Via No More Mister Nice Blog:

Karl Rove. Ed Gillespie. They’re Bush cronies. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, they’re shills for big business. And they’re stealing our democracy, spending millions from secret donors to elect Republicans to do their bidding in Congress. It appears they even taken secret foreign money to influence our elections. It’s incredible, Republicans benefiting from secret foreign money. Tell the Bush crowd and the Chamber of Commerce, stop stealing our democracy.

The Democratic National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising.

Cue republican cries of victimhood in three, two, one…

“Have these people no shame?” Rove said of the attacks leveled at him and the Chamber. “Does the president of the United States have such little regard for the office he holds that he goes out there and makes these kind of baseless charges against his political enemies? This is just beyond the pale. How dare the president do this?”

“This is a desperate and I think disturbing trend by the president of the United States to tar his political adversaries with some kind of enemies list, with being unrestrained by any facts or evidence whatsoever.”

Fascist putz – the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

These ads have been airing in the Kansas City market this morning with a frequency more like late October than late August. And the donors?

Rove-linked group uses secret donors to fund attacks

…American Crossroads GPS, on the other hand, is incorporated under Section 501(c)4, which requires it to spend the bulk of its cash focusing on issues, but frees it from having to disclose the names of its donors. In fact, it won’t be required to publicly report any of its finances until at least May 2011…

Male announcer: The message is clear. Seventy-one percent of Missouri voters don’t want government mandated health care. We want to make our own health care decisions.

Female announcer: But Robin Carnahan disagrees, while seventy-one percent of us voted no Carnahan sided with lobbyists, big unions, and Washington insiders to force Obamacare on us.

Male announcer: Missouri’s Lieutenant Governor is suing the federal government so we can keep our health care.

Female announcer: Tell Carnahan to get in touch with Missourians and support the health care challenge.

[Paid for by Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies]

Grassroots? Yeah, right. Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie are really grassrootsie (via our friends at Fired Up).

The ad is in need of a tiny bit of editing:

“…We want to make our own health care decisions…” Correction: republicans want insurance companies to deny benefits, continue rescission, and increase premiums while reducing benefits.

“…Carnahan sided with lobbyists, big unions, and Washington insiders to force Obamacare on us…” Correction: Roy Blunt (r-lobbyists) sided with lobbyists and Washington insiders to block access to health care for those who desperately need it.

“…Missouri’s Lieutenant Governor is suing the federal government so we can keep our health care…” Correction: Missouri’s Lieutenant Governor is suing the federal government so he can posture in the hopes that he can position himself for a run for higher office in 2012.

There, that’s much more accurate.

Republican, thy name is corruption. And Karl Rove is the poster boy. That doesn’t bother Lieutenant Governor Kinder (pictured at right with fellow corrupt Republican Rod Jetton). Kinder  just had Rove to Missouri on Friday for a $2700 a plate fundraiser.

Considering how quickly Kinder lied to cover his behind when his chief of staff got caught, on the job, having online pornographic conversations with a cop he thought was a thirteen year old girl; considering that the replacement Kinder hired for the perv was Richard AuBuchon, currently under investigation for his role in protecting Matt Blunt and his e-mails by torpedoing whistleblower Scott Eckersley; considering that Kinder just got caught using a sham committee to launder money for his campaign chest; and considering that, while Blunt is out of the country and Kinder’s in charge, he could reveal those e-mails that ought to be public–but refuses to, of course–considering all that, Rove seems like … just his kind of guy.

In fact, gonemild says that Rove will “presumably, offer some off-stage advice in how to juggle multiple scandals.” The gist of it will surely be, “Use any dirty trick that serves your purpose because if it gets you elected, you can tell them to go screw themselves. When they call you to testify, you just don’t go.” I don’t know if that philosophy works so well for someone in the middle of a tough election campaign (Yay, Sam Page!), but it’s been working fine for Rove for years now. He’s doing fundraisers all over the country even as Conyers tries fruitlessly to force his testimony.

In addition to Conyers, some folks in Ohio are trying to corner Rove. A lawsuit there charging electoral fraud in the 2004 election is going forward again after an extensive stay. Cliff Arnebeck, the attorney for the plaintiffs, charges that e-voting machines were tampered with and that Rove was part of that conspiracy. Arnebeck’s chief witness is a Republican IT man with multiple ties to the top of the Republican party.

The latest is that Arnebeck wants immunity for the IT guy, Mike L. Connell:

The immunity request from Arnebeck to the Ohio AG was triggered by information from a confidential source that Karl Rove, a kingpin GOP strategist, threatened that if Mike Connell doesn’t go in the tank for cyber-rigging the 2004 election in Ohio, his wife will be sued for lobbying law violations.

