HorsesAss.Org

By now most of you have heard about the NRCC’s harassing robo-calls which have been inundating as many as 50 districts nationwide. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has the best explanation, so I might as well just repeat most of it here.

Most of the call’s script is a fairly standard attack robocall, a series of Republican talking points aimed at the Democratic congressional in a particular district. Nothing particularly noteworthy. The key is the introduction. The lead into the call starts with the speaker saying ‘I’m calling with information about’ Dem candidate X. Then there’s a short pause.

At this point, you know it’s an annoying robocall, so a lot of people just hang up. If you hang up then, you think it’s a call from the Democratic candidate.

Second, the repetition. And this part is the key. If you don’t listen through the whole message, the machine keeps calling you back, often well in excess of half a dozen times with the same call. It only stops if you listen all the way through.

As you can imagine, that’s driving a lot of people through the roof.

In other words, the Republicans behind the calls win either way. If you keep hanging up, you think you’re being harassed by the campaign of the local Democratic House candidate. If you give up and listen all the way through, you hear the political attack. The true source of the call, the NRCC, the GOP House campaign committee, is only revealed at the end of the call.

(Federal regulations dictate calls be identified at the top of the call.)

Third, and for this there is as yet only anecdotal evidence, many of the calls seem to be going out overnight or during, say, a major sporting event in the given district.

These sorts of operations are supposed to glide under the radar, having maximum impact with minimal press attention.

And that’s pretty much how it worked.

People only started catching on mid-late last week as Democratic campaign after campaign started fielding complaints from voters about robocalls their campaigns weren’t even making. Even then, individual campaigns dealt with it mainly on their own. Only over the weekend did different people start putting the puzzle together.

It’s impossible to say how many voters out there are pissed off because they think they’re being phone-stalked by the local Democratic candidate. And there’s no way to tell just what the effect will be at the ballot box. But the intention is clear: suppress the Democratic vote by harassing voters with repetitive phone calls and deceiving them about who it is that’s calling them.

Remember, this is the same crew that pulled a not dissimilar phone scheme in 2002 which resulted in multiple felony convictions. This time they’ve just taken it nationwide. This is their strategy.

This is a big story that’s only gotten minimal coverage in the press, when it should have generated above-the-fold headlines. The NRCC doesn’t care that this is dishonest. They don’t care that this undermines our democracy. Apparently, they don’t even care that this is illegal.

I understand why some people still vote Republican, but for the life of me I can’t understand how they can do so with pride.

Under 50, tied with the challenger. Not a place a Republican incumbent wants to be the day before the big blue wave hits.

Among those poll respondents who have already voted: Burner leads by 8 among those who tell SurveyUSA they have already voted. Reichert leads by 5 among those who tell SurveyUSA they are certain to cast a ballot before polls close, but who have not yet done so. 38% of respondents have already voted; 62% have yet to.

What does that mean? Well, you don’t even have to do the math to see that Reichert would need to win over 5% of the uncast ballots to win the election.

It is interesting to note that in the previous poll Burner led by 8% with the 25% of respondents who said they had already voted, and now with 38% of ballots cast she still leads by 8%. Not having anything but intuition to back this up, it always struck me that a survey of how people actually voted should be more accurate than a survey of voter intent.

If I were Reichert, I’d be awfully nervous.

Rep. Dave Reichert has run out of money, and is pleading with supporters for last minute donations to fund his GOTV efforts.

“This race will be very close: We have had to spend our campaign coffers down to nothing and we still have critical Election Day activities that we must pay for. Can you help Dave in the final push by making a contribution?”

Eh. I wouldn’t worry so much about Dave’s campaign shutting down a day before the election. His party doesn’t seem to have much of a problem engaging in deficit spending.

The Washington Realtors PAC has taken quite an interest in the 48th Legislative District race between Republican Bret Olson and Democrat Deb Eddy, spending over $28,000 stuffing mailboxes on Olson’s behalf. One of their major campaign themes? Olson will solve the region’s traffic problems.

A recent mailer (you can see it here, front and back) features a picture of typical Eastside congestion, with the following text:

With the average commute getting longer every year, it cuts into the time we have to spend on the important things, like our families. Now, traffic is threatening our economy and our quality of life.

That’s why we ask you to vote for Bret Olson in the upcoming election. As our Representative Bret Olson will work for transportation solutions that give us more quality time with those who matter most.

Uh-huh. Only take a closer look at the picture of that Eastside traffic jam.

So… where exactly on the Eastside is Kirkwood Rd and Wilcrest Dr? Um… Houston. Texas.

Oh, and by the way, not only isn’t that freeway in Olson’s district, I’m pretty sure this isn’t Olson’s wholesome, healthy family either.

