Another reason I will only ever have a dog

Halter falters, and other notes from last night

Heading into Super Tuesday, Blanche Lincoln looked like a political goner. The embattled Democratic senator was down in the polls and the target of millions of dollars in TV ads and get-out-the-vote efforts in Arkansas from labor unions and other liberal advocacy groups looking to unseat her. But with the help of former President Bill Clinton, who appeared in a last-minute TV ad on her behalf, Lincoln defied the odds, besting her challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, 52 percent to 48 percent.

The progressives -- MoveOn, DailyKos, -- as well as the unions mobilized and came up short. This one tastes bad.

Still, Lincoln's victory celebration will be short-lived. In a state that has steadily moved to the right in recent elections, she faces an uphill battle to win re-election this November. Recent polls show her losing to the GOP challenger, Rep. John Boozman, by double digits.

Normally, a Democrat in Lincoln's situation would be able to depend on outside groups for election help, but many of the usual suspects, like the Service Employees International Union and League of Conservation Voters, cast their lots against her in the primary. Will those groups reverse position and lend support to the woman they tried to defeat?

No, we won't. As Barbara Morrill says:

Look for this to be a Republican pick-up in November.

The White House -- !?@*#!? -- is already kicking the unions when they're down. That's some shit, idn't it? kos:

The GOP establishment tries to nominate electable candidates, and gets sabotaged by the teabaggers. We're trying to nominate electable candidates, and we get sabotaged by the Democratic Party establishment.

All righty then. On to the Great West. First, California.

The Golden State's political history is clear: centrist Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pete Wilson (a moderate before he became an anti-immigrant demagogue) can win statewide elections. Right-wing Republicans cannot. The state is just too culturally liberal and too ethnically diverse. This year, GOP primary voters could have chosen a slightly dull, highly wonky, pro-choice former congressman named Tom Campbell. Campbell, according to a recent Los Angeles Times poll, would have led incumbent Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer by seven points in the general election. Instead, they chose former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who opposes the right to abortion, can't decide if global warming is real, won the endorsement of Sarah Palin, and according to the Times poll, trails Boxer by the same margin Campbell leads her. Fiorina didn't win the GOP Senate primary only because she is more conservative; she also bought it with her vast personal wealth. But her combination of conservatism and inexperience gives Boxer a chance to sneak back into office.

Fiorina wasn't the only former CEO who won a Republican primary last night. Mark McKinnon from the Daily Beast (who's only occasionally insipid):

In the California governor’s race, Meg Whitman’s victory over state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner places her in a faceoff against the quintessential career politician -- Jerry Brown, governor of California from 1975 to 1983, then mayor of Oakland and now the state attorney general. In the run-up to the primary, Brown sat on his campaign coffers waiting for the definitive insider-outsider battle to begin.

Whitman, who made history at the helm of eBay generating $8 billion in revenues, has said she is prepared to spend as much as $150 million to reach California’s 38 million residents. Those deep pockets will be necessary with statewide ads running $3 million a week.

More from HuffPo:

It also will set off an election season of big-money campaigns and high drama in the nation's most populous state, pitting two deep-pocketed Silicon Valley business stars against stalwarts of the Democratic Party establishment. ...

 The heated battle with Poizner to win over conservative GOP primary voters forced Whitman to move to the right on issues such as abortion and illegal immigration, moves that could hurt her against Brown in November.

Democrats and moderate independents comprise two-thirds of the electorate in California. Without a serious primary challenger, Brown has positioned himself as a moderate, pledging not to raise taxes and to make the kind of spending cuts that Whitman also campaigned on.

California is going to have almost as much fun as we are here in Deep-In-The-Hearta.

The Teabagger ladies won in Nevada ...

Exhibit B: Nevada, where everyone agrees that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is extremely vulnerable. But perhaps not quite vulnerable enough to lose to Sharron Angle, a woman who wants to abolish social security, the department of education and the income tax. Reid did his best to make Angle his opponent, spending heavily to undermine the more moderate GOP frontrunner, Sue Lowden. It seems to have worked. Angle is the perfect symbol of the Republican base in 2010: She's a fresh face; she enjoys grassroots support, and she wants to repeal the handiwork not just of Franklin Roosevelt, but of Theodore Roosevelt.

