( – promoted by Clark)

Earlier, I wrote a diary explaining why I am not a fan of current St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay.  This is how I started the post:

Below are some reasons why I think anyone who believes in the values expressed by the Democratic Party should not support the candidacy of Francis Slay for St. Louis Mayor.  I think all of these reasons fit into a general theme: in every local issue of substance, Slay has sided with the rich and powerful over the working class and the disenfranchised.  In my opinion, one of the most important things about the emergence of the netroots in recent years has been that it pushed us towards a more meritocratic system.  That is, in the traditional system, the power brokers in the media and the political establishment decided what ideas could even be heard and discussed, and they were very bad at doing so (often because they had vested interests in certain ideas).  The emergence of blogs allowed good ideas to get a wide audience simply because they were good ideas, and not because they had to get the approval of someone in power…

I don’t get the feeling that I convinced many people.  The main argument against me (IMO) was not so much that Slay is a great mayor, but rather that there were no other candidates who seemed like they were better choices.  I now present exhibit B, a column from St. Louis American political blogger “Political EYE”, which I think makes a pretty strong case that we should replace Slay with a different mayor, even if that other candidate is not everything we had always hoped for in a mayor.  I’ll include some choice quotes below the fold, but you really need to read the entire post.  

Obviously how much you make of the following will depend almost entirely on how trustworthy you think the source of information is.  The St. Louis American definitely has a history of being critical of Slay, but I personally don’t think the EYE would go out on this much of a limb without having at least some goods.  I note as well that the Arch City Chronicle followed up on this post without questioning the basic premise at all.  In fact, Dave Drebes had his own question.

The Political Eye column starts the central theme with this:

The EYE knows that money and positions change hands illicitly and off the books in this town, by virtue of being inadvertently caught up in the cell phone equivalent of a back-room deal regarding an attempt to pay off Fire Chief Sherman George. But Mayor Francis G. Slay showed more savvy than Blago.

I’m not even sure what in the rest of the article to cite, since it really is a huge list of pretty specifc innuendo, ranging from the police department to the fire department to publicists and even to the IT department.  Probably the most noteworthy is the EYE claiming to have been a part of some of the conversations in question:

Assuming everyone represented themselves truthfully in this deal n and it would have been foolish to bluff when the stakes were this high n a local developer had Slay’s go-ahead to make Sherman an offer. But even the developer was using an intermediary, a local activist who is no stranger to the deal table. This activist, unable to get a call back from Sherman over the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday weekend (when Slay wanted to close the deal), called the EYE. The EYE then called Sherman, relayed his answers n always, “no” n back to the activist, who told the developer, who spoke to Slay or then Chief of Staff Jeff Rainford or both.

Like I said, you really need to read the whole article and judge for yourself.  But I think a system like this is ultimately bad for any institution, whether we’re talking about the federal government or the City of St. Louis.

Our previous coverage of Claire McCaskill’s events in Missouri this week:

Claire McCaskill (D): “Kitchen Table Talk” in Kansas City (Kansas City)

Claire McCaskill’s Kitchen Table Talk in St. Louis: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (St. Louis)

This is the first part of the talk on Monday, December 15, 2008 in Kansas City – we’ll continue with subsequent portions in Part 3.

[transcription by CC]

…[Applause]

Claire McCaskill: Thank you, thank you all for coming here on a very cold day. And, we’re just going to have a conversation. I’m not here to give you any kind of lecture. I’m here to listen to things you want to talk about and get your input. And I wish that I could do this more frequently. Unfortunately they don’t cooperate in Washington and many times it’s, it’s hard for me to spend much time in parts of the state as I’d like. I, before we begin with questions, your questions and your concerns, I want to make sure I introduce all the staff that’s in the room….[staff introductions]…

…We call these kitchen table talks because this is about things that you’re worried about. And I don’t know about in your family, but in my family we always talked around the kitchen table about things we were worried about. Or things that we were excited about! And so, I wanted to just take a – and I really, I’ll take as much time as we need today, I’ve got to be somewhere in about two hours, but I don’t want to cut anybody off. I want to hear questions you have. I want to know what concerns you have and make sure that I have a chance – whenever I do this, I always go back to my job in Washington better equipped to work for you. What you’re, what’s on your mind is more important to me than what’s on the mind of the folks that work in Washington. So, let’s begin. Raise your hand and we’ll take any questions or comments. Yes…

…Question: I’d like to start with an easy issue and that is climate change. [audience laughter] I, I’ve been told that you are reluctant to support a cap and trade program or some other major federal effort to address climate change until the economy improves. It seems that every week, there’s a new study that comes out that says that the consequences of climate change are coming much more rapidly and much more severe than we have anticipated. And my, my concern is that we’ve really got to address this climate change issue early. We need to expect, in this climate change, for all of us to share some sacrifice. I have some pain, if a cap and trade program or a carbon tax, or something like that, is the best way to begin to address climate change. I believe we’ve got to do it.

