Today at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C141055 04/03/2015 HANAWAY FOR GOVERNOR, INC Stanley Herzog P O Box 1089 St Joseph MO 64502 Herzog Contracting Owner 4/3/2015 $25,000.00

[emphasis added]

It’s been a while.

Previously:

Campaign Finance: Oh, there is a difference… (February 20, 2015)

Campaign Finance: gone quiet (March 21, 2015)

Well, for some.

Catherine Hanaway (r) [August 2014 file photo].

Catherine Hanaway’s gubernatorial campaign has not taken in a contribution over $5,000.00 (to be reported to the Missouri Ethics Commission within forty-eight hours) in over a month.

Meanwhile, yesterday at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C031159 03/20/2015 MISSOURIANS FOR KOSTER Missouri Drive Fund 1850 E Division Street Springfield MO 65803 3/20/2015 $25,000.00

C031159 03/20/2015 MISSOURIANS FOR KOSTER Vehicle Protection Association, Inc. P.O. Box 39491 St Louis MO 63139 3/20/2015 $10,000.00

[emphasis added]

And:

C151053 03/20/2015 GREITENS FOR MISSOURI Kathleen Harbaugh 789 Backhaus Rd. Pipe Creek TX 78063 Triple H Equitherapy 3/19/2015 $5,500.00

[emphasis added]

It’s still an exploratory committee for “statewide office”.

Previously:

Campaign Finance: Oh, there is a difference… (February 20, 2015)

=====

Campaign Finance: continuing… (March 1, 2015)

Campaign Finance: steady wins the race (March 4, 2015)

Campaign Finance: steady wins the race – part 2 (March 5, 2015)

Campaign Finance: from the four corners of Missouri (March 7, 2015)

Campaign Finance: from a different crowd (March 12, 2015)

Campaign Finance: steady (March 17, 2015)

Campaign Finance: still steady (March 20, 2015)

=====

Campaign Finance: There is another? (February 25, 2015)

Campaign Finance: a little bit more (February 26, 2015)

Campaign Finance: A new bandwagon? (March 6, 2015)

Campaign Finance: but wait, there’s more (March 10, 2015)

Campaign Finance: that’ll help finance a whole lot of exploring (March 12, 2015)

Campaign Finance: it’s going to be a good quarter (March 16, 2015)

Campaign Finance: still exploring (March 17, 2015)

From Catherine Hanaway’s “How to become Governor of Missouri” checklist:

1. Goal: Find a simpatico billionaire to pave the roads with gold.

Achievements to date:

— Nearly $1 million dollars from one donor, megabucks political meddler, Rex Sinquefield.

Next steps:

— Ask Rex what he wants; submit bill.

2. Goal: Make nice with GOP crazy wing.

Achievements to date:

— Channeled the spirit of Todd Akin; attributed poverty, depravity and pedophilia to female sexual autonomy.

— Kudos from Constitutional Party, holly-rollier-than-thou, Cynthia Davis who responds to the Akin imitation with thanks to “brave women, like Catherine Hanaway, for having the courage and moral fortitude to speak the truth” about the sluts who “who have been beguiled into making their bodies available to men outside of Holy Matrimony.”

Next steps:

— Continue talking about keeping the sluts barefoot, pregnant and under Big Daddy’s thumb.

— With the understanding, of course, none of that talk applies to educated, rich Republican women who run for office.

3. Goal: Make nice with Missouri GOP power-brokers.

Achievements to date:

Endorsements:

— Former Missouri Governor and U.S. Senator Kit Bond – will put loyalty to former employees and friends over policy differences.  

— Former GOP National Committee Missouri member Ann Dickinson – goes where Kit Bond leads.

— Very connected U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner – all in for Hanaway – and why not since she’s the GOPs A-1 talent scout for women who can mouth the Republican anti-women line without retching.

— State Rep. Ed Emery, ALEC’s main man in Missouri.

Next Steps:

— Take a loyalty oath to ALEC.

