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One item of respect for Sara – she resigned, not as a stepping stone to higher office (Obama), not as a result of scandal (Dollar Bill Jefferson) – she resigned to quash the attacks on her family and her office. It was a tough but shrewd move on her part.

Obama’s supporters, critical of Palin, never mention he quit the State of Illinois – more like used its voters – to go off after a bigger payoff.
The hypocrisy of his supporters is epic and cynical.

Why I support and respect Sarah. by Mike Terrwilliger

First, there is no government closer to the people than at the municipal level. Palin spent eight years in city government, winning a seat on the Wasilla City Council in 1992 mostly thanks to her opposition to tax increases. She went on to serve two council terms from 1992 to 1996. She was elected mayor of the fast-growing Anchorage suburb in 1996 and again in 1999. Mayor Palin had a record of reducing property tax levels, increasing municipal services and attracting new industry to her town. During her tenure in Wassilla, she was elected chair of Alaska’s conference of mayors.

Next for Sarah Palin was service as chair of the Alaska Conservation Committee, a board which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry. In this appointive position she began to gain what would become extensive and valuable knowledge and experience in the area of one of America’s most pressing issues – energy. It was in this job where Palin first really demonstrated the toughness, political courage and maverick spirit that would years later so impress presidential candidate John McCain.

She resigned in January 2004 as head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission after complaining to the office of Governor Frank Murkowski and to state Attorney General Gregg Renkes about ethical violations by another commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, who was also Republican state chairman.

State law barred Palin from speaking out publicly about ethical violations and corruption. However, she was vindicated later in 2004 when Ruedrich, who’d been reconfirmed as state chairman, agreed to pay a $12,000 fine for breaking state ethics laws. She became a hero in the eyes of the public and the press, and the bane of Republican leaders.

In 2005, she continued to take on the Republican establishment by joining Eric Croft, a Democrat, in lodging an ethics complaint against Renkes, who was not only attorney general but also a long-time adviser and campaign manager for Murkowski. The governor reprimanded Renkes and said the case was closed. It wasn’t. Renkes resigned a few weeks later, and Palin was again hailed as a hero.

In 2006, Palin ran for governor and was elected in a landslide. According to Fred Barnes:

With her emphasis on ethics and openness in government, “it turned out Palin caught the temper of the times perfectly,” wrote Tom Kizzia of the Anchorage Daily News. She was also lucky. News broke of an FBI investigation of corruption by legislators between the primary and general elections. So far, three legislators have been indicted.

In the roughly three years since she quit as the state’s chief regulator of the oil industry, Palin has crushed the Republican hierarchy (virtually all male) and nearly every other foe or critic. Political analysts in Alaska refer to the “body count” of Palin’s rivals.

“The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,” says pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign. It includes Ruedrich, Renkes, Murkowski, gubernatorial contenders John Binkley and Andrew Halcro, the three big oil companies in Alaska, and a section of the Daily News called “Voice of the Times,” which was highly critical of Palin and is now defunct.

As governor, Sarah Palin’s list of accomplishments lengthened rapidly. She used her line-item veto to cut $268 million from Alaska’s state budget.

She stood up to some of Alaska’s most entrenched interests, including three big oil companies (BP, ConocoPhilips, and ExxonMobil) who hold the lease rights to much of Alaska’s oil and gas wealth:

Once in office, Palin took an aggressive stance toward the oil companies. Her nickname from high-school basketball, “Sarah Barracuda,” was resurrected in the press. Early in her term, she shocked oil lobbyists when she was so bold as to not show up when Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson came to Juneau to meet with her. Palin, after scrapping Murkowski’s deal, would not give Big Oil the terms they wanted, yet insisted that the companies still had an obligation under their lease to deliver gas to whatever pipeline Alaska built. She invited the oil companies to place open bids to build a pipeline, but they refused. A bid by TransCanada, North America’s largest pipeline builder, was approved by the legislature in August.

Palin also raised taxes on oil companies after Murkowski’s previous tax regime produced falling revenues in 2007, despite skyrocketing oil prices. Alaska now has some of the highest resource taxes in the world. Alaska’s oil tax revenues are expected to be about $10 billion in 2008, twice those of previous year. BP says about half its oil revenues now go to taxes, when royalty payments to the state are included. Recently, Palin approved gas tax relief for Alaskans, and paid every resident $1,200 to help ease their fuel-price burden.

