Jackson County Democratic Committee

So I have a paying gig that involves editing and moderating for a major dead-tree political magazine. It’s a job I have had for over five years, so I have developed a pretty good spidey-sense where the trolls are concerned — and this exchange made it tingle:

Gonzo on December 21, 2011 12:40 PM:

While they did effectively dismiss the issue rather than address it, the childish rant that follows doesn’t put the opposition in a good light either. When the Speaker gavels out and declares adjournment, the process is ended, along with any debate, unlike what the article here claims. This is a Democrat violation of parliamentary procedure to grandstand on an issue they were not politically poised to exert their will over.

If you support the legislation that was dropped, your talking point is that they didn’t address it, not that they walked out on it. Even if Republicans sided with the ranting Representative against the Speaker, it would have no legal standing.

chi res on December 21, 2011 1:24 PM:

This is a Democrat violation of parliamentary procedure

Only a true Republic moron could come up with that one. LOL!

Gonzo on December 21, 2011 2:40 PM:

chi res: Contrary to your beliefs, I am not in favor of the Republicans any more than I am their counterparts in the Democrat side. Even someone so caught up in the fervor of propaganda as you are must recognize that ranting after session has legally ended is merely for show.

As for a “Republic moron”, viewing an entire group of people as “morons” because you disagree with their political views puts you far below the Republican incumbents who’ve pandered to the rich rather than do what their constituents put them there for (tea party or otherwise).

chi res on December 21, 2011 5:15 PM:

I am not in favor of the Republicans any more than I am their counterparts in the Democrat side.

Duh. That’s the second time you’ve left the “ic” off of Democratic, Mr. Obvious.

And I didn’t call ALL republicans “moron”, just you.

I decided to look a little closer at this “Gonzo” person, and what do you suppose I found when I ran the IP?

Yes, that really does say that the person defending the “procedure” of lily-livered republican cowards ducking a fight they were scared of losing, was posting from a Missouri House of Representatives server, located in zip-code 65020. There is one House of Representatives member with an office in Camdenton –

Missouri keeps cutting services and raising the cost of getting a college education, but there is money in the budget to pay for high-speed internet connections and staffers to log on to them and troll liberal websites and defend the indefensible — raising taxes on 160,000,000 working families, four days before Christmas.

That’s your republican party, Missouri. Defending the indefensible — on /procedural/ grounds — when the result of what is being defended will be a significant tax increase on the people in Camdenton. According to the <a href=”http://www.city-data.com/city/Camdenton-Missouri.html”>City Data</a> website, the average household income for the residents of the city is approximately $30,500 — approximately 2/3 of the median income for a Missouri resident. A thousand bucks a year — that’s how much their taxes will go up on January 1 — is a lot of money to someone whose household realizes thirty grand for the entire year.

I will never, for the life of me, figure out how we manage to lose state legislature elections to these people.

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You’ll also be on the front lines of the work that it will take to win on November 6th, 2012.

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We know that our power lies in the individuals behind this movement, and there’s nothing more important than the one-on-one conversations they have in this campaign — whether while knocking on doors or leading voter registration drives on the weekends. It’s hard work, but it’s one of the most meaningful ways to build this movement.

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I’m looking forward to hearing from you, feel free to give me a call if you have any questions.

David Caicedo
Regional Field Director
Organizing For America|Kansas City|Missouri
816-590-3473
DCaicedo@OFAMissouri.com

In First TV Interview: Spence Misleads Voters,Says He Didn’t Serve on Bank Board During Bailout.

Bank Received Bailout in 2009, Spence Helped Lead the Bank Since 2005

Jefferson City, Mo.— In his first television interview as a candidate for Governor, David Spence once again tried to hide facts from voters about his role at Reliance Bank, implying that he had no involvement in its2009 TARP bailout, despite strong evidence to the contrary.

“I was a shareholder…I was not on the board, I did not vote for it,” Spence told Fox’s Charles Jaco.

In fact, at the time of the bailout, Spence had already been a board member of the bank’s main subsidiary for nearly four years. Not only that, but Spence was on the parent company’s board when it later decided to stop making payments on its TARP debt.

“David Spence obviously doesn’t want Missouri voters to know that he helped run a bank that took a $40 million bailout, but voters deserve the truth. Not only did Spence serve on the bank’s Board and fully support the $40 bank bailout, but he was part of the gang that ultimately decided the bank would stop paying back the TARP funds. It’s bad enough to cost the taxpayers $40 million, but the least David Spence can do is start telling the truth about it,” said Caitlin Legacki, Missouri Democratic Party spokeswoman.

Today, the Missouri Democratic Party calls on Dave Spence once again to stop misleading voters about his role at Reliance Bank and tell Missourians the truth about his involvement in the bank’s decision to accept the bailout and then stop repaying the $40 million in taxpayer funds.

