762 search results for ""voter fraud""

Depends On The Specific Meaning Of “Specific”

by digby

President Pissypants goes on the record, which may be a mistake. (C&L has the video):

Q Thank you. The Attorney General acknowledged yesterday that there were mistakes in the firing of prosecutors. What is his future in your cabinet? Do you have confidence in him? And more importantly — or just as important — how effective can he be in Congress going forward when he’s lost a lot of confidence among Democrats and doesn’t have any defenders among Republicans?

PRESIDENT BUSH: I do have confidence in Attorney General Al Gonzales. I talked to him this morning, and we talked about his need to go up to Capitol Hill and make it very clear to members in both political parties why the Justice Department made the decisions it made, making very clear about the facts. And he’s right, mistakes were made. And I’m, frankly, not happy about it, because there is a lot of confusion over what really has been a customary practice by the Presidents. U.S. attorneys and others serve at the pleasure of the President. Past administrations have removed U.S. attorneys; they’re right to do so.

The Justice Department recommended a list of U.S. attorneys. I believe the reasons why were entirely appropriate. And yet this issue was mishandled to the point now where you’re asking me questions about it in Mexico, which is fine. If I were you, I’d ask the same question. This is an issue that — let me just say, Al was right, mistakes were made, and he’s going to go up to Capitol Hill to correct them.

I appreciate the fact that he’s taken some action, because anytime anybody goes up to Capitol Hill, they’ve got to make sure they fully understand the facts, and how they characterize the issue to members of Congress. And the fact that both Republicans and Democrats feel like that there was not straightforward communication troubles me, and it troubles the Attorney General, so he took action. And he needs to continue to take action.

—

Q Thank you, Mr. President, President Calderon. On the dismissal of U.S. attorneys, there have been allegations that political motivations were involved. Is political loyalty to your administration an appropriate factor? And when you talked to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last year, what did you say, and what did you direct him to do?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Thanks, Kelly. I’ve heard those allegations about political decision-making; it’s just not true. Secondly, just so you know, I get asked — I get complaints all the time from members of Congress on a variety of subjects — this senator, this congressperson so-and-so — there’s occasionally frustration with the executive branch. And they will pull me aside and say, are you aware of this, are you aware of that? And I did receive complaints about U.S. attorneys.

I specifically remember one time I went up to the Senate and senators were talking about the U.S. attorneys. I don’t remember specific names being mentioned, but I did say to Al last year — you’re right, last fall — I said, have you heard complaints about AGs, I have — I mean, U.S. attorneys, excuse me — and he said, I have. But I never brought up a specific case nor gave him specific instructions.

Q Sir, might he have inferred that you discussed it with him was a need for him to take action?

PRESIDENT BUSH: You’re going to have to ask Al that question, but as I say, I discuss with my Cabinet officials complaints I hear. When members of the Senate come up and say to me, I’ve got a complaint, I think it’s entirely appropriate and necessary for me to pass those complaints on. I don’t every single time, but people view their moment with the President sometimes as an opportunity to unload their frustrations about how things may be working in their state — or congresspersons how things may be working in their district. And whether it be the Attorney General or the Secretary of State or other members of my Cabinet, I pass those complaints on at times.

I guess it depends on what the meaning of the phrase “specific cases” is:

Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, told reporters traveling with Bush in Mexico on Tuesday that the White House had received complaints about U.S. attorneys’ handling of election fraud cases in New Mexico, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and Bush had a brief conversation with Gonzales about the complaints in October.

All of these alleged complaints were bullshit Karl Rove obsessions that Bush just happened to pass-on the month before the election. Uh huh.(Here again, is Rove speaking to the Republican National Lawyers Association last year.)