— Hit the country club circuit.

4. Goal: Squash the other main GOP primary contender, Tom Schweich, like a bug.

Achievements to date:

— Long Version: Read former U.S. Sen. John C. Danforth’s eulogy for Tom Schweich to get the whole story.

— Short Version: Read TPM’s description of the way the old, political one-two works – or what Hanaway supporters and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Bill McCellan want to call politics as usual.

— Issued statement after announcement of Schweich’s suicide about what a mensch he was … oops! Make that what an “extraordinary man with an extraordinary record of service to our state and nation.”

Next Steps:

— Suspend campaign, lie low and maybe State GOP Chair and former Hanaway oppo researcher John Hancock will take all the heat.

* Edited slightly; inadvertently omitted text added back under achievements on 4th point.

Read Tony Messenger’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial piece on the death today of State Auditor and gubernatorial candidate, Tom Schweich. It’s heartbreaking. If you don’t have the stomach for sad stories and righteous anger is more your thing, just read the excerpt that Michael Bersin posted below  

Messenger makes it clear that he doesn’t know the nature of the desperation that led Schweich to do what he did. What he does know: the chair of the Missouri Republican Party, who claimed neutrality in the primary race between Schweich and Catherine Hanaway, was, according to Schweich, planning to undercut Schweich through a “whisper” campaign. Schweich’s grandfather was a Jew and that seems to be sufficient to do damage among Republicans.

The use of a race-baiting whisper campaign is old-hat for Republicans. The Nation describes one of the more notorious examples:

Eight years ago this month [i.e.,  Jan. 2008], John McCain took the New Hampshire primary and was favored to win in South Carolina. Had he succeeded, he would likely have thwarted the presidential aspirations of George W. Bush and become the Republican nominee. But Bush strategist Karl Rove came to the rescue with a vicious smear tactic.

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.

In his editorial article Messenger hones in on racism in Missouri:

Missouri is the state that gave us Frazier Glenn Miller, the raging racist who last year killed three people at a Jewish community center in Kansas City. It’s the state in which on the day before Schweich died, the Anti-Defamation League reported on a rise of white supremacist prison gangs in the state.

Division over race and creed is real in Missouri Republican politics, particularly in some rural areas. Schweich knew it. It’s why all week long his anger burned.

True enough. But from what I’ve been seeing over the past six years, this roiling racist frenzy isn’t just a Missouri phenomena, but the new defining characteristic of the Republican Party itself. Since Richard Nixon, Republican politicians have been attempting to generate and exploit white racial resentment. But it’s taken the election of an African-American president to rouse the tribal hysteria that we’ve seen in recent years.

Republican politicians and their media counterparts on Fox television and rightwing radio routinely engage in the type of racist innuendos and slurs that would have been enough to have ruined careers a decade or so ago had anyone dared say out loud what is now par for the course. I could give examples, but there’s so many it’s hard to choose – and you already know what I mean. Take for instance,  this list of the ten most racist moments at the last GOP convention. It’s even disturbed some Republicans. Charlie Christ left the GOP because “‘I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president.” Hmmm, unfriendly. Politicians are politic, but the gist is clear.

As for anti-Semitism, remember Eric Cantor? You know, the Jewish guy who used to be House Majority Leader – and the only Republican Jewish member of the House of Representatives? Prior to his defeat, which many attributed to anti-Semitism, Cantor essentially admitted that racism and anti-Semitism was a problem in the House GOP caucus. And you all know about the history of anti-Semitism in the leadership of the American Family Association (AFA), the group that has given its heart, soul and financial support to the Republican Party – which reciprocates by regularly regularly sucking up in the AFA’s direction.

Of course rightwingers become apoplectic when they hear that other R word coupled with Republican, not to mention anti-Semitism. Not Islamophobic though – they seem to like that epithet. And it’s not just the denial; there’s all the projection too. Wingers are always on about how liberals are the real racists. Sadly, though their outrage is far too shrill and contrived; their red-faced conniption fits ultimately just make the rest of us laugh.