It would appear, then, that Rove fears Arnebeck will be able to demonstrate that the election was tampered with and wants to prevent the blame from traveling up the food chain to himself.

Connell has more than likely been involved in other election monkey-business, such as, ever since 2000, coordinating supposedly independent phony grass-roots groups that attacked candidates. Furthermore, his company, Gov Tech Solutions, installed servers behind the firewalls of Congressional computers–firewalls that may have secret security gaps enabling congressional computers to be hacked by Bush/Republican operatives.

And then there’s the e-voting mess in Ohio. Connell was doing IT work for the State of Florida in 2000 and for the Ohio Secretary of State in 2004. Arnebeck says:

“And just think of this: here’s a person who is an instrument of a major presidential campaign simultaneously setting up the hosting of the votes in the Ohio election.”

As for the likelihood that e-voting in Ohio was tampered with, Arnebeck’s chief expert witness is Stephen Spoonamore, who “among other things designs and runs computer programs to analyze and detect fraudulent financial activity for the world’s leading credit card companies.” Spoonamore points to the “Connelly anomaly” in 14 Ohio counties:

in which down-ticket candidates got more votes than John Kerry. The name comes from the candidacy of C. Ellen Connelly, an African-American woman who was running for the Ohio Supreme Court in 2004. She was endorsed by pro-choice and civil rights groups, and was relatively unknown to Ohio voters, in addition to being vastly outspent by her opponent in the campaign. Yet, somehow, Connelly got scores of thousands more votes than did John Kerry at the very top of the ticket.

Arnebeck said that “if you adjust for the [Connelly] anomaly or that situation, it’s enough votes to have changed the outcome of the election. So the focus of our efforts, in cooperation with the Secretary of State, would be to find out who is responsible for that.”

The responsibility apparently goes beyond Connell and his IT work for Secretary of State Blackwell.

Spoonamore continued, “I am extremely confident in [our] analysis of the 2004 election anomalies because of the way the tabulators were programmed, and all were programmed by the Rapp family on Triad systems. So in my opinion, there should be an investigation launched into exactly what happened.

“There was an enormous number of strange activities in which Triad and the Rapp family were running around the state taking hard drives out of computers, putting in new hard drives, and posting poll results. And the reason all this was going on, I’m quite confident, was that the hard drives they were pulling out had fraudulent coding. Simple as that.”

………………

“With the Connelly Anomaly, if that was in a banking environment, instantaneously — instantaneously! — the entire system inside that box would be frozen. Any programmer who reviewed any of that code would be alerted, all the executives assisting in that process would be alerted, the hard drives would be frozen in place, extracted and immediately placed in forensic analysis. ‘Cause somebody did something major.”

Here’s what I hope for: that authorities in Ohio (dare I hope for Missouri?) will take the threat of e-voting fraud seriously this year. Nobody’s going to get Rove, certainly not before November. Maybe under President Obama and an honest Attorney General, maybe then Conyers and Kucinich will get Rove’s testimoney and, more important, his e-mails. I’d love to see that bastard brought to justice.

But I’ll settle for closely monitored elections.

In a column in yesterday’s KC Star, Barbara Shelly starts off well in her headline, “Wouldn’t it be great to a have Republican Party that embraced the center?” Gee, Barbara, that would be great. She finishes strong too:

Still, it’s been a good week. So good that I find myself imagining that, just maybe, the Kansas Legislature will spend more time in its next session discussing energy policy than late-term abortion …

… and that Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt will stop trying to roil his conservative base by inventing fears about “activist” judges…

… and that Missouri lawmakers will cease obsessing over potential embryos in lab dishes and start fixing the state’s fraying public universities…

… and that Jeff Roe, the local master of base-driven politics, will join Karl Rove on an extended hunting trip.

Freeze those visions as a delectable reminder of what could be.

Yes!!! I’m right there with you, Barbara. It’s what you wrote in between that scares me. More below the flip.

After an auspicious start with the headline, Shelly takes a hard right turn.

Goodbye Karl Rove.
Hello Rudy Giuliani.

Freeze this moment. The national Republican Party is suddenly looking good to me.

Rove is leaving Washington for Texas, having abandoned his bold dream of a permanent Republican majority anchored by its conservative base.

Giuliani, a centrist candidate, is sitting atop the party’s nationwide opinion polls.