Claire McCaskill: Well, let me, say that I – first of all, I support cap and trade. And my hesitation is not as much about the economy but the way it was, it was drafted in the beginning. And I think we’re going to do a better job as we got back at it again under the Obama administration. First of all, I hope that you noticed that the person who is going to head the Department of Energy is, his foremost expertise is in the area of global warming and climate change. And so, I think we’re going to have somebody at the head of the department that certainly understands the scientific risks that our planet faces because of what’s going on in our atmosphere. The way the bill was originally drafted, we were talking about fifty possibly, trillion dollars, as much as fifty trillion dollars being pre-spent. What they’ve done is they’ve divided up this money, and this is the money that would come about as a result of the auction. Essentially what you would do, is you would trade a commodity, a commodity is your ability to pollute. So if you were polluting, you’d have to pay for it. You’d have to buy goods to allow you to pollute. And if you weren’t polluting you earn benefits. So it’s really putting into the free market system an incentive to not put out carbon emissions. That’s essentially the simplest way to explain cap and trade. You, so, it becomes a free market. Now they’ve done this in Europe and they’ve had some success, but they’ve also had some failures. And we can learn from that. One of the things I didn’t want to see happen is, they were so busy handing out this money, to California and other – to buy them off, and this was all money that we weren’t going to spend in Congress. It was going to be spent by a board. Well as a former auditor, the idea that we were going to pre-spend fifty, over fifty trillion dollars without a whole lot of oversight kind of frightened me. And what I was most worried about was that the money wasn’t going to help citizens who were going to be faced with astronomical increases in utility costs. I want to make sure that we take the money from the auction and get it back to regular folks to help pay the utility bills. So it’s not, I’m, I’m for cap and trade, the devil’s in the details about how this is going to work. And I think we’re going to find that middle. And I know that Senator Obama agrees with me on this, he completely supports cap and trade, as did in fact, John McCain. They both were in favor of cap and trade. Now we’ve got to figure out how to make it work in a way that doesn’t damage working families and the middle class any more than they’re currently being damaged by this economy. And I think we can do that. I think we can do that. Okay, yes…

Question: Hey, Claire. I’ve had trouble trying to get into the Stowers Institute. As I’ve reached close to retirement stage I’ve kind of feel like I could do some work for them or at least [inaudible]. Have you got any ideas or any direction that you could give me to get there? And really talk to somebody.

Claire McCaskill: That’s a, that’s a good, you know I think that the Stowers Institute has been fairly insular ’cause it’s been so, it’s been a community of scientists. The best scientists in the world that are doing amazing work, and we’re lucky to have it in Missouri. And we’re very lucky to have it in Kansas City as a quality institution, incredible reputation around the world. But they’ve, they’ve not – the only really community that the, kind of – they’ve done some community outreach but it’s usually been around political attacks they’ve were under. Because of whatever type of research people were objecting to. So, I don’t know they have a really good community outreach arm over there, but certainly I know some people over there and if you visit with Corey [Dillon] maybe we can find some names or phone numbers and get you guys hooked up. Because I think certainly, they’d benefit from it. Okay, yeah, hi!

Question: In the stimulus package that’s being talked about, there’s been a lot of focus on roads and bridges and fiscal infrastructure, which is necessary and I support that. However, it only tends to focus on one type of worker, i.e. those workers who [inaudible] in construction. There’s an extremely high degree of people who do not work in that field, who are out of work. At least that I haven’t seen – in all my life, that’s twenty five years in this business. And I’m wondering, what types of things are you considering for the white collar administrative secretary, of people like that who are losing their jobs at rates as high and one recommendation that we’ve had was to look at a public service corps, where you would put people to work, working in non-profit [inaudible] government. Doing green jobs, that type of thing, but not so dependent upon the private sector to hire, because they just aren’t doing it at the high rates. And I haven’t heard that much talk of it, I’ve seen bits and pieces of it, but I’ve only heard the infrastruc
ture part of it and you can do all those other things but I’m wondering, are you all looking into that? Is it something that’s being talked about because the infrastructure thing is not going to solve the employment issues for a lot of people who are not in that field.

