Category: Republicans

Stevens: “I haven’t been convicted of anything”

Ted Stevens engages in what must be a late-in-the-game effort to break Begich voters’ jaws by causing them to hit the floor with previously unseen speeds that they remain hospitalized on election day:

“I’ve not been convicted yet,” Stevens said Thursday in a meeting with the editorial board of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. “There’s not a black mark by my name yet, until the appeal is over and I am finally convicted, if that happens. If that happens, of course I’ll do what’s right for Alaska and for the Senate. … I don’t anticipate it happening, and until it happens I do not have a black mark.”

Stevens reiterated that position during a televised debate late Thursday night, declaring early in the give-and-take with Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, “I have not been convicted of anything.”

First, this is just factually and legally a lie. A big lie. Stevens is a convicted felon, seven times over. That’s what the whole trial in DC was about. As old as he is, I can’t imagine Stevens has forgotten the judge, the jury of his peers, the FBI tapes where he says to VECO CEO Bill Allen, “that the worst that could happen to the two was if anyone found what the company had done for him was that they’d have to spend a lot of money on lawyers – and perhaps serve a little jail time.”

Second, if we were to grant Ted Stevens his big lie, we would also be forced to concede that any number of murderers sitting on death row while appealing their convictions were, in fact, not convicted of anything. Except, you know, the sentence to death I suppose. I’m sure this is bully news for lots of those convicted felons on death row, though I’m not sure what it means from a practical standpoint.

Ted Stevens has been convicted of seven federal felony charges of corruption. The conviction by a jury of his peers was a statement of his breaking the trust with Alaskan citizens. That he has the audacity to flat out lie to Alaskan voters is simply appalling and offensive to the notions of both the rule of law and honest government. I never thought I’d have to go so far as to call out a convicted felon, but shame on Theodore Stevens. Stop lying. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Go directly to Jail.

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Republicans Against Stevens

Credit where credit is due – national Republicans have been pulling no punches when it comes to their reaction to Ted Stevens’ conviction on seven felony counts of corruption.

Senator John McCain:

“It is clear that Senator Stevens has broken his trust with the people and that he should now step down. I hope that my colleagues in the Senate will be spurred by these events to redouble their efforts to end this kind of corruption once and for all.”

Sarah Palin:

“As Governor of the State of Alaska, I will carefully now monitor the situation and I’ll take any appropriate action as needed. In the meantime, I ask the people of Alaska to join me in respecting the workings of our judicial system and I’m confident that Senator Stevens from this point on will do the right thing for the people of Alaska,” she said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:

“This is a sad but serious day. Sen. Stevens was found guilty by a jury of his peers, and now must face the consequences of those actions. As a result of his conviction, Sen. Stevens will be held accountable so the public trust can be restored.”

NRSC Chair John Ensign:

National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman John Ensign (Nev.) offered a strong condemnation of Stevens and seemed to hint that this conviction would lead to his defeat.

“This is a sad day for the United States Senate,” said Ensign. “Ted Stevens served his constituents for over 40 years and I am disappointed to see his career end in disgrace.”

Of course, these people have to distance themselves from their friend and colleague as he is lead off to jail. Ted Stevens is a losing commodity nationally. He is an anchor to be hung around the necks of McCain, Palin, McConnell, and Ensign. That they turn around at try to bury his connections to them is a political necessity. I don’t know how well it will work for them, but at least they’re generally saying the right things.

What hasn’t been done yet is honest talk by McCain and Palin about what comes next:

  1. Will Sarah Palin vote for Ted Stevens for Senate?
  2. Will McCain pledge to not pardon Ted Stevens?
  3. Will McCain and Palin specifically ask President Bush to not pardon Ted Stevens?
  4. Will Palin begin immediate efforts to encourage the Anchorage International Airport to be renamed, in consultation with the Municipality of Anchorage?

Hopefully some intrepid reporters will be asking the Republican ticket these questions.

Update:

Palin pushes more chips into the pot, calling on Stevens to resign even if he’s reelected:

“I had hoped Senator Stevens would take the opportunity to do the statesman-like thing and erase the cloud that is covering his Senate seat,” she said in a statement. “Alaskans are grateful for his decades of public service, but the time has come for him to step aside. Even if elected on Tuesday, Senator Stevens should step aside to allow a special election to give Alaskans a real choice of who will serve them in Congress.”

No word yet if Palin will vote for Stevens before he resigns.

Stevens Can’t Vote for Himself

Stop the photo op! Markos reports:

Alaska law:

 

I was convicted of a felony, but have served my time and am on probation. Can I register to vote?

