Posts by Phoenix Woman

Phoenix Woman is a regular blogger for FireDogLake

Franken-Coleman Update: Coleman's Desperate Haily Marys
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on December 23, 2008 at 8:16 PM.

Another day, another set of Hail Mary efforts by the Coleman campaign.  They fared about as well as Norm's previous Hail Marys -- that is to say, not well at all.

First up was his bid to have 16 ballots that had been marked with an "X" pulled and reviewed by the state canvassing board, out of a stated concern that the ballots had either been assigned to the wrong candidate or not counted at all.  The 16 ballots soon became 40 ballots, which were all pulled and reviewed -- and no votes were changed as a result. 

Second up was his petition to the Minnesota Supreme Court to get rid of what he claimed were "duplicate ballots" in the city of Minneapolis.  As mentioned yesterday, the Hennepin County Canvassing Board itself filed a motion with the Soops  The Supremes didn't rule on it yet -- they probably won't until tomorrow, per The UpTake's Mike McIntee in his video recap -- but judging from their comments as Twittered by The UpTake, they didn't seem to be too friendly towards Coleman's arguments.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Blagojevich Impeachment Proceedings Starting Immediately; Durbin Calls for Special Election
Posted by Phoenix Woman on December 9, 2008 at 12:30 PM.

They're not messing around in the Illinois legislature now that Blago's own-goaled himself:

Within hours of Gov. Rod Blagojevich's arrrest, state lawmakers were calling for impeachment proceedings to begin.

Democrat John Fritchey, told CBS 2 Political Editor Mike Flannery that  impeachment proceeedings will have to begin now.

Speed is of the essence since even a jailed Blagojevich can make appointments, and the last thing anyone wants to see are tainted appointments. 

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Franken-Coleman Update: This Is Not Florida in 2000
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on December 2, 2008 at 4:51 AM.

As we watch the recount process unfold in Minnesota, bear this in mind: The persons screaming the loudest about "chaos" (which is apparently what would happen if all the votes were honestly counted, to judge from their squawking), and how icky everything about the recount supposedly is, and comparing the Minnesota recount to that of Florida in 2000, are the ones with the most invested in delegitimizing the results.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has sussed this out from the get-go, noting both Norm Coleman's frantically sleazy campaign and even more frantically sleazy post-campaign aren't exactly helping him here -- not when that notorious weathervane Tim Pawlenty had to tell him off in public for being a dorkwad.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Franken-Coleman Recount Update: Searching for Spines
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on December 1, 2008 at 5:16 AM.

Last Friday morning, I reported that the state canvassing board had avoided making a ruling that would commit them to reviewing the thousands of rejected absentee ballots in the November 4 election.  This action is cowardly in the extreme, being done largely because the board members are afraid of being mobbed by mindless hordes of local right-wing radio listeners.  The local lawyers I know say that the board does indeed have the right to rule on the ballots -- and that everyone knows full well that the right thing to do is to reexamine those ballots as part of the full recount (since that is what a full recount is about, non?)  In fact, officials in Itasca County have already gone ahead and decided, without waiting for the canvassing board to stop being so damned scared of the GOP Noise Machine, that they are going to go ahead and reopen their recount because of three wrongly-rejected ballots in their county.

Pressure is mounting on the canvassing board's members to grow spines.  Harry Reid himself has weighed in on the situation, calling the canvassing board's members' abdication of their authority "a cause for great concern," which at least one analyst, Washington University political scientist Steven Smith, thinks is a sign that Reid will be readying a US Senate probe into the recount.   SoS Mark Ritchie was doing pretty much the same thing when he told the board Wednesday, after they ruled not to rule, that if they continued to abdicate their authority, they were setting up a situation where the only relief for rejected-ballot voters was in the courts -- and that this would lead to a collapse of the state courts system under the weight of court cases by screwed voters.

Update: Franken and Coleman Vote Count Timeline
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on November 29, 2008 at 9:02 AM.

I've decided to channel Emptywheel and start constructing a timeline of sorts for the Franken-Coleman recount. Take a look at this handy chart compiled by Twin Cities blogger Jeff Rosenberg. It shows the ratio of challenges to ballots counted.