Some other Palin accomplishments include supporting and signing an ethics bill passed by the Alaska legislature and creating the Alaska Health Strategies Planning Council to find innovative solutions to effectively provide access to, and help reduce the costs of, healthcare.

As governor, Palin is commander of her state’s National Guard. Not content to merely sit on the title, she traveled to Kuwait to learn about her troops’ mission there. On the return trip to Alaska, she stopped in Germany to to visit wounded soldiers in the hospital, an activity that Barack Obama did not see fit to engage in during his own overseas venture, blaming the Pentagon for his snubbing of the wounded.

More accomplishments: Gov. Palin signed a resolution in opposition to the FAA’s plan to increase taxes on aviation fuel, impose user fees and slash airport funding. Also, before Palin became governor, her predecessor Frank Murkowski had purchsed a Westwind Two business jet for the governor’s use at a $2.5 million price tag, despite the objections from the state legislature and the public. Her first order of business after taking office was to put the jet up for sale.

Palin did keep the governor’s state-owned Chevy Suburban, but she got rid of the driver, saying it was wasteful for the state to pay someone to drive her around, since she was perfectly capable of driving herself. The governor’s gourmet chef also got changed from a full-time to a seasonal-only basis because Palin considered it a luxury she didn’t think Alaskans should be paying for. Her political enemies called all this “superficial pandering.”

Alaska is the only one of America’s states which borders on two foreign countries. Sarah Palin is chief executive of our most important energy state, one which lies only a few miles from Russian territory. She has negotiated sensitive agreements on fishing rights and other matters to keep the peace up there. She’s also worked on important trade deals with other countries. She has received foreign heads of state and had discussions with them.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704431804574537882681089404.html#articleTabs%3Dcomments

Chad Groening – OneNewsNow – 11/16/2009

An Iowa congressman is questioning the timing of the sudden resignation of a controversial Obama administration official, whose husband has had close ties to ACORN and has recently been named President Obama’s White House counsel.

In serving as White House communications director, Anita Dunn had created a stir when she told school children earlier this year that Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse Tung was one of the people she admired the most. She also launched a public attack against the Fox News Channel for its reporting on the ACORN prostitution scandal.

Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) thinks it is curious that Dunn abruptly resigned from her White House post, just four days after Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell raided ACORN’s national office, seizing paper records and computer hard drives.

He says Dunn’s husband, Robert Bauer, has been a staunch defender of ACORN.

“During the McCain campaign in the fall of 2008, he wrote a letter to the Justice Department defending ACORN and recommending that they not investigate ACORN — [arguing] that ACORN’s alleged transgressions were simply a political product of Republicans,” says the Iowa lawmaker.

King believes Bauer’s letter was a contributing factor in convincing the Justice Department not to investigate ACORN. But he says with the Louisiana attorney general’s action, the administration appears to be in damage-control mode.

“Are they trying to cover up a trail? Are they severing ties? Is the investigation [of ACORN] in Louisiana…going to lead all the way up through Robert Bauer and perhaps his wife in the White House?” King wonders. “Because I believe the ACORN ties do go right to the White House in multiple ways.”

King believes that as the newly named White House counsel, Bauer will be in a position to help President Obama erase his ties to ACORN.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=767638

by Mike Whitney
November 16, 2009

Barack Obama is on his way to becoming a one-term president. According to Politico: “President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year’s State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning. The president’s plan, which the officials said was under discussion before this month’s Democratic election setbacks, represents both a practical and a political calculation by this White House.” (www.politico.com)

Er, now who exactly is telling Obama that raising taxes or cutting spending in the middle of a severe economic contraction is a good idea?

This clip from Politico tells us more about the people surrounding Obama, than it tells us about Obama himself. Clearly, his chief lieutenants are just as committed to savaging Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as their GOP counterparts. This is obvious by the way they’ve handled the fiscal stimulus. Where are the jobs programs, the boost to Green Technology, the massive infrastructure rebuild?