No. A convicted felon may not register to vote unless unconditionally discharged from custody. When you are no longer on probation, a copy of your discharge papers will allow you to register.

Will the Stevens campaign still try to have him vote on election day? It wouldn’t surprise me one bit. He is not going to do anything that shows an ounce of contrition or admission of guilt.

Under the Bus

Ted Stevens’ current location, courtesy of NRSC Chair and Senate colleague John Ensign:

National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman John Ensign (Nev.) offered a strong condemnation of Stevens and seemed to hint that this conviction would lead to his defeat.

“This is a sad day for the United States Senate,” said Ensign. “Ted Stevens served his constituents for over 40 years and I am disappointed to see his career end in disgrace.”

Again, while this is a great coda to Stevens’ ability to claim clout in Washington, it’s not yet clear how Alaskans will respond.  Beyond throwing Stevens’ under the bus for his corruption and making clear that Stevens’ won’t be getting help from national Republicans, Ensign has ensured that he has no standing to argue otherwise with Alaska’s voters with the phrase “in disgrace.”

There’s a phrase my friend and coworker Tim Tagaris taught me on primary day of the 2006 Connecticut Senate campaign: “When your opponent is drowning, throw them an anchor.”

John Ensign just threw Stevens an anchor. And he’s the NRSC chair.


More on Ashley Todd

A lot was made of the Ashley Todd race baiting sexual assault hoax recently. This report, via Boing Boing, raises a whole new issue:

In March, Ms. Todd was asked to leave a grass-roots group of Ron Paul supporters in Brazos County, Texas, group leader Dustan Costine said. He said Ms. Todd posed as a supporter of former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and called the local Republican committee seeking information about its campaign strategies.

“She would call the opposing campaign and pretend she was on their campaign to get information,” Mr. Costine said last night. “We had to remove her because of the tactics she displayed. After that we had nothing to do with her.”

About a month earlier, he said, Ms. Todd sent an e-mail to the Ron Paul group saying her tires were slashed and that campaign paraphernalia had been stolen from her car because she supported Mr. Paul. “She’s the type of person who wants to be recognized,” Mr. Costine said. [Emphasis added]

Get that? She got kicked off the Ron Paul campaign for pulling similar sorts of stunts as her latest hoax.

But here’s the rub. This is how Life In The Field, the College Republican campaign that Todd worked on in Pennsylvania, describes itself:

For the past 20 years, the Field Representative Program has been the cornerstone of the College Republican National Committee. With programs in the Fall and the Spring, we deploy dozens of young, highly trained field operatives across the country to recruit new students to join the College Republicans.

Through our field representatives’ recruitment efforts, they are able to motivate students to volunteer and support Republican candidates, helping elect them to office.

And by motivating our generation and promoting conservative principles on college campuses, the College Republicans are able to make an impact on a national scale.

The 2008 Field Team is by far the most ambitious in our organization’s history. 50 field reps are deployed from coast-to-coast, equipped with cutting edge technology and innovative recruitment tools to help them accomplish their mission.

This Fall our team aims to recruit 100,000 new members and register 25,000 new voters.

That is, Ashley Todd is one of the College Republicans top 50 organizers in the entire country. One of fifty. The future of the College Republicans and the Republican Party on whole. She is one of the best they have. And she’s a serial liar who is facing criminal charges after making racist, hateful claims in the closing days of the presidential campaign.

Ashley Todd came to LITF08 with a history of doing phenomenally dishonest and dishonorable shit. No doubt this is a qualifying characteristic for the Atwater-Rove school of Republican operatives. It’s all she has, though, and it’s all the Republican Party has nowadays. If there is any fouler symptom of the rotting corpse of the Republican Party, I don’t know what it is.

Ted Stevens Guilty of Felony Corruption Charges

Talking Points Memo:

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens has been convicted of lying about free home renovations and other gifts he received from a wealthy oil contractor.

The Senate’s longest-serving Republican, Stevens was found guilty on all seven counts of making false statements on Senate financial documents.

The verdict throws the upcoming election into disarray. Stevens is fighting off a challenge from Democrat Mark Begich and must now either drop out or continue campaigning as a convicted felon.

The trial hinged on the testimony of Stevens’ longtime friend, who testified that his employees dramatically remodeled the senator’s home.

Stevens faces up to five years in prison on each count but, under federal sentencing guidelines, will likely receive much less prison time, if any.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy…

Stevens name is on the Alaska ballot for good, though I doubt he would step down. Stevens will not lose his spot in the Senate for the remainder of his term unless the Senate reconvenes to vote him out of office. He can still be reelected (!!!), but would likely face a vote in the Senate to oust him.