It’s hard to know how Bush speaks to his minions in private. But we do have a clue about how he speaks to foreign leaders when he doesn’t know the mic is on:

Bush: Yo Blair How are you doing?
Blair: I’m just…
Bush: You’re leaving?
Blair: No, no, no not yet. On this trade thingy…[inaudible]
Bush: yeah I told that to the man
Blair: Are you planning to say that here or not?
Bush: If you want me to
Blair: Well, it’s just that if the discussion arises…
Bush: I just want some movement.
Blair: Yeah
Bush: Yesterday we didn’t see much movement
Blair: No, no, it may be that it’s not, it maybe that it’s impossible
Bush: I am prepared to say it
Blair: But it’s just I think what we need to be an opposition
Bush: Who is introducing the trade
Blair: Angela
Bush: Tell her to call ’em
Blair: Yes
Bush: Tell her to put him on them on the spot.Thanks for the sweaters it’s awfully thoughtful of you
Blair: It’s a pleasure
Bush: I know you picked it out yourself
Blair: Oh, absoultely, in fact I knitted it myself
BUSH: “Right . . . What about Kofi? That seems odd. I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything else happens.”
BLAIR: “I think the thing that is really difficult is you can’t stop this unless you get this international presence agreed.” . . .
Bush: Yeah
Blair: I don’t know what you guys have talked about but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral
Bush: I think Condi is going to go pretty soon
Blair: But that’s that’s that’s all that matters. But if you, you see it will take some time to get that together
Bush: Yeah, yeah
Blair: But at least it gives people…
Bush: It’s a process, I agree. I told her your offer to…
Blair: Well…it’s only if I mean… you know. If she’s got a…, or if she needs the ground prepared as it were… Because obviously if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk
Bush: You see, the … thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over
Blair: [inaudible]
Bush: [inaudible]
Blair: Syria
Bush: Why?
Blair: Because I think this is all part of the same thing
Bush: Yeah.
Blair: What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way…
Bush: Yeah, yeah, he is sweet
Blair: He is honey. And that’s what the whole thing is about. It’s the same with Iraq
Bush: I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Bashad [Bashir Assad] and make something happen
Blair: Yeah

Notice how he orders the prime minister of Britain about, tasks him to give the president of Germany her marching orders and then talks about the UN Secretary general like his the gay houseboy in “La Cage Aux Folles.” Does the man in that excerpt sound like the type who wouldn’t inappropriately give his Attorney General orders? And do you suppose that Attorney General who owes his entire professional career to this president wouldn’t get the message?

George W. bush thinks every utterance is an order. He is not the president, he’s “the decider.”

This is quintessential codpiece:

The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we’re going to be there for a while. I don’t know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it’s not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through.

The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says “Join us,” I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it.

Sure, it’s totally believable that when that guy “mentioned” these complaints about voter fraud in the month before the election, his Attorney General just ignored him.

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Conduits

by digby

I wrote earlier about the Washington State Republican party’s effort to phony up a voter fraud scandal where none existed. And I had some strong suspicions that this GOP voter fraud fraud is a very special Karl Rove initiative.

Well, guess what:

The Seattle Times reports tonight that a chairman of the Washington state Republican Party with ties to Karl Rove pressured U.S. Attorney John McKay to launch a criminal probe during the hotly contested 2004 governor’s race, which had been certified in favor of the Democratic candidate. The ex-chairman, Chris Vance, “said that he was in contact with the White House’s political office at the time.”

Vance said then-U.S. Attorney John McKay made it clear he would not discuss whether his office was investigating allegations of voter fraud in the election. He said McKay cut off the conversation. “I thought it was part of my job, to be a conduit,” Vance, who now operates a consulting business, said in a telephone interview. “We had a Republican secretary of state, a Republican prosecutor in King County and a Republican U.S. attorney, and no one was doing anything.“

Vance’s revelation may be new evidence of a wider level of involvement by Karl Rove in the U.S. Attorney purge. Vance and Rove reportedly worked closely on state politics. The Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2004, Dino Rossi, was the candidate “Vance and Rove wanted,” the Seattle Times noted in 2005. Rove and Vance also reportedly worked to get Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-WA) to launch a Senate bid. McKay is a Republican and was appointed by President Bush. The alleged voter fraud he was being pressured to probe had already been investigated by prosecutors in his office and the FBI, who “never found any evidence of criminal conduct.” Nevertheless, he was pressured both by a GOP official and Rep. Doc Hastings’s (R-WA) office to convene a federal grand jury.

