The Vice President’s office has been quietly doing its own research on ship collisions with whales in the North Atlantic in an effort to overrule government scientists seeking to restrict the speed of ships near American ports.
Sen. Daniel Inouye (D) is headlining a fundraiser (sub.req.) for corruption-probe-hobbled Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens (R).
Does that group doing voter-suppression calls in North Carolina have ties to the Clinton campaign?
Late Update: I’m leaving this post up. But this was over-hasty and at least partly unfair. There appear to be several staff and board members in this group who are either big dollar donors to the Clinton campaign or associated with it in some fashion. But this doesn’t amount to any Clinton campaign complicity in the group’s activities. I should have been more clear on that.
TPMmuckraker’s Paul Kiel has been on the phone digging into this story of an apparent voter-suppression effort down in North Carolina. Paul spoke to the spokeswoman for Women’s Voices Women Vote, the group behind the calls. And you can see what he came up with here.
According to WVWV, it’s basically just a misunderstanding. But we didn’t get any good explanation as to why the calls did not identify the group placing them or why the calls identified themselves as coming from a “Lamont Williams.” (Hear the call here.) At the moment, it’s unclear whether such a person even exists, but the group’s spokesperson said there is no person with that name affiliated with the group and could provide no other information.
See our report here.
We’re continuing to dig into what’s going on with Women’s Voices, Women Vote, the DC non-profit behind those suspicious robocalls in North Carolina. We’ve looked into the group’s activities in other states and at least outside of North Carolina it’s really difficult to figure out whether the group was up to no good or just mind-numbingly incompetent. Purportedly, WVWV’s aim was to register unmarried women. But in state after state (Virginia, Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, et al.) the group’s mailings spurred investigations or rebukes from state election authorities for sending people registration forms after the deadlines, or sending mailings that suggested recipients were legally required to return them signed, to just freaking people out. (For more details, see Facing South, which pulled all this information together.)
That’s not a good record. And secretaries of state offices in states around the country seem to have been complaining for months. But in these other states at least it’s not clear that WVWV is guilty of anything more than really heavy-handed mailers trying to sign up unmarried female voters, even if the recipients were sometimes married.
Setting aside the incidents in North Carolina, that we’re still looking into, it seems like in the rest of the country the group was involved in legitimate voter-registration efforts for a targeted group even though they went about it in heavy-handed way and sometimes confused voters by failing to note key registration deadlines.
Late Update: Mike Lux, who’s on the group’s board, vouches for the group and Page Gardner, who runs the operation.
Even Later Update: Seems the group flubbed the deadline in Oregon too.
Not sure we can match this for muck …
TROUBLED WA Opposition leader Troy Buswell has broken down in tears at a press conference and admitted he sniffed the chair of a female Liberal Party staffer.
With tears in his eyes, Mr Buswell had to compose himself before telling the media in Mandurah this morning that his behaviour had been unacceptable.
Mr Buswell said he had repeatedly refused to deny the allegations because he wanted to protect the woman involved.
But he broke down after he was asked about the effect of the reports on his wife and children.
With tears in his eyes, Mr Buswell said he needed a short break, turned his back and then asked his press secretary to bring him a glass of water.
The attorney general for North Carolina has stepped into the “Women’s Voices Women Vote” robocall controversy.
Behind the recent “100 years” brouhaha has been Sen. McCain’s claim that we should be seeing our occupation of Iraq following the model of our long-term troop deployments in Germany, Japan and South Korea. But yesterday, the Huffington Post noted that McCain actually hasn’t been consistent on this point either — sometimes saying we need to leave soon and that Iraqis will never accept a permanent US presence and other times that he thinks they’ll be fine with it and that he’d be happy staying for 100 or 1,000 years.
In today’s episode of TPMtv, we go back to the TPM video archives to put the whole back and forth on the Korea model together. Let’s go to the tape …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
The President has declared today “Law Day, U.S.A.”:
The theme of this year’s Law Day, “The Rule of Law: Foundation for Communities of Opportunity and Equity,” recognizes the fundamental role that the rule of law plays in preserving liberty in our Nation and in all free societies.