Nowhere. Because the industry-reps and bank lobbyists who fill out the Obama roster adhere to the same pro-business credo as the members of Team Bush, that is, that all public assets and resources should be strip-mined from their rightful owners and transferred to the robber barons at the top of the economic food-chain. There’s no way that Geithner, Summers and the rest of the Wall Street insiders would ever dream of rebuilding the public safety net they’ve been trying to destroy for the last decade or more. That’s not in their interests at all.

The administration’s announcement is tantamount to a stealth-attack on Social Security in the name of “fiscal responsibility”. It’s another public relations ploy intended to enrich the parasite class by stealing crusts of bread from penniless retirees. Surely, there must have been a quid pro quo between the two-year Illinois senator and his political backers about how they planned to deal with “entitlements problem”. In other words, Obama must have given the green light to the party bosses who wanted to purloin the last few farthings in the Social Security trust fund.

So, how will Obama’a attack on Social Security etc. effect the so-called “jobless recovery”?

For one thing, it makes a double-dip recession unavoidable. After all, (according to Goldman Sachs) last quarter’s surge in GDP to 3.5% was entirely a result of government stimulus. Take away the stimulus, and the economy slips right back into to recession. Is that what Obama wants, another stretch of negative growth, plunging economic activity, lower demand and higher unemployment? Why? To satisfy the GOP “deficit hawks”?

All the handwringing over deficits is just more gibberish from the same people who brought us the Iraq War. The deficits are about as big a problem as the fictional WMD, maybe less. Here’s a clip from an article by Marshall Auerback which sheds a bit of light on the deficit fiasco:
“Large deficits are not the problem….Let’s all take a deep breath here: Whilst the dollar index has fallen some 15% from the high sustained earlier this year, it is still above the lows sustained at the height of the credit crisis reached about a year ago. Secondly, there seems to be a fear that the current fall in the dollar could well engender inflation, and create a panicked response from policy makers where the Fed actually does raise rates and the Treasury begins to reduce government spending. Given high prevailing debt levels and the weak state of the consumer’s personal balance sheet, this would be an unmitigated disaster.

It is true that excessive government deficit spending can be inflationary, and could therefore cause some impact on exchange value of dollar. But this can’t be viewed in some sort of vacuum. The size of the deficit is irrelevant in itself. There is no meaning in the terms ‘large deficit’ or ’small deficit.’ You have to relate them to the extent of labor and capital underutilization, which is a human measure of the aggregate demand deficiency. The fact that labor underutilization is now in excess of 16 per cent in the US (combined unemployment, underemployment and hidden unemployment) and capacity utilization is in the 60-65 per cent range rather than 90 per cent range sends one very clear message – the deficit is not large enough.

So the correct policy response is to spend until we get to full employment. That is the only consequence of excessive deficits — insolvency is not possible. Your social security check will never bounce in a country issuing debt in its own freely floating non-convertible currency.” ( “The US Dollar – Don’t just do something, stand there!” Marshall Auerback, newdeal 2.0)

The best way to restore economic well-being is to increase the fiscal stimulus, expand the deficits and put the country back to work. There’s no chance of inflation until unemployment drops to roughly 5%, which could be a decade away. And don’t believe the doomsayers about the dollar either. It’s a bunch of malarkey. Check this out: “As I have shown in two recent papers, even very large currency depreciations in developed economies have no effect on inflation unless they are caused by policies that attempt to hold an economy’s unemployment rate below its equilibrium level. With US unemployment currently at 10 percent, there is no chance that inflation will rise in the near term. Whether inflation rises in the longer run will depend on whether US monetary and fiscal policy stimulus is withdrawn appropriately as the economy recovers (and tighter macroeconomic policies would tend to support the dollar).” (”Who’s Afraid of a Falling Dollar”, Joseph Gagnon, Baseline Scenario)

The dollar is dropping because the Fed is doing everything in its power to push it downwards. “It’s the policy, stupid.” A falling dollar increases exports and speeds up recovery. But once the Fed stops printing money via quantitative easing, (which is set for the end of 1st Q 2010) watch out. The dollar will rebound. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the Economist: “This dollar declinism is overblown. It exaggerates the scale of the slide and misunderstands its cause. Much of the recent weakness simply reverses the earlier safe-haven flight to dollars, a sign of investors’ optimism about riskier assets rather than their fears about America’s currency. On a trade-weighted basis the dollar today is close to where it was before Lehman failed. Yields on Treasuries have not risen and spreads on riskier dollar assets continue to shrink. If investors were growing leerier of dollars, the opposite should have occurred.” (”The Diminishing Dollar”, The Economist)

