New day, new look

Tell me what you think in the comments.

We'll have some response to today's developments in the morning.

Breitbart removed from ABC's panel

This flash news ...

ABC News sends over the letter that Andrew Morse, the chief of their digital division, has sent to Andrew Breitbart, pulling the plug on their much-discussed, widely-parsed-over invitation for him to join in their election night coverage:

Dear Mr. Breitbart,
We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABCNews.com and Facebook. The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News. We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall. Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage. As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.
Sincerely,
Andrew Morse

Cue up conservative sh*tstorm...

It sure doesn't take long for this dude to get stale, does it?

Post-Halloween, Pre-Election Day Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is ready for Election Day as it brings you this week's blog roundup.

Off the Kuff takes a look ahead at redistricting.

Letters From Texas pointed out a low-down dirty Republican plot to cheat African-American voters out of casting their ballots, then turned around and did the same thing to voters casting ballots for Republicans, Libertarians, and Greens.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson notes that while most Texans know our our state needs investment in our people -- like education and infrastructure -- instead we will get the GOP's planned austerity, which will irrevocably harm Texas.

South Texas Chisme offers kudos to Hidalgo County Texas Democratic Women, the Stonewall Democrats and the new County chair for the big turnout!

Phillip Martin at Burnt Orange Report reminds everyone about what is at stake on Tuesday with a lot of posts he's put in one place: Rick Perry's Cover-Up and Corruption: A Ten Part Series.

The revealing of Todd Staples's slimy pyramid scheme was only the latest devastating hit the incumbent agriculture commissioner has taken during the 2010 election campaign. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs exposed the corruption.

nytexan at BlueBloggin looks at The Constitutional Ignorance of the Tea Party. As we have all come to learn, the Tea Party's candidates and their supporters are extremely ignorant of the document they want to restore: the U.S. Constitution. Let's not fool ourselves and think that the Tea Party and the wing nuts just stumbled upon their ignorance; its been in full bloom since Bush began stripping the Bill of Rights. It didn't seem to bother them because it was the Patriotic thing to do.

The newest scandal to rock a Republican elected? It's all about a pyramid scheme and Todd Staples.

Neil at Texas Liberal made an effort with a variety of posts over the past week to encourage folks to vote in Houston, Harris County, Texas, and the nation. That's all one can do. Let's get past Tuesday and move ahead to a better day. Thanks for reading Texas Liberal and all TPA blogs. There are hopeful days ahead and we'll keep fighting.

Sunday Sanity Somewhat Restored Funnies

This week's King Street Thugs update

-- Rep. Borris Miles had an altercation with the True the Vote criminals at the EV poll in Sunnyside.

... Miles said he was there in the first place because a constituent had called to complain about intimidation by poll watchers, including an incident in which a poll watcher bumped a voter. Miles said he spent two hours at the Sunnyside Multi-Purpose Center, 4605 Wilmington, but stayed near the reception desk perhaps 150 yards from the voting machines.

Miles said he witnessed poll watchers speaking to voters, looking over their shoulders as they voted, and walking among the voting machines. He summed up what he saw as: "The Republican/tea party poll watchers that are there intimidating, and the Republican precinct judge allowing it to happen."

-- Sunnyside and Moody Park also saw this flyer distributed.

Miya Shay again with the report:



And more from Isiah Carey:



jobsanger and Juanita Jean have more.

-- Both sides requested the USDOJ send election monitors to Houston next Tuesday.  From Cong. Sheila Jackson Lee's letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder:

"Although there are usually a few isolated occurrences of voter intimidation during the election season, the incidents that took place at polling stations earlier this week appeared to be both organized and systematic. Poll watchers have been reportedly over-stepping the boundaries between observing and interacting in the democratic process by hovering directly behind voters as they entered their votes. The group thought to be behind these acts is known as the King Street Patriots, reportedly tied to some Tea Party activists. The King Street Patriots have deployed poll watchers around the city as they implement their “True the Vote” campaign."

-- County attorney Vince Ryan issued Election Day directives for poll watchers and election judges. From Kronberg:

The first opinion (both links .pdf) says that election officials may "designate lines on the floor to protect voters from poll watcher intrusion."

The second opinion prohibits cell phones, cameras and wifi enabled computers within 100 feet of a polling station.

Electronic devices have ALWAYS been verboten inside the poll, but a King Street Thug poll watcher was observed wearing a 35mm camera around his neck at the Fiesta Mart EV location this week, in clear violation of the Texas Election Code but apparently ignored by the election judge there.