I can’t help but bring up again how we were just treated to day after day of Republicans self-righteously howling about how poor little Scooterpie was railroaded by an out of control prosecutor who shouldn’t have pursued him once he knew that there was no underlying crime.

These people are simply breathtaking in their total, all encompassing intellectual and moral corruption.

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Seeding The Future

by digby

I have speculated that Rove was pursuing a phony voter fraud strategy for 2006 and was thwarted by his boy’s catastrophic governance and some US Attorneys who refused to file charges.

Here’s what one the ousted US Attorney from Washington has to say on that:

Former U.S. Attorney John McKay said Monday night he was “stunned” to hear President Bush told Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last October that Bush had received complaints about U.S. attorneys who were not energetically investigating voter-fraud cases.

McKay doesn’t know if Republican unhappiness over his handling of the 2004 election cost him his job as U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, but the new revelations contained in a Washington Post story are sure to reignite questions about McKay’s dismissal and whether it was connected to Washington state’s hotly contested governor’s race.

“Had anyone at the Justice Department or the White House ordered me to pursue any matter criminally in the 2004 governor’s election, I would have resigned,” McKay said. “There was no evidence, and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”

For those who didn’t follow the whole saga in Washington state (like me) this article gives a full rundown of what happened and the Republicans’ insistence that the election was stolen by the Democrats despite no proof that any such thing happened. The Justice Department never “ordered” the US Attorney to do anything. Rove isn’t that bold. He had local surrogates do it, just as he did in New Mexico. And when Mckay refused to play ball he was first denied a federal judgeship and then fired.

As Josh Marshall noted last night, the GOP cries of voter fraud go back a long way. It’s an extension of their old habits of disenfranchising blacks in the south and latinos in the southwest (as Joe Conason outlines here.)

But since the 2000 election the Democrats have been the ones complaining about voter irregularities and I think that Rove recognized that he could deftly twist the public awareness we created and turn it back on us. His problem was that the Democrats won the election by too wide a margin in 2006 for them to cry fraud in any systematic way — and some US Attorneys refused to play ball.

If Rove had been successful, however, I suspect that he could have pulled off something even more subversive for 2008. He could have had in place pliant US Attorneys who are willing to keep open all of these cases of “voter fraud” and pursue new ones from the 2008 election. If a Republican wins the presidency, no harm no foul, they just keep pressing, suppressing the vote and pushing the new meme about Democrats stealing elections. If a Dem wins, they exert political pressure to keep these US Attorneys in place for reasons of “justice department integrity” and a Democratic president finds him or herself battling their own Justice Department — which has been salted with Karl Rove’s partisan clones who cannot be fired.

The problem for Karl was that a handful of US Attorneys with integrity wouldn’t be pressured with the usual inducements and so they had to be forced out. The problem for Democrats, however, is that if they don’t handle this carefully, the scenario I outlined above could happen anyway. You can bet that nothing any Republican says now will stop them from screeching like rabid howler monkeys if a Democratic president tries to replace even one Bushh appointed US Attorney in 2009.

Remember, Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy. Consistency and intellectual integrity are for losers.

For instance, Marshall notes today:

I’m not sure if it’s more a matter of entertainment or just grim confirmation, but it is worth cataloging all the Republicans who are now willing to come forward and spin out arguments about how federal prosecutors always pursue political investigations and are little more than cat’s paws for the party apparatus of the president who appointed them. Rule of law. Rule of law. Rule of law. I’ve said it a number of times in recent months: the rule of law and creeping authoritarianism has to be at the center of any sensible politics today. The degradation is so great and the bar has fallen so low.

No kidding. And keep in mind that these same people were saying just last week that the administration should not have allowed a special prosecutor to handle the Libby matter and should have left it to career prosecutors who can be trusted because they are sworn to uphold the law over all political concerns.

It’s surprising they don’t get whiplash.

Update: Marshall caught Pat Buchanan saying that there was nothing wrong with the president passing along his concerns about “crimes” being committed to the AG. No word on whether there’s any problem with the president asking his AG to pursue completely bogus claims of voter fraud in order to maintain his party’s political power, do favors for cronies and punish his enemies.

