….Representative Hartzler: All right [crosstalk]. Listen, listen [crosstalk]…
Voice: When, when you ran your campaign [crosstalk] the only thing we heard was jobs, jobs, jobs [crosttalk], jobs, jobs. [crosstalk] You get into office and the only thing we hear out of you now is abortion [inaudible].
Voice: We were gonna fix it, that’s what you said….
[underline emphasis added]
…and it still is now. Representative Vicky Hartzler (r) sent out another campaign mailer style franking piece this past week.
The franking disclaimer and signature (condensed).
…1. Do you support the department of defense’s repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy allowing open homosexuality in the military?…
…2. Should Congress pass a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, or should it be left up to the states to decide?…
…3. Should the federal government provide federal funding for abortions or health coverage for abortions?…
Is discrimination a family value? Just asking.
“…allowing open homosexuality in the military?”
Uh, isn’t that actually to allow individuals who are homosexual to serve in the military without having to worry if anyone knows or not if they are?
Should the federal government provide federal funding for federal abortions or federal health coverage for federal abortions? There, it’s fixed.
C001135 11/18/2011 JAY NIXON FOR MISSOURI Keesag A Baron 1855 South Ingram Mill Road Suite 201 Springfield MO 65804 self Cardiologist 11/16/2011 $10,000.00
C001135 11/18/2011 JAY NIXON FOR MISSOURI Larry Neff PO Box 525 Neosho MO 64850 Red Carpet Real Estate Broker 11/16/2011 $25,000.00
C001135 11/21/2011 JAY NIXON FOR MISSOURI Barry Aycock PO Box 456 Parma MO 63870 Aycock AG Services self-employed/consultant 11/19/2011 $10,000.00
[emphasis added]
Friday, via Twitter:
@FixAaron Aaron Blake
A reliable source tells me Dave Spence wrote himself a $2 million check for #MOGOV.18 Nov
Certain contributions to be reported within forty-eight hours of receipt–electronic reporting, when–rulemaking authority.
130.044. 1. All individuals and committees required to file disclosure reports under section 130.041 shall electronically report any contribution by any single contributor which exceeds five thousand dollars to the Missouri ethics commission within forty-eight hours of receiving the contribution….
[underline emphasis added]
Uh, two million dollars is greater than five thousand dollars, right?
Again, today, at the Missouri Ethics Commission, the results of a search for any candidates named “Spence”:
Committee Reports filed during 2011
MECID COMMITTEE NAME TYPE LAST NAME FIRST NAME TREASURER DEP TREASURER NAME STATUS
C000380 CITIZENS FOR SPENCE CANDIDATE SPENCE BOB CURTIS MORRISON Active
C071346 FRIENDS OF MARY SPENCE CANDIDATE SPENCE MARY MIKE SPENCE Terminated
C081001 FRIENDS OF SEAN SPENCE DEBT SERVICE SPENCE SEAN KEN JACOB Terminated
C101514E BOBBY G SPENCER EXEMPTION SPENCER BOBBY BOBBY G SPENCER Terminated
Nope, no Dave Spence there.
The results of a search at the Missouri Ethics Commission for candidates for Governor:
Treasurer for candidates and committees, when required–duties–official depository account to be established–statement of organization for committees, contents, when filed–termination of committee, procedure.
….5. The treasurer or deputy treasurer acting on behalf of any person or organization or group of persons which is a committee by virtue of the definitions of committee in section 130.011 and any candidate who is not excluded from forming a committee in accordance with the provisions of section 130.016 shall file a statement of organization with the appropriate officer within twenty days after the person or organization becomes a committee but no later than the date for filing the first report required pursuant to the provisions of section 130.046….
Okay. So, does this mean that a two million dollar check sits around for twenty days and we have to wait for a quarterly campaign finance report to see if it actually exists?
….Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said on “Meet the Press” that President Obama and White House budget officials “were asked to be hands off.”
“The Republicans said, ‘Don’t let Obama come into this, because if he does, it will make it political,’ ” Mr. Kerry said, adding, “They’ve been intimately involved, but carefully so that they didn’t politicize it. I think they did the right thing….”
….Republicans can’t urge Obama to keep his distance, and then blame him when he keeps his distance.
Members of this committee were given a task: strike a deal. Democrats were willing to meet Republicans more than half way; Republicans weren’t willing to compromise. It’s only natural to wonder who’s to blame when there’s a breakdown like this, but holding the White House responsible is deeply foolish.
Paul Krugman: ….And Newt, although, uh, somebody said, he’s, he’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like….