.. and South Carolina. Indeed, another Indo-American with an Americanized name and a changed religion (can you name the other one?) became the "new face" of Southern conservative extremism:

In what will no doubt go down in history as one of the nation's nastiest political primaries, Nikki Haley survived multiple allegations of marital infidelity to win the most votes in South Carolina's hotly contested GOP gubernatorial race. But initial vote totals show that she didn't garner enough support  to avoid what could be an even wilder June 22 runoff election. ...

With the runoff  just two weeks away, the most immediate question is whom (her vanquished GOP primary opponents) Bauer and McMaster will throw their support to. Bauer, for his part, was associated with one of the affair rumors that circulated about Haley — though he denied involvement, even to the point of submitting to a lie-detector test. McMaster was quoted this week calling the primary a total embarrassment. Will the tawdry rumors about Haley's marriage live on through the runoff?

More likely, the focus will turn to Haley's actual politics and policy stands. Though she's been championed by the tea party movement, Haley is extremely close to disgraced Gov. Mark Sanford — whose own infidelity has made him a political outcast in the state. Though she has positioned herself as an outsider, Haley was viewed as Sanford's political heir apparent and is even being advised by many of his former key campaign aides. One of her big early endorsements came from Sanford's estranged wife, Jenny.

For her part, Haley has gone to great lengths to avoid being associated with Sanford. Asked earlier this week by CNN's Peter Hamby if she's sought political advice from Sanford, Haley at first said she hadn't. But then later, she admitted they had talked "a couple of times" — and even then, she quickly added, never "on policy advice or strategy."

It doesn't even matter who the Democratic opponent is, does it? This is South Carolina, after all.

Greens' benefactor may be illegal donor

Wayne Slater follows up.

One of the state's leading election experts says a petition drive funded through an out-of-state group to put the Green Party on the ballot this fall might have violated state law.

Party officials say the group, a nonprofit corporation, collected 92,000 signatures and delivered them as "a gift" so that the Green Party could field candidates in the November election. The arrangement for the petitions, set up by an Arizona Republican consultant, was revealed Sunday by The Dallas Morning News. ...

It's unclear who paid for the petition drive, but funding went through Take Initiative America, a Missouri nonprofit corporation. Buck Wood, an Austin lawyer and expert in election law, said Monday that such a transaction is illegal under state law.

"That corporation cannot make contributions to political parties in Texas. And to do so is a felony," he said. "It is also a felony for a political party to accept a corporate contribution."

[...]

Wood said that while an individual donor could legally bankroll petition drives to put a party on the ballot, corporations cannot. Wood has represented Democrats in litigation in which corporate money was illegally used to defeat political candidates.

In the case of the Texas Green Party, a Chicago-based petition-gathering company, Free and Equal Inc., gathered the signatures under contract with Take Initiative America.

It's unclear whether the petitions could be disallowed based on how the Green Party reports the donation. But the party and its leaders could face significant penalties if they are found to break the law.

And Harold Cook has a bit more:

But when the end result is that some of the voters who care most about the environment will get duped into voting for a candidate who won't get more than 5% of the total vote, helping the guy who calls the BP oil spill disaster an "act of God" win? That's just plain dirty pool, played at voters' expense.

[...]

Apparently, the Republican operative who organized the Green Party petition effort intends to list "Take Initiative America" as the donor of the in-kind contribution to the Green Party. That entity was organized in Missouri by a guy named Charles Hurth.

Who's Charles Hurth? I'm glad you asked. Meet Charles Hurth:

Apparently he's an ... um ... butt-biter. No, really.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is sitting in the shade with a cool drink as it brings you this week's blog roundup.

It's been a busy week in the Barnett Shale. TXsharon at BLUEDAZE: Drilling Reform for Texas has the TCEQ Timeline of Deception posted, which makes it more difficult for that agency to say "Oops!" Just in time for a summer drought we find that hydraulic fracturing seems to be contaminating Barnett Shale water.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants to know why the Texas Medical Board takes a year to suspend a doctor caught jerking off repeatedly in front of his office staff? And just suspension?