-- The King Street Thugs surrendered some of their paperwork, but it doesn't clear up the mystery of their funding: large, anonymous GOP donors.

The $15,000 hat

Though acknowledging the receipt of over $80,000, the King Street extremists refuse to disclose who contributed the money. Incredibly, the group contends that the funds were raised by “passing the hat” at their meetings.

To put this outrageous claim into perspective, it would take 1,600 people contributing $50 each to raise $80,000 while a group of 400 people would have to contribute an average of $200 each.  According to activist participants, the King Street extremists' meeting space could barely hold 200 people, yet they claim to have raised as much as $15,000 at a single meeting simply by “passing the hat.”

More at Off the Kuff.

-- Lastly, the KS Thugs, Karl Rove, and the US Chamber of Commerce are essentially acting as if Citizens United is settled law.

As a nonprofit 501(c)4 corporation, King Street Patriots (KSP) should be allowed to engage in electioneering without disclosing donors or registering as a political committee, and Texas laws to the contrary are unconstitutional, said the Indiana attorney who put together the pivotal U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United campaign finance case. He placed the burden of enforcing regulations squarely on the Internal Revenue Service.

“(KSP opponents) are trying use Texas law to shut up their opponents, to throw them in jail for talking about issues,” said James Bopp Jr., general counsel for the James Madison Center for Free Speech.

Houston tea party spinoff KSP and its 501(c)3 initiative KSP/True the Vote are the subjects of a state ethics complaint by nonprofit Texans for Public Justice and a lawsuit by the Texas Democratic Party, both alleging KSP has broken state prohibitions against corporate campaign contributions — and that it should be registered as a state political committee and have to reveal its donors’ identities.

“The Supreme Court has consistently held that you cannot require an organization to be a PAC unless its major purpose is to be involved in elections. A c4 lobby group’s primary purpose is to educate and lobby, rather than participate in elections,” Bopp said. “Otherwise the IRS wouldn’t let it be a c4. They would say it’s a 527.”

[...]

Bopp, who’s currently challenging campaign laws in at least a dozen other states, said it’s clear to him that Texas laws run afoul of the First Amendment when they require 501(c)4 nonprofit corporations to register separate political committees to report coordinated campaign expenditures.

[...]

Basically, the Citizens United decision enabled corporate entities to spend unlimited money advocating for or against political candidates, as long as they don’t coordinate those expenditures with the campaigns. While the ruling did not address in-kind donations, such as hosting one-sided candidate forums, the case may have cleared the way for further challenges to remaining restrictions on corporate political contributions.

“Particularly now that the last barrier on many independent expenditures has been lifted by Citizens United — it was the last one in a chain — there will be a lot more attention paid to exactly what constitutes a coordinated expenditure,” said Justin Levitt, associate professor of law at Loyola School of Law.

In Bopp’s reasoning, the underlying assumption is that KSP is abiding by federal regulations on 501(c)4 nonprofits — namely that the organization’s primary purpose is not electioneering, generally interpreted as meaning the organization spends less than 50 percent of its resources trying to influence election outcomes for or against particular candidates.

As with national Democratic allegations concerning the Karl Rove-linked American Crossroads GPS, also a 501(c)4, the responsibility for discovering whether KSP is devoting the majority of its funds to electioneering would belong to the IRS, whose investigations are generally not very swift or public. There are also questions about how to measure the percent of an organization’s political activity.

It's not settled law, of course, but as long as you have Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court, it will be difficult to impossible to change.

That's all the information you should need not to EVER cast a vote for ANY Republican running for ANY office.

Patrick uses Tea P to clean up his ICRoT

Dan Patrick has never observed an ultra-conservative movement he wouldn't try to get ahead of.

Sen. Dan Patrick -- the Houston Republican who earlier announced the founding of the Independent Conservative Republicans of Texas to reach out to Tea Party activists and independents -- now says he's joining with other lawmakers to create the Tea Party Caucus.

"The Tea Party has played an important role this year and I want to be sure their voices are heard in Austin long after next Tuesday," Patrick said in a press release. "The power of the Tea Party beyond election day is to hold those elected accountable for a conservative voting agenda."

Patrick's office in its release said the Tea Party caucus will meet with leaders of that movement and build support for "important conservative legislation" in the coming session.

It said continued membership in the caucus will be based on whether lawmakers support key Tea Party issues, sign the Texas Conservative Coalition Pledge and keep "a conservative voting record that is in line with the coalition's annual report card."

Patrick said several lawmakers already have agreed to serve on the caucus board and he'll invite others to join the caucus over the next two months.