When the financial crisis broke out two years ago, investors around the world flocked to the dollar for safety. Now that the crisis has (somewhat) abated, those same investors are less risk-adverse, which means they are putting that money in other assets (stocks, bonds, commodities) Naturally, that is weakening the dollar, but it is not a sign of impending collapse. And while it is true that the greenback faces stiff headwinds in the long-term–due to the US’s deteriorating fiscal situation–the dollar is in no immediate danger of losing its position as the world’s reserve currency. That will take a decade or more. The growing fear about the dollar and the deficits is understandable given the amount of money that is being hurled at the financial system. But that shouldn’t dissuade reasonable people from doing what needs to be done. The dollar and the deficits are NOT the issue. The issue is jobs, jobs, jobs. Here’s an excerpt from an article by Henry Liu which sums it up perfectly: “An economy that has collapsed under the burden of excessive debt cannot recover until such debt has been extinguished. And debt can only be extinguished by wealth creation, not by creating more debt with easy credit. And wealth can only be created by employment and not by financial manipulation.” (Federal Reserve Power Unsupported by Credibility; part 1 “No Exit” Henry Liu)

Bingo. The Fed is bailing out unproductive speculators, while tossing the “creators of the nation’s wealth”, the workers, a few table scraps. That’s why we need a different policy which focuses on jobs programs, fiscal stimulus, and more deficit spending so households can rebuild their tattered balance sheets and the “engine of global growth” (the US middle class) can be re-energized. We don’t need more belt-tightening, as Obama seems to think. That is precisely the wrong approach.

Henry Liu again: “Thus we have financial profit inflation with price deflation in a shrinking economy. What we will have going forward is not Weimar Republic type price hyperinflation, but a financial profit inflation in which zombie financial institutions turning nominally profitable in a collapsing economy.”

Right again. The soaring stocks and commodities prices prove that central bank policies can create asset bubbles even during periods of severe deflation. (like now) Fed chair Ben Bernanke’s policies have had no material effect on households, consumers or workers. This is why credit contraction is in its 8th straight month and jobless claims continue to mushroom. Bernanke–a disciple of Milton Friedman–has taken the monetarist “trickle down” approach throughout, which is why stocks are surging even though the broader economy is still flat on its back. The Fed chief is doing what he’s always done, stimulate demand by creating more bubbles. Only this time it’s not working because liquidity is unable to flow through the clogged credit system. The administration needs to bypass the credit system altogether and provide direct relief via state aid, tax cuts and jobs programs to jump-start the economy and reduce the widening output gap. What’s needed is more stimulus and an aggressive reform agenda aimed at putting the country back to work. Here’s Paul Krugman:

“It’s truly amazing, and depressing, how completely deficit-phobia has swept the field in Washington. The economy remains in deeply dire straits….Yet the respectable thing, all of a sudden, is to claim that we can’t possibly afford to spend any more money on job creation.

History says differently…Other advanced countries have been substantially deeper in debt without either defaulting or having runaway inflation….

I’d be a little more forgiving of the nonsense if all the people screaming about the deficit were sincere. And some are. But many, if not most, are perfectly happy to incur huge unfunded liabilities for the wars they want to fight, and/or to eliminate inheritance taxes for the heirs of multimillionaires. It’s only deficits incurred to help working Americans that get them all moralistic.

The point is that the economy desperately needs more help — and yes, we can afford to provide it.” (”Fiscal Perspective” The conscience of a liberal, Paul Krugman, New York Times)

Yes, we can afford it. We just need to shrug off the deficit hawks and the dollar demagogues and provide the necessary resources to get the job done. It’s that simple.

