Oh my how I do love to read of tantrums on the left! James Wolcott tells you of the Kossacks dividing over Hillary and Barack, while Matt just realized that he has been marginalized by the very people he helped to put in power.

And then there are the number of people who take issue with a basic request for competence at the Obama campaign with regards to communications. People apparently don’t want Obama sending out talking points or talking to bloggers, preferring that bloggers stay independent. Well excuse me, why do you think Obama surrogates suck on TV? They aren’t getting fucking talking points, you idiots. How do you think this works?

While we’re on Obama, consider the ridiculous defenses of Obama going on Fox News and lying about his intent to ‘take them on’, to which I could refer you to Chris’s post once again. The straw men arguments were just disgusting and out in force.

Christopher Hayes of The Nation, is outraged! Outraged I tell you! Just how outraged is he? Well he took one of those urban legend e-mails that we all get, and proceeded to take a Snopes.com debunking as his own and called it a right-wing smear machine! Snopes last updated theirs in March 2005.

If you compare the two works, one can’t help but wonder, for all the allegations, why Hayes was not capable of linking to actual sources. Note that the Snopes item provides links.

I wasn’t aware that all the internet rumors that flow through the e-mail boxes are actually a carefully crafted plan by the Republicans and Rush and Fox News…See, they get all of us to keep sending them around and that’s why the Democrats message doesn’t get out! It’s just a big fat right wing conspiracy. There are absolutely no emails circulating that put Republicans in the same light!

Answer: MoveOn, and it isn’t even close

Public Enemy

By: Kenneth P. Vogel
The Federal Election Commission has fined one of the biggest liberal political action committees $775,000 for using unregulated cash to boost Democratic candidates during the 2004 elections.

America Coming Together (ACT) raised $137 million for its get-out-the-vote effort in 17 states in the 2004 elections, but the FEC found most of that cash came through contributions that violated federal limits or were otherwise barred by campaign rules.

The group’s big donors included George Soros and the Service Employees International Union.
The settlement, which the FEC approved unanimously, is the third-largest enforcement penalty in the commission’s 33-year history.

CENTER FOR RESPONSIVE POLITICS
MONEY-IN-POLITICS NEWS

SPREADING THE WEALTH
The voting booth marks the moment when a final decision is made, one
favorite is picked and then there’s no turning back. But with the
selection of the next U.S. president about 17 months away, some individuals
are showing support for as many candidates as their hearts desire — and
their checkbooks allow.

* Read the full article:

NEW PAGE ON OPENSECRETS.ORG SHOWS DEMOGRAPHICS OF PRESIDENTIAL DONORS
To really assess a presidential candidate’s fundraising strength and
potential, you have to look deeper than the total amount they’ve raised.
How many larger donors do they have? And how many of those donors have
hit their contribution limit at this early stage in the long campaign?
OpenSecrets.org’s Race for the White House section now shows how the
candidates’ donors are distributed by dollar amount. Also, the site’s
Donor Lookup now allows you to search contributions to all presidential
candidates by name, employer, state or ZIP code.

This is the work of Donkey Cons:

Dan Riehl’s got the BIG SCOOP: Jerome Armstrong’s consulting firm collected over $161,700 from SEIU — perhaps the most notoriously corrupt union in America – in a single year! And DailyKos has been pimping SEIU!

One labor journalist accused SEIU of ripping off AFL-CIO for $3 million before splitting in 2005. Wait until Tom Buffenbarger finds out what Andy “Beach House” Stern has been up to lately ….

Kos flatly denies everything:

“No politician, campaign, issue group, nor any other organization has directly or indirectly paid me for anything.”

Right. Armstrong’s been raking in big-time consultant bucks, but Moulitsas has taken a vow of poverty. In which case, Moulitsas is not the scammer, he’s the scammee.
Not a pimp, but an abused ho.
Not just a sock puppet, but a stupid sock puppet.

We now return you to our previously scheduled cynical snarking … oh, wait: Ace of Spades has beaten us to it!

Robert Kennedy has a rather lengthy piece in Rolling Stone this month. In it he tries to show the reader how Ohio was stolen from Kerry! That’s right! He cites the fact that the exit polls are an exact science and they showed Kerry as the winner. Although Rassmussen showed Bush winning! Do you remember that at around noon on election day, bloggers had projected Kerry the winner? I did love the Dick Morris article that Kennedy cited as proof..too bad he didn’t take the time to read what Morris said:

Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush’s National Guard service and the planned “60 Minutes” ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.

