Ghost In The (Campaign) Machine

Mitch McConnell, call your office.  You've got a ghost problem.

Officials with a Kentucky super PAC supporting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) blame a computer error for a $100,000 contribution that appeared more than a month after the donor died. Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party filed a federal lawsuit to lift limits on posthumous donations.

“This is pure free speech,” an attorney for the Libertarian party, Alan Gura told USA Today. “A dead person can’t corrupt someone.”

Oh this is just too much.

The donation was initially filed with the Federal Election Commission with a June 3 date, only Perry actually died on April 13. The group’s treasurer, Caleb Crosby, told the Louisville Courier-Journal on July 31 that the check for Perry’s contribution was actually received on April 12, and was subsequently corrected with federal officials.

But the donation was quickly questioned by an advisor for Alison Lundergan Grimes, McConnell’s Democratic challenger in his re-election bid.

“This raises a lot of questions that Kentucky voters deserve answers to,” Jonathan Hurst told the Courier-Journal. “The report appears to be as dishonest as their television ads.”

No kidding. Voting when you're dead, well that requires billions of dollars in new regulations and hoops for voters to jump through.  Regulating dead people donating money to Republican SuperPACs on the other hand, well why do you hate free speech, commie?

Who ya gonna call, Mitch?

Two All Vat-Grown Patties...

The first taste test of British lab-grown beef was...interesting.  From a clinical perspective, anyway.

The world's first laboratory-grown beef burger was flipped out of a petri dish and into a frying pan on Monday, with food tasters declaring it tasted "close to meat".

Grown in-vitro from cattle stem cells at a cost of 250,000 euros ($332,000), the burger was cooked and eaten in front of television cameras to gain the greatest media coverage for the culmination of a five-year science experiment.

Resembling a standard circular-shaped red meat patty, it was created by knitting together 20,000 strands of laboratory-grown protein, combined with other ingredients normally used in burgers, such as salt, breadcrumbs and egg powder. Red beet juice and saffron were added to give it color.

The two food tasters were reserved in their judgment, perhaps keen not to offend their host at the London event, noting the burger's "absence of fat".

Pressed for a more detailed description of the flavor, food writer Josh Schonwald said the cultured beef had an "animal protein cake" like quality to it, adding that he would like to try it with some of the extras often served with traditional burgers - salt, pepper, ketchup and jalapenos.

Even the scientist behind the burger's creation, vascular biologist Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, was relatively muted in his praise of its flavor.

"It's a very good start," he told the hundreds of reporters who had gathered to watch the meat being cooked and served.

At some point if we can just get the process down to, you know, not costing several hundred thousand dollars, maybe we can dispense with the whole "slaughtering of animals for their tasty, tasty meat" part and go straight to the good stuff.

But hey, even McDonald's had to start somewhere.  I'm betting in your lifetime we'll have commercially available grown meat (hopefully without the obscene amounts of anti-biotics, steroids, growth hormone, and small crates for animals.)

Thank the stars for rooster sauce and pickles, that'll work on anything.  Even lab meat.

StupidiNews!

• The court martial of Army Maj. Nadal Hasan, accused of killing 13 and injuring 32 in a shootout at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, gets underway today with Hasan representing himself.
• The US State Department is evacuating non-essential personnel and advising Americans to specifically leave Yemen immediately due to the potential for an imminent terror attack.
• Texas Dem State Sen. Wendy Davis, whose filibuster over abortion six weeks ago brought her sudden national fame, says she is close to making a decision about running for governor.
• Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will be the new owner of the Washington Post, buying the newspaper for a quarter of a billion dollars.
• A class-action suit against Indian IT firm Infosys claims that the global company discriminates against "stupid Americans" when hiring.

Last Call For The GOP Unreality Show

Paul Krugman has had enough of this crap.