Claire McCaskill: Well, I think the question is, first of all we’re not talking about it a lot because we’re waiting for, for what the administration, the future administration wants. I mean the stimulus bill, I mean, I know leadership was complaining last week saying, “We don’t really have any direction yet from” – and I think that Obama’s new economic team is really kind of hunkered down right now in figuring out what it is that should go in this plan. And, and  I know what they’re worried about, they’re worried about Congress loading it up with all kinds of ridiculous nonsense. You know, there’s this huge pent up demand for funding for so many things in this country. Now, it’s a very dangerous thing to say to the members of Congress, “Okay, we’re going to give you five hundred billion dollars to spend, now go to it.” So, I think they’re trying to figure out a way to craft this so there’s some discipline that what we’re funding is stimulative to the economy. That is, in fact, creating jobs. They know, if it’s a project that’s shovel ready in ninety days, that some people are going to go to work. Now it may not be all sectors of the economy, but it, we’re going to have people that go to work, if you do that. And we know that it’s going to be projects that are already on the books. In other words, the environmental studies that have been done, the cost benefit that has been done, all the things have been done to make sure you’re not wasting public money. To create new programs with that money, is really probably, I would assume they would want to be careful about that because it would open Pandora’s Box. Because there’s so many programs we need to be funding right now. But honestly, what you read about the stimulus program, is as much people in Congress know. And I think the next thirty days will really, it will get flushed out in the next thirty days, and if you have some specific ideas that you think could really pass that strict test of about how stimulative it would be to the economy. Because this, the idea here is, what Senator Obama campaigned on was, first we’re going to deal with energy, cap and trade, green jobs, green technology, then we’re going to do health care. Well now, we’re going to do the economy and then we’re going to do the economy and then we’re going to do the economy, the economy, the economy, the economy, the economy, until we turn this job loss situation around and along the way, we’re going to try to pick up some education, pick up some health care, pick up some energy. Yes!…

…Question: In 2007, the House passed a Employee Choice Free Act Bill, and it went to the Senate and might have been a majority of Senate people that would not pass that but it got killed in the filibuster, George Bush said he was, you know, veto it. So, now that President-elect Obama is there, he has said that he would sign on to Employee’s Free Choice Act bill that would allow workers to unionize through card check and also create a level playing field so that they don’t have to use the old NLRB process that bogs down the old idea of unionization, you know. I’m wondering now that we have a majority of Senate, a majority of House, you know, if it’s going to be possible in order for that bill to get through because I know that’s a big part of economic recovery. You know, we’re hearing things that may have some Democratic Senators that may not want to vote for Employee Free Choice Act, I just want to hear your thoughts on it.

Claire McCaskill: Well, I, I don’t – I said this in the last meeting I was in – I don’t get what the huge deal is about this. I, I honestly, I don’t understand why it would be a massive difference, if someone has the ability to vote a secret ballot, versus whether they’re voting on a ballot that’s not secret. I, I don’t think there’s a massive difference in terms of what’s going to happen in the workplace. So there’s a really incredibly intense opposition to this in some places. I, I’ve said I’m for it, and I’ll vote for it and I think that most of the Democrats in the Senate will. I think a few of the Republicans will. The question is, will we be able to get to sixty. And I, you know, I don’t know, you know, it still depends, maybe on who ends up winning in Minnesota. [laughter] You know, we still have it, believe it or not, it’s going to be Christmas and we still don’t have a Senator from Minnesota elected yet. So, it’ll be close. It will be close. Yes…

Question: As you know, in Missouri, we passed the ballot initiative for renewable energy. And at this time I’m sure the Missouri legislature is not going to be able to fund any additional projects on renewable energy in the state of Missouri. I was wondering, because a lot of our rural folks are interested in this if, if that’s a possibility in regard to economic stimulus for, for the state of Missouri but also throughout the country?

Claire McCaskill: Well, I think there’s two or three things that are going to impact how much investment is going to go on in alternative energy and the green sector. One is, how much of that can be done in a way that is very stimulative to the economy, in other words, can it be done quickly. You know, it’s, it’s – we’re not going to fund things probably in the first part of the year that would go online in 2010, or go online in 2011 or 2012. We need something that’s going to help now in terms of getting, getting the economy moving. But, certainly if you listened at all during the campaign, green technology and the economic sector that could be revitalized with green technology, whether it’s batteries, or wind farm, or solar, you know, investment in the grid. So we can transfer these new forms of alternative energy to places that really need it, that are currently using coal fired, electric plants and currently – I mean we were still allowing people to build oil-based utility plants in the east coast. Not too long ago. And so, in order to transfer electricity from places that can generate it with, by alternative forms, to some of our major metropolitan areas, is going to take a massive investment in the grid. All of those are things that, that President Obama wants to do. All those things I think there is good support for in Congress. The question is, how quickly we do them if they’re going to be part of this original stimulus package that we will probably be dealing with in January and February. But, and the other issue that I have to bring up here, is that pesky price of oil. Oil being sky-high really helps business plans for alternative energy. Oil dropping precipitously like it did, make it economically much more difficult because the business plan doesn’t work as well. If you want to get financing for an alternative form of energy, it’s hard if it’s going to be more expensive, a lot more expensive, than oil. So ironically, even though the drop in oil prices has been terrific for consumers, in a time we really need it, it is the enemy in some ways of alternative fuel technology. Having oil prices a little bit higher, make those business plans work better for some of the alternatives. So, I don’t want, don’t anybody write down in a blog, I came here and said I wanted oil prices to go up! [audience laughter] I’m just explaining a reality of, you can’t subsidize something to make it work in the market, if it doesn’t have market value intrinsically. Yes –

