Moore, roy (dis-) Hon
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beaten by reid?
SEX ASSAULT UNDERAGE MINORS?
2ndary on trump bannon
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wtf originalist?!
https://www.twopartyopera.com/comic/we-the-people-the-28th-amendment/
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/roy-moore/ loses defam
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/new-report-reveals-one-of-the-funders-of-the-federalist-and-how-right-wing-commentators-warp-the-news/
alex h
some right-wing pundits will offer a policy-by-policy defense of President Donald Trump, while right-wing pundits of the Never Trump persuasion — from CNN’s Ana Navarro and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark — will go issue by issue while slamming the president. But Jeremy W. Peters, in an article for the New York Times, examines athird type of right-wing pundit: one who is generally pro-Trump but is less interested in defending Trump on the issues than demonizing Trump’s liberal critics.}:
“What these writers and pundits don’t tend to do is make the doggedly pro-Trump defenses that appear on Breitbart and erupt from the mouth of Sean Hannity,” Peters explains. “Often, they don’t bother at all with the awkward business of trying to explain away Mr. Trump’s latest folly. Instead, they offer an outlet for outrage against those the president has declared his enemies, often by reducing them to a culture war caricature of liberalism.
Peter cites The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and Allie Beth Stuckey (who hosts the podcast “Relatable”) as examples of pundits who fall into that category. Stuckey, according to Peters, “does not go out of her way to defend the president” but does go out of her way to demonize his liberal critics.
“Through this lens,” Peters observes, “Mr. Trump’s transgressions seem irrelevant compared with the manifold misdeeds of everyone from the Clintons to CNN. Their portrayal of what the country would look like if the Democrats win big in November is indeed a frightening one to Trump supporters: a White House with Sen. Bernie Sanders as the shadow socialist president; a Democratic House of Representatives where Rep. Ilhan Omar calls the shots; a society in which mask mandates are the first step in a government experiment with social control; a political arena where conservatives are badgered into silence."
the piece also revealed one of The Federalist’s funders, who have long been kept secret, and indicated how the backer may have influenced its coverage:
Critics have asked who is funding the site, since ad revenue alone wouldn’t be enough to sustain its staff of 14 and political websites often rely on wealthy donors for support. The Federalist has not disclosed its supporters, leading to criticism that it is not being transparent about its agenda. But according to two people with knowledge of its finances, one of its major backers is Dick Uihlein, the Midwestern packing supply magnate and Trump donor who has a history of giving to combative, hard-right candidates, likeRoy S. Moore of Alabama, who make many Republicans squeamish. (After Mr. Moore was accused of assaulting underage girls in 2017, The Federalist ran an opinion piece that defended men who dated young women as a practice with a long history that was “not without some merit if one wants to raise a large family.”)
Another pundit Peters discusses in his article is Ben Shapiro, who famously became the butt of jokes in the U.K. after calling British conservative Andrew Neil a “leftist” during an appearance on his BBC program (to Brits who are familiar with Neil, the notion that he is a “leftist” is beyond laughable). Shapiro is not deeply enamored of Trump the way that Breitbart’s staff are, but as Peters notes, Shapiro’s hatred of liberals by far outweighs his issues with Trump.
“Mr. Shapiro isn’t shy about calling out the president for his divisive and unfocused leadership, but far more often, he takes shots at Mr. Trump’s critics,” Peters explains. “Mr. Shapiro echoes other conservatives who deflect: Mr. Trump wasn’t helping anyone, for instance, by asking top public health officials to study whether disinfectant could be injected into the human body as a coronavirus treatment. But, Mr. Shapiro explained he didn’t actually tell people to put bleach in their bodies: ‘That doesn’t mean he was recommending actually injecting Clorox, people.’”
Tim Miller, a Never Trump conservative and GOP activist who writes for The Bulwark, told the Times that publications like The Federalist are motivated by “an unquenchable desire to take everybody else down a peg.” Miller, on the other hand, believes that Trump has been terrible for the conservative movement — and he is happy to express that view during his appearances on cable news.
With Hemingway, Stuckey and Shapiro, Peters observes, the main ingredient is “anti-liberalism” — not an intense adoration for all things Trump like one finds at Breitbart.
Nicole Hemmer, a research scholar at Columbia University in New York City, told the Times, “The conservative ideology that had been cohesive during the Cold War is falling apart. It seems to me that ‘owning the libs’ is kind of the way you hold everyone together when your policy preferences are coming apart."
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Moore Says Closing Churches Is ‘Tyranny,’ Tells Pastors They Have Duty to Assemble
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rww
Roy Moore Group Asks Supreme Court to Overturn Marriage Equality Ruling
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yay fail
Another religious-right favorite who failed to make it through yesterday’s primaries is former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who lost a special election for the U.S. Senate in 2017 and wanted a chance to run again against the winner of that race, Sen. Doug Jones. But Moore didn’t manage to make it out of the single digits yesterday, finishing in fourth place. Former senator and attorney general Jeff Sessions did make the runoff, but President Donald Trump seems determined to stymie his bid to return to the Senate, tweeting this morning, “this is what happens to someone who … doesn’t have the wisdom or courage to stare down & end the phony Russia Witch Hunt.”