Notice that for most of the first three days of the recount, the ratios for each campaign stayed between three and five challenged ballots per every ten thousand ballots cast. Those three days were the period where Coleman's officially-announced lead over Franken was shrinking. (See here, here and here for details.) They were also in the period just before the Coleman campaign went on a frivolous-challenge jag in order to artificially (and temporarily) goose the official recount numbers in their favor, and the Franken campaign felt compelled to play tit-for-tat just to make sure the publicly-announced faked-up Coleman "lead" didn't get too high.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

G-String Rules: Republican Family Values in a Strip Club
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on July 31, 2008 at 1:56 PM.

Oh, the irony: Even as Norm "unconventional marriage (to say the least)" Coleman, repositioning himself as a Family Values Candidate, runs ads attacking Al Franken over his ties to Playboy, it seems that at least two of Norm’s fellow Minnesota Republican officeholders, paleocon Professional Christian Michele Bachmann and run-of-the-mill knuckledragger Erik Paulsen, were among the beneficiaries of Texas Republican Pete Sessions’ Forty Deuce strip-club fundraiser for the PAC that gave them money.

(Seems that Sessions is in tight with casino and strip-club operators.)

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Billionaire T. Boone Pickens Has a Plan, but What's His Word Worth?
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on July 13, 2008 at 5:31 AM.

T. Boone Pickens has a Big Ol' Plan to get Americans off oil and onto wind. Which is all well and good, except that he has a tough time keeping his promises, as some Vietnam vets could tell you.

One thing that's been a constant throughout T-Bone's career: He does whatever's best for T-Bone. One of the reasons he's heavily into wind is that he figures that the more wind power there is, the more natural gas is freed up to be converted into fuel for cars and trucks -- and guess what? Mr. Pickens has got tons and tons of money in natural gas! Amazing how that works.

Of course, as the Houston Chronicle points out, there's one big problem with T-Bone's plan: It won't work. To wit:

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Hillary for Health Secretary?
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on June 3, 2008 at 4:22 AM.

I'm not usually one to trust the Torygraph (aka the Telegraph), but this story sounds interesting:

Hillary Clinton will be offered a dignified exit from the presidential race and the prospect of a place in Barack Obama's cabinet under plans for a "negotiated surrender" of her White House ambitions being drawn up by Senator Obama's aides. The former First Lady would get the chance to pilot Mr Obama’s reforms of the American healthcare system if she agrees to clear the path to his nomination as Democratic presidential candidate. Senior figures in the Obama camp have told Democrat colleagues that the offer to Mrs Clinton of a cabinet post as health secretary or to steer new legislation through the Senate will be a central element of their peace overtures to the New York senator.

[...]

Another Democrat who has discussed strategy with friends in the Obama inner circle said that Mr Obama was openly considering asking Mrs Clinton to join his cabinet, alongside two other former presidential rivals: John Edwards, who is seen as a likely attorney general; and Joe Biden, who is a leading contender to become Secretary of State. Mr Obama hinted at the plan last week. “One of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his cabinet because whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was 'how can we get this country through this time of crisis?’ And I think that has to be the approach that one takes.”

The Clintons ought to be familiar with this strategy, as they tried a version of it with the Republicans back in Bill's first term when they did things like picking Louis Freeh to run the FBI and David Gergen to take over for the hapless George Stephanoupoulos, who the press liked much better when he was attacking the Clintons.

It didn't work so well with the GOP -- Freeh spent most of his tenure looking for ways to undermine the Clintons and Al Gore instead of worrying about domestic terrorism -- but I suspect it might work better where fellow Democrats are involved. Besides, Hillary's health care plan really does deserve a fair shot -- the one it didn't get when Howell Raines, who then was the big editing boss at the NYT, led the charge against it back in the early 1990s. I'm glad to see that Obama is willing to cede that issue to her.

Michelle Obama Outdraws Bush, McCain
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on May 30, 2008 at 5:40 AM.

This has me gobsmacked. Remember how Bush and McCain were having trouble getting more donors than protesters to show up at their recent Arizona shindigs? Michelle Obama didn't have that problem:

While the staffs of the president and of Arizona's sitting senator scrambled to find smaller gathering spaces, Michelle Obama, stumping in Phoenix, McCain's hometown, filled a large banquet room just around the corner from where the Republicans originally planned their event-- many of the Obama donors driving through the Bush-McCain protests on their way to hear the Democratic candidate's wife speak.

This just amazes me. The wife of the Democratic front-runner outdraws, handily, both the Republican front-runner himself and the guy he wants to replace in the White House -- and does so on the Republican front-runner's home turf.