But I’m not laughing now. Folks who have a chance of adding control of the executive branch of our state to their legislative branch trophies, are accused of waging an anti-Semitic whispering campaign against a fellow party member. It’s going to be hard to escape the fall-out from this latest, local evidence of Republican moral rot. Or at least it ought to be.

*Phrase added in next to last paragraph.

In the republican world:

Eli Yokley ‏@eyokley

“A million dollars from a millionaire? He made more in interest last week,” @HanawayForGov says, defending @rexsinquefield money. #MOGov 4:52 PM – 21 Feb 2015

Not too good at math. Uh, if somebody’s assets generate a million dollars interest in one week they’re considerably more wealthy than just a “millionaire”.

Somebody else caught that:

Grant ‏@GrantGambling

Billionaire* @eyokley @HanawayForGov @rexsinquefield 4:56 PM – 21 Feb 2015

Tony Wyche ‏@tonywyche

@eyokley @HanawayForGov @rexsinquefield well then that makes it OK. 5:06 PM – 21 Feb 2015

Well, it is legal in Missouri.

Sean Nicholson ‏@ssnich

It doesn’t matter if I’m subservient to one radical rich man because he still has money after he pays me [….] #mogov 5:32 PM – 21 Feb 2015

In other news today:

Missouri GOP ‏@missourigop

@HanawayForGov wins State Committee #mogov straw poll at #RLD2015 10:44 AM – 21 Feb 2015

And they say money can’t buy happiness.

Previously:

Campaign Finance: the giant chess piece in the room (January 15, 2015)

In the 2016 gubernatorial campaign.

Yesterday at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C141055 02/19/2015 HANAWAY FOR GOVERNOR, INC Cape Radiology Group 70 Doctors Park Cape Girardeeau MO 63703 2/19/2015 $10,000.00

[emphasis added]

Where’s Rex? Just asking.

Today at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C031159 02/20/2015 MISSOURIANS FOR KOSTER Eastern Missouri Laborers’ Educational and Benevolent Fund 3450 Hollenberg Drie Bridgeton MO 63044 2/18/2015 $12,500.00

[emphasis added]

And ye shall know them by their contributors.

Previously:

Campaign Finance: the giant chess piece in the room (January 15, 2015)

Campaign Finance: keeping up with the Schweichs (r) and Hanaways (r) – part 2 (February 5, 2015)

Rex Sinquefield’s pet candidate for governor, Catherine Hanaway, fired off a volley in the GOP war on women Saturday. And PoliticMo’s report of the incident tells us lots about how this war is going to be fought:

There are 644 days until Election Day, 2016, but already, Democrats in Missouri are hoping to define a Republican candidate for governor as the next Todd Akin, the former Republican U.S. Senate candidate who earned national infamy for his comments about “legitimate rape.”

What PoliticMO is talking about are Hanaway’s remarks at a conservative Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis last Saturday. And no, Democrats aren’t “hoping” to pass off innocent bon mots as Akin-like, as PoliticMO implies, since Hanaway’s speech could have been given by the Toddster himself. She donned the Akin crazy hat all by herself of her own free will and now she gets to wear it without any overt Democratic help – which doesn’t mean that we can’t laugh ourselves silly at the spectacle.

Hanaway’s target: Female sexual liberation which she blames for out of wedlock-births, poverty and a host of problems such as pedophilia and pornography (which she unequivocally defines as a problem). Hanaway, like Todd Akin, condescends to women whose sexuality she implies must be officially controlled for the good of women themselves not to mention society as a whole:

So, the liberals want to talk about conservatives waging a war on women,” said Hannaway, who is running in next year’s race to succeed term-limited Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon. “But, think about what they’re talking about. When their chief criticism of conservatives, the chief criticism is that we stand up for the sanctity of life. That because we are pro-life we are somehow against women. I am here to say that their culture of permissiveness towards sexual activity is the real war on women. Let’s start with the notion, well it’s not a notion, it’s a fact, that the fact that the culture of sexual permissiveness has led to record levels of out of wedlock births.”