But then Buchanan was one of Nixon’s favorite boys, isn’t he? Using the Justice Department to punish your political enemies and cover up your own crimes is SOP to these guys.

And they wonder why we balked when it was revealed that they were doing surveillance on American citizens without any oversight…

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Stealin’ It

by digby

Before the election last November I wrote a post about what I thought Karl Rove might have up his sleeve. I wrote:

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections:

QUESTION: The question I have: The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud. And we know that, in some states, some of our folks are pushing for election measures like voter ID.

But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it’s an interesting idea. We’ve got a few more things to do before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes, this is a real problem. What is it — five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank’s (ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven’t been able to pull that thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we’ve been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the 2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance, disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county — I mean, these are pretty extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened — open in selected precincts — I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

(LAUGHTER)

That is a problem. And I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place. And if you cannot…

(APPLAUSE)

I have to admit, too — look, I’m not a lawyer. So all I’ve got to rely on is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to show a little bit of ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don’t have driver’s licenses. We can have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say, if you’re going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let’s just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not healthy.

QUESTION: I’ve been reading some articles about different states, notably in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential, obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I’m really worried about online voting, because we do not know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are many ways to jimmy the system.

I’m also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle — but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people — you know, the practice in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election — which, remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes — we got reports of people showing up at Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County — I’m going to mispronounce the name — but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don’t live in the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it’s a real difficulty to get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at one of those four voting locations, we couldn’t monitor whether they had already cast their mail-in ballot or not. And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So yes, we’ve got to do more about it.

My speculation about Rove’s plans was greeted with some rather intense skepticism and in fact I was proven wrong. Rove didn’t do a thing about voter fraud.

But that’s not to say he wasn’t trying. With the NY Times reporting tonight that Bush was personally involved in the New Mexico matter by complaining to Gonzales about Iglesias’ refusal to pursue voter fraud charges, Josh Marshall writes:

There’s a sub-issue emerging in the canned US Attorneys scandal: the apparently central role of Republican claims of voter fraud and prosecutors unwillingness to bring indictments emerging from such alleged wrongdoing. Very longtime readers of this site will remember that this used to be something of a hobby horse of mine. And it’s not surprising that it is now emerging as a key part of this story. The very short version of this story is that Republicans habitually make claims about voter fraud. But the charges are almost invariably bogus. And in most if not every case the claims are little more than stalking horses for voter suppression efforts. That may sound like a blanket charge. But I’ve reported on and written about this issue at great length. And there’s simply no denying the truth of it. So this becomes a critical backdrop to understanding what happened in some of these cases. Why didn’t the prosecutors pursue indictments when GOP operatives started yakking about voter fraud? Almost certainly because there just wasn’t any evidence for it.

And when they refused to pursue bogus charges of voter fraud and Democratic corruption, they were bounced.

I don’t know if Rove will ever be caught red handed — he’s masterful at dirty tricks. (He taught the art of it when he was in his 20’s.) But when you see stuff like this anywhere near his vicinity you know he’s up to his armpits in it.

Stay tuned. This is shaping up to be a very serious scandal.

Check out the Wapo tonight, too.
The Attorney General definitely lied to congress, as did two of his closest aides.

Are We Clear?

by digby

Crystal.

A couple of days ago I speculated about the US Attorney purge:

This little gambit has the mark of Rove all over it. The Arkansas crony was his little house boy. He even made the mistake of defending the decisions today and drawing himself into it publicly.

It’s long past time for Bush Brain to testify before congress, don’t you think?

Guess what?

Report: Rove was urged to oust attorney

N.M. GOP chief says he complained about prosecutor, was told ‘he’s gone’

The chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party was quoted Saturday as saying he urged presidential adviser Karl Rove and one of his assistants to fire the state’s U.S. attorney.

McClatchy Newspapers reported that Allen Weh said he complained in 2005 about then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to a White House liaison who worked for Rove, asking that he be removed, and followed up with Rove personally in late 2006 during a visit to the White House.

“Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?” Weh said he asked Rove at a White House holiday event.

“He’s gone,” Rove said, according to Weh.

“I probably said something close to ‘Hallelujah,”‘ said Weh.

The GOP party leader made clear his dissatisfaction with Iglesias stemmed in part from his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation.

The Justice Department has said the dismissal of Iglesias and seven other U.S. attorneys was a personnel matter. White House involvement, Justice said, was limited to approving a list of replacements after the Justice Department made the decision to fire the eight.

The McClatchy story quoted Weh as saying he does not know whether Rove was involved in the firing of Iglesias or merely had been advised of the decision when the two talked at the White House.

“There’s nothing we’ve done that’s wrong,” Weh told the papers. “It wasn’t that Iglesias wasn’t looking out for Republicans. He just wasn’t doing his job, period.”

[…]

Neither Rove nor the White House press office responded immediately to e-mails Saturday evening seeking reaction to the McClatchy story. A reporter left messages Saturday evening at Weh’s home and cell phone numbers.

A White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said last week that administration officials were aware of the impending firings and offered no objections. But Rove “wasn’t involved in who was going to be fired or hired,” she said.

At a speech Thursday in Arkansas, Rove said of the general flap over the firings, “My view is this is unfortunately a very big attempt by some in the Congress to make a political stink about it.”

Iglesias has said he felt pressed by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., to rush indictments against Democrats before Election Day last November.

Domenici and Wilson acknowledge calling Iglesias, but deny pressuring him.

“Part of the controversy behind this is prosecutorial discretion,” Iglesias told the McClatchy papers. “What that means is it’s up to the sole discretion of the prosecutor in the case of how to handle the indictment and when to issue it.”

In case you missed it last week, here’s a little bio of Iglesias, the man whom the heroic Karl Rove axed for political reasons:

Iglesias, an evangelical Christian, was born in Panama, where his father was a missionary. His family moved to New Mexico when he was 12. After graduating from the University of New Mexico’s law school, Iglesias became a Navy judge advocate general.

In 1986, he was one of three JAGs who represented Marines accused of attempted murder for a hazing incident that their lawyers argued was encouraged by commanders at Guantanamo Bay. The successful defense helped the Marines avoid serious penalties, and the case inspired the hit Broadway play “A Few Good Men” and the later film. Iglesias was not consulted during the production of the play or movie.

He left the Navy but remains a captain in the reserves. He returned to New Mexico to start a family. Iglesias left a job in the Albuquerque city attorney’s office to become a White House fellow in the Clinton administration. He then returned to New Mexico and ran for state attorney general in 1998, narrowly losing.

After George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, New Mexico Republicans, led by Domenici, lobbied for Iglesias’ appointment as U.S. attorney. The expectation was that he would follow up his tenure with another run for public office.

“They felt they were grooming him for a political career,” said Joe Monahan, a New Mexico political blogger.

Iglesias didn’t make an initial splash. “He was very quiet,” Monahan said. He earned the ire of the state GOP by refusing to prosecute anyone for voter fraud after the 2004 elections, despite some Republicans’ contention that 15-year-olds voted. Iglesias said he could find no federal crimes.

The highlight of his term was the prosecution of state Treasurer Robert Vigil for extortion. Though Vigil is a Democrat from a prominent New Mexico political family, Iglesias’ prosecution was seen as nonpartisan and was supported by Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson. The first trial ended in a mistrial, but Vigil was convicted last year.

At the same time, New Mexico media were full of speculation about Iglesias’ investigation of local Democratic politicians’ involvement in the construction of an Albuquerque courthouse. That was the case that Domenici and Republican Rep. Heather A. Wilson had inquired about. The two politicians have denied they were trying to influence Iglesias.

David Campbell, a Democrat who was Albuquerque’s city attorney when Iglesias worked in the office, said his friend’s actions showed his character.

“As a Bush appointee he’s a stellar appointment, a right-wing evangelical Christian but somebody who plays his professional life with a lot of integrity,” Campbell said. “You couldn’t say a bad word about the guy.”

Karl Rove and his pals have systematically set out to make Republicans with integrity an endangered species.

