Month: March 2010

The Republican National Committee’s $2,000 tab at Club Voyeur in Jon’s neighborhood last week was really small potatoes compared with the kind of dough Jim “Big Jim” Greer and his sidekick Delmar Johnson stole from the Republican Party of Florida during Greer’s term as chairman of the RPOF.

The Associated Press is reporting that a criminal investigation has been launched against Greer following an audit that found he awarded himself and his executive director a fundraising contract worth $200,000.

Greer owned a 60 percent share of a corporation set up to raise money for the GOP. Serving as Florida GOP executive director, Johnson owned the other 40 percent of the company, which also received a 10 percent commission on money raised for the party.

Current Florida GOP Chairman John Thrasher reported the audit’s findings to the attorney general’s office. The attorney general’s office sent the case to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for investigation. (Note to reader: Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum is running for governor. Oh, and he’s a Republican.)

Greer was a controversial GOP chairman, despite being hand-picked by Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Greer’s controversial term as chairman led to many complaints about lavish spending. Greer resigned under pressure in February 2010.

Greer was fond of quotes that mixed equal parts threat and promise. Here was his last quote we shared in an earlier post. It is classic Big Jim, from his resignation letter:

However, despite the great progress our Party has seen over the last three years, a small but vocal group within our Party has made it a point to destroy this progress and negatively impact our opportunity for victory in 2010. There has been, as you may be aware, an effort by this group to seek my removal for reasons that hold no justification. The facts and accuracy relating to this issue have become lost and irrelevant to these disruptive efforts and despite my own efforts, in addition to the efforts of others, to correct the record with the facts and truthfulness, these divisive individuals and their efforts continue without any concern for our Party’s future.

Oh Jim, we think it was you who had no concern over your party’s future, which is why when you quit the party had about $125,000 in its coffers and more than $400,000 in debt. Trouble is, Jim — and you knew this — audits are both factual and accurate, which is why you would never allow one during your tenure.

Maybe it’s because I live in a state where registered Democrats outpace Republicans by nearly 9 percent but is still characterized as a “red state,” that I have always rejected the red state/blue state nomenclature. Or maybe it’s because I have also long recognized that racism is not a place, and argued that the rest of the country lets itself off light by labeling racism as something that only happens down south. When announcements for black people to leave Wal-Mart are made in Washington Township, N.J., no one explains the incidents by saying that everyone in New Jersey — or even the entire Northeast region — is like that, as they do when racism is displayed in the Southeast. When Hillary Clinton presaged the Tea Party movement by making an appeal to “hard working white Americans” in Pennsylvania, no one moved the Keystone State — or Hillary herself — from the blue side over to the red.

For whatever reason, I am fascinated with the Tea Party movement. At last, thanks to Tea Baggers, who are found in every city and state in this great land (although I still doubt their totals), I feel like we can move beyond the inaccurate red state/blue state, racist area/nonracist area categories and embrace a more precise Us vs. Them label. We no longer have to struggle with “Trailer Park voters,” or “white trash,” or “ignorant rednecks” or even “residents of Glennbeckistan.” Now we can sum it all up in one tidy tag: Tea Baggers. Instantly, the picture of not so bright, chronically aggrieved, red-faced white people springs to mind. Screaming slogans that make no sense, waving signs with misspelled words, and threatening to shoot if only someone will give them the excuse, Tea Baggers prove that even though you live in San Francisco or Taos or Manhattan or the Research Triangle, you can still be eat up with hate and anger.

A new study published by FiveThirtyEight shows again that ideological divides are more complicated than geography. Despite U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s (R-Minn.) pleas to trash your Census form, people in “red states” are sending them in at or above “blue state” rates. Bachmann’s state, of course, is characterized as red despite the fact that it gave us Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun (who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade), Garrison Keillor, Sen. Al Franken, the Coen Brothers, and Vietnam War protester Father Philip Berrigan. The study shows the Dakotas leading the red states, at about 62 percent response each, while Alaska, which as of 2006, received 13,805 federal dollars for every man, woman, and child there, was last with only 41 percent responding to their Census mailing. And according the to the Census Bureau’s map, blue state California is tied with red state Alabama, both with only 48 percent participation.

If it has added nothing else to the public discourse, the Tea Party should get credit for proving that fear, racism, selfishness, and mean-spiritedness know no homeland.

Think
Progress:

On CNN’s Larry King Live last night, King interviewed two top tea baggers, Dana Loesch and Wayne Allyn Root. When asked about health-care reform, Loesch and Root criticized the new law as being “unprecedented” and “unconstitutional.” King made the point that Social Security is mandatory, and asked if tea baggers would “do away with” it,too. “I would, yes,” said Loesch. Root said he’d rather invest his retirement money.

KING: Would anyone turn away Social Security now? Would you do away with it?

LOESCH: I would, yes.

KING: You would?

LOESCH: Yes, absolutely.

KING: Would do you away with it, Wayne?

ROOT: I’d certainly like to. At best, I do away with it because I could find better ways to spend and save my own $15,000 a year.

A new poll by 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair found that 50 percent of respondents would support an openly gay person as the president of the United States, while 44 percent would oppose it. This was all in the context of the impending repeal of the U.S. military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.

Fifty-five percent to 40 percent would support a gay Supreme Court justice, and 56 percent would support a gay secretary of state, over 39 percent opposed.

A full 61 percent would support a gay commissioner of baseball to 32 percent opposed.

The most support was expressed for a gay Super Bowl quarterback — 62 percent to 29 percent.

Gallup: Most people assume that the health care reform law would mostly benefit Democrats, but new polling finds that among the uninsured, 31 percent are Democrats, 17 percent are GOPs and 48% are independents.

Gallup’s analysis:

Given this finding from Gallup Daily tracking in March, passing health-care legislation did not merely cater to the Democrats’ base, but could potentially expand it among the uninsured themselves, who may now have more reason to support Democrats. Gallup polling immediately after the health care vote found 58 percent of uninsured Americans, compared with 45 percent of insured Americans, favoring the bill.