Via the AP

A judge admonished a congresswoman’s son and three other Democratic campaign workers for interfering with voters’ civil rights as he sentenced them to jail Wednesday for puncturing the tires of some Republican vans on Election Day 2004.

Judge Michael B. Brennan exceeded the recommendation of prosecutors in sentencing the four men to jail time ranging from four to six months for misdemeanor property damage.

“Voter suppression has no place in our country,” Brennan told the defendants in Milwaukee County Circuit Court. “Your crime took away that right to vote for some citizens.”

The Republican Party wanted to use the vans to transport voters to the polls during the presidential election.

The men, including the son of U.S Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, had pleaded no contest in January to misdemeanor property damage in a plea agreement with prosecutors who recommended no jail time.

When the NSA Spy program story first broke, many on the left were screaming about how “data mining” undermines an individuals privacy..THIS IS BIG BROTHER.. well that is until they found they could use it to their advantage. Use it to their advantage and split the party I guess!

Democrats’ Data Mining Stirs an Intraparty Battle: With Private Effort on Voter Information, Ickes and Soros Challenge Dean and DNC

Doesn’t it look like they loved Dean , before they loathed him?

The question for this week’s poll:

Would you support a federal law whereby all American citizen’s would be required to present a valid ID card in order to vote in US elections?

Your choices are:

Yes it should be law!
No it’s discriminatory!
No - it invades privacy!
I don’t care

You can participate in the poll in the upper left of the site. This post is open for discussion on the topic.

View previous poll results.

Related in the news:
Federal judge grants voter ID injunction: Order suspends law requiring photo identification at polls
Cato Institute: Cites study in Georgia found more than 15,000 dead people on active voting rolls statewide.
Georgia’s Voter Identification Law Barred
Neil Boorts with GEORGIA VOTER ID LAW BLOCKED

Related in blogs:
Slobokan.com with The Georgia Voter ID Bus and states: “I, as a resident of the great state of Georgia, have no problem with the new voter I.D. law. I, personally, think it’s long overdue.

NYDN

I hear that John Kerry loyalists are kicking themselves for cooperating last year with filmmaker Steve Rosenbaum on “Inside the Bubble,” a potentially devastating behind-the-scenes look at the Massachusetts senator’s failed presidential campaign.
I’m also told that Hillary Clinton partisans are licking their chops to see the film, which “could end up being the silver bullet that kills Kerry’s presidential chances for 2008,” says a Lowdown spy.

It features, among other not-ready-for-prime-time moments, Clinton scowling and rolling her eyes over an apparent Kerry gaffe during a presidential debate; Kerry pretending to interview himself and babbling in Italian while waiting for a real interview to begin; Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) cursing at reporters during a campaign stop, and Kerry message guru Robert Shrum confidently declaring a few days before the 2004 election: “Zogby [a prominent pollster] just announced who’s gonna win. Us!”

I think Zogby got that wrong John!

Don’t ‘lurch’ to the right or left, Democrats told

In a variation of “the operation was a success but the patient died,” Sen. John Kerry gave an upbeat assessment of his losing 2004 campaign for the White House during a brief Seattle visit Friday.

In what might be part of an effort to try again for the presidency in 2008, the Massachusetts Democrat stressed to a national gathering of Democratic state legislators the importance of rebuilding the party by having it strengthen its grass roots “and fight even harder for what we believe in.”

“We don’t need some great lurch to the right or lurch to the left or redefinition of the Democratic Party. The last thing America needs is a second Republican Party,” Kerry told the luncheon audience.

Fox
Plame Gave Money to Anti-Bush Group
Outed CIA spy Valerie Plame last fall gave a campaign contribution to go toward an anti-Bush fund-raising concert starring Bruce Springsteen, it was revealed Tuesday night.

It’s the first revelation that Plame participated in anti-Bush political activity while working for the CIA.

The $372 donation to the anti-Bush group America Coming Together (search), first reported by Time magazine’s Web site, was made in Plame’s married name of Valerie E. Wilson and covered two tickets.

The Federal Election Commission (search) record lists her occupation as “retired” even though she’s still a CIA staffer. Under employer it says: “N.A.”