Tags: Amy Phan WestDavid LaneDeAnna LorraineJack HibbsJeff McFarlinJeff SessionsRoy MooreSean FeuchtYoung KimChurch-StateDominionismElection 2020American Renewal ProjectCalifornia Renewal ProjectRepublican Party
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220 rub for senate
Senate Candidate Roy Moore on God, Guns, Gays and Government
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/roy-moore-sues-right-wing-publication-for-reporting-sexual-misconduct-allegations/
no lnx
Roy Moore sues right-wing publication for reporting sexual misconduct allegations
Written by Alex Henderson January 29, 2020
One of the most stunning political events of 2017 occurred when Republican Roy Moore — who was inundated with sexual misconduct allegations involving teenage girls — lost to Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race. Although Alabama is a deeply Republican state that President Donald Trump is almost certain to carry in November, Moore was a badly flawed candidate; regardless, Moore is hoping to run against Jones again this year. And his response to negative publicity from the Washington Examiner is filing a $40 million lawsuit against the right-wing publication.
The Washington Examiner, although clearly conservative, has published a series of articles discussing the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore. In the lawsuit, a 2019 article by journalist Tiana Lowe for the Examiner is described as “libelous” and lacking a “factual basis.”
Legal reporter Jerry Lambe, in a January 28 article for Law & Crime, describes Moore’s lawsuit against the Examiner as full of holes.
“Moore’s complaint appeared to falsely convey the publicly available facts and drastically misconstrue the legal threshold required to prove defamation against a public person in claiming that the story exhibited a ‘reckless disregard for the truth,’” Lambe explains, adding that Lowe’s reporting “was based on more than a dozen allegations and witness statements covered by every major news outlet in the nation.”
On May 28, 2019, the Examiner published a blistering op-ed by Lowe headlined “If Alabamans Vote for Roy Moore, They Deserve Doug Jones.”
Lowe, in her op-ed, stressed, “If Alabamans willfully choose Moore this time, kneecaping their odds of winning the election, they will deserve every insult lobbed their way — and they will deserve every left-wing progressive Democratic vote cast in the Senate on their behalf by Doug Jones.”
Lowe’s description of Jones as a “left-wing progressive” is way off base; the Alabama senator is quite centrist, and philosophically, he has much more in common with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia than he does with staunch progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But Lowe speaks for many on the right when she says that nominating Moore to run against Jones a second time would be political suicide for the Republican Party, which may or may not lose control of the U.S. Senate in November.
Republican Bradley Byrne, who served in the Alabama State Senate in the 2000s, announced in February 2019 that he would be seeking the GOP nomination to run against Jones. Republican strategists have asserted that he would have an easier time defeating Jones than Moore.
Scott Wong
@scottwongDC
"I welcome [Judge Moore] to the race,” @BradleyByrne says, adding that Moore can't win the GOP nomination.
“I think people are very concerned that we Republicans lost a U.S. Senate seat because he was our nominee in 2017, and we don’t need to do that again." https://twitter.com/scottwongDC/status/1133431343734501377 …
Scott Wong
@scottwongDC
JUDGE ROY MOORE to announce Senate bid soon? GOP rival @BradleyByrne says Moore camp is telling him to expect a JUNE launch #ALSEN https://thehill.com/homenews/house/445781-gop-candidate-expects-roy-moore-to-announce-senate-bid-in-june#.XO11CeRwf1g.twitter …
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/far-right-extremist-roy-moore-is-running-for-senate-again-even-after-sexual-abuse-allegations-tanked-his-last-campaign/
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That time Democrats secretly used Russian social media tactics
The Democratic Party may be furious about the tactics' possible impact on democracy, but they aren't above using them.
Remember those dubious Twitter and Facebook tactics the Russians reportedly employed to influence the United States’ 2016 election? You know, the ones that Democrats have been railing against for a couple of years. Turns out that the Democratic Party may be furious about their possible impact on American democracy, but isn’t above using them.
According to The New York Times, “a group of Democratic tech experts” mimicked Russia’s social media tactics in the infamous 2017 Alabama senate race between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones. Jones ultimately beat accused sex offender Moore by a narrow margin, earning Democrats another seat in the Senate.
Just a year after the Alabama special election, a secret project which, according to one of the participants, aimed at garnering a better understanding of Russian methods, has come to light. As reported by the Times:
An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.
“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says. …
The project had a budget of just $100,000, in a race that cost approximately $51 million, including the primaries, according to Federal Election Commission records. … Despite its small size, the Alabama project brought together some prominent names in the world of political technology. The funding came from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who has sought to help Democrats catch up with Republicans in their use of online technology.
The money passed through American Engagement Technologies, run by Mikey Dickerson, the founding director of the United States Digital Service, which was created during the Obama administration to try to upgrade the federal government’s use of technology. Sara K. Hudson, a former Justice Department fellow now with Investing in Us, a tech finance company partly funded by Mr. Hoffman, worked on the project, along with [Jonathon Morgan, the chief executive of the cyber security firm New Knowledge].
Due to the limited scope of the effort, it’s considered highly unlikely it had a significant impact on the 2017 election. However, as the Times’ piece points out, the cause for concern lies in whether future U.S. elections will be determined by questionable tactics such as these. The Alabama incident illustrates that it’s not just foreign entities that are invested in stacking the odds in favor of their interests. As Republican consultant Dan Bayens put it, “You’ve got Russia, which showed folks how to do it, you’ve got consultants willing to engage in this type of behavior and political leaders who apparently find it futile to stop it.”
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https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/can-democrats-extend-blue-wave-swept-doug-jones-office-2018
...Jones’ victory was many things. It was a triumph for grassroots organizing in a state that hadn’t seen a Democratic upset in years. It was an affirmation that a good candidate can inspire people to turn out in droves to defeat a bad candidate who turns off his party’s base and the public. And it was perhaps a sign that voters have had enough of the tribalism that infects modern politics, epitomized by the GOP under Donald Trump.
