised to take the Senate, Democrats are running away from President Obama’s record like it’s, well, Ebola, and all the usual lefty tactics are sinking with a thud.

A Democratic House candidate in New York named Martha Robertson was booed during a debate in which she tried to accuse her opponent of being a part of the “war on women.” Loud groans were audible.

In New Hampshire, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen was booed for interrupting her opponent during a debate to make a snarky comment about the Koch Brothers.

In Massachusetts, the Boston Globe endorsed the Republican candidate for Governor for the first time in 20 years.

And in Colorado, Sen. Mark Udall has run a campaign so narrowly focused on women’s issues, his Republican opponent Cory Gardner is up a whopping 21 points among men. And for all of Udall’s efforts, he is only 6 points ahead among women. He has been nicknamed “Mark Uterus” on the campaign trail.

And that’s just the bad news in blue states. Over in Kentucky the Democrats’ candidate for Senate won’t admit she voted for the President and current leader of her party. In Texas the Democratic gubernatorial candidate ran an attack ad highlighting her opponent’s disability.

The left is not well.

Mr. Kim’s unhinged tweet is a perfect encapsulation of the desperate unraveling of a once pretty together group of people who managed to win not one but two Presidential elections with a guy who had no experience the first time and a pretty questionable record the second time.

This is a fairly commonplace mode of thought among members of both parties when they win an election. There will be a “we have engineered a total victory for all time” celebration on Fox Tuesday night and on through the lame duck if it goes as predicted. They will pat each other on the back and sing and dance on the grave of liberalism for weeks. And frankly, if the shoe were on the other foot, the liberals would do the same thing.

And it’s pretty much always wrong. No, liberalism is not dead if the Republicans win seats in a midterm of the 6th year of a Democratic presidency. It would be a huge upset if they didn’t. And no, it will not spell the final fiery demise of the Tea Party if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency and the Democrats take back one or both Houses in two years. These are permanent factions in American politics and power shifts between them. To say that any single election “proves” the other side is finished is just plain dumb.

Dumb like this:

[D]esperate times call for desperate measures. And so the editor of the left’s flagship magazine has decided to make this nurse the next Gandhi, the next Vaclav Havel, the next Nelson Mandela.

If it weren’t so offensive, it would just be funny. And kind of sad. But at the very least, it finally answers the age-old question: What’s the dumbest metaphor ever?

Uhm, it wasn’t a metaphor.

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The other endless war to destroy the planet

by digby

Golly, who could have guessed that an energy lobbyist is a dishonest piece of offal?

If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.

The blunt advice from the consultant, Richard Berman, the founder and chief executive of the Washington-based Berman & Company consulting firm, came as Mr. Berman solicited up to $3 million from oil and gas industry executives to finance an advertising and public relations campaign called Big Green Radicals.

The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.

He went on to call it “an endless war” that needed to be paid for.

But he went too far, even for some in this crowd:

What Mr. Berman did not know — and what could now complicate his task of marginalizing environmental groups that want to impose limits on fracking — is that one of the energy industry executives recorded his remarks and was offended by them.

“That you have to play dirty to win,” said the executive, who provided a copy of the recording and the meeting agenda to The New York Times under the condition that his identity not be revealed. “It just left a bad taste in my mouth.”

I doubt this will stop him. Unless the energy executive is able to persuade his friends that this is the wrong thing to do, I suspect they’ll just do it anyway.

Still, it’s interesting that at least one member of this group of energy executives was repelled by this cynical approach. That’s more than most of Washington apparently since the New York Times went on to blithely point this out as if it’s old news:

Mr. Berman is well known in Washington for his technique of creating nonprofit groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom that secretly collect corporate donations to finance the aggressive, often satirical media campaigns his team conceives. They are intended to undermine his opponents, like labor unions or animal rights groups that have tried to spotlight the treatment of animals at meatpacking plants…the speech, given in June at the Broadmoor Hotel and Resort, where the Western Energy Alliance held its 2014 annual meeting, could end up bringing a new round of scrutiny to Mr. Berman and the vast network of nonprofit groups and think tanks he runs out of his downtown Washington office.

I guess “Washington” thinks that’s perfectly fine. And it would be nice if this article “brings new scrutiny” but perhaps the news media could report this stuff without having a sexy recording as a hook. They certainly seemed to know about it before. If we can’t keep money out of politics the least the press can do is shine a light on what it’s buying.