As for Olson’s “transportation solutions,” apparently they include passage of I-933, which Olson endorses, and which would lead to unregulated, unchecked suburban sprawl throughout the 48th LD and the rest of the state. Not that this would have much of a negative impact on local traffic. In Houston.

Sage advice from Atrios:

Well, 48 hours or so from now I’ll probably be contemplating my exit from our little CNN sponsored election night party, either so I can go celebrate in style away from the camera eye or to run away from the taunts of krempasky or boxturtle ben or assrocket or Captain Ed or who knows what kind of weirdass people will be there.

And, then, the next day we get to work. The big mistake in 2004 was that the netroots or whatever the hell we are at some point started deferring to the powers that be, and then post-election disillusionment combined with a leadership vacuum from those powers meant that things stagnated.

Either way, not this time. Time to keep marching. Worry about, and try to affect, the things you have some control over right now. Wednesday morning you can figure out how to do it better.

Last night after the show, us drunken bloggers stood in the rain while Mollie had a smoke, and we chatted a bit about our post-election narrative. I still think the Dems are going to pick up 30 to 40 seats in the House, and have a good shot at controlling the Senate. I also think that between Peter Goldmark and Darcy Burner we’ll pick up at least one seat here in Washington state. Statewide, I expect both evil initiatives (920 and 933) to go down in flames, while Democrats make modest gains in the state Legislature.

But there are many possible scenarios ranging from total victory to crushing defeat, to mixed results that given my high expectations will leave me feeling much less happy than I’ll have a right to be. Whatever the national results, if both Darcy and Peter lose I expect the (u)SP type folk to tease me mercilessly, but then, they’ve always missed the point: personally, as a liberal blogger and netroots activist I already won. The local netroots played a huge role in helping both Darcy and Peter make their races competitive beyond all the expectations, and while it is true that macro forces were largely responsible for creating the political climate that threatens to sweep the Democrats into power, if not for the netroots, half of the 50 most competitive House races would not have had Democratic challengers in a position to take advantage of the opportunity. This time last year, nobody in the political and media establishment could have anticipated the impact the liberal netroots would have on this election. Hell… I didn’t anticipate the impact we’d have.

I may slow down for a couple weeks after the election, just to take a breather and collect my thoughts. And maybe clean up my house. (Metaphorically and literally.)

But I promise you, this is only the beginning. Whatever Tuesday’s results, we will come back stronger and smarter and most definitely, better financed.

Ten years from now pundits will look back at the 2006 election as a turning point. From the class of Democratic freshmen elected this year will rise a new generation of political superstars and congressional leaders. And from the class of bloggers and net activists who helped elect them will rise a new generation of pundits, media personalities and party power brokers.

I honestly don’t know what my role will be in all this. A few years ago I was just some guy angry at the direction our country was going; I had no idea that a joke initiative, born of frustration, could launch me on a path where I could help shape headlines and influence elections. It’s been an enormously gratifying journey, though it’s left me flat broke with little income, at a time when I should be enjoying my peak earning years. If I can’t find a way to monetize my efforts, I’ll have no choice but to step back from full-time blogging and take some paying work, however trivial it might be.

But at this point I am absolutely confident that nothing can stop the netroots revolution from reshaping the Democratic Party and the way the media covers politics.

Enjoy tomorrow’s election, whatever the results. You are watching history.

I know this video is making the rounds, and Slog got it up first, but well, it’s worth the repetition.

It’s been a bird-free day — no Seahawks, no Eagles — so tune in for some political football tonight on “The David Goldstein Show” on Newsradio 710-KIRO, from 7PM to 10PM.

7PM: Do Republicans have a prayer? Seattle P-I political columnist Joel Connelly spent the day checking out the spirit at some of our local mega-churches, and he joins me in the studio to talk about Tuesday’s midterm election, and how the latest sex scandal might impact its outcome. We’ll also be getting a field report from fellow blogger TJ of Loaded Orygun, whose been following some very interesting ballot return trends that could have the red team feeling awfully blue down in the Beaver State.

8PM: Is flipping off the President a fireable offense? An Issaquah school bus driver gave President Bush the finger, and his fellow Republicans cheered when Rep. Dave Reichert took credit for getting the woman fired… credit which Reichert now says he doesn’t deserve. Taking Reichert at his word (that is, his latest word) what does this say about the first-term congressman’s character that he would actually brag about getting the single, working mom fired, when he says he had nothing to do with it? Chris Dugovich from the Washington State Council of County and City Employees will call in to give the driver’s side of the story, and we’ll be playing audio and taking your calls.