Patrick's obsequiousness is so obvious that even Big Fat Dumbass Jolly can see through it. Via Neil, who is once again much more polite than me.

Too funny to wait for Sunday

Yes We Cannabis

Maybe? Possibly? Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

Via Mark Kleiman, here's an interesting poll result for Proposition 19, the initiative to legalize marijuana cultivation and sale in California. It comes from the pro-19 forces, and I don't have any independent way of knowing how reliable it is, but it shows that standard polling has Prop 19 losing 46%-41%, while automated polling shows it winning 56%-41%.

Take this for what it's worth. I'm basically skeptical that Prop 19 will pass, and I have my doubts that there's really such a large number of people who are afraid to express support for Prop 19 to a live interviewer. Supporting pot legalization isn't really a huge stigma in California, after all. Still, it's interesting if it's legit. We'll find out a week from Tuesday.

People lie to pollsters? Really? And from the Kleiman post ...

One of the yes-on-19 groups did a split-sample poll, with some respondents answering a live interviewer and others punching keypad buttons. The results (assuming the poll is being reported accurately) suggests that live polling may be noticeably under-estimating support for the proposition: the fact that the demographics of the two subsamples match closely makes me a tentative believer. With virtually every politician and newspaper in the state denouncing Prop. 19, it wouldn’t be surprising if some people were reluctant to express their disagreement (and risk being thought of as potheads).

Moreover, support for Prop. 19 declines sharply with age; the under-30s are overwhelmingly for it. They’re also much more likely than their elders to have cell phones only and therefore be missed by most polling, which calls only land-lines.

So this could still go either way. The InTrade market, which showed the proposition favored as recently as a week ago, now gives it one chance in three of passing. At those odds, I’m not taking either end of the bet. It may come down to whether the “amotivational syndrome” some drug-prevention folks have tried to attribute to cannabis applies to voting.

I think this observation in the polling is quite hilarious. I have no idea whether the referendum passes or fails, but it's certainly drawing a certain bloc of voters to the polls in California who don't seem likely to vote Republican.

Todd Staples' slimy pyramid scheme

Even compared to the vast corruption of Rick Perry, the incumbent agriculture commissioner occasionally manages to one-up the Eagle Scout/Aggie yell leader.

A criminal case from the mid-1990s refers to an "endless chain scheme" called the Friends Gifting Network (or the "Friends Gift Network" or  "Friends Network" or "Friends Helping Friends", and a variety of similar names).

In 1994, Todd Staples participated in this pyramid scheme and had family (his brother-in-law) participating in it. A criminal complaint was filed in Anderson County -- the seat is Palestine, Staples' hometown -- and Staples' brother-in-law was arrested and charged. The Palestine city attorney followed up by requesting help from the Anderson County district attorney for assistance in investigating the illegal pyramid scheme. (Staples is between elected-official jobs at this time; he has previously served on the Palestine city council, and for the years 1990 and '91 as mayor pro tem.)

This document reveals that the case was put on "hold" in 1994 and then dismissed in '96.

The case was dismissed because Todd Staples -- who was elected state representative in a special election to fill a vacancy in 1995 -- voted in favor of legislation that legalized the crime for which his brother-in-law was charged. This had the added benefit, of course, of making it impossible for Staples himself to ever face any charges or even be questioned in detail about the matter by a prosecutor, or the media.

But Staples wasn't finished. From the press release:

Staples and others managed to escape prosecution for their participation in the illegal enterprise, and court records reveal that Staples and Jeff Herrington, the Anderson County DA at the time, worked in concert to get the officer that investigated the scheme and arrested Staples’ brother-in-law removed from his job. At the time, the same police officer who investigated Staples’ brother-in-law was raising serious questions concerning why Herrington and his office received an unauthorized share of federal drug forfeiture funds. Additionally, a member of Herrington's staff had been implicated along with Staples in the pyramid scheme.

You read it right. Staples exacted revenge on the officer who investigated the case, Commander Jerry Powell of the Texas DPS, by colluding with DA Herrington to remove Powell from his post.

According to additional court records, shortly thereafter, Staples became involved in a series of events leading to the removal of a narcotics officer who arrested his brother-in-law and was the lead officer investigating the Friend’s Gifting Network.

Court records show that Staples’ facilitated meetings with the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety at the behest of, among others, the same Anderson County District Attorney whose staff member was involved in the pyramid scheme, in order to discuss removal of the police officer.