But how much of what Jones accomplished in Alabama can be applied or repeated elsewhere? In some ways, his election was a special case. Sex scandal-plagued Roy Moore was a truly terrible candidate. Most establishment Republicans avoided him or kept away until the end—like President Trump and the national party committees. It was also a surprise that might not have happened if Sen. Richard Shelby hadn't told fellow Republicans to write in another name—not Moore's. (There were nearly 23,000 write-in votes; 2,100 more than Jones' margin of victory.)
While these dynamics are unlikely to recur in 2018, there are takeaways from Alabama that apply to the most critical congressional and gubernatorial races next year. That's when two-thirds of the Senate contests are incumbent Democrats facing re-election and Democrats need 24 seats to retake the House. While there are unknowns, such as how much the GOP tax plan and Trump will weigh down Republican candidates, there is a starting-line landscape found in red-run states like Alabama. That's where the GOP has spent this decade creating supermajorities and voting rules that benefit them and undermine Democrats.
That red-state gaming of the electoral field begins with extreme redistricting, or segregating each party’s reliable voters to give GOP candidates a 6-to-8 percent lead in their districts. It continues by suppressing Democratic turnout via stricter voter ID requirements, which knocks off another 2 to 3 percent in the fall, followed by other voter suppression measures. (These figures are cited in court rulings, congressional studies and academic papers.)
Jones’ victory underscores key lessons about the hurdles facing Democrats next year in states like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. The big takeaway, as evidenced by every major election in 2017, including Alabama, is that winning takes a giant turnout wave supporting Democrats, and a corresponding average turnout from Republican voters.
Wave Elections and Turnout
That's the pattern that voter turnout experts saw in Alabama. The wave was most visibly led by the African-American community, whose voting rights heritage gave the nation Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a moral imperative to vote no matter what. But there was also high pro-Jones turnout in college towns and among suburbanites, many of whom voted for Trump in 2016. These trends were noted on Twitter posts by election experts Tuesday and in analyses of media exit poll data on Wednesday.
The first sign that Jones could win was seen in the extraordinary high turnout by African Americans.
“Amazing: turnout is at 72%-77% of ‘16 presidential race in heavily black counties, but just 55%-60% in rural white counties. Black voters punching above their weight tonight & giving Jones a chance,” tweeted the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman on Tuesday as the precinct-by-precinct returns were rolling in.
“To win, Jones needs: 1) Ridiculous Dem margins in Birmingham/Montgomery 2) Strong crossover from college whites in Huntsville/Shelby 3) Not much drop-off from '16 turnout in Black Belt 4) Weak/typical off year turnout among non-college whites,” Wasserman predicted on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he tweeted. “What happened last night? All four of these things.”
“Hot takes that #ALSEN Republicans stayed home I think are incorrect,” McDonald tweeted. “Turnout is typically low in a special special election. Republican counties turned out at a rate we might typically expect, perhaps even more so given the competitive race. Democrat turnout was through the roof.”Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor and turnout expert, debunked the claim that Alabama Republicans stayed home. What happened, he said, was that the state's GOP base behaved just as predicted in any off-year special election.
The pro-GOP Weekly Standard also noted that many whites voted for Jones as well.
“Jones won a substantial number of white voters,” David Byler noted. “According to exit polls, Jones won 31 percent of white voters and 96 percent of black voters. Typically, Democrats win large majorities of black voters in southern states while losing many white voters. In 2012, the exit polls showed President Obama earning 15 percent of the white vote. And while exit polls do have their disadvantages, it’s worth noting that the New York Times’ Upshot also estimated that Obama won 16 percent of the white vote in 2012. Jones did significantly better with white voters while still holding onto lopsided margins with black voters.”
The New York Times noted Jones won big among women in upscale suburbs, generally a Republican haven. That figure is not surprising, given that several Alabama women said Moore had sexually preyed on them in their teen years, while Jones was a prosecutor who convicted KKK members whose bombs killed several black teenage girls.
Momentum Going Into 2018
Looking to 2018, it’s clear the electorate’s energy and enthusiasm have shifted from Republicans and independents electing Trump to growing factions backing Democratic candidates. In every major election this year, Democrats have done far better than expected. But that doesn’t mean they won on Election Day.
Jon Ossoff, in Georgia’s sixth U.S. House district, who lost amid dubious vote counts—and post-Election Day disclosures that the state had destroyed his race's vote count records—still did better than any Democrat in his district in years.
Last month in Virginia, Democrat Ralph Northam won the governor’s race and a surge of voters backing Democrats brought the party to the brink of retaking the House of Delegates, despite a 2011 gerrymander that gave the GOP a supermajority. The GOP is up by two seats, while four races are being recounted, starting this week.
Jones’ victory is also remarkable because Alabamians experienced voter suppression tactics, according to accounts posted on Twitter by political reporters and election protection attorneys. These obstructions that can make the difference in close elections.
On Tuesday, many polling places were unprepared and experienced long lines. There were voting machine breakdowns and shortages. There was police intimidation of voters, checking IDs for people with outstanding fines. There were voters that had been incorrectly purged. There were others complaints of voters not receiving absentee ballots. There was confusion over poorly designed ballots. All of these are unnecessary hurdles to what should be a straightforward process.
Election observers squarely blamed Alabama’s hyper-partisan GOP Secretary of State, John Merrill, for much of that dysfunction. Merrill’s low voter turnout estimates left polls unprepared for Tuesday’s turnout, which one turnout expert said was “bordering on malpractice.” As late as Tuesday on national TV, Merrill predicted only 25 percent of the state’s 3.3 million registered voters would turn out, when 40 percent did—a figure every academic turnout expert had predicted based on recent special elections.