Lightseeker over at TexasKaos comments on Rick Perry's management of the Texas state bureaucracy. In short, it is a study in incompetence. Or as he has said elsewhere, if you hate government then no one should be surprised when you can't govern. Check it out....An Open Letter to Rick Perry: TCEQ screws up, lies about it - Gov.Perry has full confidence in them .

WhosPlayin is doing a server move this weekend and may not be back up by Monday, but wanted to spread the word about plans by Williams Co. to put a centralized gas production wastewater collection facility in Lewisville..

Off the Kuff looks behind the numbers of the recent UT/Trib poll on the ACA and the public schools.

McBlogger has never been a fan of self-aggrandizing politicians, which may explain his intense dislike of Todd Staples.

A federal judge in Houston wants all the lawsuits that will be filed against BP for damages associated with the Gulf oil disaster. Oh, and BP wants him to hear the cases as well. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs gathers some links on Judge Lynn Hughes.

Neil at Texas Liberal wondered how Houston mayor Annise Parker, a Democrat, could cite an article calling Houston a successful model of urbanism for the nation when 47% of Houston kids live at or below the poverty level? It is time for liberals, progressives and Democrats to ask more of Mayor Parker.

Texas Greens get an assist from an Arizona Republican

Via STC, this news is grating.

The liberal Green Party's uphill battle to get on the Texas ballot this fall has been fueled by a surprising benefactor: an out-of-state Republican consultant with a history of helping conservative causes and GOP candidates. ...

What's unknown is who paid for the previously undisclosed arrangement, pieced together by The Dallas Morning News. Green Party officials said they don't know who funded the effort. The Perry campaign denied any involvement. And Arizona Republican operative Tim Mooney, who set up the petition drive, refused to say.

Green Party officials said an outside group gathered the 92,000 signatures and gave them as "a gift" to the party, which delivered them to the secretary of state ...

Christina Tobin, who heads a Chicago-based petition-gathering company called Free and Equal Inc., said she was approached by Mooney to collect signatures for the Green Party of Texas.

Another group, Take Initiative America, based in Missouri, would provide payment, Mooney said.

Mooney estimated the cost at $200,000, but declined to give a specific figure or say who put up the money.

"Take Initiative America, being a nonprofit, doesn't disclose its donors, nor is it required to," said Mooney, who has little history of working in Texas. "Take Initiative America is a nonpartisan organization. They'd like to see everybody have a chance to get on the ballot – the more choices the better."

More from the Examiner:

Names of private citizens, especially Texan Republicans, are being bandied about, including but not limited to billionaire Harold Simmons of Dallas. Simmons could certainly afford it and there are those who point to the $3 million he contributed to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to defeat John Kerry. Certainly as a man who likes to be known as someone who knows "more than a thousand ways to skin a cat", this would be an easy and relatively inexpensive amusing  last-minute surprise for Simmons, who has been called both Dallas' Angel of Grace and  Most Evil Genius. 

Whatever satisfaction one might take in the idea that additional choices are good for "little d" democracy is outweighed by the premise that the whole ploy is a result of conservatives being so afraid that Rick Perry will lost to Bill White that they had to resort to dirty tricks.

Update: Boyd Richie reacts ...

“The Green Party has become just another arm of the Republican Party and Governor Rick Perry's re-election effort and the Republican/Green Party coordination is a blow to the integrity of our election system,” said Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Richie. “The signatures gained through this Republican effort should be withdrawn and Green Party candidates, officials and supporters should save their integrity and repudiate petitions that undermine democracy and fair elections.”

... as does Burnt Orange.

Update II: Harvey Kronberg's commentary for News8Austin ...

The first mystery money in the 2010 election surfaced just this week. According to Wayne Slater at the Dallas Morning News, a secret out-of-state benefactor has coughed up an estimated $200,000 to pay for a petition drive to get the Green Party on the November ballot. The secret money was laundered through an Arizona Republican political consultant who won’t identify the actual source.

A Green Party slate will siphon off a few votes from Bill White and other Democratic candidates. A handful of votes can be significant. Republicans retained control of the Texas House last year when they won a single legislative race by seventeen votes.

Here we go again. Mysterious out-of-state money from secret sources poisoning Texas elections.

Sunday Funnies