Question: Recently the TVPRA was, well the Williamsburg, was just passed through the Senate and the State. You know, when it was signed in 2005, in Title II, there were some provisions and appropriations for American victims of trafficking that were never requested. So now then that it has been reauthorized,
it hasn’t been signed by the President yet, but it’s passed, what would you suggest to be done to make some amendments to that bill, you know, to go back to the Title II in ’05 because we have, I work at Veronica’s Voice here in the city, and we work with women and girls that are trapped in prostitution. And there is no federal funding for our American citizens, it is all going for foreign nationals and it is, it is a cry to my heart to see the victimization that these women go through. And when we look at their history, ninety seven percent of the women we work with were trafficked as children and sexually exploited commercially, as children, and now they’re stuck in this cycle, but yet, there’s no funding for our Americans. So, what would you suggest? And I did bring a packet I want to give to you, if you would take it.

Claire McCaskill: Well, first of all, you have to understand that there’s lots of ways that we can address the issues of these women besides just federal funding. And, you know, I know that you’re probably clued in, in the community but there are very few women that are trapped in this, the prostitution, in the victimization, that don’t have substance abuse problems.  

Question: They, yes, they do end up with substance abuse issues.

Claire McCaskill:: Yeah. And, and so there’s all kinds of places that you can try to go to get help for women who are in this situation. I mean, Clyde McQueen and Jim Nunley are sitting up here, one’s Full Employment Council, and one has run the Combat Program in this county forever.

Question: We have gotten Combat money before. [crosstalk] The, the thing is, to sustain us, because, yes, there are these other programs, women don’t really turn to those. When you’re labeled a prostitute, by society, you know you don’t go, “Oh, I’m a drug addict.” Yes, we get girls that go to drug treatment, but they don’t talk about their prostitution issues in drug treatment. Drug treatment centers bring them to us and the VOCA money is not authorized, and that’s state funding and fed – and, you know –  

Claire McCaskill:: It’s federal dollars that are authorized.

Question: Right, but it comes through the states, we’re not entitled to those funds.

Claire McCaskill: Well, we’ll take a look at it. I mean, I, I have to tell you, I’ve got – I mean, I want to try to be helpful and we want to try to find you different places, grants or wherever, but there are, you know, the reason that the nation – the foreign folks are under the federal funding more so, is because they, generally speaking, we can impact, we can only impact the conduct of foreign nations at the federal level. Whereas, a lot of problems like the victimization of children is inherently, like there are not laws on, on the books in the federal government to prosecute child predators. [crosstalk] That’s state law.

Question: So we should, maybe we should look more at states.

Claire McCaskill:: Absolutely. The prosecution of violent crime and sexual assault, ninety nine percent of it is done at the state level. People don’t realize, they think the Attorney General has all this power to go after crime in this country, there is very limited federal crime under our constitutional framework. Vast majority of the crime that occurs in this country is prosecuted at the local and state level. And one of the problems we’ve had traditionally is all the prostitution crime has gone into municipal courts so we’ve never gotten a handle on how serious it is even at the state court. So we can try to help, sit down with you and try to strategize. [crosstalk] Okay. Okay.

Question:: I would love that. I would absolutely love that. And who should I leave this packet with?  

Claire McCaskill: With Corey [Dillon]. She’s right behind you.

Question: Oh great, thank you. And thank you so much.

Claire McCaskill:: Yes, sir…  

Question: One of the things that’s been difficult for a lot of people to understand, including myself is the difference in how Congress has treated Wall Street, AIG and so on, and then when all of a sudden the blue-collar representing and other auto makers come they’re asking questions like, “How did you, how did you get here? And did you fly?” And so on. No one ever asked whether the people from New York took Amtrak. So, the question is, how would you explain, and, and then you have this bailout, which looks as though no one knows what’s happening to it, and yet, now you have the treatment of people who include, blue-collar worker people on the line and all of a sudden now, you know, there’s concern about how this is going to be spent and it’s so much less and it’s a loan. How would you explain the difference in how this is being treated by Congress? [crosstalk]

Claire McCaskill: Let me try to explain. And I don’t know if any of you saw – I gave a speech on the floor of the Senate that basically expressed what you’ve just expressed, a terribly unfair double-standard that occurred in terms of – in fact, we call, I had my staff call, there are five different major financial institutions that have individually received more than fifteen billion dollars from the federal government in the last ninety days. And, you know, Citicorp, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, all of them, have received more than fifteen billion dollars.

Question: And we don’t know how the spent it.