Fair-minded Americans should be cheered by Alabama’s results. For once, a deserving candidate, supported by a diverse and energized grassroots coalition, inspired a flood of citizens to turn out and not be deterred from voting. But it took a giant wave just to barely beat an unusually bad candidate, including an unexpected last-minute assist from the state's senior Republican senator.
Democrats will have to repeat this giant wave in 2018 to breach the red-state barriers that stand between them and winning back control of Congress and key governorships. In red-run swing states that should be politically purple, the GOP has a 10 percent starting line advantage. Even with a large turnout wave, there's no telling what surprises await—for better or worse....
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mtg w/ TP, got brooks to endorse...
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/25/alabama-senate-bannon-strange-moore-243131
For Mitch McConnell and Ward Baker and Karl Rove and Steven Law — all the instruments that tried to destroy Judge Moore and his family — your day of reckoning is coming,” Bannon said, referring to the Republican Senate leader and a trio of prominent GOP strategists backing incumbent Sen. Luther Strange. “But more important, for the donors who put up the [campaign] money and the corporatists that put up the money, your day of reckoning is coming, too.”
With polls showing Moore leading comfortably, the event was an early victory lap of sorts for the nationalist ex-Trump adviser. Since departing the White House last month, he’s made electing Moore — a like-minded, pugilistic outsider — the first of what he hopes will be many pet projects to oust “globalist” Republican incumbents. Bannon broke with his ex-boss, President Donald Trump — who traveled to the state last week to campaign for Strange — and suggested Monday that the president was duped into supporting the incumbent.
Bannon said mainstream Republicans behind Strange's campaign regard Alabama voters as “a pack of morons. They think you’re nothing but rubes. They have no interest at all in what you have to say, what you have to think or what you want to do. And tomorrow, you’re gonna get an opportunity to tell them what you think of the elites who run this country!”
Bannon headlined the get-out-the-vote rally inside a hay-lined barn alongside Moore — who at one point pulled a gun out of his pocket to highlight his Second Amendment bona fides —Brexit leader Nigel Farage and “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson.
But Bannon stole the proverbial show. In his fiery us vs. them rhetoric, Bannon name-checked his enemies, repeatedly going after McConnell.
...
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There have been many postmortems about the Alabama Senate primary runoff last Tuesday, mostly focusing on what its result tells us about Donald Trump and whether it affects Mitch McConnell's future. These are good questions, since the candidate endorsed by Trump and McConnell lost to a deranged theocrat considered to be so extreme that even the National Rifle Association dropped nearly a million dollars' worth of ads to try to defeat him. How can it be that a man who was opposed by just about everyone in the Republican Party won the Republican nomination in the most Republican state in the country?
One way of looking at this result is to simply note that President Trump didn't back the Trumper candidate. In a rare moment of party comity, Trump agreed to help out Mitch McConnell and endorse the establishment's chosen candidate, appointed incumbent Sen. Luther Strange, against the wishes of Trump's revolutionary wingman Steve Bannon. Trump was either convinced by his advisers and the party poobahs that wild man Roy Moore couldn't win and he needed to back the winner or that Moore was nuts and Trump needed to pull Strange over the goal line with his massive popularity. Whatever the reasoning, Trump seemed to understand that he'd backed a dud when he mused out loud at his big rally for Strange last Friday night, "Maybe I've made a mistake."
One can easily understand why so many Republicans from all factions of the party wanted to keep Judge Roy Moore out of the United States Senate. He is a notorious political figure from the most extreme corner of the religious right, who was twice removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to enforce the rule of law. First it was for refusing to remove a 10 Commandments monument from the courthouse and then it was for ordering the state to refuse marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Moore is a vocal birther who believes that sharia law is being enacted in states around the nation and claimed that Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota should not be allowed to serve in Congress because he is a Muslim. Not only did he refuse to honor the Supreme Court's order legalizing gay marriage, he thinks homosexual conduct should be outlawed. He has said that the 9/11 attacks and the Newtown mass shooting occurred because God was upset that we "legitimize sodomy” and “legitimize abortion.”
In other words, Moore is exactly the kind of fringe candidate that caused the Republicans to fail to win the Senate back in 2010 and 2012 after running kooks like Todd "legitimate rape" Akin and Sharron "Second Amendment remedies" Angle. As a leaked GOP memo about the Alabama race that was circulated among donors pointed out, the party leadership thought it had purged the self-destructive Tea Party impulse by running more mainstream candidates in 2014 and 2016 and winning the majority. Apparently you can't put that genie back in the bottle.
Charlie Sykes, a Trump critic and former right-wing radio host, pointed out inTime magazine this week that the right has been dealing with a strong strain of "crackpottery" for many decades. and it's true. The modern conservative movement was hatched in the McCarthy era, after all, and the Republican party has been dealing with one group of flakes after another ever since, from the gold bugs to the theocrats to the gun nuts and sovereign citizens and more. It's in the GOP DNA. Until recently, party leaders were able to skillfully exploit the prejudices and paranoia of those factions of their base, while keeping a lid on the worst excesses most of the time and maintaining a somewhat respectable reputation.
But talk radio changed everything and, along with Fox News and the newer online media platforms, has radicalized the grassroots. Starting in the '90s, the Republican Party began to lose control of its own supposed constituency. Sykes quotes a fellow apostate in explaining his own epiphany:
Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, tried to diagnose the mindset of the Tea Party voters when he told the Washington Examiner, "I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans." Massie continued, "But after some soul-searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas. They were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class."
Roy Moore, like fellow birther Sheriff Joe Arpaio, is likely to become a close pal of the president if he wins the election. He's Trump's kind of guy, a card-carrying kook. Trump isn't likely to make the same mistake again and will be backing the extremists from now on. He may not know much about politics, but he knows his base.