Last week House Republicans voted for the 40th time to repeal Obamacare. Like the previous 39 votes, this action will have no effect whatsoever. But it was a stand-in for what Republicans really want to do: repeal reality, and the laws of arithmetic in particular. The sad truth is that the modern G.O.P. is lost in fantasy, unable to participate in actual governing. 

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about policy substance. I may believe that Republicans have their priorities all wrong, but that’s not the issue here. Instead, I’m talking about their apparent inability to accept very basic reality constraints, like the fact that you can’t cut overall spending without cutting spending on particular programs, or the fact that voting to repeal legislation doesn’t change the law when the other party controls the Senate and the White House.

Pretty much everything in this article is truth, and Krugman nails the clown car zeitgeist to the wall again.

When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to their own con game. And I would argue that something similar explains how the party lost its way, not just on fiscal policy, but on everything.  

This.

Jerry Brown Does The BART, Man

In California, Dem Gov. Jerry Brown stepped in late Sunday night to call time out on the threatened Bay Area Rapid Transit strike in San Francisco.

Hundreds of thousands of San Francisco Bay area commuters got at least a temporary reprieve from a massive transit strike when Gov. Jerry Brown ordered an inquiry into a labor contract dispute.

Sunday night’s eleventh hour order averted the walkout and left the morning commute to proceed normally, without the widespread travel congestion that a strike involving Bay Area Rapid Transit, the nation’s fifth largest rail line, would have created.

In the order, Brown named a board of investigators for a seven-day inquiry into the contract dispute that had labor unions poised to walk off the job at midnight Sunday.

The order Brown issued came under a law that allows the state’s intervention if a strike will significantly disrupt public transportation services and endanger public health.

“For the sake of the people of the Bay Area, I urge — in the strongest terms possible — the parties to meet quickly and as long as necessary to get this dispute resolved,” Brown said in the order.

So Jerry bought the Bay a week or so, but odds are real good we'll be back here next Monday talking about a major public transit strike, and with good reason.  A previous strike last month tied up traffic for four days, and all that did was get BART management to the table.  They haven't done squat since.  The real issue, as always, is pay and pensions.

Despite a state-brokered 30-day contract extension that ended the July walkout, the points of contention are largely unchanged from last month.

BART is offering smaller raises than the unions are seeking, and the transit agency wants workers to begin paying into their pension fund and contribute more toward health costs. Union leaders say the result for many workers would be a net pay cut after years without raises.

BART complains that workers have the best pubic transit worker package in the country.  Workers know that management's game is to change that, and stick them with thousands in health care and pension costs yearly.  We'll see where this goes, but if the workers and unions lose here, there's bascially nowhere left in America where they can win anymore.

That should worry all of us.

The Monster Turtle Of Fancy Farm

The annual political slugfest that is Fancy Farm in Kentucky ignited again over the weekend, and for those of you from out-of-state, Jonathan Miller of the Daily Beast has your primer.

For those uninitiated in Bluegrass State politics, the Fancy Farm picnic is neither fancy nor on a farm. The picnic, held annually on the first Saturday in August in a tiny, far-Western Kentucky hamlet called Fancy Farm (population 458: Salute!), is hosted by St. Jerome's Catholic Church, which bills the event as the "world's largest one-day BBQ." While the day's menu features bingo, 5k runs, and some of the world's most savory sandwiches (Try the mutton... seriously), the main event begins at 2:00 PM when the state's most powerful politicians (and occasionally a few national figures such as George Wallace and Al Gore) take the stage for five to ten minute riffs on the year's hottest campaigns.

But Fancy Farm went from a quiet Western Kentucky stop on any KY politico's statewide tour to the Bluegrass Bowl of mud-slinging because of one man:

Mitch The Turtle.

The Fancy Farm political speaking forum used to have a similar old-fashioned feel. Al Cross, the dean of Kentucky political journalists, remembers that Fancy Farm used to be a “traditional community gathering with the focus on the interests of Western Kentucky,” with a small-town, state-fair sort of ambiance.