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Rolling in the Deep State

by digby

Marcy Wheeler has an important piece up at Salon on an issue which all of you who think that “oversight” is the answer to our dilemmas about unconstitutional spying and surveillance:

A presidential order that governs the bulk of the NSA’s spying (and a good deal of other agencies’ spying), Executive Order 12333 has gotten a lot of attention lately. In July, a former State Department official, John Napier Tye, laid out how the order can be abused to permit the government to spy on Americans’ communications collected overseas. More recently, coverage of documents obtained under an ACLU FOIA have introduced new people to the order.

In addition to describing the structure of the intelligence community and prohibiting assassinations, the EO lays out some limits on the spying intelligence agencies can do on Americans.

But there’s something missing from this recent discussion. Indeed, it is missing even from the government’s response to ACLU’s FOIA, even though it probably shouldn’t be.

On December 7, 2007, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor to read out language he got declassified from DOJ Office of Legal Counsel opinions that had authorized President Bush’s illegal wiretap program. “An executive order cannot limit a President,” Whitehouse read from his declassified language. ”There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.”

In short, if the President does something (or orders something done) that is prohibited by his own Executive Order, no biggie. He can do that if he wants. Without even changing the language in the order!

This is the common understanding of this tremendously powerful document which governs a huge amount of our intelligence gathering. In other words, if the president does it it’s not illegal.

This is, to say the least, problematic. Even if you have full trust in your president whether it be Obama or Bush or Saint Ronald Reagan, there will always be someone new in the office someday who is not the angel your preferred president is. And then what?

This has been one of the guiding legal documents of the Deep State for many, many years. And it might as well be written on kleenex.

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The politics of misdirection

by Tom Sullivan

There is a scene early in Die Hard With a Vengeance where Jeremy Irons’ character, Simon, posing as a crazy revolutionary, gives the Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson characters a riddle over the phone:

As I was going to St. Ives,

I met a man with seven wives,

Each wife had seven sacks,

Each sack had seven cats,

Each cat had seven kits:

Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,

How many were there going to St. Ives?

After fumbling for a moment trying to do multiplication in their heads, the two realize it’s a trick question. There’s only one guy. The rest is misdirection.

Misdirection is James O’Keefe’s M.O. O’Keefe was in North Carolina yesterday to release another of his hidden-camera videos exposing voter fraud (or something). An actress posing as a Brazilian immigrant tells electioneers at early voting sites that while not a citizen, she is a registered voter with a driver’s license. The under-trained volunteers (the ones he chose to show, anyway) tell her — incorrectly — that if she is registered, she should vote. O’Keefe claims they committed felony bad advice. Good luck prosecuting that.

Did they video a Democrat presenting himself to vote under the name of a dead person? No.

Did they observe someone voting twice? No.

Did they film a campaign staffer signing someone else’s absentee ballot? No.

Did they so much as videotape someone filling in their ballot with a number 3 pencil? Sorry.

As the Raleigh News & Observer reports, “O’Keefe didn’t get anyone with major campaigns to take the bait, nor does the video show any poll workers allowing noncitizens to vote.” Not that the howling right will notice. They’re not supposed to. Like Jeremy Irons’ phony revolutionary, O’Keefe is the fraud. He found none. The rest is misdirection.

So which real polling places did this fake noncitizen with her phony story and her nonexistent NC driver’s license walk into and use an imaginary voter registration to put her fake signature on a real voting register and cast illegal ballots, committing real felony voter fraud? Bueller?

The only people being fooled by O’Keefe are his audience. Willingly.

And I was so hoping “exposing fraud” this time would involve James O’Keefe dropping his pants in public … in front of police officers.

Kings of Spy Prom


by digby

I wrote a fun piece for Salon earlier about the big expose by Ali Watkins and Ryan Grim about the “Spy Prom.”  Talk about too weird to be believed:

We’ve all heard of the junior prom for high school students. Many of us went to one, although those left peering in the window from the outside undoubtedly still feel the sting of not being invited. And everyone knows about the “nerd prom,” the absurd celebration of D.C. insiderism otherwise known as the Washington Correspondents Dinner. But now we know about the most exclusive prom of all: “spy prom,” an annual gathering of the clandestine services where the spooks all gather to let the good times roll. 