The political press generally saw this campaign as a test of Steve Bannon's political clout versus the president's, and Bannon's "win" as a high-profile Moore booster has them swooning. According to the New York Times, Bannon and his billionaire benefactors Robert and Rebekah Mercer are planning to run primaries against incumbent Republicans in order to "drain the swamp" and "blow up the establishment." If this feels like déjà vu all over again, that's understandable. Just a few years ago, the billionaire Koch brothers decided to do the same thing and financed the Tea Party movement. The philosophical goals are different -- the Kochs are pro-business libertarians and the Mercers are eccentrics who want to usurp the establishment -- but the process is the same.
The result for the Republican Party is likely to be what Sykes describes as "an endless feedback loop as it tries with diminishing success to placate its most bombastic voices. The most obvious consequence is their inability (so far) to legislate." Longer term, the party seems to be headed for the long-awaited crack-up.
The GOP stuck together to vote for Donald Trump despite the misgivings of many more mainstream Republican voters. They are party loyalists and simply couldn't imagine themselves voting for a Democrat, especially not the hated Hillary Clinton. Those voters aren't the ones who will get fed up and leave. It's far more likely that if the party finally splits it will be the people who want to vote for "the craziest son of a bitch in the race" who will go their own way. That's not how Steve Bannon originally envisioned blowing up the establishment, but it could achieve his goal anyway.
Heather Digby Parton,
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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bannons-oligarch-cage-match-worries-gop
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http://www.motherjones.com/print/262941
The GOP's Sweet Home, Alabama
Rove went on to work with business power brokers in Alabama; donations to that state's Supreme Court candidates since 2000 (including "Ten Commandments Judge" Roy Moore) have been higher than in any other state, totaling more than $48 million.
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judicial.alabama.gov/supreme.cfm
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Supreme Court - 2 days ago
In 2012 Alabama redrew the boundaries of the State's 105 House dis- tricts and 35 ...Alabama et al., also on appeal from the same court.
Washington Post - 2 days ago
The Atlantic - 1 day ago
More news for alabama supreme court
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_Alabama
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www.politico.com/.../supreme-court-alabama-redistricting-ruling-...
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:{www.washingtonpost.com/.../courts.../supreme-court...:{}:
The Washington Post
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2 days ago - The Supreme Court sided with black challengers Wednesday and told a lower court to reconsider whether a redistricting plan drawn by ...
:{www.washingtonpost.com/.../in-defiant-ruling-alabam...:{}:
The Washington Post
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Mar 4, 2015 - The Alabama Supreme Court ordered a halt Tuesday to same-sex marriages in the state despite a U.S. Supreme Court order allowing them to ...
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http://blog.locustfork.net/2012/10/how-karl-rove-took-over-the-alabama-supreme-court-and-created-a-no-win-zone-for-citizens/
How the Corporate Republican Courts Turned From ‘Tort Reform’ to ‘Sovereign Immunity’ for Hospitals and Destroyed Americans’ Sixth Amendment Jury Rights
How did Karl “Turd Blossom” Rove, the adopted son of a gay man with pierced balls and a drunk, drug addict mother, become such a powerful and destructive force in American politics?
In the South we have a long history of asking people where they’re from, about their family. We have a need to know something about their mama. Yet as an American demographic, white Southern males over 50 have been listening to the politicians handled by Karl Rove and his ilk for three decades now. How did this happen?
While Karl Rove’s personal story may be a sad and tragic one, it may also explain why he became such a vicious, mean political animal. But that does not mean we have to listen to him.
Was it not clear enough in 2008 that Rove’s crowning political achievement, fooling the American establishment and the people into electing one of the worst presidents in U.S. history twice, George W. Bush, that his brand of Machiavellian, scorched-earth politics is bad for American democracy and the global economy?
Now, according to all the available evidence, including the reporting in Craig Unger’s book Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power, Rove sits on the largest political war chest in human history. He has usurped the National Republican Party’s fund raising authority. He’s using millions of dollars from billionaire donors to try to help Massachusetts Mormon Mitt Romney unseat President Barack Obama from the White House, and he’s now allowed to do it in a totally unaccountable way due to the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial ruling in Citizens United**vs. the Federal Election Commission.
:{:{}:
How is it possible that no one in the American news media been able to bury this horrendous political animal and stop him from destroying what’s left of this experiment in government of, by and for “the people?”}:
If Rove’s client Mitt Romney wins the presidential election of 2012, chances are we will end up in another world war, perhaps a nuclear war, and a global depression, according to a variety of experts. But even the president of the United States can’t seem to effectively make that case with only two weeks to go before the Nov. 6 elections.
So we will make the case here.
While Craig Unger was hobnobbing with the political brass in Dallas, Texas, and knows the Bush family political landscape where Rove got his first start in big time politics, and his book is highly recommended for anyone wanting to know the factual big picture of what happened, I know the other state where Karl Rove really cut his political consulting teeth, Alabama. When Rove was invited by Bill Canary of the Business Council of Alabama to come help Republicans take over the state Supreme Court starting in 1994, I had already worked as a political reporter for newspapers in South Alabama and North Alabama and covered the final term in office of George C. Wallace, one of the brilliant politicians who mastered the art of dirty tricks Rove would study and steal tactics from — especially using racism as a political weapon.