But that all changed dramatically in the 1980s, when the picnic’s political forum devolved, according to Cross, into “a piece of political theater”: a hyper-partisan, name-calling screaming match, a microcosm of everything that Americans hate about politics.

The primary culprit? Cross points squarely at Mitch McConnell, and few would disagree. Al Smith, a retired journalist who's such a Kentucky legend that the state's major journalism award bears his name, argues that the Senator must assume significant responsibility for the precipitous decline in civility at Fancy Farm: "McConnell was the first with the idea to bus in hundreds of noisy supporters from the rest of the state, and maybe out-of-state as well...[and he] was the first to use the stage as political theater," cutting down his opponents with elaborately designed, choreographed productions, dressing up his staff to make fun of his opponents."

Mitch the Turtle did much the same again this year.

McConnell, who spoke first, avoided direct attacks on his opponent, instead speaking in broad strokes: “Over the next 15 months, we are going to decide what kind of America we want … Barack Obama’s vision for America or Kentucky’s.”

Alison Grimes wouldn't let Mitch go without a fight.

Grimes, who followed GOP Rep. Ed Whitfield on stage, took direct swipes at McConnell: “Sen. McConnell is the most unpopular senator among Democrats but Republicans, as well. … There’s a reason he’s so disliked. There is a disease of dysfunction in Washington, D.C., and after 30 years, Sen. McConnell is in the center of it. As long as he remains in D.C., D.C. will stand for dysfunctional capitol.”

And neither did Mitch's Tea Party primary challenger, Matt Bevin.

Bevin, an investment fund manager who has attracted support from tea party groups, spoke last out of the trio.

“Mitch McConnell has disappeared. … Where’s Mitch?” he asked the crowd, alluding to McConnell’s time spent in the Senate chamber. “The people of Kentucky have been wondering that for a while now.”

In a reference to his family’s bell-manufacturing business and above the sound of bell-ringing supporters, Bevin said: “Let me tell you something senator: Ask not for whom the bell tolls, senator; they toll for you. Because the people of Kentucky have had enough.”

Mitch the Turtle is looking at the very possible end of his political career, and he knows it.  The Fancy Farm Beast he created 25 years ago is now slobbering in his face, and this race is on, all 15 months of it (or should Mitch lose in May to Bevin, nine months.)

You thought Rand Paul/Jack Conway was an ugly race when I covered it three years ago?  Welcome to Kentucky.  More on this year's Fancy Farm here, here, and here.  Fancy Farm is a nationally known event now, thanks to Mitch...but there's all number of edges on that sword this year and next.

StupidiNews!

• State Department officials will keep 15 of the 22 consulates and embassies closed Sunday due to a terror threat, and have added four more in Africa for a total of 19 closed through Saturday.
• Scottish actor Peter Capaldi, most famous for his role in BBC's The Thick Of It, will play the 12th Doctor Who as announced Sunday.
• Groups of various pro-military, pro-Morsi, anti-government and Sunni and Shi'ite groups met in Cairo over the weekend to try to start a compromise process in Egypt.
• Ambulance service Rural/Metro, who operates ambulances and firefighting teams in 21 states, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
• The White House has overturned a FTC decision that could lead to bans on older iPhone and iPad models.

This All Has A Familiar Stink To It

Remember last month's massive Abu Ghraib prison break in Iraq that sprung dozens of major Al Qaeda figures?

Hundreds of convicts, including senior members of al Qaeda, broke out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail as comrades launched a military-style assault to free them, authorities said on Monday.

The deadly raid on the high-security jail happened as Sunni Muslim militants are re-gaining momentum in their insurgency against the Shiite-led government that came to power after the U.S. invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

Suicide bombers drove cars packed with explosives to the gates of the prison on the outskirts of Baghdad on Sunday night and blasted their way into the compound, while gunmen attacked guards with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

Other militants took up positions near the main road, fighting off security reinforcements sent from Baghdad as several militants wearing suicide vests entered the prison on foot to help free the inmates.