So who all came to see Michelle Obama?

In Phoenix, Michelle Obama drew a crowd unusually diverse for a high-dollar downtown political fundraiser; there were people of every race, class, age, gender, and ethnicity. The fact that there were more women than men was no surprise. Michelle Obama is well liked and admired by women. Voters unsure of Barack, often have a fondness for her. When I told a long-time Republican friend that I would be attending a fundraiser headlined by Michelle Obama, she said, "Tell her my vote for Barack in November is really for her."

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

House GOP Leader John Boehner Got his Blood Money
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on April 5, 2008 at 1:50 PM.

I was wondering what my topic should be for today. Really, after a point there's so much to choose from that it's hard to decide which atrocity rates the most attention. Then I read this post by my co-blogger Charles over at Mercury Rising, on how Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republican corruption mongers escaped prison terms, and I knew. In fact, the post is so good that I'm going to reprint it in its entirety, below the fold, with some additional commentary.

From Mercury Rising:

In the course of the long political war that has at last exposed the massive corruption in the Republican party, no battle was more important than bringing to light Newt Gingrich's slimy dealings. At the end of it, Gingrich reached an agreement with the House Ethics Committee to permit himself to be rebuked and fined $300,000. And then, in a classic Gingrich move, he conspired with other Republicans to spin the rebuke. He largely succeeded, setting the stage for the hubris of the Abramoff Republicans to run rampant.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Bush Admin's Secret Iraq Intel Source "Curveball" Revealed
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on April 1, 2008 at 5:53 AM.

Lost in last week's hubbub was the news that "Curveball" -- the mysterious Iraqi engineer whose bogus claims on Saddam's weapons capabilities were used by Team Bush to justify invading Iraq -- has been outed:

An Iraqi engineer who provided the information that became one of the key planks in the Bush administration's case justifying the invasion of Iraq has been tracked down by undercover reporters to a drab residential block in southern Germany.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan, code-named Curveball (a baseball term for deception), has been in hiding since the invasion five years ago, and lives under an assumed name.

The German government's got him hidden away, and for good reason: I can imagine a number of people who would want him dead.

But get this:

Although German intelligence officials had warned the CIA that Curveball's claims were unreliable, and UN inspectors had failed to corroborate them, the Bush administration promoted the existence of such mobile labs for months after the invasion.

Now Curveball denies having made the claims in the first place. The BBC 2 programme Newsnight broadcast last night secretly filmed footage of the discredited agent who was approached by Der Spiegel magazine in his German hideout where he declined to give a formal interview. His face was blanked out in the footage in which a reporter asked him on his doorstep whether he had ever spoken about Iraq's biological weapons. Curveball replied "No."

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Clinton Camp Freaks Out Over Richardson's Obama Endorsement
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on March 23, 2008 at 12:35 PM.

The news of New Mexico governor and long-time Hillary Clinton friend Bill Richardson's endorsement of Barack Obama was officially and cleverly greeted by Clinton campaign adviser Mark Penn with a yawn. But apparently James Carville didn't get the memo:

Mr. Clinton helped elevate Mr. Richardson to the national stage by naming him his energy secretary and ambassador to the United Nations. And Mr. Clinton left no doubt that he viewed Mr. Richardson's support as important to his wife's campaign: He even flew to New Mexico to watch the Super Bowl with Mr. Richardson as part of the Clintons' high-profile courtship of him.

But Mr. Richardson stopped returning Mr. Clinton's calls days ago, Mr. Clinton's aides said. And as of Friday, Mr. Richardson said, he had yet to pick up the phone to tell Mr. Clinton of his decision.

The reaction of some of Mr. Clinton's allies suggests that might have been a wise decision. "An act of betrayal," said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

"Mr. Richardson's endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic," Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

Ooooh, snap!

Frankly, Jimmy, you're a fine one to talk about betrayal, considering that you've been one of the voices leading the rearguard action against Howard Dean's efforts to undo the a) shoving of the party ever further towards Republicanism and b) concentration of power in the hands of a few well-paid DC-based elite consultants like, oh, say, James Carville:

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Is McCain Lying, Stupid or Both?
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on March 20, 2008 at 5:14 AM.