9PM: What do you get when you pack four drunken bloggers into the KIRO studio? Will, Mollie and Carl join me almost every week on Podcasting Liberally, recorded live at Seattle’s Montlake Alehouse, and they’ll be joining me in the studio for a Drinking Liberally roundtable discussion of electoral push. Is this the year a big blue wave sweeps the Democrats into power? Or will Karl Rove prove that American democracy is dead, and that nothing short of a violent revolution can dislodge the GOP from the reigns of power? Give us a call and let us know what you think, before all of us liberal bloggers are shipped off to Gitmo.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

Democratic challenger Darcy Burner spoke at a rally this afternoon:

“A long time ago, the Republicans announced that Reichert had raised enough money to put this seat out of reach of any challengers,” Burner told the crowd. “They thought they could buy this seat. But I’m happy to tell you that about ten minutes ago, thanks to the thousands of supporters who have invested in this race, we passed the $3 million mark!”

Wow.

Reichert likes to belittle his opponent for her lack of experience, but Burner has outraised him in every filing period this year, and her $3 million-plus total ranks her amongst the five top Democratic challengers nationwide. Not bad for a political novice, huh?

That’s what hard work and smarts does for you.

I love Cliff Schecter.

Remember all those years when you’d watch some GOP SOB viciously shouting down some stiff, jaw-clenched Democrat who would just politely bend over and take it? Well no more. This is how the game is played, and unless everybody gets together and agrees to change the rules, this is how we’re going to play it.

A reader from Washington’s 2nd Congressional district forwarded me audio of this rather amusing botched robocall from Republican challenger Doug Roulstone. Or maybe it’s a botched robocall from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenneger. It’s hard to tell.

Ah well. So much for the Republican Party’s much-vaunted GOTV machine.

(Oh, and Doug… there’s no shame in losing. But there is shame in cynically questioning John Kerry’s patriotism as a desperate campaign ploy. This is how voters will remember you. If at all.)

Colorado Springs’ New Life Church just announced that it has fired Pastor Ted Haggard for his “sexually immoral conduct.” The much publicized meth and gay hooker scandal has elicited a little bit of soul searching and a lot hemming and hawing from Haggard’s fellow Evangelical leaders, but perhaps the most ridiculous response came yesterday from Pastor Mark Driscoll of Seattle’s Mars Hills mega-church-wannabe. Writing in his personal blog, Driscoll offers his fellow pastors “some practical suggestions” on how to avoid the type of temptation that consumed Pastor Haggard. And near the top of his list?

“Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.”

Uh-huh. Leave it to a fundamentalist Evangelical preacher to have such a profound understanding of human sexuality. Or as the inimitable Dan Savage so aptly put it:

“I’m sure Ted Haggard is saying something along these lines to his wife right now: ‘Oh, honey… I wouldn’t have been having those meth-fueled ass-banging sessions with that gay hooker if you hadn’t have let yourself go like that!’ “

Of course, using Pastor Driscoll’s line of reasoning one would suppose about two-thirds of married, middle-aged Americans — men and women alike — to be meth-addicted homosexuals. Hmm. I haven’t looked at the statistics recently, but that figure strikes me as just a tad high… at least, outside of Colorado Springs.

But scroll further down Pastor Driscoll’s list and you’ll find some more useful suggestions on how to avoid temptation. Like a pastor should never travel alone, or freely give out his cell phone number, or hang out at places where he might come in contact with “lonely people”… you know… like at his own church. Pastor Driscoll also advises against keeping “a secondary email account from which to build a secret identity.” Personally, it never occurred to me to create a secret identity, but I suppose the prospect must have some appeal to joyless, rigidly moral, puritanical hypocrites like Pastor Driscoll and his colleagues.

But mostly what I’ve learned from Pastor Driscoll’s sage advice is that becoming a pastor is a great way to meet women. (And men, I guess.) Apparently, the ladies think pastors are hot:

“I have, however, seen some very overt opportunities for sin. On one occasion I actually had a young woman put a note into my shirt pocket while I was serving communion with my wife, asking me to have dinner, a massage, and sex with her. On another occasion a young woman emailed me a photo of herself topless and wanted to know if I liked her body. Thankfully, that email was intercepted by an assistant and never got to me.”

Pastor Driscoll has been “blessed with a trustworthy heterosexual male assistant,” and I’m sure he was equally thankful to intercept that scandalous email. Praise the Lord.

Wow. Mega-church preachers are like rock stars — there’s sexual temptation lying behind every pew. With office perks like that, even a secular Jew like myself might consider becoming an Evangelical preacher, except, unlike Pastor Driscoll, I’m not into all that kinky stuff:

“How can we proclaim that we are new creations in Christ if we continually return to lap up the vomit of our old way of life?”

Blyech!

If I ever find myself alone in a room with Pastor Driscoll, remind me to stay off the meth.

Oops. Republicans are getting testy:

Gov. Jeb Bush, traveling with the attorney general and fellow Republican during a stop in Orlando, bristled when television reporter Steven Cooper interrupted another reporter to ask about Crist’s sexuality.

“Put a smile on your face and don’t be such a horse’s ass,” Bush said.