“And what has that done for women? It has impoverished women,” Hanaway continued. “It has reduced their access to educational opportunities. It has impoverished and endangered their children. It has forced those children to grow up in households where their mothers have to work, to make it economically viable for them to exist and with no fathers. How is that culture good for women and children?”

Hanaway proceeded to charge that this “liberal framework,” by affirming “every sexual preference,” fosters pedophilia and child porn.

Remember Akin defending his anti-abortion fanaticism with remarks to the effects that he was fighting against “ideas that leave people in bondage, in slavery, in poverty,”  or identifying liberalism as one of the greatest threats to America’s prosperity. Isn’t Hanaway here defending the “sanctity” of fetal life in terms almost identical to those used by Todd Akin and other devotees of dim-wittery. Remember nutty Cynthia Davis, a close acolyte and admirer of the Toddster, who defended his legitimate rape gaffe, characterizing GOP calls for him to drop oout of his Senate race as “bullying”? Her oft-expressed views on the topic of marriage and poverty:

… Despite Herculean efforts and massive expenditures, the majority of citizens still end up trapped in low-income, marriage-absent lifestyles.  Never before have we had more consequences of marriage-absence such as crime, violence, poverty, and lack of upward mobility.  Taxpayers are weary of taxes.  Now Missouri’s social expenditures are the largest line-item in the budget – 50% more than what we spend on education.

Admittedly it’s one of the standard articles of conservative dogma that poverty is the result of out-of-wedblock births and single-parent families rather than the complex of economic and social policy issues that also seem to figure into the equation. And there is actually evidence of a linkage although it’s not as simple a linkage as conservatives wish it were – poverty is a complex subject and when it comes to the role of out-of-wedlock births, it’s the old chicken vs. egg question all over again, along with the addition of lots of other variables that the conservative fixation on marriage ignores.

One can understand, though, why Hanaway chose this particular chestnut to respond to the GOP war on women meme. She’s got a base to placate. Rightwingers like to blame the victim – and since 70% of out-of wedlock births occur in African-American communities, it is especially appealing to elderly, white Republicans – the current GOP base – to blame “those” particular victims. It’s the GOP way, right? Hanaway has evidently decided that if she wants to get elected, she has to serve up what her public wants. As Michael Tomasky observes in an article on the simple-minded positions advocataed by members of what he terms “still the party of stupid”:

… Let me put it this way. The greatest cardiologist in the world could move to town. But if everybody wants to eat chili-cheese fries all day and nobody wants to have bypass surgery, there’s still going to be a lot of heart disease.

In other words, the GOP is nowhere without the angry dim bulbs of its base. But still, isn’t blaming pedophilia on female sexual autonomy going just a little too far – no matter how many Pavlovian drool-puddles its mention might elicit?  Pedophilia is a classic sexual disorder that has been around a lot longer than the pill and the sexual revolution it initiated. For that matter, pornography, poverty, and prostitution, including child prostitution, were flourishing in Victorian England where rigid mores and female subjugation of the sort Hanaway seems to be advocating were officially enforced.

The worst part of Hanaway’s diatribe is the hypocrisy. It’s galling to hear the representative of a party that opposes making birth-control easily accessible, and who visited us with the expensive failure known as abstinence-only sex education, regurgitating poorly digested and mostly fantastical talking points about the relationship between liberalism, liberated women, illegitimacy, and poverty, while pretending to be advocating for women’s welfare. It’s not just chili-cheese fries, it’s chili-cheese fries gone seriously rancid. At the very least, given her million dollar price-tag, Sinquefield might have procured a better quality meal.  