Rove continues to be paid by the taxpayers of the United States and needs to be called to testify before congress on his role in this. I suspect that the White House will claim executive priviledge for this political henchman, but they should be forced to do that. The American people need to be reminded that they are paying for this assassin and that his boss, the president of the United States, is protecting him. It’s all part of the big picture that’s emerging about Republican rule.

Update: Josh Marshall wrote this, which seems to me to further make the case for Rove’s involvement.

Given what we know about New Mexico and Washington state, it simply defies credulity to believe that Lam — in the midst of an historic corruption investigation touching the CIA, the White House and major Republican appropriators on Capitol Hill — got canned because she wasn’t prosecuting enough immigration cases. Was it the cover? Sure. The reason? Please.

I’m not sure Lam would have been canned simply for prosecuting Cunningham. His corruption was so wild and cartoonish that even a crew with as little respect for the rule of law would have realized the impossibility of not prosecuting him. But she didn’t stop there. She took her investigation deep into congressional appropriations process — kicking off a continuing probe into the dealings of former Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis. She also followed the trail into the heart of the Bush CIA. Those two stories are like mats of loose threads. That’s where the story lies.

Rove no longer has any policy responsibilities. He’s the white house political guy, period. He failed to keep control of the congress. He has no job — unless it is putting out all these political fires. Dirty politics has, in the end, turned out to be the only thing he is really good at.

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Next Up

by digby

The Libby verdict is very exciting — Howard Dean and other Dems are all calling on the president to promise not to pardon Scooter. The right is spinning like tops. Fox news commentators are lamely saying that the verdicts don’t make sense because they acquitted Libby on one count. Bob Novak said the Bush administration had no “guts” because they agreed to allow an “unsupervised” special prosecutor to investigate them when they could have just shut down the investigation from the beginning. (G. Gordon Liddy couldn’t have said it better.) It’s a bad day for the Republicans.

And it’s getting worse. I would suggest that everyone keep at least one eye on the next brewing legal scandal. It’s looking more and more obvious like the Bush administration fired all those US Attorneys because they were investigating Republicans or allegedly dragging their feet in investigating Democrats. In Washington state the federal prosecutor was pressured to investigate “voter fraud” where there was none.

With the vice president’s office being completely discredited today and using the justice department for political purposes, we are now officially in Nixon territory.

Talking Points Memo has a rundown and video of the hearings this morning and they are explosive. The meltdown continues.

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Payback

by digby

I hope that all of you Pacific Northwest readers keep this in mind as we look toward the next election:

McKay, who stepped down recently, said in an interview that his positive review in May 2006 didn’t explain his ouster, nor did the phone call he received in December from a Justice Department official who ordered him to resign.

The 65-page evaluation described McKay’s relationship with most of the federal judges in his area as “excellent” and praised the quality of his office’s work.

McKay “is an effective, well-regarded and capable leader,” the evaluation stated.

The review had some criticism, including descriptions of several administrative problems in McKay’s office.

But the issues were apparently minor because the director of the executive office for U.S. attorneys later wrote McKay, praising him for his “very positive” evaluation.

“I understand that the recent evaluation of your office went well,” director Michael Battle told McKay in a letter dated April 7, 2006.

Despite the praise, Battle called McKay and other U.S. attorneys in December to ask them to step down.

Supporters said they believed McKay may have been removed because he was seen as a maverick.

McKay came under fire when right-wing organizations in his state claimed that he wasn’t aggressively pursuing voter fraud allegations against Democrats in the 2004 governor’s race. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, was eventually declared the winner by a margin of 129 votes.

I love how someone is seen as a “maverick” for refusing to “find” voter fraud where there wasn’t any.

This is reason number 2,862 that Republicans must be removed from power. Giving cronies positions to the best political stepping stones is probably not unprecedented. But removing federal prosecutors from office because they didn’t agree to overturn an election is something else entirely.

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Waiting, Waiting…

by digby

So, MSNBC has chosen the most partisan Republican election lawyer in the country, Ben Ginsburg, to be their legal expert. (I’m kind of surprised they couldn’t get Limbaugh to reprise his earlier work with the network.)