Claire McCaskill: Well, we know something about how they spent it. But the bottom line is, we called all of them to ask how many times they’ve used their corporate jet in the last thirty days. Citigroup has gotten fifty billion dollars and they’ve used their corporate jet fourteen times in the last thirty days. So, clearly they weren’t worried about using a corporate jet. Meanwhile, the guys that run GM, Chrysler, and Ford were taking the task for using corporate jets to come to Washington. Probably dumb they did that, they should have at least ridden together for gosh sakes but – [audience laughter] But here’s what happened, and, and pardon me if I go on too long but I want to give you a sense of how this really felt if you were there. All of a sudden, we start having high level meetings in Washington with a wide variety of economic experts. It wasn’t just Hank Paulson, who’s the Secretary of Treasury for George Bush. It was everyone from Paul Volcker, who obviously was President of the Fed a long time ago, to the, the best economists in, in academic institutions all over the world. All of them saying, we have this horrible crisis because what had happened was, all this toxic paper was out there, all of these ridiculous liars loans and these sub-prime mortgages that got sliced and diced into different financial instruments and they were being traded and frankly, their value was absolutely, no one had any idea what they were worth. So all these giant financial institutions, that essentially are, make money flow in this country, were frozen because no one was willing to loan anybody money because nobody knew what anybody was worth. The confidence was zero. So all of a sudden, nobody was loaning anything. Now, you hadn’t felt it out here yet but you would have, eventually. Eventually no small businessman would have been able to get a loan. Nobody would have been able to buy a car. Nobody would have been able to get a college loan. All of a sudden there was no loaning going on. So, they said, we need a stimu- we need this money to buy up assets. We’re going to buy stuff. We’re not going to write anybody a check. We’re going to buy stuff. And by buying this stuff, we’re going to unfreeze the credit and people are going to start loaning money again. Barack Obama said yes, John McCain said yes, believe me, just about everybody said yes. Because the consequences of no money being loaned in this country, would have impacted everyone, not just GM, and Chrysler, and Ford but Brown’s Deli, right up here. Okay? And, and all the businesses you can see within, within your eyesight. So that’s why it happened. Now, i
t happened. Then Paulson gets over there and realizes that if he starts buying up this toxic paper it’s going to take too long. We’ve got to do something quickly. So they decide to start buying stock in banks instead. Nobody got written a check, we bought stuff with it. And I believe we’ll get all of it back, every dime of it I think we’ll get back. We may even make money on it. And, and by buying stock in these financial institutions, by taking an interest in these financial institutions, we injected capital in them. And sure enough, money began being loaned again. It’s still not back where it was, but you’re beginning to see it unloose. You’re beginning to see some things happen. I mean, like, a good example, Kansas City Southern announced a hundred and twenty nine new jobs today in, in Kansas City, that average seventy seven thousand dollars apiece. And, I know they were closing on a big bond deal today. In other words, they were borrowing some money today. So, it, it did help a little. Now, we all came home after that. And everywhere I went I got yelled at. [audience laughter] I mean, I would drive down the street and people would yell at me, “Where’s my money? You’re not giving me any money!” [audience laughter] I’d walk down the aisle in the grocery store and people would start hollering at me, “What are you doing writing those rich people checks on Wall Street, what about my family? What about Middle America?” And it was like, oh my gosh, everyone’s so angry. So, go back to Washington, along comes General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. So everyone who’s been yelled out now wants to show how we’re on the job and paying attention [audience laughter] so all of a sudden we start asking questions we never asked on the financial bailout, that is, “How much money is everybody making?” “What about your health care costs?” “What about your pension?” “What about your CEO pay?” “What about corporate jets?” That’s how it happened. It’s not right. It’s a terrible double-standard. And frankly, it is unbelievable to me that we would put manufacturing in this country at risk like this. Now, the good news is, I believe that the White House is going to do the right thing and do some of these bridge loans to General Motors and Chrysler before the end of the year. I know this, there’s three hundred fifty billion of that original financial rescue package, that has not been authorized yet. All they got was three hundred fifty, they didn’t get the other three hundred fifty yet. I know this, there’s going to be a lot of us who are going to be reluctant to give them the other three hundred fifty if they don’t do what’s necessary to give automobile manufacturing a chance to survive in this country. That make sense? Okay, in the very back…

What Pastor Dan said.

Waterboarding is torture. Period.

In a December 15, 2008 interview with ABC News:

Transcript: Cheney Defends Hard Line Tactics

In Exclusive Interview With ABC News, Vice President Dick Cheney Opens Up About His Hard Line Tactics

…KARL: And on KSM, one of those tactics, of course, widely reported was waterboarding. And that seems to be a tactic we no longer use. Even that you think was appropriate?

CHENEY: I do…

It’s not “hard line tactics”, it’s freakin’ torture.