Here’s more from Marshall Auerback: “The Administration … must free themselves from the discredited dogmas of neo-liberalism and channel the spirit of FDR’s bold experimentation. We need less deficit terrorism. Fiscal policy must be much more oriented to personal balance sheets, not bank balance sheets. We need to turn around the private sector and begin to produce more tax revenue, so that the large deficits would be short-lived. If we continue down the current path, we slow recovery and court large budget deficits for many years to come. Far better to spend now to create jobs and get the private sector growing again.(”New Agenda for America: How to Start Anew”, Marshall Auerback, newdeal 2.0)

Economists know what it will take to put the country back to work; debt relief, loan modifications, wage growth and full employment. But it will require a fundamental shift in ideology; a rejection of neoliberalism and a strong commitment to rebuild the middle class. Obama can either help in that process or follow the beggarly path to early retirement. So far, there’s no reason to be hopeful.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16108

Plutocracy vs Democracy
By Christopher Bollyn – American Free Press

Voting Machines vs Hand Counted Paper Ballots.

The widespread use of electronic voting machines has completely undermined the integrity of elections in the United States. Behind the Omaha-based company making most of the flawed voting machines is a small, and very secretive, group of men, which includes a well-known U.S. senator from Nebraska, who also happens to belong to part of the REAL “shadow government,” i.e. Bilderberg group.

Is it much of a surprise then that the unexpected “upset” U.S. senatorial election in which that U.S. senator [Charles T. Hagel] was elected in 1996, the voting machines that counted the votes that brought him to the U.S. Senate were made and operated by the company of which he had, until recently, been chairman [from 1988 until March 15, 1995].

Furthermore, isn’t it odd that Mr. Hagel did NOT disclose his relationship with that vote-counting company on his required documents and financial disclosures?

In 1997, that same company, American Information Systems (AIS), had been a “wholly-owned subsidiary of Omaha World Herald Company, a large company of which the newspaper is actually but a small part. They are much more involved in data accumulation and more profitable ventures than newsprint.

This company, AIS, seems to be guided by billionaire and millionaire conservatives of the “Christian Coalition” type, who have been politically active, and successful, in making the Republican Party into a extreme pro-Israel, Christian “fundamentalist” party – one that will do ANYTHING to win.

The recent mid-term elections have been described as “revolutionary” due to the unusual success of Republican candidates while a sitting president from the same party occupied the White House. However, the upset election results that heralded the Republican revolution have been accompanied by a largely ignored credibility gap because of the more significant and historic devolution in how Americans cast their votes.

As a result of the 2000 election fiasco in Florida, expensive electronic voting machines have replaced paper ballot voting systems in a growing number of jurisdictions across the United States. However, the electronic touch-screen voting and ballot-counting machines lack the transparency and credibility of hand-counted paper ballots. As Rick Fulle, in Chicago, head of technology for the Illinois Board of Elections told AFP about touch-screen voting machines, “Nobody knows what happens inside of those machines.”

Furthermore, troubling revelations about the people who own the companies that make these voting machines raise a host of serious questions about the condition of the democratic franchise in the United States – even whether it actually exists on a national level, or not.

The companies that design, build, and operate most of the voting machines currently being used in America, are privately held and extremely secretive. Before the 2000 elections, when this reporter [Bollyn] tried to learn who owned Omaha-based Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), the largest voting machine company in the United States, the information was simply not available. A visit to the ES&S office in Chicago [across the street from the Board of Elections] resulted in no answers from ES&S, but a number of men in suits escorting Bollyn to the door – Chicago style.

[Bollyn, writing for the court-killed SPOTLIGHT newspaper of Washington, D.C. received a thinly-veiled death threat for asking questions about who made the "control cards" which record the data and tell the vote-counting machine what to do.]

ES&S, whose motto is “Better elections every day” claims to have counted 100 million ballots in the 2000 election and 56 percent of the vote in the last four presidential elections. However, ES&S company officials repeatedly refused to discuss the [electronic] security of their voting machines or divulge who owns and directs the company.

Two independent writers, Bev Harris of Talion.com and journalist Lynn Landes of EcoTalk.org have investigated the voting machine companies operating in the United States and have discovered a number of political connections to the Republican Party and a well-known senator from Nebraska. These connections are too important to ignore.

THE OMAHA CONNECTION

All this happening while we are fighting over healthcare, where the 9/11 terrorists will be tried, Cap/Trade and the Beer Summit. People need to wake up and quit taking the freaking bait.