Heh. That thrice married grifter who was paid a ton of money by Freddie Mac, Newt Gingrich (r), lectures us about morality at some right wingnut forum in Iowa:
Newt Gingrich (r): ….Let me, let me now take that, and for a brief moment describe Occupy Wall Street. All of the occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything. They take over a public park they didn’t pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn’t pay for, to beg for food from com, places they don’t want to pay for, to instruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park, so they can self-righteously explain that they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything.
Now, that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, go get a job right after you take a bath [applause]….
….business analyst Harrison Schultz and professor Hector R. Cordero-Guzman from the Baruch College School of Public Affairs, today released a study based on a survey of 1,619 visitors to the occupywallst.org site on October 5. And about a quarter of them have also attended occupation events. So they aren’t all armchair activists….
….“Get a job!” wouldn’t apply to most of them. Half of the respondents are already employed full-time, and an additional 20% work part-time. Just 13.1% are unemployed–not a whole lot more than the national average….
[emphasis in original]
If God exists she will make Newt the republican nominee. We can only pray, and cross over to vote in the republican primary.
Here is video for health care policy wonks. Professor Sidney Watson testified on Nov. 10th at a state senate hearing in St. Louis on whether Missouri should create a health care exchange. Watson is a lawyer and a researcher at St. Louis University on health care issues. Testimony was limited to three minutes a person; but after her time was up, Watson continued fielding questions from Senators Brad Lager, Jane Cunningham and Rob Schaaf for another fifteen minutes.
Your humble videographer screwed up and didn’t put a fresh memory chip in before Watson began speaking, so a couple of minutes of her prepared testimony are missing while I took care of that oversight.
Students at the University of California at Davis exhibit commitment and discipline:
Ani Ucar, Aggie TV (UC Davis): This is Ani Ucar reporting with Aggie TV. I’m standing outside of Surge Two where a press conference was held with Chancellor Katehi and Chief Spicuzza in an effort to address the events that happened Friday, November eighteenth.
Student voice (via people’s mic): They could have held it in a bigger room. This is a university. There are huge lecture halls. We should be able to participate in this press conference.
Ani Ucar: The private news conference was interrupted when protesters entered the building unexpectedly, leading News Service Director, Claudia Morain, to cut the conference short.
Student voice (via people’s mic): The proposal is we give Katehi a safe way out.
They want us to close the door while they consider our proposal.
Ani Ucar: Protesters formed lines around the building, clearing a path for the Chancellor to walk through.
I don’t know how to break it to you, but police brutality in the service of the one-percent has always been the institution’s reason-for-being in the United States of America. One need only look at the history of policing in America to arrive at the realization that fealty to the rich has been ingrained in the institution since it’s inception. Just trace the arc as policing moved from a function of the community to a function of the state — and that move was in service to rich people.
There has always been a mechanism for maintaining the status quo. We won’t go all the way back to England and the middle ages and the evolution of policing from tythings and the tythingman that was charged with keeping order among his group of ten families in agrarian settlements.
In colonial America, the community was charged with policing itself, and the punishment was geared toward humiliation of the offender, employing methods like stocks, dunking stools and scarlet letters to shame to rule-breaker. But as cities grew and industrialization emerged, populations grew too large to be controlled by constables and community mores. This paralleled the emergence of the wealthy industrialist and political classes that desired protection from the masses they exploited in order to gain their wealth and power in the first place. This is what the textbooks refer to as the political era of policing and it emerged in the crowded urban centers of the northeast in the decade between 1830 and 1840, and uniformed police were the norm in every established urban center in the country by 1850.
From the outset they worked for the one percent, and private forces — emphasis on “force” — worked right along side the commissioned police officers of the era to break strikes and keep the rabble in line. Pinkertons, the favorite of the rich industrialist that wanted to — ahem — “discourage” unions from organizing famously called in the Pinkertons to bust heads along with unions, and in a pinch they could be counted on to offer falst testimony against troublemakers so they could be dispatched on the gallows, under the color of law. The most infamous case of this was the breaking of the Pennsylvania Miner’s Union in 1876. Twenty miners were accused of terrorism; allegedly for being members of the Molly Maguires, a militant Irish group. None were members, but the testimony of a Pinkerton agent got them sentenced to hang, and the negative publicity from the case effectively killed unionizing in Pennsylvania for two decades.
The so-called “tea party” was allowed to brandish weapons and hold up signs that proclaimed violence (“If Brown can’t stop it, a Browning can” at an anti-healthcare-reform rally) because they were, in effect, demanding the status quo remain unchanged.
