The latest turn in the implosion of the Daily Caller‘s months-long effort to smear US Senator Robert Menendez has been the sudden self-injection of none other than Roger Stone into the public debate on this topic, via a series of somewhat desperate-sounding late-Sunday night tweets, all done in the space of an hour:

Why does Sen Menedez campaign spend so much on DC Hotel Rooms? Apt staked out? — Expand

Menendez? WaPo will be proven wrong- Daily Caller/Tucker Carlson will be proven right- Menendez banged hookers in DR — Expand

ABC NEWS skype interviewed current DR Govt official who attended Menendez Sex party- Suppressed? — Expand

WaPo full of shit- 3 girls who said they were paid for sex with Menendez are being paid to lie NOW- Not the same girls in Daily Caller — Expand

ABC NEWS skype interviewed current DR Govt official who attended Mennedez Sex party- Suppressed? — Expand

A few things spring to mind:

– Really, Roger? Still pretending that the Washington Post is the only entity that’s called the Caller‘s smear job into question? When the FBI found it baseless? When ABC, the New Jersey Star-Ledger, and the Associated Press have all publicly cast doubt on it? Did all of these entities somehow interview the wrong hookers, Roger? Are they all paying hookers to trash the Caller? Really? Read the rest of this entry →

Of course, Consortium readers knew about this well over a year ago, and Anna Chan Chennault ‘fessed up to it. (See here and here for example.)

But now the tapes are out, and it’s no longer deniable, even though the Atlantic writer Connor Simpson tries to soft-pedal it: Richard M. Nixon committed treason — and condemned several million Vietnamese and American troops to be maimed and killed over the next six years — just so he could win the 1968 presidential election:

In previously released tapes from Johnson’s Presidency, we had heard about Johnson having substantial body of evidence showing Nixon had schemed to keep the South Vietnamese away from the negotiating table at the 1968 Paris peace talks. Like Nixon, Johnson had recored all of his conversations held inside the White House. Nixon was accused or dispatching Anna Chennault, a senior advisor, to convince the South Vietnamese they would get a better deal if they didn’t agree to a peace deal until after the U.S. Presidential election. Chennault confirmed she spoke with the Vietnamese in her autobiography, The Education of Anna, but nothing more than that. If true, the charge would likely amount to treason.

And it was true, as we already know from Robert Parry’s shop. (And by the way, the peace talks were much closer to success than the persons trying to minimize Nixon’s treason are willing to admit.)

Why did Johnson not act on the knowledge — publicly, at any rate? (He had already confronted Nixon on it privately.) Because it might have, among other things, damaged the nation’s security: Read the rest of this entry →

There was a bit of controversy in southeastern Minnesota recently when it was discovered that Dennis Egan, the newly re-elected mayor of the City of Red Wing, had taken a job as a lobbyist for a recently-organized lobbying group backing frac sand mining. As Greater Minnesota chronicler Sally Jo Sorensen notes, this was such a boneheadedly unethical move that even the pro-mining Winona Daily News asked “What was he thinking?” (My guess is that he figured that, since his being a career lobbyist for firms with Republican ties, a lobbyist so dedicated to his trade that he started and ran his own lobbying firm, hadn’t apparently set off any alarm bells for the voters of Red Wing, he could get away with having as another boss an entity determined to turn the beautiful bluffs of Red Wing and environs into huge sand mining sites.)

Calls grew for Mayor Egan to choose between his frac sand lobbying gig and his mayoral job, and early this morning — a Saturday morning, no less — he made his choice known: He kept the frac sand lobbying gig and dumped his mayoral post, his resignation from the latter to occur by April 1.

But here’s the Bizarro World coda to this affair: The editorial staff of the hometown paper, the Red Wing Republican Eagle, put out an unbelievable piece of chutzpah mourning Egan’s resignation as mayor, going so far as to say this: “While we wish he’d had the wisdom and foresight not to become executive director of the new Minnesota Industrial Sand over until Council, he did, and the resulting debate over holding both posts escalated to the point of a near lynching.”

Ahem. A “near lynching”.

A “near lynching”.

To help clarify things for the Republican Eagle editorial staff, Sally Jo Sorensen links to the story of James Cameron, who in 1930 suffered a true near-lynching, when he along with two other black men accused of killing a white man and raping a white woman was severely beaten but whose life was spared by the lynch mob, which chose instead to hang his fellow inmates from a tree in the courthouse square. (The lynch mob in this case was being relatively merciful: They did not castrate the men, nor did they douse them with oil or kerosene and set them on fire as they hung, two common practices of lynch mobs. They did, however, break the arms of one victim when he tried to get the noose off his neck.)

So when a longtime lobbyist decides he wants to become one of the elected officials his clients pay him to lobby, and he’s called out on this when he signs up with a mining lobby that wants to gouge great big holes in the area’s biggest scenic jewel and tourist attraction, to the Red Wing Republican Eagle editorial staff that’s exactly the same as being beaten to a pulp, but narrowly escaping being hung by your neck from a tree — or being mutilated and/or burned while you hang.

Words fail me.

The resignation of Michael Hervey as Chief Operations Officer of the much-maligned Long Island Power Authority is a nice start at cleaning up a state agency with a history of questionable dealings, among them being polling payments that were linked to efforts to boost New York State Republican politicians like Rick Lazio. But it’s only a start.

Here’s the problem: LIPA has a long history as a GOP ‘turkey farm’ — that is, a place (either a government agency or a private company) used as a place to provide salaries to the friends and kin of Republicans and their patrons. (This has the added advantage, from the anti-government Republican point of view, of providing “proof” of the inherent inefficiency of government programs, as well as a pretext to privatize them, when these programs run into problems as a result of being run by otherwise-unemployable political hacks.) Mayor Bloomberg’s girlfriend, Diana Taylor, was once LIPA’s chief financial officer. A recent New York Times story gives a hint at just how deep the rot runs:

Lynda Nicolino, the former counsel to the Suffolk County Republican Party, earns $260,000 a year as the authority’s general counsel. Barbara Ann Dillon, a $125,000 compliance officer, is the daughter of Denis Dillon, the former Nassau County district attorney. Andrew McCabe, an assistant general counsel paid $117,000 a year, is the son of a former top judge in Nassau County.

Other top executives include former aides to the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, the former Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, and the former head of the Suffolk Republican Party.

The executives did not respond to requests for comment.

DiNapoli is the only person on that list who isn’t a Republican, and one gets the feeling he was included largely in an effort to stave off angry phone calls from conservative readers. The reality, as various New Yorkers of my acquaintance have stated, is that LIPA is a GOP cookie jar which they want to keep as a cookie jar — Democratic governors who try to appoint non-Republicans to key jobs such as COO run into unbelievably intense opposition from the state GOP.

Speaking of the state GOP, guess who they want to replace Hervey as COO? Patrick Foye, long prominent in local GOP circles and another political hire at LIPA. Anybody think that his elevation to COO will be anything more than yet another fox installed as the head of the LIPA henhouse? I sure don’t.

Remember that little US Bank and Minnesota Chamber of Commerce shindig scheduled for earlier today? The gathering of the elites to both circle their cloth-of-gold-covered wagons and to nervously pat themselves on their Brooks-Brothers-clad backs?

Well, US Bank president Richard Davis must figure that having wealth on the order of Ozymandias gives him a similar imagined immunity from the consequences of his own words and actions. Not only does he not acknowledge that he and his buds might have done anything wrong (much less the throngs gathered outside courtesy of OccupyMN to protest him and his buds), he chides the nervous Nellies among them who might still have concerns over what’s been going on. Check this out, courtesy of City Pages‘ Gregory Pratt:

Davis did comment on the economic woes facing the country, saying “fear,” “loss of faith,” and “uncertainty” were damaging American society. Davis called these feelings “really lame reasons to not get up in the morning.”

“‘Everybody’s breaking the rules, blah blah blah,’” Davis said at one point, admonishing the assembled business leaders to “get over it.”

Clap louder, guys! C’mon, clap louder! Gotta drown out the sounds of the protesters outside! Don’t you know that every time Tinkerbell’s allowed to hear a protester, it’s another dagger in her heart?!

Geez, this guy wins the Marie Antoinette Award for callous cluelessness — or is it clueless callousness?

One of the crowning ironies of the for-profit prison hucksters is that the only way they can achieve their prime directive, turning a huge profit, is by pushing the law until it breaks (as happened recently when a judge ruled Florida’s prison privatization scheme to be unconstitutional, thus sending the share prices of jail-for-pay outfits CCA and the Geo Group into the tank) or lobbying their purchased legislators to make new laws and regulations designed to make criminals out of more and more people.

The latter route has been popular with many states. See, for instance, Minnesota, as described in this story from the Minnesota Independent (hat tip to Bluestem Prairie): Read the rest of this entry →

Is the much-touted “Fourteenth Amendment option” a viable end run around the debt-ceiling nonsense that threatens to destroy the world?

Charles Grassley thinks so. Bruce Bartlett thinks so. Former president Bill Clinton definitely thinks so: He’s said he’d do it “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me”.

As for whether the courts or anyone else would or could try to stop Obama should he invoke the Fourteenth, even Laurence Tribe, who is known to be close to the Obama administration — close enough to carry its water, as he blatantly did with his pronouncement earlier this month that the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t trump the debt ceiling legislation — has admitted that this is highly unlikely: “This is not a circumstance in which the courts have any plausible point of entry.” Tribe even went so far as to dismiss the threat of impeachment as “not politically a very plausible scenario.”

So, knowing all of this, and with so much on the line — why, then, won’t President Obama admit that this is an option? Why, instead, is he pushing to put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block — and getting various liberal “Veal Pen” groups to echo his call for cutting Social Security?

Could it be it’s because he’s been planning to attack Social Security and Medicare — and whatever else is left of the New Deal and the Great Society — all along?

It sure looks like it. As Glenn Greenwald says: Read the rest of this entry →

Earlier today, I put up a post where I noticed the eagerness of conservatives to blame the terror attacks in Norway on Muslims — and predicted that, now that it’s known that the terrorist was actually Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing neo-Nazi sympathizer who hated Muslims, the conservative response would be to downplay the terror attacks and/or the victims of these attacks.

Sure enough, GOP strategist Matt DeLuca did a Tweet that mockingly referenced President Obama’s press conference expressing America’s sympathy for Norway in this tragic time — a Tweet so obnoxious that a horrified David Brauer spotted it and preserved it for posterity and screen-shotting before DeLuca could pull it: “@MattDeLuca: Waiting for @Barackobama’s press conference honoring Amy Winehouse for giving a voice to crack addicts everywhere.” (See also above.)

And over at his domain, the ever-brilliant TBogg, a fellow connaisseur de la folie conservatrice, has some choice morsels of right-wing intellectualism from Astute Bloggers, including this one:

UPDATE: HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM…

I THINK MAYBE THERE’S A POSSIBILITY THAT THIS BREIVIK IS ACTUALLY A PSYCHOTIC LEFTIST WHO DID THIS HORRIFYING ACT TO DISCREDIT THE RIGHT.

DO YOU THINK THIS IS TOO WEIRD TO BE TRUE!?!? BELIEVE THAT IT COULD NEVER HAPPEN!??

Well, sure, Mister All-Caps — except for the fact that Anders Behring Breivik’s longtime proclivity for following conservative and anti-Muslim groups is pretty well documented. But then again, conservatives like you were and still are busily telling anyone who will listen that right-wing white supremacist Timothy McVeigh really didn’t blow up the Murrah Building.

UPDATE: I’m reminded that none other than Michele Bachmann, the insane congresswoman from the congressional district just to the north of mine, is on record as being one of the loudest Republican voices attacking the Department of Homeland Security for pointing out what legitimate terrorism researchers have known for years — that right-wing terrorism is a very real threat. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center suspects she may be an enabler of right-wing terrorist militias.

Most Minnesotans who follow politics in the state figured that Bachmann and Associates, the counseling clinic run by Michele Bachmann’s husband Marcus, did professionally-discouraged “ungaying” therapy even though Marcus has denied it for years. Now, thanks to the efforts of The Nation and of Truth Wins Out (h/t to Dump Bachmann), we have proof that they do indeed.

First, The Nation documents the harrowing 2004 experience of Andrew Ramirez:

In the summer of 2004, Andrew Ramirez, who was just about to enter his senior year of high school, worked up the nerve to tell his family he was gay. His mother took the news in stride, but his stepfather, a conservative Christian, was outraged. “He said it was wrong, an abomination, that it was something he would not tolerate in his house,” Ramirez recalls. A few weeks later, his parents marched him into the office of Bachmann & Associates, a Christian counseling center in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, which is owned by Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus. From the outset, Ramirez says, his therapist—one of roughly twenty employed at the Lake Elmo clinic—made it clear that renouncing his sexual orientation was the only moral choice. “He basically said being gay was not an acceptable lifestyle in God’s eyes,” Ramirez recalls. According to Ramirez, his therapist then set about trying to “cure” him. Among other things, he urged Ramirez to pray and read the Bible, particularly verses that cast homosexuality as an abomination, and referred him to a local church for people who had given up the “gay lifestyle.” He even offered to set Ramirez up with an ex-lesbian mentor.

Ramirez was not impressed. After his second appointment, he resolved not to go back, despite the turmoil it might cause in his family. “I didn’t feel it was something that I wanted to change, and I didn’t think it could be changed,” he says. “I was OK with who I was.”

That “ex-lesbian mentor”? As Dump Bachmann’s lloydletta points out, there is a longtime Bachmann associate named Janet Boynes who is billed as an “ex-lesbian” — which leads us to the second bit of evidence, that gathered by Truth Wins Out’s John M. Becker: Read the rest of this entry →

Well, well. Longtime hotheaded jerk Republican Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice David Prosser, he of the short fuse and the knuckle-dragging attitudes who barely survived what normally would have been a cakewalk of a re-election campaign a few weeks ago, is at it again, it would seem:

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser allegedly grabbed fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley around the neck in an argument in her chambers last week, according to at least three knowledgeable sources.

Details of the incident, investigated jointly by Wisconsin Public Radio and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, remain sketchy. The sources spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing a need to preserve professional relationships.

They say an argument that occurred before the court’s release of a decision upholding a bill to curtail the collective bargaining rights of public employees culminated in a physical altercation in the presence of other justices. Bradley purportedly asked Prosser to leave her office, whereupon Prosser grabbed Bradley by the neck with both hands.

Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs was notified, and the fact that both Prosser and Bradley refuse to speak in public about it indicates that there is legal action afoot.

Per Think Progress, there are four ways Prosser can be removed from the bench, but since three of them would require either Prosser or his Republican colleagues in the state legislature to be fundamentally decent persons, the most likely avenue would be via a recall — and since recently-elected officials are allowed a one-year grace period (which is why Wisconsin must wait until late January before recalling Scott Walker), Prosser would be guaranteed to sit in judgement of persons far less nasty than him for nearly another year.