In 1994, however, I was not in a position to cover what became a Conservative Revolution in Alabama politics while House Speaker Newt Gingrich took over Congress and implemented his so-called “Contract With America.” I had my nose in books and academic research papers studying how the news media effects public opinion in a Master’s degree program at the University of Alabama, in the College of Communications and the Political Science department. In the very early days of the Internet and Web browsers, I was spending much of my time in Gorgus Library reading books and journals in paper form and making hundreds of copies of documents, which I still have in metal file cabinets all underlined from my extensive readings.
By 1995, I finished my Master’s thesis, earned my degree and left the state to teach in Georgia, then to work on a Ph.D. in Tennessee. By the year 2000, the year the U.S. Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the keys to the White House in the wake of the hanging chad controversy in Florida, I had moved to News Orleans to teach and conduct research at Loyola University New Orleans. By 2002, I was writing for The Dallas Morning News, however, and then the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times.
In 2004, when Taylor Bright did one of the few stories on what Karl Rove was up to in Alabama for the now defunct Birmingham Post-Herald, and Joshua Green was working on his piece for Atlantic Monthly on Karl Rove in a Corner, I did my own investigation and told the definitive story on George W. Bush’s lost year in 1972. Bush was hiding out from a drug charge in Houston by working on the Senate campaign of Republican Red Blount in Montgomery, Alabama, while Karl Rove was stealing his first election — as president of the College Republicans.
I moved to Washington, D.C. in 2004 to get news work in the nation’s capital, and maybe find a way to help stop Bush from being re-elected to a second term. I already had a sense that the Bush-Rove style of politics was bad for America, but nobody would listen then. Nobody seemed to care until in early 2008, we found out that the country had already been in a Great Recession since the winter of 2007.
All of a sudden the political landscape was ripe for a Harvard educated black guy like Barack Obama, a one-term U.S. Senator from Chicago.
Since moving back to my home state, however, I finally got the opportunity to interview Mark Kennedy earlier this year on what really happened to him in 1994.
How Karl Rove Ran Mark Kennedy Off the Supreme Court
Kennedy, the son-in-law of George Wallace himself, was the first state Supreme Court Justice targeted by Karl Rove, who came to work for a University of Alabama Law School professor named Harold See at the behest of the Business Council of Alabama. It was and is still run by Bill Canary who had worked as a political operative for George H.W. Bush. We haven’t seen much of Canary since he was named prominently in all the stories about the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.
Kennedy actually beat Rove and his candidate in that first race, barely, but he was so shaken by the dirty campaign tactics that he decided not to seek another term and face Rove again in 1998. He retired, but finally agreed in 2010 to get back into politics as head of the Alabama Democratic Party.
I caught up with him at an AFL-CIO convention in Prattville last fall and got him to tell me the story of what Karl Rove did to him. You can see the interview in the
above.
Before being elected to the state Supreme Court, Kennedy served as a juvenile judge and family-court judge, where he saw the negative plight of abused children who ended up in the justice system. In light of his experiences, he helped start the Children’s Trust Fund of Alabama and later the Corporate Foundation for Children and served as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect.Kennedy’s campaign commercials showed his volunteer work, and included pictures of him holding hands with children he had helped.
Rove took those innocent pictures and, in the early days of the Internet, got Republican operatives at the University of Alabama Law School and the secretive, conservative Federalist Society to e-mail around an attack ad claiming Kennedy was a gay pedophile. It was not unlike the “whispering campaign” he used in Texas to get Bush elected over Ann Richards, who he accused of being a lesbian in similar fashion.
“Karl Rove is a expert at turning what you believe to be your strongest suit into being your worst nightmare, kind of like the Swiftboat ads,” Kennedy said. “He accused me of being a pedophile.”
Rove also exaggerated the issue of large jury awards and turned “tort reform” into a campaign issue, accusing judges like Kennedy of being “too liberal” and guilty of “jackpot justice.” With those misleading tactics, he managed to take over the Texas and Alabama appellate court systems by getting pro-big business Republicans elected. Over time the Alabama Supreme Court and the Court of Civil Appeals became a “no win zone” for any average Alabamian seeking justice for a grievance against any corporate entity that wronged them. Big insurance companies loved this, so they chipped in millions to Rove’s campaigns after that and still support him to this day in a big way.
While it is clear that even if there was an imbalance in the court system in favor of juries granting too much to defendants in trials in those days, the pendulum has swung way too far back in the other direction, and nobody in the mainstream media is telling that story.
So in the process of investigating this, to show how imbalanced the courts have become, we caught up with a Montgomery woman named Jo Ann Shiver. She is also interviewed in the.
How the Supreme Court Came Up With ‘Sovereign Immunity’ for Hospitals
Shiver’s mother was killed by a deadly staph infection she caught in a Baptist hospital that was ignored and even covered up by the hospital staff.
Her sister filed a lawsuit against the Montgomery hospital and actually managed to win a jury verdict in the lower court. But the case was thrown out by the state Supreme Court, by the judges Rove and his brand of dirty politics were instrumental in electing to the bench.
Ms. Shiver said she has no doubt politics played a role in the case. “Follow the money,” she said.
You could research the court dockets in this state and find hundreds of cases like this where justice was clearly not done. But this one is so strange it deserves special attention.
In this case, not only did the justices throw out the jury verdict and the award for damages. They actually set a precedent that unless reversed soon will result in thousands of unnecessary deaths by unaccountable doctors and hospitals. Here again, theUniversity of Alabama plays a critical role in this part of the saga.
The Montgomery hospital had entered into a management agreement with the university on paper to handle some of the accounting due to some financial problems they were having, and as a result, the Supreme Court ruled that the hospital was a legal entity of the state and could not be sued under an old English Common Law tenant known as “Sovereign Immunity.” You could not sue the King in a Monarchy, and under certain circumstances, you can’t sue the state even today.