One day after Joe Lieberman corrected him in public for once again stating his oft-repeated false claim that Iran, a majority Shiite country, was supplying the mostly Sunni militant group, al-Qaeda, McCain unbelievably repeated the false claim again:

For the third time in two days, the Arizona Republican has pushed the definitively false statement that the terrorist group Al-Qaeda was getting assistance from Iran, even though he was publicly ridiculed for the same false assertion on Tuesday.

This time, in a statement from his campaign honoring the fifth year anniversary of the war, McCain wrote:

"Today in Iraq, America and our allies stand on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism. The security gains over the past year have been dramatic and undeniable. Al Qaeda and Shia extremists -- with support from external powers such as Iran -- are on the run but not defeated."

On Tuesday, the senator, appearing in Israel, made a nearly identical assertion that al-Qaeda was leaving Iraq to retool and regroup in Iran.

[...]

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who was accompanying McCain on the trip, was forced to lean over and whisper in McCain's ear that it was Shiite extremists, not Sunni al-Qaeda, that was going to predominantly Shiite Iran.

So he's still repeating a spiel he knows -- and has been told, in public yet -- is wrong.

There are three possible explanations:

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Who's So Scared of the Spitzer Scandal's Effect on Children?
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on March 14, 2008 at 9:40 AM.

Saw this headline in Yahoo!News: "Spitzer Scandal Tricky for Parents".

Change "Spitzer" to "Clinton", and you have stories that were originally written ten or (like this one by Ron Fournier) eight years ago. Or rather, as this NYT piece shows, Republican TV ads pitching that very point: (And of course last fall, Mitt Romney snidely referenced the awful alleged horrors of parents allegedly needing to explain oral sex to their children as a result of Hillary's Vile Husband. Oh Noes! SexEd! Eeeek! I put my kids in private school just so they'd never learn what a penis is!)

Oddly enough, there was no handwringing about "what will we tell the kiddies?" when David Vitter was exposed. Or Larry Craig. (That's right: Nobody last year was writing stories about poor little kids asking their fathers "Daddy, what's a 'gay prostitute'?"*) Or Bob Livingston. Or Mark Foley. Or Newt Gingrich. Or Philip Giordano. Or Ken Calvert, Or Bob Packwood. Or Dan Burton. Or Helen Chenoweth. Or Jack Ryan. Or... hell, just go here for a by-no-means-complete list of Republican sex scandals that never ever triggered the "what will we tell the children?" concern trolling from the GOP/Media Complex.

Oh, God in Heaven: Now another AP story is headlined "Clues to Spitzer's demise may be found in his childhood". Like he was a goddamn serial killer. Gee, there's nothing like dime-store psychiatry. And now we have yet another concern-troll dissection of What It's Like To Be A Wronged Wife. Again, we saw none of this shit with Larry Craig or David Vitter or any other Republican.

Just kill me now.

DNC Seeks FEC Probe of McCain's Finances
Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake on February 26, 2008 at 7:47 AM.

Last Saturday, in my post on DNC Chair Howard Dean's laying the smack down on John "Double-Talk Lobbyist Boy" McCain, I referred to a line used by one of the Dudley Boyz, ECW's famous tag team, whenever they were about to put the hurt on somebody: "D-Von! Get-- the table!" Well, consider the table procured.

Hard on the heels of the FEC's telling John McCain that his attempt to weasel out of his campaign finance pledge stank to high heaven, the DNC has weighed in:

The national Democratic party wants campaign finance regulators to investigate whether Sen. John McCain would violate money-in-politics laws by withdrawing from the primary election's public finance system.

McCain, who had been entitled to $5.8 million in federal funds for the primary, has decided to bypass the system so he can avoid spending limits between now and the GOP's national convention in September.

Federal Election Commission Chairman David Mason notified McCain last week that he can only withdraw from public financing if he answers questions about a campaign loan and obtains approval from four members of the six-member commission. Such approval is doubtful in the short term because the commission has four vacancies and cannot convene a quorum.

"John McCain poses as a reformer but seems to think reforms apply to everyone but him," Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Sunday.

The DNC said it plans to formally seek an FEC investigation Monday.

And, as promised, that's what the DNC is doing.

One of the things the FEC is being urged to examine is a loan that McCain got for his campaign last year. The loan wasn't secured directly by McCain's potential access to public funds, but his agreement with the bank that lent the money required him to reapply for public funds if he lost early primary contests (which he had) and to use that money as collateral.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »