The Mississippifarian

Yes, I was a little cranky last night. Even going to a friend’s place to watch Cleveland-Boston didn’t do much to cheer me up (that was while all you busy beavers were leaving messages last night). This morning, after semi-successfully hacking the pollengelatinous gunk and chunks out of my throat, I ran around delivering checks to vendors because nothing spells success like being too busy to pay your bills. And just now I got an eyeful of sun courtesy of the back window of a car driving by and am typing with a big purple spot the size of an NFL hematoma blurring my vision.

Just so you know it’s not all Hillary.

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It’s more than a little amazing how much you can slow down criminal investigations when you control the DOJ. The open and shut voter suppression case from the New Hampshire GOTV phone jamming case is still dragging on.

They hauled Allen Raymond in front of Congress yesterday. 

Rep. Paul Hodes, a New Hampshire Democrat, urged his colleagues to focus on key “unanswered questions” about whether the White House played a role in the plot and whether the Justice Department dragged its feet on the case for political reasons.

“We need to know whether others were involved in the election interference, whether they attempted to cover up the involvement of other political operatives, and whether there was a concerted effort to delay prosecution,” Hodes said.

Hodes said the public deserves to know whether political interference delayed prosecution of the case until after the 2004 elections and Bush’s re-election.

Republicans fumed at the charges. Rep. Chris Cannon, a Republican from Utah, suggested Democrats were recycling a 6-year-old case to score political points against the GOP in an election year.

“These cases are old news,” Cannon said.

The phone-jamming scandal has led to at least three criminal prosecutions and a lawsuit that was settled with Republicans paying the Democrats $135,000.

More than 800 hang-up calls jammed get-out-the-vote phone lines set up by the state Democratic Party and the Manchester firefighters union for more than an hour on Election Day, when Republican John Sununu won a Senate race against then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat. Because Sununu won by nearly 20,000 votes, the more than 800 jammed phone calls probably had little effect on the outcome of the race.

Charles McGee, former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, pleaded guilty and served seven months in prison for his role in the scheme.

Former RNC regional director James Tobin of Maine was convicted by a jury in 2005 of helping arrange the phone-jamming calls. He was acquitted this year on appeal; federal prosecutors are appealing. 

 

Phone records from Tobin’s trial show he made two dozen calls to the White House political office right about Election Day 2002, as the phone-jamming operation was finalized, carried out and abruptly shut down.

The White House political office, recipient of most of the calls, was run in 2002 by Ken Mehlman. He has denied any calls were related to the jamming, contending the discussions focused only on the close election won by Sununu. 

 

Concord Monitor

In 2009, the new Congress needs to immediately pass legislation removing the statute of limitations for all crimes buried by Bush’s DOJ. Re-election doesn’t mean all your crimes are absolved, and there are clearly more unindicted felons associated with this case than felons who’ve served time.

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Sara Robinson writes on ten theories about change. My take isn’t that the problem is with change, so much as the subversion of change by the rich and powerful. Look at Microsoft. By now I would hope that most people are computer friendly enough to recognize that personal computing has been moving forward with the handbrake on thanks to Microsoft’s buggy and virulently unsafe platforms. 

Barack Obama could increase national safety and decrease long-term administrative costs simply by switching the government over to Macintosh computers. Stronger regulatory functions could stop greedy CEOs from underpaying workers who contribute most to productivity (hint: that would be no one in accounting or upper management). Patent and copyright reform could put an end to corporate exploitation of others’ creativity, while opening the door to further innovation and technological advances. 

The time is right for a big thinker, and that’s Barack Obama. Does even the most die-hard HRC supporter think that she would ever do anything to loosen the death grip the wealthy have on how things are done in this country?

The future belongs to the young, and right now most of the young have zero incentive to educate and better themselves, having seen how that worked out for their parents, most of whom have worked themselves half to death without getting ahead, and who are facing retirement without any assurances of home ownership or proper medical care.

Change is mandatory, but this time it needs to be real change, not Bush league bullshit.

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CBS is buying CNET for $1.8 billion. The old media is truly more clueless than anyone imagined. Then again, in real, pre-Bush dollars, that’s way less than a billion.

I feel sorry for anyone whose pension money is invested in a fund that holds a lot of CBS stock. (And I feel worse for dollar hoarders in general.)

More proof that the wealthy are putting their dollars into tangible assets as fast as they can.

This painting selling for $86.3 million is all the proof I need that the dollar isn’t worth much anymore. Think of what you could buy with $86 million, then look at this painting again. One hundred years from now there will be hundreds of Bacon’s contemporaries whose work will be more highly prized. This is the work of desperate people who have all the money, but know the value of nothing. To say that this painting is worth more than a nice house is stretching it. To say it’s worth more than 500 homes is, on the face of it, absurd.

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The Republican National Committee yesterday attacked Barack Obama for promising to stop federal raids against clinics that dispense medical marijuana in states where it has been legalized. (I reported his promise yesterday.) Danny Diaz, the R.N.C. communications director, released this statement:

“Barack Obama’s pledge to stop Executive agencies from implementing laws passed by Congress raises serious doubts about his understanding of what the job of the President of the United States actually is. His refusal to enforce the law reveals that Barack Obama doesn’t have the experience necessary to do the job of President, or that he fundamentally lacks the judgment to carry out the most basic functions of the Executive Branch. What other laws would Barack Obama direct federal agents not to enforce?”

Bruce Mirken, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, which supports legalizing medical marijuana, said the R.N.C. statement “ignores a few salient points, such as the fact that last year 15 Republicans voted last year for the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment to cut off funding for Justice Department medical marijuana raids, including such flaming liberals as Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Dana Rohrabacher of California, a former Reagan staffer.”

John McCain has echoed the Bush administration’s line that there’s no evidence of marijuana’s efficacy for pain relief, but several recent studies have concluded otherwise. 

John Tierney

 

A little too little too late. Medical marijuana was the compromise. Since the Republicans chose to continue playing hardball, the new position should be legalization, and immediate full pardons for everyone in jail or prison with only marijuana-related offenses on their record.

Bankers who swindled billions from hard working Americans are getting golden parachutes, but we still lock up working people whose only crime was to try to forget about what a shithole country the Republicans have turned America into.