The United States prosecuted individuals for war crimes in the aftermath of World War II for waterboarding prisoners of war and civilian detainees:

(from A Small Clique Of Legal Extremists…)

Changi Prison, October 1943

…The Japanese were trying to establish that there was a spy organization in Changi Prison which received and transmitted by radio telephony, which had established contacts in the town for the purpose of sabotage and [12937] stirring up of  anti-Japanese feeling, and which collected money from outside for this purpose. In fact, there was no organization, no radio transmission and no attempt to promote anti-Japanese activities outside the Camp…[12939]

…Usually interrogations started quietly and would continue as long as the inquisitors got the expected answers. If, for any reason, such answers were not forthcoming, physical violence was immediately…

…[12940] employed. The methods used were:

(1) Water Torture. There were two forms of water torture. In the first, the victim was tied or held down on his back and a cloth placed over his nose and mouth. Water was then poured on the cloth…

International Military Tribunal for the Far East – Proceedings, p. 12,936.

[emphasis added]

Earlier in the ABC interview Dick “Elmer Fudd” Cheney stated:

…And I think those who allege that we’ve been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the terrorist surveillance program, simply don’t know what they’re talking about…

Dick Cheney is a fascist idiot and a war criminal. And an asshole. Big time.

Via the Political Wire:

“It’s hard to tell, hard to imagine what it’s like to go from 100 miles an hour to 5. I’m going to want to build a policy institute at Southern Methodist, probably write a book. And beyond that, I’m open for suggestions.”

— President Bush, in the upcoming People magazine, on what he’s going to do after leaving the White House.

[emphasis added]

“…Alex, for $1200, ‘What is the world’s smallest building?'”

I do have a suggestion for what he can do with his book.

The best time by far to solve election problems is after the election. Not on election day, not one month before, and not three months before. You start, says Denise Lieberman of the Advancement Project, two years before an election–in other words, beginning the day after. Because if you wait until three months before the election, all the decisions have been made and all the systems have been put in place. Anyone who waits until a month ahead of time to complain about, say, e-voting machines would be better off going to the movies. Even if that activist could convince a local election board of the dangers of DREs, it would be too late to do anything about it.

The Advancement Project is a national non-profit civil rights organization based in D.C. It promotes research, analysis, and advocacy, all of which are activities that don’t lend themselves to the hustle and bustle of an election. Lieberman, who is the Project’s Missouri state coordinator, has been a civil rights lawyer in St. Louis since 1995 and is a political science professor at Washington University. She is experienced in the areas of research, analysis and advocacy. In fact, she just spent the last two years putting those skills to work by focusing on provisional ballots.

Her superiors chose that area for her and others to home in on because such ballots only came into common use recently and many wrinkles need ironing out. After the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters in 2000, when the names of voters were inexplicably missing from the rolls or deliberately purged from the rolls–not only in Florida but right here in Missouri as well–the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 mandated the use of provisional ballots so that, in theory anyway, voters who faced such problems could cast a provisional ballot and officials could sort out later whether they should have been allowed to vote.

But the best laid plans, you know, gang aft agley, and so it is with provisional ballots. The theory has some flaws. One is that these ballots sometimes disenfranchise people who’d have gotten regular ballots under the old system and who’d have had their ballots counted. And besides, even the people who would not have gotten regular ballots may vote provisionally and still not get their votes counted when they ought to. Early in 2007, Denise and other Advancement Project attorneys from around the country were assigned to go down in the trenches and file public records requests so that they could get copies of every envelope containing provisional ballots in five critically important counties, including Cuyahoga County in Ohio. They did not want to rely on what state election officials said about the ballots. As she pointed out, of course they’re going to say that they’re only rejecting ballots of people that aren’t eligible. Her team wanted to know exactly why each ballot was rejected.

They worked with political science professors who were experts in geographic mapping. First, they mapped locations where provisional ballots were cast and then overlaid those maps with maps of which provisional ballots actually counted. Next, they overlaid those maps with census data and racial data.

“It turned out that provisional ballots were being disproportionately cast and disproportionately rejected in certain areas of the counties, areas that had higher minority and higher core low income populations. That was something that we were able to then prove, not just sort of speculate–you know, say ‘Well, it’s probably true that ballots of poor black people get rejected more often.’ And there’s some reasons we could easily speculate about why that’s likely to be true, but here we were able, we were, like, no, let’s actually sit down and read these ballots and then look at exactly why they didn’t count. And when you can look at the ballot, you can see, ‘Oh, this person actually was eligible to vote. The reason his ballot was rejected was because one of the election judges didn’t sign it.’ Right? And that’s just one example of the reasons ballots were rejected. There are half a dozen more.

(…..)

By combing through these boxes of documents, analyzing them in an academically credentialed, viable way, you know putting that analysis together, you then have an incredible picture of how this particular election policy is playing out.”

Lieberman would have liked to include St. Louis County in that seminal two year study. Unfortunately, she was unable to obtain the data. The St. Louis County Board of Elections refused to release the ballots. Nevertheless, she has been able to use the study in advocating for changes to the way provisional ballots are handled here–successfully, too. Since 2006, the County Board of Elections has reduced by half the number of provisional ballots issued, largely as a result of suggestions from Lieberman and the people she works with.