Court filings also show that, were the word of Staples’ high-level participation in the Friend’s Gifting Network become publicly known prior to the 1995 special election to replace State Rep. Elton Bomer, it would have likely ended Staples’ political career. The same court filings show that Staples’ assistance to the District Attorney came at a time when he and his office were accused of receiving an unauthorized share of funds seized during a federal narcotics investigation. The same police officer who arrested Staples’ brother-in-law had initiated inquiries to determine why the DA’s office had received this share of funding.

This document contains a transcript of an undercover phone call regarding Friends Gifting Network; these documents show Staples' rise to "vice-president" in the Friends Network pyramid scheme and contain the police case file on Staples' brother-in-law. This document is the transcript of the arrest in which Staples' brother-in-law helps entice the undercover police officer to participate in the pyramid scheme.

Finally, these documents contain the response to Staples' Motion for Summary Judgment, and the Affidavit of Plaintiff talks about Staples' motivation, mentioning the case's potential for damaging his budding political career.

Let's review: Todd Staples participated in an illegal pyramid scheme which bilked hundreds of East Texans out of thousands of dollars. The crime was investigated and his accomplice brother-in-law charged. Staples went on to be elected to the Texas Legislature, where he voted in favor of a bill which made illegal pyramid schemes legal, exonerating his brother-in-law in the process. Staples then conducted a personal vendetta against the investigating officer of the case.

All so as not to damage his future political viability. Because as all Texans are aware, you never know when the agriculture commissioner might one day become the longest-serving governor in the history of Texas.

Do we want to really reward this slimeball with re-election? No, we don't.

We want a new Commissioner of Agriculture (whose greatest crime, it should be noted, happens to be not wearing his seatbelt, and working out a payment plan with the IRS).

Update: Read this Dallas Morning News story and don't miss reading the comments.

The House may be lost

Some additional insights here from electoral-vote.com worth knowing.

Long-time political observer Charlie Cook is predicting the Republicans are likely to win 198 seats in the House, with another 47 being tossups. If the Republicans win even half of these, that gives them the majority. But in wave elections most of the tossups go the same way, so the odds of the Republicans winning 30 or more of the tossups are reasonably good. Cook's best guess is that they will pick up something in the range of 48 to 60 seats. This would put this election on a par with 1994, when they picked up 52 seats in the House.

In the Senate, he is predicting a Republican gain of about 8 or 9 seats. If that happens, all eyes will be on Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to see if they jump ship. However, both of them are keenly aware of what happened to Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) when he did just that: he was defeated in a primary. Both of these could expect nasty primary fights if they became Republicans, especially if it were to save their own skins rather than out of some deep-seated convictions that have been rather absent until now. Nelson has to worry about the fact that Nebraska is full of Republican politicians who would primary him with the slogan "vote for a real Republican." If he decided to switch, his real battle would be the primary--where only Republicans can vote--rather than the general election, where Democrats can, too. Lieberman is so unpopular and unpredictable that anything is possible with him, but he has nothing in common with Jim DeMint and even less with Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, so he is likely to continue to caucus with the Democrats.

If the Republicans capture the House, as Cook, Nate Silver, and other close observers predict, the new Speaker of the House is virtually certain to be Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) (which he prefers to pronounce "Bayner" rather than "Boner" or "Booner"). Boehner has an everpresent deep tan and smokes two or three packs of cigarettes a day. The Washington Post has a long profile of him today.

Boehner has a strange history within the caucus. He was one of the authors of the Republicans' "Contract with America" that propelled them to victory in 1994. But in 1998, he was booted out of his leadership position, only to be elected majority leader in 2006. He is more of a back-room wheeler-dealer type person than an "ideas" man, as former Speaker Newt Gingrich fancied himself. Still, if the Republicans have a small majority starting in January, he is going to need all his people skills to rein in the fractious tea partiers intent on changing Washington the moment they arrive. It is likely that the tea partiers will form their own coalition. If they get more members than the Republicans' majority, they get a de facto veto on everything he does, much as the Blue Dogs have with the Democrats. However, since the brunt of the voters' wrath is going to fall on the Blue Dogs next Tuesday, the Democratic caucus is going to move to the left, and with the tea party members of his own caucus pulling him to the right ... he is not likely to accomplish much.

If Boehner moves up, the other Republican leaders will move up. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the only Jewish Republican in Congress, is likely to become majority leader and Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) would then become whip. Boehner is not very close to either of these -- just as current Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't especially care for her #2, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD). Boehner tends to hang with some of the rank-and-file Republicans, especially Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA). Boehner lives in a basement apartment he rents from one of his many lobbyist friends. His wife, Deborah, lives in Ohio.