As Atrios would say, just make it stop.
Gail Collins nails it …
Louisiana has gotten $130 billion in post-Katrina aid. How is it that the stars of the Republican austerity movement come from the states that suck up the most federal money? Taxpayers in New York send way more to Washington than they get back so more can go to places like Alaska and Louisiana. Which is fine, as long as we don’t have to hear their governors bragging about how the folks who elected them want to keep their tax money to themselves. Of course they do! That’s because they’re living off ours.
The three-day Conservative Political Action Conference — which bills itself as the “Largest Annual Gathering of Conservative Students, Activists and Policymakers!” — started today in Washington. It’s quite a lineup, and should be pretty entertaining, especially this year, given the GOP’s woes. You can watch the live stream here, and we’ve dispatched Matt Cooper with camera in hand to bring us the latest goings-on.
Late Update: Just to give you the flavor, this afternoon at 2:30 ET, TPM fave Hans von Spakovsky will be on a panel titled: “Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System.”
If you haven’t been following Eric Kleefeld’s bang-up coverage of the Minnesota Senate election saga at TPMDC (come to think of it, this fiasco pre-dates the launch of TPMDC and dates back to our TPM Election Central days — just another reminder that here it is almost March and the results of the Nov. 4 election are still unresolved), then you may not be aware of where things are headed. But there’s been an ominous turn in Minnesota, so let me bring you up to speed.
In a nutshell, Norm Coleman has lost but refuses to concede and now wants to throw out the original election, the one he lost, and hold a new one.
Coleman was ahead after the initial tally on election night, but then found himself 225 votes behind Al Franken after the state-mandated recount. So Coleman sued to have the results of the election overturned by a court, primarily (though not exclusively) on the grounds that certain absentee ballots were counted that shouldn’t have been and others weren’t counted but should have been. That’s most of what the twists and turns of the legal dispute have been about (a political junkies dream, really).
But five weeks into the election contest trial, the court has repeatedly issued rulings that narrow Coleman’s chances of either collecting enough newly counted ballots or throwing out already counted ballots — or some combination of the two. So in recent days, the Coleman legal team has become increasingly shrill in its attacks not just on the court but on the entire electoral process in Minnesota, getting closer every day to outright calling for the Nov. 4 election be declared null and void and a whole new election be held between Coleman and Franken. And now Coleman himself has suggested that a do-over election may be necessary.
In the background of course is the fact that the longer the legal dispute drags on, the longer Senate Democrats are denied an important 59th vote, in the person of Al Franken. But let’s not allow that to distract from the fact that Coleman (and the GOP) still desperately wants to win, and has shown himself willing to do just about anything to get there.
Throwing your hands up and saying let’s just call the election a tie and do it again is the desperate last act of a losing candidate. That this ploy requires attacking the entire electoral process and the people who conduct elections in the state is just a sign of his desperation. But apparently even the Coleman camp is starting to see that a do-over election is the only avenue still open to Coleman that might, albeit remotely, allow him to return to his seat.
For years, and certainly most loudly since the Florida debacle of 2000, Republicans have made ill-founded election hijinks charges against Democrats. But Norm Coleman, with the support of national Republicans (keep in mind that one of Coleman’s lawyers is Ben Ginsberg, the Bush campaign’s top lawyer in 2000) is now poised to try to pull off what would be perhaps a bigger election robbery than Bush v. Gore: toss out the nearly three million votes cast on one of the most-anticipated election days in this nation’s history in favor of a much smaller special do-over election. It’s breath-taking. Yet for some reason this story still seems to be flying below the national political radar.
Obama will lift the ban on photographing the returning American war dead at Dover Air Force Base, but will allow families of the fallen to prevent photographs on a case by case basis.
Bobby Jindal’s speech the other night was bad enough — but was a key anecdote he told during the speech really true? TPMmuckraker investigates.
Dusty Foggo gets 37 months in prison for steering CIA contracts to his old buddy Brent Wilkes, the Duke Cunningham uber-briber.
Greg Anrig fact-checks Marc Ambinder on Social Security.
(ed. note: As long as we’re at it, Patrick Ruffini does not work at TPMDC — see big red No. 3 in middle of the page.)
TPM is now taking applications for our Spring 2009 intern class. TPM interns are probably as intimately and rapidly involved in the preparation and production of news coverage as interns at any other news organization. And that ranges from work on the news section of the front page to research for our news blogs to video editing to bylined articles. Former interns have gone on to jobs at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and TPM, among other places. To find out details for how to apply, click here.
John Bolton, former Bush administration warlord, just showed up to a rock star reception at CPAC, the annual right-wing shindig in DC where ‘wingers come together to rage about liberal freaks and other fun stuff. Matt Cooper reports from the scene.