by TChris

Tom DeLay should be pleased that fellow scoundrel Karl Rove has been grabbing headlines lately, diverting attention from DeLay’s own woes. DeLay is back in the press, however, as the result of the Abramoff indictment that TalkLeft discussed here and a Federal Election Commission audit.

ARMPAC, Tom DeLay’s political action committee, unlawfully used more “soft money” to pay its 2001-02 administrative expenses than federal law allowed. The accounting shenanigans increased the amount of money the PAC had available to spend on Congressional races in 2002.

The FEC hasn’t decided yet whether to levy a fine against ARMPAC.

by TChris

Doug Hanks abandoned his race for a city council seat in Charlotte after a newspaper revealed that Hanks posted more than 4,000 comments to a white supremacist website over a three week period. Hanks, who had been seeking the Republican nomination, claims he was merely posing as a racist to research a novel he's writing. Hanks found inspiration for his novel in The Turner Diaries, "a racist novel by William Pierce that begins with a truck bombing of FBI headquarters as part of a war against the government."

Hanks says he isn't a white supremacist, but was trying to target the novel to white supremacists to improve sales. That subtle distinction is undermined by Hanks' other antics:

Normally, I don't quote Newt Gingrich as an authoriative source. But I'm making an exception this one time, for his comments on the results of the Schmidt-Hackett race in Ohio:

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) warned fellow Republicans yesterday not to ignore the implications of the party's narrow victory in Tuesday's special election in Ohio, saying the public mood heading into next year's midterm elections appears to helping Democrats and hurting Republicans.

"It should serve as a wake-up call to Republicans, and I certainly take it very seriously in analyzing how the public mood evidences itself," Gingrich said. "Who is willing to show up and vote is different than who answers a public opinion poll. Clearly, there's a pretty strong signal for Republicans thinking about 2006 that they need to do some very serious planning and not just assume that everything is going to be automatically okay."

Chris Bowers of My DD reports he's having trouble posting but all precincts are now accounted for in the Ohio House race between Republican Jean Schmidt who had been considered a shoo-in and Democrat and Iraq war vet Paul Hackett:

753 of 753. Schimdt 57,974--54,401 Hackett. Hackett will conceede. He will run again in 2006, and win. Its over--but not for long. Any other district in Ohio and he would have won. This has been a collosal victory for the netroots. It's tidal, if you ask me."

Swing State Project has been reporting live from the field for a week, and Daily Kos and Atrios have been all over this David vs. Goliath election.

Kudos to the netrooters and to Hackett for such a close result. Republicans should take heed....

by TChris

One of many reasons a felony conviction shouldn't disqualify a citizen from voting:

"Felony disenfranchisement laws are the last vestiges of Jim Crow," said Catherine Weiss, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, who is working on the issue. "They disenfranchise African Americans way out of proportion to their numbers in the population."

As of 2000, almost 5 million Americans couldn't vote because of laws that restrict those convicted of a felony from casting ballots -- in some cases even after their sentences and parole are complete, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that favors alternatives to prison. Four in 10 of those disenfranchised were black.

Racial disenfranchisement comes at a high cost to a democratic society.

"This marginalizes people," said Ronald Hampton, executive director of the National Black Police Association. "If they can't participate politically, they tend to care less and less about other things that go along with voting."

Fortunately, voters' rights advocates are making progress.

by TChris

Statements like this might cause a casual observer to wonder whether the vice president has lost touch with reality.

The vice president said in a recent interview that [Howard] Dean was not the type of person to lead a political party and mentioned the chairman's mother. "I've never been able to understand his appeal. Maybe his mother loved him, but I've never met anybody who does. He's never won anything, as best I can tell," Cheney said in an interview on Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes."

Never won anything?

Dean was elected governor of Vermont five times between 1992 and 2000.

Hollywood loves Hillary Clinton. Wednesday night she appeared at a few fundraisers in L.A. and took in $1 million. Sen. Harry Reid appeared with her.

From a $1,000-per-person soiree at the home of Warner Bros. chief Alan Horn to a late-night Young Hollywood shindig co-hosted by such performers as Christina Aguilera, Scarlett Johansson and Jake Gyllenhaal, organizers of the Wednesday night events had to turn away aspiring guests.

One dinner at the home of radio syndication billionaire Norm Pattiz was expected to bring in $450,000 for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, organizers said. Clinton appeared at the event with Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Thursday night, Hillary continued, with fundraisers in Sacramento and San Francisco.

Why isn't she with the country's other progressives at the Take Back America conference? Marc Cooper has a theory.

by TChris

Paper ballots that can be counted by an optical scanner are easy to use and they leave a verifiable paper trail that enhances voter confidence in the legitimacy of an election result. Miami-Dade County will become the first venue to replace controversial touch-screen machines with optical scanners if the county's election supervisor gets his way.

Elections supervisor Lester Sola said in a memo Friday that the county should switch to optical scanners that use paper ballots, based on declining voter confidence in the paperless touch-screen machines and quadrupled election day labor costs.

The county paid $24.5 million for the touch-screen machines, and would need to spend another ten or twelve million to replace them. The initial decision to buy the touch-screen machines is regrettable, but nothing is so important in a democracy as a fair election. Miami-Dade, like every other jurisdiction using machines that can't produce paper evidence that each vote was counted correctly, should spend the money to replace the machines. It's an investment in democracy.

by TChris

Have you ever wished you could be in two places at once? It's easy to do if you have a twin.

The leading candidate for mayor of San Antonio admitted on Thursday using his twin brother as a stand-in at a civic event without telling anyone it was not him.

Martha Reeves, lead singer for Martha and the Vandellas, has announced she's running for the Detroit City Council.

Reeves said the city is dealing with a number of serious problems including blight, abandoned buildings and a struggling public schools system....Reeves, 63, said she wasn't put off by the sometimes volatile nature of city council meetings.

"I think that our city council could probably get along better if they had a little music," she said. "And I'll get them to dance in the streets."

I bet she will. You go, Martha.

by TChris

Will Florida ever get it right?

A computer glitch caused Miami-Dade County's electronic voting machines to throw out hundreds of ballots in a special election March 8 and raised questions about votes in five other municipal elections, officials said. The problem came to light when officials noticed a high number of undervotes in the election on whether to have slot machines at tracks and jai alai frontons. That measure was defeated. Undervotes are ballots with no recorded votes.

by TChris

Fernando Ferrer, the current front-runner in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary, may have been going after the "law and order" vote when he made comments about the Amadou Diallo case that are difficult to justify. (Background on the Diallo case is here.) That strategy appears to have backfired as polls show a four point drop in voter support, including an eleven point drop among African American voters.

Ferrer, a vocal critic of NYPD policies during the Giuliani administration, startled black leaders by telling a police group on March 15 that there was an effort to "over-indict" the cops who shot and killed Diallo and that the shooting wasn't a crime.