Day: October 1, 2007

Giuliani Backer Behind Failed Scheme to Give 19 of California’s Electoral College Votes to 2008 GOP Nominee

Jon Ponder

Two big stories broke over the weekend about the Republican scheme to change California’s winner-take-all primary to a proportional system that would give nearly half the state’s 55 Electoral College votes to the GOP in next year’s presidential election.

If the initiative had passed, it could well have resulted in handing Giuliani the presidency in a close election.

First came word that the campaign to put an initiative on the June ballot had failed and was closing shop. Then we learned that campaign’s once-secret major donor was a key back of Rudolph Giuliani, the GOP frontrunner and, not incidentally, the person most likely to have benefited if the initiative had passed.

Pundits have all but ceded the California primary to Giuliani because he is the most liberal GOP candidate. But it is considered highly unlikely he or any Republican could win the state in the general election.

The stakes were actually quite huge. Under the proposed change, if the GOP candidate were to win all the California districts his party won in 2006, even though he lost the state overall, he’d still have 19 additional Electoral College votes — roughly the total votes held by Ohio.

In the story Saturday that broke the news of the initiative’s failure, note the reference to the lack of disclosure of the identity of a donor:

Unable to raise sufficient money and angered over a lack of disclosure by its one large donor, veteran political law attorney Thomas Hiltachk, who drafted the measure, said he was resigning from the committee … Campaign spokesman Kevin Eckery said he was ending his role as well … [Backers] said Thursday that they believed the measure was all but dead, at least for the 2008 election.

In the second story, we learn the donor’s name and that he has close ties to Giuliani:

A close friend and major fundraiser of… Giuliani has identified himself as the mystery financier of the proposed California initiative to apportion the state’s 55 electoral votes by congressional district instead of winner-take-all.

He is New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. He said he provided the $175,000 to initially finance the petition drive to get the measure on the June 2008 ballot …

Singer oversees Elliott Associates, an $8 billion investment fund. He is also chairman of Giuliani’s northeast fundraising operation that produced a third of the New Yorker’s $33.5 million campaign war chest in the first six months of 2007. Singer and his employees have donated at least $182,000 to the Giuliani campaign so far this year.

“I made the contribution without any restrictions,” Singer’s statement said. Some Democrats have threatened legal action, complaining that federal campaign finance laws were violated if the Giuliani campaign was involved.

The Giuliani campaign denied having any role in the campaign:

A Giuliani campaign spokeswoman, Maria Comella, said today that Singer’s donation “was completely independent from our campaign.”

But this strains credulity because, if the initiative had passed, it could well have resulted in handing Giuliani the presidency in a close election next November.

Why We Can’t Ignore the Termites in the Basement

Trish

How can governments, including ours, say it would hurt their economies to fix climate change? Don’t they realize, as Al Gore pointed out in the scene in An Inconvenient Truth with the gold bricks, that losing life as we know it not only costs more but trumps, well, everything?

PAX World Mutual Funds’ Julie Gorte, senior vice president of sustainable investing, explains the attitudes of those who think we have the luxury to ignore, or postpone dealing with, global warming.

The termites will destroy your house much more quickly and much more surely than some of those wolf-at-the-door problems, but you always have the feeling that you can get to them later

I sort of divide all problems into two types. There’s a wolf-at-the-door problem, which is how we think about things like terrorism and taxes, and then there’s the termites-in-the-basement problem, which is what climate change is. The termites will destroy your house much more quickly and much more surely than some of those wolf-at-the-door problems, but you always have the feeling that you can get to them later — that we can cut our energy consumption, that we can replace fossil fuels, that we can cut emissions next year or the year after that, when we can afford it.

And we end up never getting to those problems, and then we wind up in a world where the sea level rises not 35 millimeters but 35 feet, and the disease vectors have expanded so that tropical diseases are all over North America and they affect our food supply and everything else. There are so many things that climate change can do that will make this world something we never thought we’d see in our lifetimes that I think it’s the most important thing that we need to focus on.

Now It’s Official: FlaDem Chair Thurman Really Is Working for Lobbyist Cardenas Who Works on Romney Campaign

Buck Banks

In what is being called a “bipartisan” effort, Florida Democratic Party Chair Karen Thurman is now officially working for Republican lobbyist Al Cardenas, who advises Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to the Miami-Dade County Commission. The strange bedfellowship was first reported by the Miami Herald in July, and while some in the Democratic Party questioned the head of the state party organization lobbying with a Republican operative to the tune of $3,500 per month while receiving $100,000 per annum from the FDP.

It sure is strange to read a letter from Cardenas, a top advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, praising the woman determined to turn Florida from red to blue in 2008.