I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked that a respected elected official like Jeb Bush would get the phrase “horse’s ass” into dozens of family newspapers. What is this world coming to?

I was on the phone with Darryl from Hominid Views and we were looking over state Sen. Luke Esser’s PDC filings, when a curious anomaly jumped out at us: Esser’s campaign seemed to have incurred an inordinately large expense in “bank charges.”

So we looked at Esser’s expenditure reports in greater detail, and this is what we found for “bank charges” over the life of his current campaign:

VENDOR	DATE	AMOUNT	DESCRIPTION
BANK OF AMERICA	06/06/2005	$16.00	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	11/07/2005	$1,471.17	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	11/07/2005	$5.00	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	05/24/2006	$100.00	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	05/24/2006	$5.00	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	05/30/2006	$16.75	BANK CHARGE
AMERICAN EXPRESS	06/19/2006	$32.50	BANK CHARGE
AMERICAN EXPRESS	06/26/2006	$17.55	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	07/03/2006	$446.04	BANK CHARGE
AMERICAN EXPRESS	07/11/2006	$9.75	BANK CHARGE
AMERICAN EXPRESS	07/26/2006	$1.63	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	08/01/2006	$43.34	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	09/01/2006	$48.40	BANK CHARGE
COMPLETE CAMPAIGNS	09/22/2006	$52.50	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	10/02/2006	$38.54	BANK CHARGE
COMPLETE CAMPAIGNS	10/03/2006	$7.50	BANK CHARGE
COMPLETE CAMPAIGNS	10/11/2006	$15.00	BANK CHARGE
COMPLETE CAMPAIGNS	10/20/2006	$39.38	BANK CHARGE
COMPLETE CAMPAIGNS	10/27/2006	$30.00	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	10/30/2006	$4.25	BANK CHARGE
Total Expenditures for this report: $2,400.30

Hmm. Notice something unusual? We sure did.

Over the past two years Esser reports bank charges of between $4.25 and $52.50, except in November of 2005 and July of 2006 when he reports astonishingly high charges of $1,471.17 and $446.04 respectively.

For the most part the report makes sense. It seems quite clear that the charges you see are either monthly service fees or transaction costs incurred taking contributions via credit card. But the $1,471.17 charge in particular is almost entirely inexplicable as a normal cost of doing business.

In fact, assuming this expense was properly reported as a “bank charge,” the only thing I can imagine that could possibly account for such high costs would be interest and penalties on an outstanding credit card or line of credit debt. And yet during this same period Esser’s campaign reports no liabilities whatsoever.

Now, I don’t actually like to engage in speculation, but I’m more than willing to do so when given no other choice, and since Esser’s campaign has not returned my emails or phone calls, here’s my guess at one plausible explanation: the $1,471.17 charge represents interest and penalties incurred on a campaign credit card that Esser used to cover his personal obligations. Esser eventually paid off the principal, but billed the finance charges and penalties to the campaign.

And keep in mind that this hypothesis was not developed in a vacuum. As was widely reported, Esser recently avoided an October court date with credit-card giant MBNA (a division of Bank of America) by paying off an outstanding $6,556.15 debt.

Darryl did manage to reach Esser’s campaign manager, and while he refused to comment on these specific charges, he suggested that perhaps these were credit card transaction fees.

Uh-huh. But that’s not possible. Even at a usurious 4 percent transaction fee rate, $1,471.17 would represent over $36,000 worth of contributions, whereas Esser only raised a few thousand dollars during this period, mostly in the form of big checks from PACs. And besides, Bank of America charges a monthly fee for “merchant services” regardless of the number of credit card transactions — the lack of other bank charges prior to May of 2006 strongly suggests that Esser’s campaign was not equipped to accept contributions via credit card at that time.

Of course there are other possible explanations — perhaps the $1,471.17 represents wire-transfer fees on illegal drug-money Esser was laundering through his campaign? Or perhaps Esser merely ordered some really expensive checks. But again, assuming this expenditure was correctly reported as a “bank charge” (and Esser actually amended the return on June 8, so you know they’ve reviewed it,) I still think that my hypothesis is the most plausible.

Darryl is scheduled to meet with Esser’s campaign manager Monday morning, and he will be given every opportunity explain these unusual bank charges. I suppose I could have waited to post until then, but that would just reward the campaign for delaying their response until the day before the election, when it would be too late for other members of the media to follow up.

So there you have it. If the Esser campaign can explain these bank charges, they know how to get ahold of me, and I suggest they do so now. Otherwise, I’ll just continue to speculate until they provide evidence to the contrary.

UPDATE:
Turns out, the expenditure wasn’t correctly reported as a “bank charge.” It was a check he had deposited in his account that didn’t clear. Darryl has the details.

I think that pretty much says it all.