TCB this afternoon. More later.
The Chicago Daily Observer writes about Missouri’s let-them-eat-cake gang:
The Missouri Republican Party’s Executive Director Lloyd Smith wrote of what they’ve uncovered in documents linking Secretary of State Carnahan to Missouri’s ACORN chapter:
What we found was shocking: at least 2,300 pages of correspondence that clearly detailed a close working relationship between the highest levels of Carnahan’s office and ACORN in Missouri.
These e-mails show the lengths Carnahan’s office went to accommodate the group. Top ACORN officials lauded her office for “having the ability to share information.” They asked “very quick research question(s),” which Carnahan’s staff was happy to provide. They said “we’ll do an event whenever Robin can make it to St. Louis, though book closing date is best.”
And it gets better … ACORN and Carnahan worked together to stop photo IDs being shown when voting.
Perhaps most shocking was an e-mail sent after the defeat of a common sense proposal, opposed by Carnahan, that would have required a photo identification to vote. ACORN congratulated Carnahan’s office and a host of liberal groups on “a great team effort.”
More from the Springfield News-Leader:
What we found was shocking: at least 2,300 pages of correspondence that clearly detailed a close working relationship between the highest levels of Carnahan’s office and ACORN in Missouri.
These e-mails show the lengths Carnahan’s office went to accommodate the group. Top ACORN officials lauded her office for “having the ability to share information.” They asked “very quick research question(s),” which Carnahan’s staff was happy to provide. They said “we’ll do an event whenever Robin can make it to St. Louis, though book closing date is best.”
Perhaps most shocking was an e-mail sent after the defeat of a common sense proposal, opposed by Carnahan, that would have required a photo identification to vote. ACORN congratulated Carnahan’s office and a host of liberal groups on “a great team effort.”
It’s no wonder ACORN called Carnahan “helpful” in a lawsuit that netted them $450,000 from Missouri taxpayers.
I can’t wait to see if a future James O’Keefe ACORN video includes anything from any Missouri offices.
This also makes sense as to why so many ACORN workers were present at Russ Carnahan’s summer rally for fauxcare.
I very nearly laughed out loud at the sad little dog and pony show that is this WaPo article on Dede Scozzafava. Wait – I hear a tiny violin playing in the background.
“Oh, someone left chocolates for me!” she said, picking up a present from her aunt and uncle. Her GOP family has been less supportive. And she warns that what happened to her will happen to candidates like her.
Exactly, so be warned, all you liberals who will pose as Republicans and run on a Democrat platform!
In the summer, Scozzafava and her husband, Ron McDougall, a local labor leader, retreated to their summer house at the end of a dirt road on Sylvia Lake. The place has no TV reception — a good thing, she said, given all the attack ads against her funded by the Club for Growth, the anti-tax group backing Hoffman. Still, she wasn’t entirely isolated. She heard through friends that Palin insinuated she had been “anointed” by a “political machine” because county chairs handpicked her as the nominee. Beck denounced her as “ACORN-supported” and an “Obama-Lite Republican.” Former House majority leader Dick Armey’s group FreedomWorks mobilized against her. She said she heard conservative robo-calls in the district describing her as a “child killer,” a “lesbian lover” and a “homo.”
“It was organized,” she said.
Remember how easy it was to get the robo call Scozzafava had rushed out to record for Bill Owens? Funny, I never heard of such a robo call smearing her as such. Had it existed it would have been posted on liberal blogs far and wide. Good grief, do politicans really think people are that stupid?
Her aide rang to say former governor George Pataki, who had encouraged her to run, was going with Hoffman.
The next day, she tried to keep her spirits up at events, but the betrayal by Pataki, who is mulling a Senate run, stung. Around 6 p.m., she and her husband pulled over at a Stewart’s convenience store on the rainy drive home from her Watertown campaign office. An aide called with dismal poll numbers. For hours, they sat, with Scozzafava staring at the windshield wipers going back and forth. Her husband counted the people using the convenience store’s ATM to pass the time. Mostly, she just cried.
That night at the lake house, sleep wouldn’t come, and she leafed through old Newsweeks without processing the words and prayed for perspective. At 7 a.m. on Halloween, her spokesman left her a voice mail: What did she want to do next? She called back hours later on the way to campaign headquarters and told him to draft a statement announcing her withdrawal from the race.
Soon after, triumphant releases rolled out of conservative press offices. Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, immediately transferred the party’s financial support over to Hoffman, who placed no condolence call.
“One man who did call me was Bill Owens,” she said. “He didn’t ask for an endorsement, he just said, ‘I hope you’re doing okay.’ “
And even though she said during the campaign that she was a true Republican, a pro-abortion/spending/Obamacare/cap-n-tax Republican whatever that means, Bill Owens calling the woman who basically won the election for him (it was the least he could do, come on) was all it took to start the ball rolling towards an endorsement.
What I find positively comedic, is the shameless way the Democrats used this woman (you can’t be liberal and say that this woman was selected locally while also saying that she was used by the GOP, no worky). I”m embarrassed for her. They make her sound like some tween at a Miley concert.
Unbeknown to Scozzafava, the kindly gesture was the first salvo in a White House-orchestrated initiative to win her endorsement. “I did speak to her because she’s a friend,” said June O’Neill, former chairwoman of the New York State Democratic Party, who became the White House’s in-district point person. “And she had just made the difficult decision to pull the plug on her own campaign.”
According to a White House official with knowledge of the courtship, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel assigned the mission to his political director, Patrick Gaspard, who months earlier floated the idea in the State Assembly of Scozzafava running as a Democrat and now asked allies to console her.