A couple of months down the road and a real crisis in the Florida Democratic Party, and the relationship still just doesn’t seem right.

It’s interesting to note that none of the articles on the topic of Thurman’s unholy alliance with Cardenas mentions exactly what she’s supposed to be lobbying for.

… it sure is strange to read a letter from Cardenas, a top advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, praising the woman determined to turn Florida from red to blue in 2008.

”During her time in Congress, Karen worked tirelessly on issues related to healthcare, taxes and the economy,” the letter says. It also notes her “ability to work productively with members of both parties.”

And Cardenas is nothing if not a staunch Republican. Here’s an excerpt from an article in South Florida CEO from 2003, after he stepped down as state Republican chair:

Background: Cardenas’ name has been synonymous with GOP power for decades, including a stint on President-Elect Ronald Reagan’s transition team. Now, with Florida’s governor, cabinet and two-thirds of the state legislature — plus two-thirds of Florida’s federal legislators — all Republicans, says Cardenas, “It’s more of a mission-accomplished feeling in deciding to move on to the next challenge.”

Ambition: Cardenas is now building a high-end government relations practice in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., with a focus on “up-tier” clients. He is busy hiring top-drawer attorneys to create that type of practice for the firm.

My theory — and I’m sticking to it — is that the commission is trying to shake loose big fed money to pay for a $1 billion tunnel project between the Port of Miami and the mainland. The City of Miami Commission has so far resisted voting on ponying up $50 million for the project. Only last Thursday a looming Sept. 30 deadline to have funding in place was extended indefinitely, to allow the commissioners who are up for re-election in November to defer the vote until after the election.

The state of Florida is kicking in more than $400 million, but that still leaves a gap in the overall $914 million price tag. Enter Cardenas and Thurman, who will be going after federal transportation grants and homeland security grants for the Port of Miami on behalf of the Miami-Dade County Commission. At least that’s what I’m betting.

I’ll leave the questions about whether Thurman helped kill the Florida Democratic Party for the 2008 presidential election to the conspiracy theorists.

At Secret Meeting, Christian Nationalists Threaten to Leave GOP If Giuliani Is Nominee

Jon Ponder

More signs that Christian extremists are awakening to the fact that their nearly 30-year marriage to the mainstream Republican Party has been a sham from the start:

Republicans brought Christian nationalists into the fold in the wake of Watergate when it became clear that their rapidly dwindling coalition of country club-types, gun nuts and isolationist-paranoiacs was not large enough to win against Democrats.

According to anonymous sources present at a clandestine breakaway session held alongside the secret thrice-annual meeting of the extreme rightwing Council for National Policy, a handful of America’s top Christian nationalists signed onto a resolution that threatens to leave the GOP and run their own candidate if Republicans select Rudolph Giuliani as their party’s nominee next year.

Among those at the double-secret meeting were heads of two wealthiest organizations in the homophobia industry, James Dobson of Focus on the Family — with total revenues in 2006 of $142,279,843 — and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, which had revenue in 2006 of $10,858,374. Also in attendance was Richard Viguerie, the conservative guru of direct-mail marketing, a cutting-edge political communications tool of the 1980s.

The breakaway session resulted in a written resolution stating that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third party candidate.”

According to Sourcewatch, the CNP is a “secretive forum that was formed in 1981 by Tim LaHaye” — a one-time John Birch Society member who is the multi-millionaire author of the theocratic fantasy “Left Behind” book series. Sourcewatch says CNP is “a networking tool for leading US conservative political leaders.” Mark Crispin Miller, author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” is also cited, describing the CNP as a “highly secretive … theocratic organization — what they want is basically religious rule.” Another source says the CNP is a meant to counter the Council on Foreign Relations.

Republicans brought Christian nationalists into the fold in the wake of Watergate when it became clear that their rapidly dwindling coalition of country club-types, tax-haters, gun nuts and isolationist-paranoiacs was not large enough to win against Democrats.

For the first two decades, Republican leaders who were not particularly religious, including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Newt Gingrich, paid lip service to the theocrats in order to keep them in line. It is ironic, however, that the fissure between the GOP and its religious extremists base has erupted during the presidency of George H. Bush, who claims to be an evangelical Christian.

If Christian nationalists do abandon the Republican Party, the numbers could look a bit grimmer for the GOP next year. Among the 31 percent of voters who describe themselves as Republicans, fewer than one-third say they are evangelicals. If the evangelicals move their support to a third-party candidate, the GOP nominee would be forced to try to court back an additional 10 percent of conservative independent voters, many of whom left the GOP during the Bush term because of the party’s profligate spending and a series of back-to-back scandals that have exposed the party’s corruption and hypocrisy.