I’d say convicted felon Ted Stevens is in real trouble in the closing days of the election. Hopefully the conviction will propel Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich into the Senate with ease.

(Disclosure: I was Mark Begich’s Online Communications Director until mid-September.)

Spinning Away From the Mandate

David Sirota writes on a subject I’ve been thinking a lot about lately:

The Village freakout continues, this time in the form of Peter Wehner’s op-ed in the Washington Post today. With most Republican candidates explicitly running on a platform promising a revival of Reagan conservatism and berating the supposed “socialism” of Democrats, this former Bush hack writes that “it is a mistake to assume that significant GOP losses, should they occur, are a referendum on conservatism.”

It’s hard to overstate how absurd this is. Let me repeat: In the stretch run of this campaign, the Republican Party has decided to make this an ideological contest between Reagan conservatism and supposed wild-eyed liberalism/socialism – and now, sensing a potentially huge loss, conservatives are now arguing that despite their decision to make this an ideological contest, “an Obama victory would be a partisan, rather than an ideological, win.”

Obviously, the Right understands what’s really going on in America – and is working to reinterpret that reality.

Having doubled-down on Reaganism, they know that a loss under these circumstances would be not just a momentary electoral set back, but a huge repudiation of conservative ideology, and a huge mandate for progressivism. And so conservatives are already trying to revise history to pretend these last few months of the campaign never happened.

All the stories we’ve seen about voter fraud, ACORN, too much influence by Obama’s small dollar contributors, and hoaxes like Ashley Todd serve one purpose: to undermine the validity of Obama’s election and define down the importance of the mandate it will reflect for progressivism.

FiveThirtyEight.com is projecting an Obama win with upwards of 370 electoral votes and over 52% of the popular vote. We will undoubtedly see Obama win more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, with nationwide turnout at record levels. Recall that in 2004, Bush won reelection with 50.7% of the population vote and smallest margin of a winning candidate in history, yet the results were universally declared by Republicans and media figures alike to be a mandate for rule. Bush’s small and questionable margin were, in fact, no real mandate handed over by the voters, but let’s concede that the outcome of the election is a reflection of the extent that the public is giving a mandate to a candidate, that candidate’s party, and the agenda that the candidate ran on. Naturally we can expect voters to deliver a massive mandate for change to Barack Obama next week.

The GOP is now trying to define away the coming election, in advance, by fiat.  We’ll see them continue to step up the pre-buttal of the results and their meaning between now and the 4th. And come November 5th, the GOP will be in full-court press to make the media – and subsequently the public – think that these results don’t mean what we think they mean. It’s hard to envision a more bogus political move than this. As Sirota writes, the GOP is revising history and pretending that the McCain campaign, and really the failed Bush presidency, did not happen.

The simple fact is that for eight years George W. Bush and the Republican Party were given every single thing they asked for in executive and legislative policy (save for privatizing Social Security). Every single thing Bush and the Republicans have done has been a failure. These failures are a reflection of the fundamental failures of conservative’s governing philosophies. They had carte blanche, they used it, and the country is inarguably worse off as a result. Voters see this and are poised to do the expected thing: vote these people out of power and give Democratic policies and politicians an opportunity to turn the country around. Any argument being put forth that suggests otherwise is willfully denying reality and forgetting eight years that most Americans would likely to be glad to forget.

In this final move of the Bush-Cheney Republican edifice, a final defining characteristic manifests itself: the pathological unwillingness for Republicans to take responsibility for their actions. Even when America is poised to hold them accountable for their failures, they seek to deny culpability and ignore the consequences they are suffering as a result of their actions in power. Of course, this is the Republican Party that we know all too well. It’s not a surprise, but this should be yet another nail in the coffin of the GOP as they head towards status as a regional political force with limited impact outside of the South.

I Get Quoted

Well, a tweet I wrote about the Ashley Todd hoax gets quoted by Sarah Lai Stirland at Wired’s Threat Level blog:

Todd was one of the members of a group called 50 College Republicans that has been publicizing its activities through a blog and Twitter feed on a website called Life in the Field. The volunteers’ tweets carried the hashtag “#litf08.”

On Friday, commenters started using the tag to broadcast their disgust, causing the sarcastic tweets to be automatically displayed on the Republican site.

“Anyone know which Rove protege is responsible for #litf08? Because they lack the execution skills of the man himself,” tweeted Matt Browner-Hamlin, a former blogger for Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn.’s presidential campaign.

Thanks to Marisa for sending this my way.