At Gaspard’s request, Andrew Cuomo, the state’s attorney general, rang her up and told her that he, too, had known the political depths. In 2002, his insurgent primary challenge for governor collapsed, but now, he told her, he was on top again.
“You’re probably the next governor,” Scozzafava said she told Cuomo.
After she hung up, another incoming call. “It’s Chuck Schumer,” she mouthed to her husband.
And then they both girl-shrieked and were all LIKE OMG.
White House operatives practically skipped up to New York in order to secure an endorsement for one of their own. She must be high, entertaining the idea of running on a GOP again, ever, in the future, after wasting the $1 million that the Republican party spent on her bid by endorsing a Democrat.
Those conservative forces now descend on Florida, where former House speaker Marco Rubio, who on Monday received the endorsement of the Club for Growth, might shove aside centrist Gov. Charlie Crist, who was once on John McCain’s short list for running mate. And Scozzafava has a warning.
“There is a lot of us who consider ourselves Republicans, of the Party of Lincoln,” she said, her face now flush. “If they don’t want us with them, we’re going to work against them.”
Really? We knocked you off the ticket once and rattled the party, we’ll do it again.
I don’t get very personal here, but it’s Veterans’ Day and I want you to meet a very special person who’s very close to my heart: my Grandpa, Howard S., who served as a gunner aboard the USS Alabama during WWII.
His youth was marred by tragedy but he served his country proudly. While on leave he lost his first wife and parents in a horrific car accident caused by a drunk driver. He buried them and then returned to battle to fight for his country.
I have never in my entire life met anyone who demonstrated as much strength or reserve as my grandfather did. I saw him cry only once in his life, when my grandmother passed away. He almost fell to his knees at the cemetery and was escorted behind the cars by his oldest son who knew that Grandpa preferred to work out his emotions in private, away from the prying eyes of his twenty-some-odd grandchildren.
My firstborn was his first great-grandchild.
He passed away the day that I gave birth to my second child, his third great-grandchild, almost five years ago. As life left him I brought a new life into the world. He lived long enough to hear that it was a relatively easy birth and that we were all well. A few hours later he closed his eyes and left this world.
I have fought the good fight,
I have finished the race,
I have kept the faith.
I’ve written before, elsewhere, how the dichotomy of his death and my son’s birth was a bit of a mindjob, this man who I revered as much as any child would revere a father. That I was unable to attend his funeral inflicted a small tear in the fabric of my soul that God is mending with time.
This morning I got a bit teary on air because I was sitting across the studio from a man who just sent his firstborn into battle; people were calling in, full of emotion, thanking our veterans, sharing stories of their loved ones. I take this day so very seriously because it should be taken as such. It takes a certain sort of individual to do what our veterans have done. I don’t care whether it was the draft or volunteerism that accounted for why a man or woman joined the ranks of America’s finest. I don’t think that things like that happen all willy-nilly for a reason anyway, I think that certain people were put in certain positions because they were the best, the strongest.
When the war was over my grandfather came home, met my grandmother, and raised a family. By the time I entered this world and met him he was a senior citizen, a man hard of hearing brought on my the massive artillery blasts of the guns he fired during the war, a life that seemed so far away from the life and Grandpa I knew. He wore his USS Alabama hat proudly. When I hit my teen years and thought myself immortal and beyond reproach, I asked Grandpa why he fought, anyway. He could’ve just run off.
“These things aren’t just given,” he said, raising his bushy eyebrows at me. “Freedom isn’t free.”
I learned about commitment, honor, and duty from this man.
Years later, cancer would take him from us. He was ready to go. He raised his brood. He missed Grandma and he was blessed enough to have lived a long full life with people who loved him. My final communication with him was through my mother, as I laid in the labor and delivery room, recovering.
“Does he know?” I asked my mother through the phone. I dared not cry because I knew she was already dealing with enough.
“Yes,” she replied, her voice strained. “7 lbs, 8 ounces, healthy and feisty. He said ‘good.’”
When I hung up I sat in my room alone, as Chris was home with our firstborn, cradled my infant, and cried harder than I’ve ever cried in my life. Grandpa was such a blessing to our family and he’s home now.
I’ve such wonderful stories about him to tell the boys. Like the time he was in the VA following a lung operation, and the doctors took my mother and her siblings aside and said: “Look, we have no idea how this happened, but, um, your father was exposed, at some point, to a vast amount of radiation.”
They were all stunned.
“Oh, that’s from the bomb,” Grandpa piped up, thanks to his often selective hard-of-hearing. We’re not sure how, but he was at a vantage point, somewhere in the Pacific, to see one of the atomic bomb explosions. He described it in fascinating detail. He went on further and talked about how when the USS Missouri was freshly commissioned, it was chosen to be the ship on which the US signed the peace accord with Japan. All the Missouri sailors on the ships in vicinity were furious and on the Alabama they talked of shooting the new girl down.
They instead were invited to board the Missouri and be present at the historic signing.
When Grandpa finished telling this story nearly everyone who was able in the ICU ward was around his bed, jaws to the floor, his family included. It was the first time we all had heard this; he was very quiet about his service. I know some people would put this stuff on a belt buckle and wear it out and about, not Grandpa. He took it literally, what the Bible said about service: never let the left hand know what the right is doing. He kept that Bible on his coffee table. He had no need of banks; he kept his money in Genesis.
His body now rests on a hill in southern Missouri, in rich Ozark soil. He left behind an amazing legacy of service, both to this country and to our family.
For him and to all veterans, thank you.