Ten policemen and four militants were killed in the ensuing clashes, which continued until Monday morning, when military helicopters arrived, helping to regain control.

By that time, hundreds of inmates had succeeded in fleeing Abu Ghraib, the prison made notorious a decade ago by photographs showing abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers.

Payback has apparently been organized rather quickly.

The al Qaeda threat that closed U.S. embassies in the Middle East on Sunday is the most serious in years and the "chatter" among suspected terrorists is reminiscent of what preceded the September 11 attacks, a U.S. lawmaker who is briefed on intelligence said.

The State Department closed 21 embassies and consulates and issued a worldwide travel alert warning Americans that al Qaeda may be planning attacks in August, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa.

"There is an awful lot of chatter out there," Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

He said the "chatter" - communications among terrorism suspects about the planning of a possible attack - was "very reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11."

Pretty obvious the two are related.  The timing however is rotten.  Not even Bush went this far.  If after 12 years of fighting these guys there's a prison break and we're closing embassies, we were never winning in the first place, were we?

This all has a familiar stink to it, and I don't like it one bit.

Bastions Of Free Speech In NC

So while Republicans want you to fear President Obama and the Democrats, and scream about how liberals are un-American and stifle free speech, please remember it's the Republicans who are trying to fire a North Carolina public TV host for daring to criticize them.

The North Carolina Republican Party is calling on UNC-TV to break its ties with host and columnist D.G. Martin.

Martin is the longtime host of the popular "NC Bookwatch" program on the statewide public television station. He's also a longtime political columnist whose left-leaning columns appear weekly in publications around the state. The two are separate ventures.

In his most recent column, Martin seems to compare supporters of Republican legislative leaders to apologists for the recently ousted Egyptian government and for the Nazi regime in Germany.

The column in question is titled "Egypt, Nazi Germany, and North Carolina," datelined July 29. 

Needless to say, the NC GOP has gone completely insane as a result.  Party chairman Claude Pope wants Martin's head, now.

"We call on UNC-TV to suspend this program while they evaluate their relationship with their host who made such an outrageous and damaging comparison. Such divisive hyperbole only serves to confuse and trivialize issues that are important to North Carolinians, who all deserve a formal apology,” Pope said. 

Martin, for his part, has apologized.

Reached by phone, Martin said he understands the GOP's point.

"I'm very sorry that I offended some people, and I apologize. Period," Martin said.

UNC-TV Communications Director Steve Volstad released a statement late Friday, noting that Martin "has volunteered his time to host Bookwatch for more than 10 years."

But I bet it won't matter:  Martin has awakened the raging, fascist Tea Party beast, and they'll be out to end not only Martin and his book review program, but I would suspect the entire UNC-TV system will have to be obliterated as well.

It's what Goebbels would do.

Hoosier School Grades Again

Looks like Tony Bennett, the one-time Indiana school head embroiled in a controversial school evaluation scandal where a fat cat GOP donor's charter school got a top grade despite not meeting Indiana's criteria, and now current Florida schools chief, may lose the "current" part of his job title for the terms "disgraced and fired".

A Florida education official says the state’s education commissioner will resign because of allegations he changed a charter school’s grade during his previous job as Indiana’s school chief.

The official told The Associated Press of Tony Bennett’s resignation on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to disclose the information before a formal announcement. The official says Bennett will resign because of the scandal surrounding Christel House Academy, an Indiana charter school run by a major Republican donor.

Emails published by the AP this week show Bennett and his Indiana staff scrambled last fall to ensure Christel DeHaan’s school received an “A,” despite poor 10th grade algebra scores that initially earned it a “C.”

I don't see how Bennett can survive given the completely toxic stupidity of literally changing the entire grading scale for the state of Indiana just to accommodate a big GOP donor's charter school.  Certainly Gov. Skeletor's office isn't going to want Bennett's idiocy around their necks.