The big exposé comes from Ali Watkins and Ryan Grim at Huffington Post, who start off with this wry observation:

Relations between the intelligence community and the media are at such a low ebb it might be hard to believe that there’s a reporter who spies deeply admire. 

That’s the one jarring note in the whole piece, actually. I can personally think of at least half a dozen reporters whom I’m sure the intelligence community are pleased as punch to call their friends and protectors. It’s not as if there weren’t many so-called journalists who reflexively defended the spying on Americans and ruthlessly criticized reporters who revealed it. From the pages of the New Yorker to the the gabfests on MSNBC, even many ostensibly liberal journalists were quick to condemn the Snowden leaks and demand that he come home immediately to face trial, warming the hearts of police agencies the world over. In fact, I’m fairly sure that the intelligence community sees most reporters who write about them as friends and the few who reveal what they’re actually doing are just bad apples in an otherwise excellent barrel. 

Anyway, that’s just a quibble. The story is amazing.

It is.  Read on. You cannot make this stuff up.

You can’t put lipstick on a pig


by digby

So Rand Paul is out there hustling for the African American vote  — which is a good thing.  I don’t know how successful Republicans might be ,considering their philosophy and policies, but they should, at least, want to.

But this made me laugh:

“Remember Domino’s Pizza? They admitted, ‘Hey, our pizza crust sucks.’ The Republican Party brand sucks and so people don’t want to be a Republican and for 80 years, African-Americans have had nothing to do with Republicans,” Paul said, according to The Hill.

Paul said that the party needs a makeover because “the perception is that no one in the Republican Party cares.”

Here’s the thing. Dominos announced that their pizza crust sucks and did a big ostentatious re-brand. But the crust is just as bad as it always was. As is the pizza. It is what it is.

And, by the way, the most loyal customers would have bolted if they changed it in some fundamental way. They like the shitty pizza just the way it is — and they certainly don’t want some new fangled crust with a bunch of new toppings they have no use for.

As I said, it’s nice that Paul “cares.” And he needs to because his racially insensitive past (and his father’s notorious newsletters) are problematic for some of the younger voters that form his fanbase. This makeover is personal for him. Making over the whole Party? Good luck with that.

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You mean you can be a terrorist without being a Muslim? Who knew?

by digby

Shhh. Don’t tell Bill Maher, but not all terrorists are Muslims. And there are a bunch of them right here in the United States:

Federal agents reportedly found a supply of the explosive ammonium nitrate, along with a pile of guns and ammo, when they searched the hotel room of a leader of a Texas border militia member earlier this month.

The San Antonio Express-News reported on Wednesday about court records that showed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives dispatched agents to a hotel in Brownsville, Texas where Kevin “KC” Massey had been staying before his Oct. 20 arrest on weapons charges.

Along with a box containing the chemical, the officers found “an AK-47 with six loaded magazines, a loaded handgun, a ballistic helmet and several cameras,” according to the Texas newspaper.

As the Express-News noted, ammonium nitrate is the substance used by the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in the attack that killed 168 people.

Massey belonged to the paramilitary group “Camp Lonestar,” and was described as a “CO,” or commanding officer, in a September profile in the Texas Observer.

Imagine that. A misfit weirdo with a bunch of explosives who isn’t a jihadi. How could he have thought of this without the Koran telling him what to do? I can’t figure it out …

In fact, did anyone ever find the hidden Muslim extremist connection with McVeigh? There must be one somewhere. If there isn’t one, that would mean that people find all kinds of reasons to commit political violence and you can’t attribute it to a religion which claims 1.6 billion non-violent believers any more than you can attribute Tim McVeigh’s violence to Thomas Jefferson who said “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”. You probably need to look a little more deeply to find the reasons for these things.

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Thursday, June 08, 2006 

The Theme

by digby 

As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections. I can’t find an exact transcript of his talk, but it exists on C-SPAN for 30 bucks if anyone wants to watch it. Raw Story caught a few excerpts although not the ones I recall about about the dirty elections in the “state of Washington and around the country.”

I want to thank you for your work on clean elections,” Rove said. “I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002, election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election.”

Rove then suggested that some elections in America were similar to third world dictatorships.

“We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today,” Rove said. “We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it’s a real problem, and I appreciate that all that you’re doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot — the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it’s important to our democracy.”