Furthermore, Lieberman sat down last summer and presented the results of the study to Robin Carnahan, who was interested in learning what the study showed–though she and Lieberman parted company on whether the state’s open records law requires that local boards of election turn over provisional ballots.

Sure, there’s still wide room for improvement, not only in how provisional ballots are handled in this state but on a host of other election issues. Lieberman doesn’t look like she’ll be losing a job for lack of work that needs doing. So just because her work isn’t being splashed across the front page of the Kansas City Star and the Post-Dispatch, don’t assume that progress in election protection has been stymied. It’s happening steadily, behind the scenes.

I drove through inclement weather and icy roads to Jefferson City early today for a late morning interview with Attorney General-elect Chris Koster in his transition office. We spent about twenty minutes in conversation.

Attorney General-elect Chris Koster in his Jefferson City transition office.

[transcription by CC]

…Show Me Progress: You’re knee deep in the transition now and this is the first transition in, for Attorney General’s office in sixteen years. So, in a sense, this is sort of new ground, isn’t it?

Chris Koster: It makes – this transition is more complicated because the, Attorney General Nixon has the opportunity to fill a new government and the people he knows best are the people in the Attorney General’s office. So he is filling the government with many of, many folks from the Attorney General’s office and that makes this particular transition larger than usual.

SMP: So you’re, you’re having to fill a lot of staff positions?

Chris Koster: Right, there is, there is a certain attrition that is natural to the office and so there are probably fifteen to twenty positions that are open naturally and don’t have anything to do with the, the transition that Governor-elect Nixon is experiencing. And then, on top of that natural attrition there’s probably another fifteen, to twenty openings that are directly related to Jay’s change in jobs. So, all told, I would say that there’s a restructuring and approximately forty open jobs that we’re looking at right now…

…SMP: So that’s, that’s a lot of people to talk to.

Chris Koster:It’s a, right, it’s a lot of big decisions and then there’s the natural desire to begin to rethink the office. Bart Giamatti, the old President of the American League said that you know, it’s good to redesign an office every eight years. In fact I think the exact quote is that, “A man should quit his job every eight years.” Because, you know, he goes in, redesigns, then he grows into his own design but then he never really thinks that there’s a need to redesign the office that he built. So that’s in hence his, his quote that one should quit his job every eight years to force that redesign. You know I think that there is a, a rethinking of the Attorney General’s office that is perhaps timely. And, you know, we’re looking for a team of people to help us engage in that.

SMP: In the Attorney General debate in Kansas City, you had sort of touched upon that actually, I think when you had talked about the sort of distribution of staff in the different offices in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Jefferson City. So will some of this sort of entail some of that?

Chris Koster: I, that is a subdivision of the larger restructuring, I agree. The, it strikes me that when you go to the state of Illinois – Lisa Madigan’s main office is not in Springfield, it’s in Chicago. When you go to the state of New York, Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General of New York, his main office is not in Albany, it’s in Manhattan. As Missouri is a – seventy percent of the population is in the broad markets of St. Louis and Kansas City. And so, allowing those two offices to find their own watermarks, water levels, I think is something that I’m open to.

SMP: One of the things that you talked about previously were, were some of the things you’d like to emphasize coming in as Attorney General. Among them, prevailing wage. And that ultimately can have a pretty big impact in a lot of things and enforcement of prevailing wage. In light of certain things like the economic kind of stimulus things that are going on in government, or that are being proposed and in some cases the, the concept of, of aggressively enforcing prevailing wage is new in some parts of Missouri.

Chris Koster: Prevailing wage has been on the books for a long time in Missouri. I’m not exactly sure when it was implemented but it’s been there for decades and decades. It is one of the least prosecuted criminal laws in the state of Missouri. And there are unscrupulous individuals in the construction industry that will cut corners in order to undercut the prevailing wage. My belief is that an aggressive Attorney General’s office, working in coordination with the prosecutors around the state, can really have a dramatic effect on this area of the law. When I was prosecuting attorney of Cass County we focused a lot of attention on that. I think we changed the culture of construction inside Cass County, whereby individual firms that came into the county knew that they had to comply with the law when they’re within Cass County borders. I think that an Attorney General is uniquely positioned to take that philosophy all across the state and I, I have never, you know, been convinced that the Attorney General couldn’t clean up this problem if he put his mind to it. In other words, I think that the Attorney General can have a dramatic effect in this area and that is what we intend to do.

SMP: Are there other areas that you feel the Attorney General’s office could help clean up?

Chris Koster: Medicaid fraud would be certainly top on that list. In 2006, 2007 I worked heavily on the Medicaid fraud issue in the Senate. We have a good Medicaid fraud unit with the Attorney General’s office, gentleman by the name of Rick Williams, comes out of the Naval JAG Corps, heads that unit for the state. And I’ve worked with Rick over the last couple of years from a legislative perspective. And look forward to reaching for new heights in that area of the office. Whereby, we’re really gonna dig down and try and increase the level of recoveries by unscrupulous contractors to the Medicaid system.

