Does The DCCC Have Its Own Troll Farm?

So who is Patrick Karlsson? No really... who is he (or who are they)? If he were a person, he would be a superman who doesn't need any sleep and who would "automatically" tweet as soon as someone would say anything positive about Laura Moser (like "Patrick Karlsson"-- not a Swede-- does). About 3 or 4 days before the primary, he popped up and went on the warpath against Moser. A pseudonym for Ben Ray Lujan or Nancy Pelosi? Nah. Jason Bresler? That sounds possible.

I never heard of him until today when I was told he's part of what looks like a concerted effort to continue the DCCC's shocking smear of Laura, one of the 2 Democrats-- the progressive one-- who made it into the TX-07 runoff. When I looked him up to read his tweets myself, this popped up on my screen:

So I had a friend look him up and BOOM! No problem at all finding tweets like this by the troll:

So I guess I'm blocked... by an account I never heard of and that doesn't appear to belong to an actual person. Wouldn't that be just like the DCCC (or EMILY's List)? I guess no one at the DCCC cares that Bernie said he's "especially distressed that the DCCC tried to do negative attacks against a very respectable and intelligent candidate who is running a serious campaign. That’s just not acceptable. I suspect that it backfired on them, and I hope they don’t do it again." They keep going with the negativity-- except not on their own website this time. They're trying to destroy Laura's character, using really vile tactics right out of the Lee Atwater/Karl Rover playbook-- going right for her strengths and turning them into weaknesses. Laura is the progressive in this race, running against an anti-union corporate Dem, EMILY's List shill Elizabeth Pannill Fletcher. So the DCCC trolls are painting her as a racist, tearing her down and tearing her down in the ugliest possible ways. [Don't quote me on this but I think her husband is a person of color.]

Someone told me about another possible DCCC troll, an account called Paradigm Shift Suki (@freeandclear1). I had never heard of it and went to check it when I was told the account was the source of endless smears against Laura. When I did, this was the message:

You are blocked from following @freeandclear1 and viewing @freeandclear1's Tweets. Learn more.

The DCCC and EMILY's List are setting the table in such a way that will absolutely guarantee one winner in November, John Culberson-- and what's most tragic about all this is that THEY KNOW IT AND DON'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS. They would much rather have a conservative Republican in Congress than a progressive.

The DCCC is the worst den of iniquity in Washington. As Bernie said over the weekend in Texas. "I detest that type of politics and I think most Americans do... That is to my mind, absolutely unacceptable. And it’s got to end." But it won't stop, not while unaccountable, corrupt DC characters like Pelosi, Hoyer and Crowley control the party. Please consider helping to teach the DCCC a lesson they badly-- oh so badly-- need to learn by contributing to Laura's campaign at the Take Back Texas ActBlue thermometer on the left.

Racism-- Still A Pillar Of The Republican party

Ted Cruz's father might not be as much as a racist neanderthal as he comes off. I mean, some people think he just acts that way to make his son seem relatively less racist and neanderthal. Or, if that doesn't work… well, people look at the old man and say, "poor, Ted; no wonder he turned out that way. When right-wings-- father or son start talking about "the average black," you know you're in for some stomach churning.

The hate-filled preacher Rafael spoke at Western Wilco-- the Western Williamson County Republican Club in Cedar Park, an almost all white, almost all-Republican suburb of Austin. The medium household income is $67,527, considerably higher than the state average of $49,393.

During the speech, Cruz spoke at length about a recent conversation he said he had with a black pastor in Bakersfield, California.

“I said, as a matter of fact, ‘Did you know that Civil Rights legislation was passed by Republicans? It was passed by a Republican Senate under the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats,’” Cruz said. “‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then I said, ‘Did you know that every member of the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats from the South?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know that.’ You know, they need to be educated.”

Cruz cited a book Please Stop Helping Us by Jason Riley, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

“I am going to try to encourage everybody I can to buy a book written by a black journalist. His name is Jason Riley. He wrote a book called Please Stop Helping Us, talking about how all the handouts to blacks have kept blacks in the poorhouse. And I’ll tell you what, I am going to make it my task to buy 15 to 20 copies of that book and hand it out to some black leaders to read.”