Nobody can ever accuse these Republicans of not having balls. It’s really breathtaking sometimes. This is not an isolated remark. Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Chris Matthews show:

MATTHEWS: … What did you make—we just showed the tape, David Shuster just showed that tape of a woman candidate in the United States openly advising people in this country illegally to vote illegally.

MEHLMAN: It sounds like she may have been an adviser to that Washington state candidate for governor or some other places around the country where this has happened in other cases with Democrats.

That is almost verbatim what Rove said at that lawyers conference. He also singled out one very special “voting rights” Republican lawyer named Thor Hearne, about whom Brad Friedman did a great deal of investigation last year. (Links here.):

Karl Rove spoke to Republican lawyers this weekend (carried on C-SPAN) and thanked them for their work ensuring “clean elections” in 2000 and 2004.

He singled out Mark F. “Thor” Hearne by name. Hearne was the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc. who, along with RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, created the so-called non-partisan “American Center for Voting Rights” (ACVR) just three days before being called to testify before Rep. Bob Ney’s (R-OH) U.S. House Administrative Committee hearing in March of 2005 on the Ohio Election. The front group, which declared tax-exempt 501(c)3 status, has still failed, to our knowledge, to disclose any information of it’s funders or proof of their 501(c)3 non-profit, non-partisan status. They operate out of a PO Box in Houston, TX, though neither of their founders live in Texas.

ACVR was the only “Voting Rights” group called by Ney to testify at the hearings, and identified himself only as a “longtime advocate of voter rights” in his testimony. He failed to mention his connections to Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc.

Hearne and ACVR have done little more since they opened shop beyond creating propaganda reports to suggest that their is an epidemic of Democratic voter fraud in the country to encourage state legislatures around the country to implement Democratic voter disenfranchising “Photo ID requirements” at the polls. Their charges of a voter fraud epidemic has been roundly disproven in various court cases around the country. (Though it does appear that at least one voter, Ann Coulter, seems to have engaged in voter fraud lately.)

They have been gearing up for this for some time. However, Rove had wanted to use this against African Americans, not Hispanics. He knows that alienating the Latino vote is the kiss of death for the party long term. But it’s out of his hands now. Immigration has a life of its own and I suspect it will be quite easy to adjust the plan and the machinery to try to 1) get out the base, 2) suppress the Latino vote which is now heavily leaning democratic and 3) serve as a rallying cry and cause when they lose seats and possibly their majority. This will be immediately played for 08 with a whole bunch of “voter integrity” legislation. They will be screaming to high heaven. Lou Dobbs will have his aneurysm removed on live television.

The Democrats could have innoculated against this when the Republicans stole the 2000 election, but they didn’t. Had they been screaming bloody murder for six solid years about Republican vote fraud, it would be much more difficult for the GOP to suddenly glom onto this issue. Instead, it was a mere underground drumbeat that was heard, but only in the vaguest way. Now the CW about stolen elections is going to be turned on us — and we will be on the defensive fighting both the charge of electoral fraud and being soft on criminal Mexicans because we need illegal aliens to stuff the ballot boxes for us. 

If we allow the Republicans to define this next election as they usually do, it will be about immigration and voter fraud. If I were in Vegas I’d be placing a bet on it. And it won’t take a gaffe like Busby’s. They will attempt to create a national story, which will be exploited in the last days of the campaign in various individual ways through their media infrastructure. If they lose it will be blamed on dishonest vote stealing Democrats and illegal aliens. If they win it will be be because they fought back against the dishonest vote stealing Democrats and illegal aliens. 

I dredge this moldy old post up because of this new “study” being ballyhooed all over the right wing media that supposedly proves that illegal immigrants are voting by the millions.

If you go to that link you’ll see the study is flawed, to say the least.  But that won’t stop them.

Also too, this:

Polls show that the Republicans have an advantage in the fight for control of the Senate. They lead in enough states to win control, and they have additional opportunities in North Carolina and New Hampshire to make up for potential upsets. As Election Day nears, Democratic hopes increasingly hinge on the possibility that the polls will simply prove wrong.

But that possibility is not far-fetched. The polls have generally underestimated Democrats in recent years, and there are reasons to think it could happen again.

In 2010, the polls underestimated the Democrats in every competitive Senate race by an average of 3.1 percentage points, based on data from The Huffington Post’s Pollster model. In 2012, pre-election polls underestimated President Obama in nine of the 10 battleground states by an average of 2 percentage points.

I think it’s fairly predictable what they will say if close elections don’t go their way these days.

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