Update: To McCain, this was a “hysterical diatribe.”
Another update: Obama says during a later Q&A that he’ll debate McCain “anywhere, anytime” on foreign policy:
Former Senator Lincoln Chafee: The GOP abuses the environment at its own peril.
This is a special day for TPM, a bittersweet one, but also a happy one in as much as we’re sending off someone who’s contributed so much to what this network of sites has become over the last two and a half years.
Today is Paul Kiel’s last day at TPM. He’s been snatched away by the good folks at Pro Publica, a new news organization that’s just starting up that employs yet another new model for producing vibrant and path-breaking journalism in an era in which the web and collapsing journalistic business models have the entire journalism world under threat.
For TPM regulars Paul doesn’t need any introduction. Paul was TPM’s second hire, one of two blogger-reporters I hired with the funds raised to start TPMmuckraker.com. In fact, Paul came on board a couple months before TPMmuckraker actually launched. He was later joined by Justin Rood as the site’s original two reporters.
TPM got a great deal of attention and praise for our coverage of the US Attorney firing scandal last year. And as the face of TPM, a lot of those kind words have focused on me. But it was really more a collaboration between Paul and I. Justin Rood left in January of last year, just as the story was getting underway. And in part because Paul and I had our hands so full throwing everything we had at that story, we didn’t get around to hiring a replacement muckraker until late spring when the bulk of the story — at least the biggest headlines — were already behind us. I really can’t thank him enough for his work on that story.
It’s sort of in the nature of a small, scrappy organization that you hire people and if you’re lucky get to watch them come into their own on your team. It’s one of the most satisfying aspects of running this operation. And I’m hoping that over the coming years we’ll be able to find other great talent like Paul, have them contribute mightily to what we do here, shape what it is we do, and then when the time comes have them go off to other outfits hopefully taking some small bit of what they’ve learned working here with them.
In the next few days we’ll be announcing new hires who will make up the new TPMmuckraker team. And I’m confident they’ll take the site in exciting new directions applying our model to the copious amounts of new muck that’s out there waiting to be raked. But like anything truly special, Paul can’t really be replaced. And we will miss him.
Late Update: A reader-blogger at TPMCafe has set up a thread to send Paul best wishes and, I suppose, also reminisce about your favorite Paul Kiel moments or Kieliana.
Vote suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky withdraws his nomination to the FEC.
Duke Cunningham briber Tommy Kontogiannis sentence to 8 years and one month.
From the San Diego Union-Tribune …
The contrition, tears and poor health of Thomas Kontogiannis were not enough to spare him a prison sentence of eight years and one month for his role laundering bribe money for former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Larry Burns also fined the wealthy Long Island financier $1,050,000 – twice the value of the bribe that Kontogiannis laundered through fraudulent mortgages that allowed Cunningham to buy a $2.4 million mansion in Rancho Santa Fe.
Tom Allen (D) is running against Sen. Susan Collins (R) in Maine. Until the Democrats took over the senate, Collins was the chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee — the analog of the Waxman committee in the House, the body’s main investigative committee. And now Allen is charging that Collins’ failure to hold any oversight hearings on contracting fraud and abuse in Iraq led to massive waste and even the loss of lives.
Here’s a story on it from the Portland Press Herald and a video segment on it from a local news station …
From CNN …
At a Friday night town hall in Oregon, Senator Hillary Clinton criticized Senator John McCain for his speech predicting victory in Iraq by the end of his first term.
“It sounded a lot like ‘Mission Accomplished,’ only postponed into 2013,” said Clinton, referring to President George Bush’s declaration less than two months after the Iraq invasion that major combat was over. “From my perspective, it’s just more of the same. It’s a continuation of the Bush policies that have been failures.”
I must say I had a similar feeling about this ad and speech. Your promises about what you’re going to accomplish in four years are implicit, and often explicit, in every presidential campaign. But taking a victory lap over your list of accomplishments that you haven’t even accomplished yet does come off a little silly.
Here’s the ad; see what you think …
Since its inception, TPM has been chronicling the Republican party’s efforts to push bogus or wildly exaggerated claims of vote fraud to suppress voting among predominantly Democratic constituencies like the old, the poor and the non-white. And here we have another installment from the GOP vote fraud bamboozlement file.
Two years ago Texas’ Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott declared war on what he claimed was rampant vote fraud in Texas. He set up a special vote fraud unit and got a $1.4 million grant from the feds for the work.
Now, two years on, courtesy of the Dallas Morning News, we have a run-down of what Abbot came up with — 26 cases.
The details tell the story: All 26 cases involved Democrats, and almost all were either blacks or Hispanics.
Of the 26, 8 appear to have been genuine cases of fraud, two of which were cases of people actually casting fraudulent ballots, as opposed to bogus registrations.
The remaining 18 cases all involved eligible voters casting legitimate mail-in ballots. The ‘fraud’ was that others collected the ballots and deposited them in mailboxes without putting their own name and address on the envelope in which the mail-in ballot was sent. These latter instances were almost all cases involving elderly or disabled voters who could not easily mail their own mail-in ballots. In other words, the great majority of the cases in his meager haul were technical violations that non-politicized prosecutor’s offices most likely never would have pursued.
The final verdict is one that will be familiar to anyone who’s followed this on-going scam. Claims of widespread vote fraud justify big investigations, which more or less transparently target minorities, and find at most a handful of actual cases of wrongdoing.
No one denies there are isolated cases of vote fraud. The question is how organized and widespread it is, whether it’s affecting the outcomes of any actual elections, and whether (depending on the answers to those questions) whether the extent of the problem justifies measures which also have the effect of making it either more difficult or more perilous for eligible voters to exercise their rights at the ballot box. The fact that these politicized and morally corrupt prosecutors offices can’t come up with more than a trivial number of actual cases makes the answer to the question pretty straightforward.
Remember the larger context too. In the case of the US Attorney firings, most of the dismissals targeted prosecutors who refused to use the power of their office to advance the interests of the Republican party by engaging in these kinds of witch hunts.
Not surprisingly, Abbot is also pushing for a new law in Texas to require photo IDs to be allowed to vote — the latest gambit to try to shave a few percentage points off voter participation among the targeted groups.
Nor should we forget that President Bush just spent five months in a stand-off with the senate over his efforts to put the country’s top voter-suppression guru, Hans von Spakovsky, on the FEC.
Late Update: TPM Reader GS points out that the Texas Observer had a really good piece on Abbott’s shenanigans back in April. Give it a look.
The most secretive Administration in history lays the groundwork for a new system for protecting non-classified governmental information.