But somehow I doubt that even those who wrote the language for the English law would have envisioned a day when sovereign immunity would cover a private, for profit hospital owned by a church.
The court vacated a $3.2 million jury verdict in favor of the family of Lauree Durden Ellison. She died Nov. 8, 2005, after a stay at Baptist Medical Center East in Montgomery. She developed a staph infection from the hospital, but the church-state hospital administrators refused further treatment and denied liability or responsibility.
“They said she slipped through the cracks,” Ms. Shiver said, nearly tearing up.
I have searched high and low for an independent legal expert who could address this situation with insight. But so far, apparently the precedent is so strange that no one knows anything about it. It truly is one of those times when you have to throw up your hands and say, “only in Alabama.”
“Nobody knows the consequences of that opinion. It goes where no one has gone before,” Mark White, a former president of the Alabama Bar Association, told a Tuscaloosa newspaper reporter last year in one of the few news stories on the case to get reported in Alabama. No national news organization has touched the story.
Then-Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb, the one Democrat on the court at the time who dissented in the case, said although Baptist Health retains an interest in its assets that are managed by the UAB health care authority, the court’s decision means the hospital is no longer “legally responsible for the harm that may be caused by its negligence.”
“Shouldn’t a hospital be responsible if they cut the wrong leg off?” Ms. Shiver asks. “It gives them license to be negligent.”
William Powell, an attorney for a friend-of-the-court group, said sovereign immunity is a powerful legal-protection device.
“You can only sue the king if the king lets you,” he said.
The Alabama Association for Justice and theAlabama AFL-CIO have asked the court to grant a rehearing in the case, but so far, the high court has been non-responsive.
Morris Lilienthal, a trial lawyer in North Alabama who has reviewed the Ellison case, said the decision overreaches in a major way.
“It’s going to have dramatic effects on the law in Alabama,” he said.
The effect, in essence, is that all the health systems in Alabama, which already have “unbelievable, overreaching” protections under the Alabama Medical Liability Act, “may just be totally immune” from negligence or wrongful death claims from now on, Lilienthal said. “The doctors and staff there now have compete immunity from any accident.”
The Law as a Check on Greed
The law is supposed to be a leveler for and a check on “corporations out just for greed and money” and has made the world a safer place, he said. Even doctors should admit if they operate on the wrong limb of someone or leave medical instruments in a person and cause harm, for example, they should be held to a certain standard and be held accountable.
The Ellison case sets up a scenario where they are no longer held to a standard and are immune from any accountability. “It’s certainly not fair,” he said.
Tom Edwards, who ran for a state Supreme Court slot in 2010 as a Democrat and lost, said the Ellison case is a “clear example of how our Supreme Court will go out of its way to protect big business.”
When asked if he thought Rove’s takeover of the courts ended up creating a big corporation protection bureau and destroyed constitutional jury rights, making it impossible for average folks to get justice in the court system, he said: “That’s exactly what happened.”
“They do it very systematically,” he said. “The decision uses strained logic to set a legal precedent that grants state sovereign immunity to a private, profit-making operation competing in the private sector. It was a way for them to go out of their way to protect the medical industry.”
Another one of Rove’s tactics is to get his clients to rail against “activist liberal judges” who “legislate from the bench” to protect minorities and such.
But no one ever seems seems to talk about “activist conservative judges” who legislate from the bench to protect big corporations.
The Ellison case, Edwards said, is an example of “an activist court of an extreme nature. They write new laws from the bench every Friday, and they protect big corporations over the citizens of Alabama.”
Of course many doctors, hospitals, their PACs and their insurance carriers give millions of dollars in campaign contributions every year, mostly to Republicans.
Now ask yourself if your vote matters. If a hospital killed your mother, would you not want to sue somebody? Apparently you can’t do that anymore in Alabama.
For average working folks to vote Republican is “absolutely against their economic interest,” according to union officials such as Al Henley of the Alabama AFL-CIO and Auburn History Professor Wayne Flynt.
In addition, Lienthall added, most states have a tort claims act on the books where state entities can be held liable. But not in Alabama, he said, which is still operating under an outdated constitution written in 1901, updated in election years by constitutional amendments placed on the ballot at election time — and by judges. Those judges are elected as partisans who must raise millions in campaign contributions to get elected to jobs that qualify them for state retirement benefits — subsidized by the taxpayers, citizens who no longer possess full citizenship since they have no right to sue for damages or render judgements against corporations from the jury box.
Legal experts agree that where legislatures and courts intercede on these rights they violate the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Yet again, Karl Rove and his clients are getting away with trampling on the constitution — seemingly without challenge. Only on the Web Press.
Why is it that the people who are getting screwed the worst keep voting for them?
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time,” Lincoln said.
Unless you can convince them all to get their news from talk radio and Fox.
Karl Rove at a book signing in Birmingham withWilliam “Bill” Pryor who President George W. Bush appointed to the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta as a political payoff for beginning the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Rove denied even knowing Pryor in a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, even though he ran his campaign for Attorney General of Alabama in 1998. When Pryor greeted Rove at this event at Brookwood Mall, he said, “Hey bud,” and they hugged.
Ms. Shiver has written a letter to the University of Alabama Board of Trustees asking about a conflict of interest and an ethics problem with the hospital arrangement, but she has never received a response. You can read her letter below.
2012 Glynn Wilson
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Associate Justice Harold See was the heavy favorite to win the Republican nomination because of his support from the state business community and the party hierarchy, including Chief Justice Hooper. However, as Moore made headway in state polls, See elicited the help of Republican strategist Karl Rove, advisor to Texas Governor and future President George W. Bush. Despite Rove's support and significantly more campaign funding, See lost the primary to Moore, who then easily defeated Democratic contender Sharon Yates in November's general election.