Hattip to PCD
EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. (AP) - A federal jury Wednesday convicted the chairman of the city’s Democratic Party and four others of scheming to buy votes with cash, cigarettes and liquor last November.

Prosecutors relied largely on secretly recorded audiotapes in which they say the accused could be heard talking about paying $5 per vote to get key Democrats elected.

Charles Powell Jr., 61, the city’s Democratic Party chairman, was found guilty along with the city’s former director of regulatory affairs and three others.

Fox
WASHINGTON — Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean (search) headed to Capitol Hill Wednesday to fire up his party base by lighting up an issue Democrats have been hot about for months — the alleged suppression of African-American votes in Ohio during last fall’s presidential election.

Dean, who was in Washington Tuesday night in part to offer a spirited defense of Sen. Dick Durbin (search), D-Ill., over remarks he made comparing prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay to some of the world’s most heinous regimes, released a Democratic study on Wednesday that described voting problems in Ohio last November.

“The results show that our election system failed the citizens of Ohio,” Dean said.

Among the charges laid out, the study concludes that 52 percent of African-Americans in Ohio reported significant problems at the polls and, on average, African-American voters waited three times as long as white voters to vote.

Do Not Pass Go - - Let The Campaign Pick Up The Tab

Sen. John F. Kerry tapped campaign funds for Red Sox tickets and to pay nearly $300 in overdue Boston parking tickets in March, records show.

Kerry’s Senate campaign committee wrote a $287 check to the City of Boston Parking Clerk on March 31, 2005. The Bay State senator listed “travel expense” as the purpose for the expenditure.

Kerry leased a car for campaign-related travel in Massachusetts that was cited for about a half-dozen parking tickets in Boston.

Most of the tickets were issued in October and November 2003 and not paid until more than 15 months later in March 2005 after accruing penalty fees.

Parking tickets - $287.00
Red Sox tickets - $3,150.00
Knowing John Kerry misused funds
Priceless

Actually the FEC stated that as long as the “expenses” were campaign related then campaign funds can be used - - I’m just curious as to how much campaigning he actually got done at a baseball game.

Rev Al On Video

The FBI, as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the Rev. Al Sharpton, secretly videotaped him pocketing campaign donations from two shady fund-raisers in a New York City hotel room and then asking for more.

The Post confirmed the FBI investigation of Sharpton. The two dubious donors whom Sharpton met with in the hotel on May 9, 2003 — Democratic fund-raisers La-Van Hawkins and the late Ronald White — suggested that nearly $90,000 was missing from the official campaign report Sharpton filed with the FEC.

Hawkins is currently on trial in Philadelphia on corruption charges unrelated to the Sharpton case; White also was going to be indicted, but he died before charges could be brought.

An FBI wiretap picked up Hawkins telling White he believed they had raised more than $140,000 for Sharpton in the previous quarter — but Hawkins fretted because Sharpton had reported only about $50,000 on his federal election filing.

Kerry Cites Voter Intimidation Examples

“Last year too many people were denied their right to vote, too many who tried to vote were intimidated,” John Kerry said at an event sponsored by the state League of Women Voters.

“There is no magic wand. No one person is going to stand up and suddenly say it’s going to change tomorrow. You have to do that,” he said.

Kerry also cited examples Sunday of how people were duped into not voting.

“Leaflets are handed out saying Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday. People are told in telephone calls that if you’ve ever had a parking ticket, you’re not allowed to vote,” he said.

Is Kerry saying that people who were going to vote for him fell for any one of those?

John Kerry says the media muffed the job in the last election

John Kerry says the media muffed the job in the last election, or at least that the people who voted against him paid attention to the wrong media outlets, which is why he lost the presidential election.

He’s concerned, for instance, that large numbers of Americans voting for George W. Bush believed incorrectly that Saddam Hussein played a part in the 9/11 attacks and seems to think this is because they were paying too much attention to a “sub-media” that aimed to entertain, not inform, and that undercut the valid reporting of mainstream outlets.

The Massachusetts senator is extensively quoted in The Weekly Standard as saying this much and more during a Boston session last month. Our excuse-making Democrat also worried aloud about the “corporatization” of the media and the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, which was a governmental policy restricting free speech on radio and TV. Put all these negatives together, and the honest, intelligent, right-thinking candidate is put at a serious disadvantage, he and a Boston columnist lamented.