In other news, the robo-call aspect of the vaunted 72 hour GOP Suppress the Vote operation seems to have captured the attention of the media. At least for now.

Lot’s of voting problems everywhere, especially in Ohio. Mean Jean Schmidt couldn’t get her voting machine to work. And that impeachment managing scumbag Steve Chabot was turned away:

Chabot turned away from poll

Howard Wilkinson reports:

Congressman Steve Chabot found out just how serious elections officials are about the new voter ID law when he showed up to vote at his polling place in Westwood.

Chabot went into the polling place at Westwood First Presbyterian Church about 9:30 a.m. and pulled out his Ohio driver’s license to show the poll workers. They looked at his license, and told the congressman that, even though they know perfectly well who he is, his driver’s license was issued to his business office, not his home, which is his voting address.

Somewhat sheepishly, Chabot went back out into the parking lot, jumped in his 1993 Buick – the one he talked about on his campaign commercials – and drove back to his home a few blocks away to find a proper ID.

“I guess I’ll see if I can find a utility bill,” Chabot said. “That’s the law. You have to have proper ID.”

Chabot returned about 10 minutes later with a bank statement and a Social Security Administration statement in hand.

He went inside and voted quickly.

“My wife told me to bring two documents just to be sure,” Chabot said. “I guess this just shows the poll workers are really doing their job.”

Easy for him to say. he doesn’t work for a living. He’s a Republican congressman.

Their vote suppression efforts seem to be working out well so far. And we’ll have the likes of Ben Ginsburg explain how this is all necessary to prevent mexicans, blacks and old and working people from voting Democratic voter fraud, so that’s good.

We always had to win big enough they couldn’t steal it. Let’s hope that wave is a Katrina level 5 and it’s enough to carry us over the huge levee of obstruction and suppression they’ve built to hold it back.

If you have a few minutes today, Call For Change. There isn’t going to be any real news for hours.

I’m going out to Vote!

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Using Our Religion

by digby

Readers urged me to write about this today and it is worth some discussion:

The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.

The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.

The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, the same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports earlier this year.

The committee’s formal inquiry into Smartmatic and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif., was first reported Saturday in The Miami Herald.

Officials of both Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government strongly denied yesterday that President Chávez’s administration, which has been bitterly at odds with Washington, has any role in Smartmatic.

“The government of Venezuela doesn’t have anything to do with the company aside from contracting it for our electoral process,” the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, said last night.

(Right. This is worthy of investigation but the president of Diebold saying he was determined to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004 was just a figure of speech.)

The fact that the government is investigating Hugo “sulphur” Chavez’s alleged interest in election machines may very well be part of an emerging post-election GOP narrative. I have believed that Republicans might claim vote fraud in this election for some time. I wrote back in June:

The Republicans have figured out something that the Democrats refuse to understand. All political messages can be useful, no matter which side has created it. You use them all situationally. The Republicans have been adopting our slogans and memes for years. They get that the way people hear this stuff often is not in a particularly partisan sense. They just hear it, in a sort of disembodied way. Over time thye become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for all sorts of different reasons.

In this instance, there has been a steady underground rumbling about stolen elections since 2000. Now, we know that it’s the Republicans who have been doing the stealing —- and the complaining has been coming from our side. But all most people hear is “stolen election” and they are just as likely to paste that charge onto us as they are onto them. It’s like an ear worm. You don’t know the song its from, necessarily, but you can’t get it out of your head.

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections:

QUESTION: The question I have: The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud. And we know that, in some states, some of our folks are pushing for election measures like voter ID.

But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it’s an interesting idea. We’ve got a few more things to do before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes, this is a real problem. What is it — five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank’s (ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven’t been able to pull that thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we’ve been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the 2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance, disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county — I mean, these are pretty extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened — open in selected precincts — I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

(LAUGHTER)

That is a problem. And I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place. And if you cannot…

(APPLAUSE)

I have to admit, too — look, I’m not a lawyer. So all I’ve got to rely on is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to show a little bit of ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don’t have driver’s licenses. We can have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say, if you’re going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let’s just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not healthy.