“Jason Riley said in an interview, Did you know before we had minimum wage laws black unemployment and white unemployment were the same? If we increase the minimum wage, black unemployment will skyrocket. See, he understands it, but the average black does not.”

The elder Cruz added “every ethnic group” wants “the ability to succeed,” saying Democrats “sell this guaranteed utopia” that is “guaranteed mediocrity.”

“What we need to sell is the American dream,” Cruz said.

He pissed off Digby, who agreed that someone needed to be educated alright-- but not African-Americans. She dug up this video from another Texan, one who really did pass Civil Rights legislation… and not a Republican:

This truly is the stupidest right wing trope out there, and that's saying something. This silly thing ran over the week-end on the same subject. I don't know if they're idiots or think everyone else is an idiot but the idea that black people don't understand that the parties switched places-- due to civil rights!-- in the 1960's and 1970's is mind-boggling.

Here's a little friendly reminder of how the pre-eminent Republican strategist of the Reagan years explained the Southern Strategy and the evolution of the GOP on these issues:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”-- that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”



…By the way, Republican avatar Ronald Reagan opposed every major piece of civil rights legislation adopted by Congress, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But he was cheery about it.

I know this is overkill. It's obvious to any sentient being that the racist Southerners who had been Democrats out of tradition stemming from the Civil War were disillusioned and adrift once the leadership of the Democratic Party endorsed civil rights for African Americans. And anyone with a 6th grade education knows that the Republicans then took advantage of that opening and grabbed on to that racist faction with both hands. Maybe Ted Cruz's daddy really doesn't know that. Somebody should tell him. He sounds like a fool.

He sounds like a less slick version of his son.

Did McCranky lie last night? But of course! Hey, it's what Young Johnny does -- and he knows it

by Ken

As I've made clear, I didn't watch the debate. As I also expected, I've also been unable to avoid the "highlights."

And I realized that one major reason I can't watch a McCranky "debate" is the fondness for what Keith Olbermann the other night referred to as his "phony umbrage," the manufactured hysteria he goes into when he has no substantive issue and instead pretends that his deep-rooted personal honor has been outraged -- as if the useless sack of poop still has any vestige of honor.

He does it whenever he lies about Senator Obama's foreign policy or tax plans, for example, or when he pretends that he has tried to be some kind of "reformer" on financial issues. And as I watched those clips, I thought of the point I made in my post last night about the film Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story:

Now it wasn't news to me that politicians lie. What was news is that everybody involved on the inside of the electoral game understands that people lie all the time. It's so normal that it's taken for granted. Only we poor schlubs on the receiving end of the TV feed aren't in on the game.

Last night, for example, there was that moment of bad dinner theater when the Crankyman went into a whopper frenzy special even for him, blithering about ACORN attempting to perpetrate the greatest threat to democracy in history.

The simple, undisputed fact is that not one single "fraudulent" vote can or will be cast as a result of ACORN's voter-registration efforts. Even a second's actual thought -- which is to say a second more than Senator McCranky has devoted to any issue in this campaign -- will tell you that if "Mickey Mouse" or "Tony Romo" fills out a fake registration card, in order to pad the registration gatherer's daily output and thereby increase his/her meager pay, there is absolutely zero chance that "Mickey Mouse" or "Tony Romo" is going to show up at the polling place attempting to vote.

THE ACORN RED HERRING

ACORN in fact has taken the lead in identifying of problematic registration cards it gathers. By law it has to submit all registration cards gathered; it isn't allowed to make judgments of validity, which the law apparently prefers to leave to duly authorized election officials. And there are documented cases, as in Nevada, of officials simply discarding the cover sheets in which ACORN officials called attention to problems.

Ironically, in fact, ACORN is being punished for its own vigilance. The organization itself has a practice of calling attention to problem registrations in its cover submissions. The reality is that the level of problem registrations is on the low side for paid signature-gathering -- lower, say, than is customary with Republican petitions to get their patented democracy-diminishing propositions on the ballot in California.

The truth is that ACORN is doing extraordinarily important work, attempting to register eligible voters whom guardians of the rich like the Crankyman would rather not see vote -- notably poor ones, and especially racially "different" ones. Let the states or the federal government undertake the job of registering all eligible voters, and ACORN can devote its energies to other matters.