Attorney General and probable 2016 gubernatorial candidate Chris Koster (D) is doing well with campaign contributions. It’s not quite chess playing territory, but it’s still good. Today at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C031159 01/31/2015 MISSOURIANS FOR KOSTER James B Nutter Sr 1201 W. 66th Street Kansas City MO 64113 James B. Nutter & Company Mortgage Banker 1/29/2015 $10,000.00

C031159 01/31/2015 MISSOURIANS FOR KOSTER UAW V CAP 8000 E. Jefferson Avenue Detroit MI 48214 1/29/2015 $50,000.00

[emphasis added]

The alternatives will do this.

Previously:

Sorting it all out (January 12, 2015)

Campaign Finance: the giant chess piece in the room (January 15, 2015)

Tom Schweich (r) versus Catherine Hanaway (r) in 2016 (January 28, 2015)

Campaign Finance: kings to pawn $361,506.00, check (January 29, 2015)

Campaign Finance: trickle in (January 31, 2015)

Campaign Finance: keeping up with the Schweichs (r) and Hanaways (r) (January 31, 2015)

The Stenographer: ignoring the obvious (January 31, 2015)

It’s been a while.

In the universe of political stenography you can ignore a candidate’s behavior because it’s not quite as outrageous as that of someone else.

Yesterday, at the Kansas City Star:

Steve Kraske: The money in politics is out of control

By STEVE KRASKE

The Kansas City Star 01/30/2015 5:19 PM 01/30/2015 5:30 PM

….On Thursday, Republican Tom Schweich kicked off his campaign for Missouri governor attacking what he considers the whacked-out money culture in Jeff City.

“You can’t get anything else done until you clean up the corruption,” he said.

Voters, for sure, are weary of all the talk of big money gobbling up government. They think the whole game is rigged. They’ve disengaged.

It feels like the system is coming unhinged. Government isn’t just for sale, folks. It’s been sold, and folks like Rex Sinquefield have the receipts.

[emphasis added]

On that same day State Auditor Tom Schweich’s (r) gubernatorial campaign committee took in over $360,000.00 from twenty-eight individuals and entities. There was one campaign contribution of $50,000.00 from one individual and a total of $75,000.00 in two separate contributions from one couple. All of those twenty-eight contributions were over $5,000.00 and were required to be reported within forty-eight hours.

Tom Schweich (r) ain’t exactly the poster child for campaign finance reform and single source fundraising restraint.

You think that would be worth a mention?

Previously:

Sorting it all out (January 12, 2015)

Campaign Finance: the giant chess piece in the room (January 15, 2015)

Tom Schweich (r) versus Catherine Hanaway (r) in 2016 (January 28, 2015)

Campaign Finance: kings to pawn $361,506.00, check (January 29, 2015)

Campaign Finance: trickle in (January 31, 2015)

Campaign Finance: keeping up with the Schweichs (r) and Hanaways (r) (January 31, 2015)

Ah yes, the 2016 race for Governor.

Yesterday at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C031159 01/30/2015 MISSOURIANS FOR KOSTER Sheet Metal Workers Local 36 Political Education Account 2319 Chouteau Avenue Suite 100 Saint Louis MO 63103 1/28/2015 $10,000.00

C031159 01/30/2015 MISSOURIANS FOR KOSTER Ironworkers Political Education Fund 1750 New York Avenue, NW Suite 400 Washington DC 20006 1/28/2015 $10,000.00

C031159 01/30/2015 MISSOURIANS FOR KOSTER Red-Card Systems, LLC 7700 Bonhomme Avenue Suite 200 Saint Louis MO 63105 1/28/2015 $25,000.00

[emphasis added]

Attorney General Koster (D) is no slouch in the campaign fundraising department.

Previously:

Sorting it all out (January 12, 2015)

Campaign Finance: the giant chess piece in the room (January 15, 2015)

Tom Schweich (r) versus Catherine Hanaway (r) in 2016 (January 28, 2015)

Campaign Finance: kings to pawn $361,506.00, check (January 29, 2015)

Campaign Finance: trickle in (January 31, 2015)