Moore was sworn in as Chief Justice on January 15, 2001.
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TProg
In 2003, a panel of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s fellow judges unanimously removed him from office due to his repeated refusal to comply with a federal court order requiring him to remove a giant Ten Commandments monument that he installed in the state’s judicial building. At the time, Moore’s removal by his own peers in a very conservative state’s judiciary was viewed as the end of his judicial career. As it turns out, that’s [not likely to be true](http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20120314/NEWS02/120314004/Roy-Moore-people-spoken-?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|Frontpage|s):
Roy Moore said about 2 a.m. Wednesday that even though he had not been declared the winner of the Republican primary for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court that he expected to win without a runoff. … Moore was well ahead of former Alabama Attorney General Charlie Graddick and current Chief Justice Chuck Malone. He needed more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff.
With more than 98 percent of precincts reporting at about 2:15 a.m., Moore was hovering about 4,600 votes ahead of the 50 percent level he needed.
It’s important to understand why Moore’s decision to install his monument in a state courthouse was such a flagrant violation of the Constitution. Courts exist for the sole purpose of delivering equal justice under law. Yet, when the government endorses a particular religious view, it, in Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s words, “sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.” It’s difficult to imagine any message that is less appropriate for a judge to send than the message that some Americans are more favored than others.
More importantly, however one feels about the Constitution’s wall of separation between church and state, a judge’s first loyalty must always be to the law itself. Moore disagreed with the court order requiring him to remove his monument, and that is his right, but his decision to openly defy a court order was not just wrong, it was standing-in-the-schoolhouse-door wrong. Moore’s actions were lawless, plain and simple, and when a judge is defies the law in such a blatant and fragrant way, he sends a clear message that the law itself is irrelevant within the confines of his judicial chambers. America can ill-afford judges who place their own whims ahead of the law itself.
This is why Moore’s resurrection is such a sad commentary on the state of our nation’s respect for the rule of law. When Moore lost his job nearly a decade ago, it reflected a national consensus that there were some things that judges simply could not do. Moore can speak out for his position. He can advocate to change the law, but no judge is permitted to openly flout the law. The consensus in 2003 demonstrated that liberals and conservatives stood together in reaffirming this basic understanding of how a nation of laws must function.
Today, however, this consensus has broken down. The case against the Affordable Care Act has, in conservative Judge Laurence Silberman’s words, no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.” And yet Republicans almost unanimously demand that the Supreme Court cast aside our founding document and nearly 200 years of precedent in order to invalidate this law that they disapprove of. When Republicans disagreed with the Obama’s Administration’s contraceptive access rules, they were not willing to simply make their case to the voters. Instead, they dreamed up an utterly meritless constitutional challenge to the rules that was rejected by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia more than two decades ago. Tea Party lawmakers who disagree with Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage or the national ban on whites-only lunch counters tout long-discredited arguments that these laws are unconstitutional.
In other words, contrary to the perception that Moore was a universally discredited rogue in 2003, it is now clear that he was a harbinger. Moore’s brand of lawlessness — his belief that judges can enforce the constitution they wish we had instead of the Constitution we actually have — now dominates the Republican Party. Roy Moore is not an Alabama problem; he is an American problem.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/chief-justice-roy-moore/
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Guess Who Profits When You Can Throw Pregnant Women in Jail for Using Drugs?
Quote Originally Posted by Deborah Small | 5/13/14
Pregnancy holds a special space in most societies; it is a biological necessity for species preservation and represents the promise of future generations. Pregnancy is thought by many to bestow upon women an extra layer of societal protection and care. Social conventions dictate that pregnant women be given priority seating on buses, trains and other forms of transport and in lines for rest rooms and priority rescue during natural disasters. We believe ourselves to be solicitous and helpful to pregnant women and accord them an extra measure of respect.
But in many ways in the United States the treatment of pregnant women has been and continues to be class specific. Poor and working-class women often find pregnancy a difficult time, especially if they have jobs that don’t offer health care benefits, sick time or maternity leave. Those challenges can make pregnancy difficult enough without the extra worry of health care providers and/or aggressive prosecutors looking over your shoulders and sometimes even examining your urine to make sure you aren’t engaging in activities they consider ‘harmful’ to your fetus. In the aftermath of the crack cocaine media hysteria of the 1980s, laws that were enacted to give more protection to women who were physically assaulted while pregnant – began to be used against pregnant women. Punitive prosecutors and anti-choice advocates promoted the idea that the most dangerous place for certain children is their mother’s womb.
This month saw an escalation in this perversion of “protection” when Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed legislation that will allow women in the state to be charged with assault for harm to their fetus or newborn that can be attributed to the mother’s use of illegal drugs beginning July 1st. Haslam signed the legislation after “extensive conversations with experts including substance abuse, mental health, health and law enforcement officials,” he wrote in a statement [3]. “The intent of this bill is to give law enforcement and district attorneys a tool to address illicit drug use among pregnant women through treatment programs.”
“This law brings treatment to the worst of the worst,” say state representative Terri Weaver, who sponsored the bill in the House. “It’s heartbreaking if you’re a police officer, and you see a woman is seven or eight months pregnant and shooting heroin. There is an individual inside that belly that has no choice but to take whatever goes into it.”
“Tennessee has become one of the top states for babies born addicted,” says Weaver, who introduced the bill in the House. The legislation is just the latest in Tennessee’s series of efforts to deal with a rise in infants born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS), which is a group of problems akin to the effects of withdrawal.......
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