The danger is of course that Bennett risks letting millions of Florida voters know the state GOP plan to privatize, loot, and destroy public schools in the state, changing public education to for-profit nonsense that will leave millions stuck in pay-for-play schools designed to produce unskilled losers.  Can't have the plan out in the headlines like that, so away goes Bennett, and of course a new round of "education reforms" will be put in his place.

But at least people know what the game looks like now.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Time Warner Cable has blacked out CBS in 8 major cities and pay channel Showtime nationwide over a ferocious licensing fight with the network.
• Here in Kentucky a Catholic order of monks and a sister order of nuns are refusing to give up land to make way for a natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to the Gulf Coast.
• With their 40th vote to repeal Obamacare, House Republicans voted 232-185 to bar the IRS from implementing any part of the health care law.
• Some 15 months after its disastrous IPO and a stock price drop to less than half its value, Facebook stock is back above the $38 mark.
• Legendary game designer and space mogul John Carmack's rocket company, Armadillo Aerospace, has run out of fuel and is crashing back to Earth.

Last Call For Canceling The Apocalypse

Meanwhile, just another gentle reminder that the eliminationist/militia movement/sovereign citizen/end of the world types are now mainstream, acceptable members of the Republican Party, at least in states like Washington.

An Eastern Washington legislator, speaking at a “Self-Reliance Rally” of Tea Party activists and survivalists, predicted last weekend that the United States economy is going to collapse and told activists to stock up on ammunition and stay in top physical condition for when that happens.

“We need to prepare for the inevitable collapse that is going to happen: You know it’s going to happen. That’s right, I am a politician and I am standing up here and saying that,” said state Rep. Matt Shea, a Republican from Spokane Valley. The lawmaker’s remarks were reported in the Coeur D’Alene Press.

“When it happens, we need to look at this as an opportunity, not a crisis,” Shea added. “Whose job is liberty? That’s our job.”

Lovely sentiment from an elected lawmaker:  the country will collapse, and I'm with the anarchists.  And this Shea joker is a real piece of work, too.

Shea is no stranger to controversy. The Spokane Spokesman Review reported an incident, about two years ago, in which he pulled a loaded gun on another motorist in what was described as a road rage incident. He was cited for having a loaded handgun in his pickup truck without a concealed weapons permit.

While a defender of traditional marriage, Shea was also in the news for his recent divorce. The lawmaker’s wife sought two temporary restraining orders and a protection order, and claimed to have been treated like a “possession.” She claimed that Shea insisted that she walk on his left side “because his sword, if he had one, would be on his right side.”

Washington State, out near the Idaho border, is kind of a scary place.  These are the people they elect to send to represent them in the state.  To represent them in DC?  Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Republican Conference and author of a lovely guide for House Republicans to use during the five-week August recess to bash the hell out of the federal government they work for.

This doesn't surprise me in the least.  More than a few people out there east of Spokane who are hardcore survivalists and would happily see the government burn.

And remember, McMorris Rodgers is the number 4 Republican in the House, behind Orange Julius, Eric Cantor, and Majority Whip Kevin "Aptly Named" McCarthy.  She's not fringe, she's leadership.

Food for thought.

Mitch Turtles Up

How terrified is Mitch McConnell right now?  Looks like the one-two assault from both the left in Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes and the right in GOP primary challenger Matt Bevin has got the Turtle holed up in his shell and calling for reinforcements.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s chief of staff is stepping down from his position to focus exclusively on the GOP leader’s reelection campaign and the national Republican effort to take back the majority next year.

The move, Republicans say, is a reflection of the growing belief — and concern — that 2014 could be the last opportunity in years for the GOP to recapture the Senate after blowing their chance at the majority in the past two election cycles. So McConnell is moving a key aide out of his official Washington office to work entirely on campaign politics.

Josh Holmes, who has run McConnell’s personal office handling Kentucky-centric issues since December 2010, will now work in a dual role as a senior political hand to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and to help advise the GOP leader’s difficult reelection bid in Kentucky. In his new NRSC role, Holmes will work as a conduit to the downtown fundraising community as the GOP seeks to keep pace with Democratic fundraising.