Now this is important, so let me say it again: Not one single "fraudulent" vote can or will be cast as a result of the defective ACORN registrations. Registration fraud is a totally separate issue from vote fraud, and the kind of registration fraud we're talking about here, which has to do only with padding the rolls, simply cannot translate to vote fraud, because there is never any intent to have the bogus registrants vote.

The entire issue is designed (a) to manufacture a conversation diversion and, perhaps more important, (b) to cover the all-too-real and all-too-massive programs of vote suppression and stealing in which the Republicans have engaged in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Apparently we can look forward to even worse actual election-rigging to even more of the same this time around, and will have to hope that the higher level of awareness will provide some protection.

The only reason I've gone into this matter is to bring my Lee Atwater lesson into the discussion,

Of course McCranky knew he was lying. Of course McCranky knew he was lying. Of course McCranky knew he was lying.

He wasn't misspeaking or misguided. He was, as I put it in my head to last night's post. lying his fool head off. And he did it, does it, because, as I suggested last night, he thinks voters are morons.

You see how long it takes to set out even this very simple version of the reality of ACORN's voter-registration work. The lie is much simpler than the truth and, alas, is thought by the liar to be readily received by his/her target voter.

Just make no mistake. Consider the new whopper in Young Johnny's repertory, his claim that he has repeatedly rebuked McCranky-crowd members who say inappropriate things. In fact, as far as anyone knows, he has done this exactly once, clearly in response to weeks of rising demands that he ferchrissakes do something about the rising tide of violent rhetoric among his audiences -- a direct result, of course, of the mood of hatred he and his running mate the Danger Moose have been fomenting.

Once. And that was only in response to rising levels of national outrage. I don't believe for a second that Young Johnny really believes otherwise. He just thinks there's no price to be paid for lying. Is he right?


CONFIDENTIAL TO WINGNUT LURKERS AND TROLLS

You do realize that Young Johnny thinks you're dumber than doody, don't you? Of course, it probably doesn't bother you, since you're used to being led by the nose by frauds and phonies and outright crackpots who, for their own personal reasons, lie to you and then feed the delusions they've planted, on the assumption that you're so stupid, you'll never catch on.

You're led by people who either are nuts themselves (and really aren't in touch with reality) or else hold you in utter contempt, ridicule, and loathing, and consider you perfect tools for achieving their nefarious goals.

You do know that, don't you?


WHAT DID YOU THINK ABOUT THE DEBATE?
(NOTE: YOU'LL FIND HOWIE'S TAKE IN THE COMMENTS)

As you may have gathered, Howie is traveling today, and so isn't positioned to offer his perspective on the debate. [Oops, not so! Check it out in the comments section. -- K] Feel free to share yours in the comments.


SPEAKING OF THE DEBATE, ARIANNA HUFFINGTON'S
GOT A GREAT POST UP:

"McCain's Losing Strategy: Double Down on the Anger"

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I didn't see the debate, but I'll bet Young Johnny McCranky lied his fool head off. Lee Atwater would have understood, and applauded

Outside the Hofstra University student center students championed their favorites Wednesday. Tonight's debate is said to have cost the school in the neighborhood of $3.5 million.

by Ken

I'm not going to kid you. I didn't watch the debate. (It is over, isn't it?) I may watch Keith Olbermann's post-debate wrap-up on MSNBC, or then again, I may not. The problem is, it's going to be all about, you know, the debate

As I've said a number of times, basically I don't watch debates. You know as well as I do that you hardly ever learn anything about what the candidates would actually do if they're elected. What you learn is mostly how well coached they were, and perhaps how coachable. What's more, ind in the end it never matters what I think. It only matters what some mass of people out there -- usually known as the "middle" or the "undecideds" -- take away, and that may or may not have much to do with what really happened.

And of course I will inescapably see, many times over, the "highlights" of the debate, the things I'm supposed to need to have seen.

It makes me if anything less interested in this debate, coming as it does mere days after I followed through on my announced intent and saw the documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.

I don't want to write about the film in detail without the benefit of a transcript or a DVD or a second viewing. But a couple of things popped out at me. First was the reminder of how young the "boogie man" was. His ambition was limitless, as was his willingness to do absolutely anything to win an election.