SMP: Another concern that, that people have been – you know I guess we’re talking now about consumer kinds of problems, which in turn, the Attorney General’s office does deal with, what impact, based on the kinds of crises that are going on with mortgage and mortgage fraud, what impact can the Attorney General’s office have in trying to help mitigate or clean up some of the problems?

Chris Koster: There are a number of ideas that we are looking at right now. In fact, I just left a meeting that was on point, related to this issue. Historically, the Attorney General’s office has focused on these problems through its consumer division, its consumer protection division. I’m not certain that it doesn’t merit a higher level of scrutiny than it has received to date under the consumer umbrella and we are trying to decide whether to bolster the consumer division with increased resources that would specifically go after securities fraud, mortgage fraud, insurance fraud, banking fraud, or to create a stand alone unit that is essentially strike force in those areas. And it’s, you know, I, I’m not exactly sure where we’re going to come down on that question but it’s one that’s under active consideration.

SMP: You had previously also talked about a death penalty review panel. Is that something that you’re, you’re going to try to work on?

Chris Koster: There are a number of issues that I want to talk to the prosecutors about. The prosecutors get back together I think in January and my hope is that meeting might be an opportunity for me to sit down with the electeds. I want to reach out to them for input on the death penalty issue in the state. There’s also a lot of conflict cases that are coming in from the prosecutors to the Attorney General’s office that we are handling. I’m not certain that is the path I want to continue on, I want to reach out to them as to whether they want to continue to use us as primary conflict counsel or whether they want to take some of these cases back. And I want to reach out to the police chiefs on these issues. When I was here as Assistant Attorney General in the late eighties and nineties, the Attorney General’s offi
ce was more focused on simply the death penalty cases and conflict homicide cases. Now it has become much broader. I’m not certain that this is a better model and I know, you know, coming out of the prosecutor field myself, that prosecutors are pretty ambiguous about the increasing role of the Attorney General’s office in this area. So I’m going to hold my thoughts on this until I get first hand input from my former colleagues in terms of where they want to take this, these prosecutions.

SMP: When you were in the Senate, some of the issues that, that you were really involved in, in a sense you, you have a much different role in, do you feel in some of these issues, that you won’t be able to take as active a role? Things like stem cells or the Missouri Court Plan or, sort of the challenges that keep coming up on these issues, things like that?

Chris Koster: It’s going to be issued-dependent. I think on issues where the Attorney General is well-positioned to offer an opinion, like on the Missouri Court Plan, I think you still have a voice there. Certainly I have a personal passion around the stem cell research issue and so it would be hard to keep me out of that debate. But, by the same token, I’m not going to be a senator anymore. And I’m not going to be a member of the General Assembly and the General Assembly is a completely different branch of government. I have an extraordinary degree of respect for the branch and also recognize that part of that respect is not meddling in issues that are uniquely there for the General Assembly. So I think it is pretty important for me not to wade into every debate as though I was still a Senator, I have a different job now. And so I have an office to mind, and will concentrate on doing that. But there are certainly issues that, you know, may differ from that general philosophy.

SMP: Getting to the campaign, this was a – this in, in many levels was a particularly nasty campaign. And, you know, and not just in your race, but, you know, across the state. After you, you come through these kinds of campaigns how, literally, how do you feel about the process?

Chris Koster: I feel good about the process. Actually, one of the things I feel best about is that we stayed very positive. While we took a lot of incoming attacks during the entirety of the campaign, increasingly we found that the way I wanted to pursue the effort was to just look into the camera for long thirty second intervals and tell the people of the state why I want to work for them, what I want to accomplish, and why I think I’m qualified for the job. The campaign is a, a prolonged job interview process. And one of the things that I took out of prosecution and into the election – the state-wide election process is, when I was a trial attorney as a prosecutor, I came to believe that if you just give people the right information, if you just give people full information, they’ll make a good decision. Juries usually do make good decisions despite the conventional wisdom to the contrary. And, so, I think that we try to be respectful of the process in the way we presented ourselves and with increasing focus we left everything aside that was a filter between me talking to people. And, so, the farther we got into the campaign, as you analyzed those commercials, it was more and more just me talking to people. And it’s a campaign that I’m proud of, I think my my parents, my dad’s passed, but my mom was proud of it and I, I think that it’s just a model that I believe in. Just, give people information and let them make up their own minds. We ran a positive campaign.

SMP: Alright, very good. Well, thank you very much….

Previous posts:

Chris Koster in Independence, MO (posted on March 30, 2008)

Democratic Attorney General Debate in Kansas City, part 4 (posted on May 26, 2008 – links to parts 1,2, and 3 are at the top of this post)