But every time the status quo is threatened, the police are deployed against the masses by their masters.
We see it when we look at the unionization era of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The massive violence against unions and working people — the 99% — is bookended by the Pennsylvania Miner’s Union organizers I mentioned above and the Matewan Massacre in West Virginia in 1920, when the police joined the miners who were fighting back. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, seven union-busting hired guns from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency lay dead, including the two brothers who were in charge of the contingent; along with four townspeople, among them the mayor.
Matewan was the turning point. It also took the better part of five decades to arrive at that point, and the road went through Haymarket Square in Chicago and Ludlow, Colorado.
We saw the same sort of police violence directed at Suffragettes as we saw directed at unions. Why? What did these peaceful women do to deserve the brutality directed at them?
They threatened the status quo. They threatened the white, male power structure. If women were granted the vote and a say in how things were done, the power of the ruling class would be diluted.
We saw it in the sixties with the civil rights movement…
…and the anti-war movement.
We see police brutality every time the status quo is threatened. And the 99%/Occupy Wall Street movement are a threat the likes of which the status quo hasn’t faced in decades, if ever.
The fear of the 1% is evident in the violence they are eager to unleash their uniformed thugs to perpetrate.
And that is what underlies the bold and arrogant nature of the police as they attack protesters.
We saw it from the beginning when the white-shirt Tony Baloney maced women who were penned behind orange mesh and posing no threat.
We saw it in Oakland when police beat protesters…
…and fired rubber-covered bullets at them.
We saw it in Seattle last week.
And we saw it at UC Davis yesterday, when a so-called “public servant” walked down a row of peaceful protesters, who were no threat to anyone, they were sitting on the ground, for fucks sake, and sprayed them directly in the face with police-grade pepper spray…then something amazing happened:
After the blatant, criminal assault against peaceful American citizens — who were committing no crime, merely exercising their First Amendment Right to peacably assemble and ask for redress of their grievances, the very citizens that had just been brutalized with chemical weapons encircled them chanting “shame on you” and “Whose University? Our University!”
But that’s not the amazing part. The amazing part happens when they use the People’s Mic to tell the police “We are willing to give you a brief moment of peace so that you may take your weapons and your friends and go. Please do not return.”
And they do.
The police, who moments before had been pointing firearms at the students take their toys and go.
UPDATE: GMTA, I guess….My friend Imani (@AngryBlackLady) is on this, too, and she has the contact information for UC Davis. Including the police officer who busted out the pepper spray.
….In short, this is quite possibly the stupidest constitutional amendment I think I have ever seen. It looks like it was drafted by a couple of interns on the back of a napkin. Every senator cosponsoring this POS should be ashamed of themselves….
[emphasis added]
…Bartlett‘s work is informed by many years in government, including service on the staffs of Congressmen Ron Paul and Jack Kemp and Senator Roger Jepsen; as staff director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress; senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House; and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department during the George H.W. Bush administration….
The announcement is set for 3pm, which when you account for the rules of political events, means closer to 3:15.
Winners and losers if Kinder runs for Lt. Governor
Winners: Peter Kinder (if he loses, it’ll be far less of an embarrassment as losing by 15-20 to Jay Nixon would have. If he wins, 4 more years to get paid to tweet). Other Republicans who could run for Governor but weren’t (Sure, they’d still lose, but someone has to think they’re better than Dave Spence or Bill Randles). Dave Spence (“Hi, I’m Dave Spence, you’ve never heard of me, but can you just let me have the nomination? I have money!”)
Losers: Brad Lager and Chris McKee (Back to the drawing board. No down-ballot statewide incumbent has lost a primary in Missouri since 1934). Peter Kinder (Like he’s gonna have a shot at Governor in 2016. This is the ultimate tail-between-legs moment for a guy who is 5 for 5 in elections).
Not Sure: Susan Montee (It’s not like a tough race wasn’t still expected after Steven Tilley dropped out and now. Kinder’s Gubernatorial “campaign” isn’t going to be forgotten in 2012 either.)
Now, it’s 45 (or 60) minutes to the announcement. So there’s always a shot that Kinder just retires. But guys who get paid money to cover politics claim he’s running for Lt. Governor.
—-
Updates!:
From Aaron Blake on Twitter: “A reliable source tells me Dave Spence wrote himself a $2 million check for #MOGOV”
Blake also passes on claims of Kinder endorsing Spence while bailing on the race.
We saw the same sort of police violence directed at Suffragettes as we saw directed at unions. Why? What did these peaceful women do to deserve the brutality directed at them? 
We saw it in the sixties with the civil rights movement…