Rudy Giuliani is a centrist? It’s a testament to how far right the conservative noise machine has moved the discourse in this country that Giuliani could be considered a centrist. Let’s forget his incompetence, typified by locating his emergency response HQ in a well-known terrorist target, the World Trade Center. Let’s also set aside his personal troubles, such as letting his wife know about their divorce from an interview in the New York Times. Let’s look at his actual policy positions.

On Iraq, Giuliani says that invading Iraq was “absolutely the right thing to do.” He could also support a further escalation in Iraq above and beyond the additional troops that Bush already sent in. On torture, he says, “Whatever methods they can think of.” On foreign policy, Giuliani submits a vision called “Toward a Realistic Peace” that is neither realistic nor peaceful. Even on abortion, where Giuliani is supposedly moderate, he supports the Hyde Amendment and would appoint the right kind of activist judges.

Barbara, when you say that you wish you that the legislature would pay more attention to the state’s well-being than to the whims of religious conservatives, I’m right there with you. But when you call a man a centrist who proclaimed proudly, “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do,” I fear for our country.

( – promoted by hotflash)

<img src="http://www.rawstory.com/images/new/rovebush.jpg&quot; width="191"

Liberal knees have been knocking together at the very mention of the name “Rove” for seven years now.  He stole two presidential elections and ground congressional Democrats into submission for so long that they learned to breathe dirt.  Even with his departure from the Bush administration at the end of this month, he will leave his legacy in the scorched earth way that Republican campaigns are run.

But the man who, above all else had to know it all, leaves humiliated.

Rove wanted far more than merely to be a successful campaign consultant.  He wanted to determine Bush’s domestic agenda and use it to create a permanent Republican majority.  Since polls point toward a likelihood that Democrats will take the presidency and both houses of Congress in ’08, Rove obviously failed. 

His blueprint for permanent realignment is, like fragile old parchment rubbed roughly between one’s hands, a crumbling memory.  That blueprint lay in five pieces of legislation:

No Child Left Behind was aimed at dismantling public education, further exacerbating the two tier system of education in this country while seeming to provide accountability.  This was the only piece of the plan that passed, and it did so because it was, uncharacteristically, passed with bipartisan cooperation.  And even that minor success will be up for review before a Democratic Congress next year.

The second item on the agenda was to funnel government funds to religious organizations via “faith based initiatives”, thus strengthening the party’s appeal to the religious right.

Rove planned to undo the New Deal by partially privatizing Social Security and by creating private health-savings accounts as an alternative to Medicare.  These two plans would not only rip apart any lingering public perception that the Democrats would provide a social safety net, but it would do so by bringing young voters into the Republican fold. If Rove could plant fear that the safety net would not be there for young people as they grew older, the Democratic notion of “we’re all in this together” would disappear and Republicans would rule.

Finally, Rove wanted immigration laws that would appeal to Hispanic voters (not to mention wealthy employers).

Not only did Rove successfully pass only one of the five items on the agenda, he failed so spectacularly that the electorate was left to focus not on a new domestic agenda but on … Iraq.  Joshua Green, in a lengthy article in the September Atlantic explains why Rove failed.

The gist of it is that the Rove presidency ran Congress the same way it ran campaigns.  It was top-down autocracy, everyone on-message, slash-and-burn stomping on Democrats even when such tactics were counterproductive.  And Republicans were treated only nominally better than the enemy, Democrats. 

One anecdote in particular illustrates the mentality:

Dick Armey, the House Republican majority leader when Bush took office … told me a story that captures the exquisite pettiness of most members of Congress and the arrogance that made Bush and Rove so inept at handling them.  “For all the years he was president,” Armey told me, “Bill Clinton and I had a little thing we’d do where every time I went to the White House, I would take the little name tag they give you and pass it to the president, who, without saying a word, would sign and date it.  Bill Clinton and I didn’t like each other.  He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress.  But he knew that when I left his office, the first schoolchild I came across would be given that card, and some kid who had come to Washington with his mama would go home with the president’s autograph.  I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it.”  Armey said that when he went to his first meeting in the White House with President Bush, he explained the tradition and asked the president if he would care to continue it.  “Bush refused to sign the card.  Rove, who was sitting across the table, said ‘It would probably end up on eBay,'” Armey continued.  “Do I give a damn?  No.  But can you imagine refusing a simple request like that with an insult?  It’s stupid.  From the point of view of your own self-interest, it’s stupid.  I was from Texas, and I was the majority leader.  If my expectations of civility and collegiality were disappointed, what do you think it was like for the rest of the congressmen they dealt with?  The Bush White House was tone-deaf to the normal courtesies of the office.”

Installment two of this topic will explain in detail how Rove was hoist on his own petard.

photo courtesy of Raw Story