We are reminded of this forcefully by Ed Rollins, who managed Ronald Reagan's presidential reelection campaign in 1984 and afterward took the audacious step of hiring Atwater, with his bare minimum of experience, as his deputy. Rollins tells us that people warned him seriously not to hire Atwater, that he couldn't be trusted, and sure enough, Atwater almost immediately repaid the man who gave him this extraordinary opportunity by attempting to ruin him. Rollins provides a vivid description of their ensuing conversation, in which he informed the young man that if he ever did anything like that again, he would kill him. There is a strong suggestion that Rollins wasn't speaking metaphorically.

(Footnote: During the second Reagan term, Rollins says, Atwater used his office to ingratiate himself with Vice President Bush and his people and to bad-mouth Rollins, thus ensuring that Bush wouldn't turn to Rollins to manage his presidential run, turning instead to -- imagine that! -- Lee Atwater.)

I've also had to replace my image of Atwater as a master strategist with one as a master innovator. Give him a set of circumstances, and he could come up with a stratagem that probably nobody else would have thought of -- or would have had the gall to actually do. Polls, apparently, were an Atwater specialty. Somebody in the film points out that if Lee needed a poll, he would just go in the next room, and half an hour later he had the poll he needed.

Related to this is the point I wanted to get to: the casual acceptance of lying in campaigns. As several commenters in the film point out, there is really only one standard in campaigns: winning. And the stakes don't get any higher than the presidential level, where Atwater found himself competing at such a remarkable age. But when it looked like he had blown the 1988 Bush campaign, he was on his way to becoming a pariah. We're told that GHWB was perilously close to firing him.

It's not surprising to learn that the patrician Bushes didn't take to a loudmouth cracker like Atwater. But they were happy to let him do their dirty work, as along as it showed signs of winning for them.

GHWB himself certainly understood the etiquette of public lying. We see longtime White House correspondent Sam Donaldson watching videotape of Bush browbeating Dan Rather, who's attempting to get actual answers to interview questions and is punked by Bush. Donaldson laughingly makes clear that Bush was just plain lying his head off. But, he says, you just can't say that when it comes to presidential politics.

My first reaction was, why not? But I think I'm beginning to understand. Once you point out that so-and-so is lying, so-and-so is forced to come back at you with a bigger and better arsenal of destructive weapons.

Now it wasn't news to me that politicians lie. What was news is that everybody involved on the inside of the electoral game understands that people lie all the time. It's so normal that it's taken for granted. Only we poor schlubs on the receiving end of the TV feed aren't in on the game, and are left parsing each statement, as if the candidate meant it to be taken seriously rather than to create some sort of emotional effect.

Very likely the ease of lying has been undermined somewhat by the present-day existence of such extensive and readily searchable political archives -- in a matter of seconds any nerd sitting in his living room or den can call up not just accounts but actual video of candidate X -- let's call him Young Johnny McCranky -- contradicting everything he just said. In fact, as Rachel Maddow among others has pointed out, this is an odd and hard-to-explain feature of the McCranky campaign. Maybe it's because of his famous unfamiliarity with modern technology like "the Google," but he still doesn't seem to understand how accessible the historical record is now.

Now I don't believe that all political candidates lie, or that even the ones who do all lie to the same degree. On the one hand, while I'm sure there have been misstatements of fact out of the Obama campaign, I do believe that the campaign managers and strategists have accepted an obligation to truth as the standard against which their claims are to be measured.

Whereas, as I've noted more than once, I've not only never seen but never imagined a spectacle like the McCranky campaign, in which every word, inflection, and indeed blink of the eye has to be assumed to be wholly unrelated to truth.

I guess now I understand better. There is an assumption inside campaigns that voters are morons, and clearly Senator McCranky thinks the people who might vote for him are barely even that. Is it possible that McCranky-Palin sympathizers don't realize that their guy thinks they're dumber than doody?
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HOW REPUBLICANS WIN ELECTIONS

Republicans are obsessed that unionized workers or colored people or college students are going to vote twice. Or worse yet, that twenty million Mexicans are going to sneak over the border and vote on the first Tuesday in November... any November. They are hysterical about it. And the same folks who have convinced them that Christmas and Easter and their guns are under siege have brainwashed them into thinking the damn libruls are stealing the elections. In their minds that makes it ok to... steal the elections.

Allen Raymond has a book out, How to Rig An Election, Confessions of a Republican Operative, and he ought to know. He spent some time in prison for doing just that. Author Raymond was one of several Republicans who took the fall for the GOP theft of the 2002 New Hampshire senate election-- which threw Bush control of the Senate-- and gave right-winger John Sununu an undeserved victory. Today AlterNet published an interview with Raymond-- who was angry because Mehlman and the RNC asked his firm to jam Democratic phone lines, but would not defend him in court after Democrats fought back and pressed court charges. Raymond went to jail. Mehlman, Rove and Sununu still haven't.

ALTERNET: The title of your book is How to Rig an Election. Can elections be rigged?

RAYMOND:: Sure. We're not talking about what people often think about, like ballot box stuffing. Certainly, that stuff goes on here and there. What we are really talking about in the book is how messages are created and delivered to the voting public, in a way that orchestrates and manipulates response. It's all about feeling an emotion; it's not about raw issues and logic.

In the book I give a lot of examples of rigging elections by, put it this way, guys like me-- I used to be a campaign manager. Once you are all said and done and deliver a message, two plus two equals whatever I want it to equal. The facts and sometimes even contorting the facts to lead voters to conclusions that may not necessarily, if you step back, make any sense-- but, in context, make all the sense in the world.

There's that aspect of it. Then there's just the more raw aspect of it, which leads up to the culmination of the book, which is the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal.

Raymond thinks Republicans are about to pick McCain because it's "his turn. That's in the Republican DNA. You pick the guy whose turn it is. I think that's more of the dynamic going on." Alternet asked him what tactics he expects to see in the primary and the general out of the GOP. "In both, you see tactics that seek to tap into latent bigotry and racism. That's just part of the equation. And it's a horrible thing to say. But it's better to be candid and transparent to understand what is going on than ignore the elephant in the room. For instance, let's go back to 2000 and the South Carolina attack on Sen. McCain and his daughter, which was totally abhorrent, but that was meant to tap into a racist thread or strain in a segment in that electorate. It's going on again in South Carolina, this time targeted at Gov. Romney and his faith and tying that to polygamy. So that's bigotry."

Back to the GOP strategy of election theft, Alternet, of course, wanted to know how high up the chain of command it went. "Is everything tied to Karl Rove?" they asked.

RAYMOND: There is a difference between the line responsibility and the overall responsibility. So, a Karl Rove is going to be responsible for the overall strategic and tactical thinking. But when you get down in the trenches, there's line responsibility. And so most decisions don't go any higher than, say, the political director at the Republican National Committee.

But in my case, having worked there in those jobs, I knew two things, which was-- the first being, and I say that in the book, this (phone-jamming) was an unusual request. It prompted me to seek out an attorney. But what that tells me is such things don't see the light of day unless they have been vetted, particularly by someone who has worked at the RNC for as long as my co-conspirator had.

The GOP primary in South Carolina is a perfect way to observe American politics at it's very worst-- the way it was shaped by scumbags and soul-dead criminals like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

In the last week before its Jan. 19 primary, the Palmetto State is awash in stealth e-mail attacks, fake polling calls and other dirty tricks reminiscent of the scurrilous rumors that scuttled John McCain's candidacy in 2000.

The dubious tradition stretches back to native son Lee Atwater, the Republican operative who invented many of the modern techniques of negative campaigning, including the 1988 ad that linked Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis to the parole of murderer Willie Horton and contributed to the victory of President George H.W. Bush that year.

"Many understudies of Lee Atwater are still in this state, in the political-consulting business,'' said Blease Graham, a scholar of Southern politics at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Among Republicans, the shenanigans this year include automated telephone pseudo-surveys trashing former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson's stance on abortion, mailings claiming Arizona Senator McCain turned his back on fellow prisoners of war in Vietnam and a phony Christmas card from former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney extolling polygamy.

...Some practitioners of the dark political arts defend these tactics. In 2004, Warren Tompkins, a veteran South Carolina political strategist who worked the Bush campaign in 2000, was asked why operatives spread false rumors about McCain in that race. ``It worked, didn't it?'' said Tompkins, who now works for Romney.