QUESTION: I’ve been reading some articles about different states, notably in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential, obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I’m really worried about online voting, because we do not know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are many ways to jimmy the system.

I’m also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle — but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people — you know, the practice in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election — which, remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes — we got reports of people showing up at Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County — I’m going to mispronounce the name — but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don’t live in the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it’s a real difficulty to get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at one of those four voting locations, we couldn’t monitor whether they had already cast their mail-in ballot or not. And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So yes, we’ve got to do more about it.

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.

But the fact is, one thing we know, the American people believe that legal voters should vote and they believe that their right to vote ought to be protected from people that don‘t have the right to vote.

Rove was talking to the Republican lawyers association, many members of which specialize in “voter fraud,” and may very well be preparing to challenge every close race and file spurious complaints to Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department.

And even if they didn’t, be prepared to hear all of our complaints about election stealing yelled back at us if they lose. They are not afraid to take somebody elses talking point and use it to their advantage. It’s one of the things they do best and because a lot of people don’t pay close attention it will sound perfectly reasonable to them that the Democrats stole the election.

Just something to think about as we look to the morning after election day.

One other thing Rove said during that talk before the GOP lawyers:

Well, I learned all I needed to know about election integrity from the college Republicans.

I don’t doubt it for a moment.

*note: the excerpt of my original post has been altered a little bit to include more of Karl Rove’s comments.

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The Theme

by digby

I cannot say that I’m entirely surprised by the Busby results in CA-50 on Tuesday. The minute I heard her gaffe, I knew it would become an iconic symbol of the Republican’s meme for this mid-term — Democrats are stealing elections by having illegal aliens vote. They can piggyback on the Democratic drumbeat of the last few years about stolen elections and rile up their racist base all at the same time. It’s tailor made for them.

The Republicans have figured out something that the Democrats refuse to understand. All political messages can be useful, no matter which side has created it. You use them all situationally. The Republicans have been adopting our slogans and memes for years. They get that the way people hear this stuff often is not in a particularly partisan sense. They just hear it, in a sort of disembodied way. Over time thye become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for all sorts of different reasons.

In this instance, there has been a steady underground rumbling about stolen elections since 2000. Now we know that it’s the Republicans who have been doing the stealing —- and the complaining has been coming from our side. But all most people hear is “stolen election” and they are just as likely to paste that charge onto us as they are onto them. It’s like an ear worm. You don’t know the song its from, necessarily, but you can’t get it out of your head.

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. 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 similiar 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.

But the fact is, one thing we know, the American people believe that legal voters should vote and they believe that their right to vote ought to be protected from people that don‘t have the right to vote.

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.

Francine Busby couldn’t have done anything more helpful to the Republicans than saying what she said. (I know she was misquoted and taken out of context. That means nothing when dealing with the RWNM.) She gave them a test run on their November plan and it worked out perfectly. Here’s Robert Parry on how this works:

At dinner a few weeks ago, a well-placed Republican political operative was oozing confidence about GOP prospects in the November elections, not because the voters were enamored of George W. Bush but because the Democrats and liberals had done so little to improve their ability to reach the public with their message.

By contrast, he described to me a highly sophisticated Republican system for pouncing on Democratic “bad votes” and verbal gaffes and distributing the information instantaneously to a network of pro-Republican media outlets that now operates down to the state, district and local levels.

This huge conservative media advantage has now contributed to dooming Democratic hopes for snaring the vulnerable suburban San Diego seat of imprisoned Republican congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

In the June 6 special election, Republicans reported a last-minute surge of support after conservative media outlets trumpeted a verbal blunder by Democrat Francine Busby, propelling Republican lobbyist Brian Bilbray to victory by about four percentage points.

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. Unless the Democratic party wakes up and figures out a way to both define the election to our advantage and counter this move, it’s going to be much harder to dislodge those GOP incumbents than we think.

I think this election is going to be all about turn-out and Democrats are stupidly resting on their laurels on that count. More on that in the next post. (If I can access Blogger…)

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