Is John Danforth really saying that the Obama campaign should team up with McCain’s and RNC’s voter suppression efforts? Aren’t they usually able to handle that stuff on their own? It just seems like it’s asking a bit much.
Sarah Palin denounces the “unconscionable voter fraud” going on in Pennsylvania …
Needless to say Palin’s record leaves little doubt that she’d be canning the next round of US Attorneys who confirmed that the charges of voter fraud were bogus.
If you have any question what this ACORN/vote fraud con-job is about. Here’s an episode of TPMtv from April 2007. It includes video from a speech Karl Rove gave in April 2006 about claims of election fraud. Rove reels off what he calls the “hot spots”. And surprise, surprise: half of them are cases where the US Attorneys ended up getting fired, or were slated to be fired. It’s all a scam. Take a look.
At today’s Palin rally in Pennsylvania a supporter yelled “Kill him!” when Sarah Palin a speaker mentioned Barack Obama. Yesterday, at a joint McCain-Palin rally in Virginia, another supporter was moved to shout “Obama bin Laden” as Palin spoke.
The new indictment of Jim Tobin in the 6-year-old New Hampshire phone jamming case, which we first reported today at TPMmuckraker, requires some reconsideration of whether the Justice Department has been insufficiently aggressive in the case — or perhaps whether new hands at DOJ are taking a more aggressive tack.
The big question in the case has always been how high up in the GOP political apparatus did knowledge of and involvement with the phone jamming scheme go?
At the time of the 2002 scheme, Tobin was the New England regional political director for the RNC and regional director for the NRSC. As the phone jamming case heated up, Tobin was forced to resign as New England campaign chairman for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign.
On Election Day 2002, as the scheme was falling apart, Tobin made 12 calls between 11:20 a.m. and 11:42 p.m. EST to the White House political office, then run by Ken Mehlman, who later became RNC chairman. (Mehlman has denied that any of the calls that day had anything to do with the phone-jamming scheme.) The RNC has spent nearly $3 million defending Tobin against the criminal charges. (Two other GOP operatives did jail time over the incident.)
The case looked all but dead earlier this year. Tobin won his appeal of his conviction so convincingly that the trial judge felt he had no choice but to acquit him. The government’s appeal of that decision is pending, but frankly looked like a long shot. If the feds were inclined to let this case die a natural death, you would have expected it to end with that appeal.
For the government now to come back with a new indictment based on new facts completely unrelated to the initial phone jamming incident, but instead focused on Tobin’s alleged false statements to FBI agents investigating the case (presumably to avoid the double jeopardy trap), is definitely an aggressive move, especially less than a month before the next election.
Are the feds taking another look at the RNC and the White House, too?
Many of you might not know that in addition to being a network of news blogs, TPM is a community with thousands of members. Anyone who wants to can sign in to have his or her own blog, comment on the posts of other readers or TPM staffers, or recommend favorite posts to others.
Today we’re announcing myTPM, an upgrade to the current system and a new set of tools that allow you to customize your community experience and choose your favorite contributors to follow. I explain in today’s TPMtv…
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
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Endangered Mississippi senator plays the Village People card against socially conservative Dem opponent.
Since last Friday, Fox News has mentioned ACORN 342 times, according to Media Matters. It’s all ACORN all the time over there (which by itself should tell you a little bit about the credibility of the allegations of widespread voter fraud).
But I wanted to draw your attention to one of the so-called voting experts Fox has been using lately. Everyone remembers Hans Von Spakovsky, right? He’s the former official in the Bush Justice Department who got a recess appointment to the FEC but whose nomination failed to get through the Senate because he’s made a career of finding ways to restrict access to the polls.
The politicization of DOJ was wide and deep, and the U.S. attorney firings was just a part. The civil rights division, particularly the voting rights section, was thoroughly politicized. Von Spakovsky was one of the key players in that effort, along with Bradley Schlozman. It was Schlozman who later replaced the ousted U.S. attorney in Kansas City and filed federal charges against ACORN workers there on the eve of the 2006 elections. And so we come full circle.
Last time we checked in with Von Spakovsky, he was being hired by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights where he was to help oversee a report the Commission will produce on the Justice Department’s monitoring of this year’s election. Here’s Von Spakovsky this afternoon on Fox:
Roger Simon: It’s honorable of John McCain to try to calm down some of the crowds his campaign has spent months inciting.
(ed.note: Simon’s article actually hits McCain’s campaign pretty hard — that it’s out of control, tanking, that his crowds bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the crowds that usually end up storming the castle at the end of each Frankenstein movie. But still, deep down, McCain’s a very honorable man. I thought conservatism made a big play about personal responsibility. At a certain point, folks need to come to grips with the fact that this is John McCain. The race he chose to run. And stop making excuses for him.)