DTN DIRECTORY GROUPS ISSUES FUNDERS INDIVIDUALS MEDIA ACADEMIA POLITICS ARTS & CULTURE

GROUPS VIEW LIST OF ALL GROUPS

RESOURCES
SECRETARY OF STATE PROJECT (SOSP) Printer Friendly Page

Major Introductory Resource:

SOS in Minnesota
By Matthew Vadum
November 7, 2008

Additional Resources:

Al Franken — Democrat from Acorn
By Investor’s Business Daily
July 2, 2009

Secretary of State Watch
By Dan Pero
May 13, 2009

The Stealing the Election Project
By Fred Lucas
January 8, 2009

ACORN, Soros Linked to Franken Vote GrabBy David A. Patten
December 22, 2008

The Soros Connection in the Minnesota Senate Race Vote Count
By Ed Lasky
November 17, 2008

Questions Surround Role of Minnesota Secretary of State in Hotly Contested Senate Race
By FOXNews.com
November 14, 2008

Another ACORN Secretary of State in Minnesota Will Be Running the Coleman-Franken Recount
By Soren Dayton
November 7, 2008

Secretaries of State Give Dem Firewall
By Avi Zenilman
November 2, 2008
URL: Website

Project of the Democracy Alliance
Works to help Democrats get elected to the office of Secretary of State in selected swing, or battleground, states
Receives funding from Democracy Alliance members George Soros and Rob Stein

A project of the Democracy Alliance, the Secretary of State Project (SoSP) was established in July 2006 as an independent “527” organization devoted to helping Democrats get elected to the office of Secretary of State in selected swing, or battleground, states; these were states where the margin of victory in the 2004 presidential election (between George W. Bush and John Kerry) had been 120,000 votes or less.

The idea for SoSP germinated shortly after that 2004 election, when the group’s Democrat founders blamed Kerry’s defeat on then-Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, who had ruled that Ohio (where Bush won by a relatively slim 118,599-vote margin) would not count provisional ballots — even those submitted by properly registered voters — if they had been submitted at the wrong precinct. Though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ultimately upheld Blackwell’s decision, SoSP’s founders nonetheless received the ruling with the same bitterness they had felt regarding former Florida (Republican) Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s handling of the infamous ballot recount in 2000 (when Bush defeated Al Gore in the presidential election). Moreover, SoSP’s founders accused Blackwell and Republicans of conspiring to suppress Democratic voter turnout in Ohio. “We were tired of Republican manipulation of elections,” said SoSP co-founder Michael Kieschnick, who also serves as President of Working Assets. “It seemed like lots of decisions were made by people who were pretty clearly political operatives.”

To establish “election protection” against similar disappointments in subsequent political races, SoSP in 2006 targeted its funding efforts on the Secretary of State races in seven swing states — Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Colorado, and Michigan. Democrats emerged victorious in five of those seven elections — all except Colorado and Michigan. As USA Today reported at the time: “The political battle for control of the federal government has opened up a new front: the obscure but vital state offices that determine who votes and how those votes are counted.”

In a 2008, pre-Election Day article assessing SoSP’s overall strategy, Politico.com reported:

“In anticipation of a photo-finish presidential election, Democrats have built an administrative firewall designed to protect their electoral interests in five of the most important battleground states. The bulwark consists of control of secretary of state offices in five key states … With a Democrat now in charge of the[se] offices, which oversee and administer their state’s elections, the party is better positioned than in the previous elections to advance traditional Democratic interests —such as increasing voter registration and boosting turnout — rather than Republican priorities such as stamping out voter fraud. Perhaps more important, in those five states Democrats are now in a more advantageous position when it comes to the interpretation and administration of election law — a development that could benefit Barack Obama if any of those states are closely contested on Election Day.”

In addition to the aforementioned Michael Kieschnick, SoSP was co-founded by James Rucker (a former director of MoveOn.org Political Action and Moveon.org Civic Action) and Becky Bond (a young woman who today is affiliated with Working Assets, US PIRG, and the New Organizing Institute). Said Bond: “Any serious commitment to wrestling control of the country from the Republican Party must include removing their political operatives from deciding who can vote and whose votes will count.”

According to political analyst Matthew Vadum, SOSP’s founders and foot soldiers

“religiously believe that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 … and in Ohio in 2004…. The secretary of state candidates [whom] the group endorses sing the same familiar song about electoral integrity issues: Voter fraud is largely a myth, vote suppression is used widely by Republicans, cleansing the dead and fictional characters from voter rolls should be avoided until embarrassing media reports emerge, and anyone who demands that a voter produce photo identification before pulling the lever is a racist, democracy-hating Fascist.”