Holmes’s departure comes as two other senior leadership aides have announced they are leaving the Senate, albeit for different reasons. Dave Schiappa, who serves as McConnell’s floor general and is perhaps the most important Senate Republican staffer, is leaving the chamber after nearly three decades of work to take a job as vice president at the Duberstein Group, a downtown lobbying firm. And Rohit Kumar, a top policy aide to the leader who helped negotiate key deals including the fiscal cliff accord, is also stepping down for personal reasons.

When your senior staff is running for the hills and scrambling for lobbyist jobs this early in the cycle, something is badly, badly wrong.  It's even worse when your senior staff is heading over to run the party Senate campaign machine so they can funnel as much cash and other resources as possible to stave off the very real possibility of defeat of the party's Senate leader.

The fact that all of this is happening with nine months and change before the May primary is a really, really big hint that priority one is saving Mitch's turtle ass in 2014.  Yes, Republicans are very, very worried.

They should be.

Crashing To The Ground With A THUD

Brian Beutler details the rapidly disintegrating "House GOP budget plan" to force Senate Democrats and President Obama to the table to talk about just how much austerity Americans will be facing.  There's only one problem with the plan, and that's the fact that Republicans are stuck in an increasingly uncivil war among themselves and can't pass anything in the House when it comes to Paul Ryan's budget.

Indeed, Paul Ryan’s entire reputation rests upon these kinds of abstractions. His budgets imagine huge cuts to Medicaid and food stamps and Medicare and so on, but they have no binding force. His allure to the conservative movement as a vice presidential nominee was that he’d be uniquely suited to turn these abstractions into reality.

But many close Congress watchers — and indeed many Congressional Democrats — have long suspected that their votes for Ryan’s budgets were a form of cheap talk. That Republicans would chicken out if it ever came time to fill in the blanks. Particularly the calls for deep but unspecified domestic discretionary spending cuts.

Today’s Transportation/HUD failure confirms that suspicion. Republicans don’t control government. But ahead of the deadline for funding it, their plan was to proceed as if the Ryan budget was binding, and pass spending bills to actualize it — to stake out a bargaining position with the Senate at the right-most end of the possible.

But they can’t do it. It turns out that when you draft bills enumerating all the specific cuts required to comply with the budget’s parameters, they don’t come anywhere close to having enough political support to pass. Even in the GOP House. Slash community development block grants by 50 percent, and you don’t just lose the Democrats, you lose a lot of Republicans who care about their districts. Combine that with nihilist defectors who won’t vote for any appropriations unless they force the President to sign an Obamacare repeal bill at a bonfire ceremony on the House floor, and suddenly you’re nowhere near 218. 

And the fact of the matter is when it comes to taking full responsibility for cutting trillions of dollars from already crumbling bridges and roads, already strained schools, already overloaded SNAP food benefits, and of course Medicare and Medicaid, House Republicans don't want anything to do with the plan.

So pull up a chair, kids.  The House GOP is about to come crawling to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in order to get yet another spending extension passed, and it will be on the Democrats' terms.  The Republicans have nothing, and they now know it.  And now, so does everyone else.

StupidiNews!

• Secretary of State John Kerry says that negotiations with Pakistan are ongoing and that the United States hopes to end all drone strikes in the area "very soon".
• A French court has overturned the country's ban on Monsanto's genetically modified corn, ruling that under EU law France has failed to show the crops are harmful.
• Senate Democrats want additional oversight on secret FISA surveillance court rulings in the form of legislation reforming the court's process.
• Keystone XL pipeline company TransCanada is considering a new pipeline across 2,000 miles of Canadian wilderness from Alberta to Saint John, New Brunswick.
• Microsoft reports the number of Windows 8 machines has finally surpassed Windows Vista PCs, but has a long way to go to beat Win XP.