SoSP raised a total of $500,000 for the 2006 Secretary of State candidates whom it supported. Because few Americans realize the importance of the Secretary of State’s duties, races for that office tend to draw fewer (and smaller) donations than do the more prominent races. Consequently, even a modest injection of cash from a small handful of generous donors can make an enormous difference in the comparative financial resources of rival campaigns, and thereby tip the scales decidedly in favor of the better-funded candidate.

When Jennifer Brunner defeated incumbent Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio in 2006, twelve of the eighteen individuals who contributed the maximum $10,000 to Brunner’s campaign resided in states other than Ohio. (One of those donors, incidentally, was Teresa Heinz Kerry.) Said Brunner, “I received significant support from the SoS Project, which helped me toward the election.”

Brunner went on to make her influence felt in the 2008 election cycle, when she ruled that Ohio residents should be permitted, during the designated early-voting period extending from late September to early October, to register and vote on the very same day. Citing the potential for voter fraud under such an arrangement, Republicans objected. But on September 29 of that year — the day before early voting was scheduled to commence — the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed Brunner’s decision.

In a separate matter, Brunner sought to effectively invalidate a million absentee-ballot applications that Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign had issued. Each of those applications had been inadvertently printed with an extra, unnecessary checkbox, and Brunner maintained that if a registrant failed to check the box — even if he or she signed the form — the application could be rejected. On October 2, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned Brunner’s directive on grounds that it served “no vital purpose or public interest.”

Brunner’s most noteworthy claim to fame took place in October 2008, when she refused to provide county election boards approximately 200,000 voter-registration forms in which the name did not match the driver’s license or Social Security number.

Another 2006 beneficiary of SoSP support was Mark Ritchie, a former community organizer with close ties to ACORN, who defeated a two-term incumbent Republican in the race for Minnesota Secretary of State. Ritchie acknowledged his debt to SoSP when he said, “I want to thank the Secretary of State Project and its thousands of grass-roots donors for helping to push my campaign over the top.” Other contributors to Ritchie’s campaign included George Soros, Drummond Pike, Deborah Rappaport (wife of venture capitalist Andrew Rappaport), and Heather Booth.

Like Jennifer Brunner, Ritchie went on to play a significant role in a key state election two years later. In 2008 the conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority exhorted Ritchie to conduct “a thorough review and verification of all voter-registration records,” citing some 261,000 duplicative registrations and 63,000 voters listing invalid or nonexistent addresses. But Ritchie dismissed these pleas as efforts “to create a cloud over an election so people don’t accept the outcome.”

In Minnesota’s 2008 election for U.S. Senate, incumbent Senator Norm Coleman, a Republican, finished 725 votes ahead of Democrat challenger Al Franken. But Franken refused to concede, and the thin margin of victory triggered an automatic recount. With Mark Ritchie presiding over the recount process during the ensuing weeks, Coleman’s lead gradually dwindled due to a host of what journalist Matthew Vadum describes as a long series of “appalling irregularities” that almost invariably benefited Franken. A detailed account of these irregularities can be found here. By the time the recount (and a court challenge by Coleman) ended in April 2009, Franken held a 312-vote lead. On June 30, 2009, after the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously rejected a Coleman lawsuit, the Republican officially conceded and Franken was declared the victor.

In 2008, SOSP supported Democratic Secretary of State candidates in Missouri, Montana, Oregon and West Virginia; all four Democrats won. Again SoSP realized a high return on a relatively small financial investment. As of September, the group had raised $280,000 for the campaigns it was targeting — not a large sum by any means, but enough to have a profound effect on the lightly funded Secretary of State races.

Among the more notable contributors to SoSP are Democracy Alliance members George Soros, Rob Stein, Gail Furman, and Susie Tompkins Buell

Here is the comment time: Nov 15, 2009 9:54:31 PM

Maybe, Axelrod has some astroturfers at work, but that comment made me laugh and scratch my head. Tapper a conservative? A racist? Racial tone? The comment couldn’t be more off base, if the commenter had tried. Or, maybe MO is up late. Who knows, but there are some strange posters on the internet.