In the interview, which aired Saturday, Spence implied that his involvement with the bank didn’t begin until after the bank accepted TARP funds in 2009, despite the fact his involvement began in 2005, nearly four years prior to the bank’s bailout. [St. Louis Post Dispatch, 5/13/05]

Watch the full interview here. [Bailout section at minute 2:50]

DAVID SPENCE’S RHETORIC VS REALITY:

RHETORIC: “I was a shareholder…I was not on the board, I did not vote for it.” [KTVI, 12/10/11]

REALITY: Spence Joined Reliance Bank Board in 2005. As reported by the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Spence joined the board of directors of Reliance Bank, the main subsidiary of Reliance Bancshares, in 2005. He served on the board of Reliance Bank until 2009, when he joined the board of the parent company. Reliance Bank was “the largest part of Reliance Bancshares.” [St. Louis Post Dispatch, 5/13/05; St. Louis Business Journal, 9/17/04; Reliance Bancshares, SEC filing 14A, 4/15/09]

REALITY: Spence Served on Board That Decided to Stop Repaying Bailout Funds. Spence was serving on the board of Reliance Bancshares when, in February 2011, “its Board of Directors…determined that it will” stop making payments on its TARP debt. [Reliance Release, 2/11/11; SNL Bank Weekly Midwest, 3/21/11]

###

—

Crossposted from They Gave Us A Republic

Jessica –

Chances are, you pay a higher percentage of your income in taxes than the richest Americans.

Meanwhile, huge corporations that turn billion-dollar profits are getting tax breaks and giveaways that only pad their bottom line. That doesn’t make sense.

Things are out of whack when we’re fighting tooth and nail to save Medicare and Social Security for the middle class while some millionaires and billionaires aren’t even paying their fair share.

This week, President Obama proposed the “Buffett rule” to make millionaires and billionaires like Warren Buffett — who actually asked to pay more taxes — carry their fair share of the burden for reducing our debt.

So tell me: do you support the Buffett rule?

Click here to cast your vote in our quick online poll today and let me know if you support the Buffett rule.

While the Republican talking points say the Buffett rule is class warfare, I say it’s about fundamental fairness for most Americans — those in the middle class.

This rule is about fairness for those families who work hard, play by the rules, and don’t have access to the special goodies in the tax code that benefit the mega-wealthy, who pay more money to their accountants than most American families bring home in a year.

But people like Karl Rove and the right-wing billionaires backing his front group have a lot of influence with Republicans in Washington, and they’ll kick and scream as loud as they can to keep from paying higher taxes.

As congressional debt reduction negotiations begin, I need to know where you stand.

Will you let me know where you stand on the Buffett rule by taking our quick online poll now?

Thanks for all you do,

Claire McCaskill

Karl Rove is scared of a girl

Karl Rove must be scared spitless about the Missouri GOP’s prospects of either Todd Akin, Sarah Steelman or an as-yet-unnamed republican emerging from a primary able to beat Claire McCaskill.

Why else would he already be going around the state party and launching $50,000 worth of radio attack ads /sixteen and a half months before the election?/

Look at it from his angle. The state party has two unpalatable options. There is Sarah Steelman, and there is no way in hell the state GOP is going to let her have the nomination because she is a loose cannon and a nincompoop who makes Sarah Palin look smart. That leaves them with Todd Akin, who is under fire for illegally voting in a precinct where he no longer maintained a residence and whose vote to kill Medicare and his record of rubberstamping every one of Bush’s wacky schemes that got us into the mess we’re in will not go over well with the people who are being looked toward to pay for his folly now.

That’s some pretty weak tea they are brewing up.

If I were a higher-up in the Missouri GOP (stop laughing, and suspend disbelief for a moment. I could have been a republican — if my mother had dropped me on my head a few times as an infant) I would be really offended that we were being undermined by outsiders — and knowing my fellow Missourians the way I do, I have a feeling that this may not work for them as well as they think it will — especially in the rural areas north of Kansas City, where she is very, very popular.

I won’t be surprised at all if their “attack early, attack often” strategy backfires on them. In fact, I expect it will.

See, we Missourians — especially those of us with rural roots — are notoriously stubborn. We are stubborn to the point of being spiteful, we don’t like being told what to do, and we sure as hell don’t like outsiders coming in and attacking our own.

Claire is one of our own, and the Crossroads a-holes are not. This is going to rally the Democratic base, offend independents and even the last 12 remaining sane republicans in the state, and after a couple of months of their nonsense, the remaining ones will start tuning out the noise.

I say this about the northern tier frequently and can’t stress it enough — the population may not be dense up there, but neither are the people. Rove writes them off as gullible rubes at his peril.

On Friday, June 17, I got up early to catch a train to get to St. Louis in time to catch the rally to save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security outside Senator McCaskill’s St. Louis office, and then go on to the Missouri Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner at the Renaissance Grand in Downtown St. Louis.

Basically, if all the statewides are scheduled to appear somewhere, chances are pretty good that if you look for the table at the back, where the tripods are set up and the hand-held recorders are out on the table, you will find me and assorted other members of the political media — especially my partners at Show Me Progress. We try very hard to have someone at every event.

Sometimes that is short notice and it frequently sends me scrambling for resources if I haven’t had time to plan ahead, but we get there and we cover it and we archive audio so we can fight back with context and/or accuracy when Democrats are misunderstood — or as happens far to often, deliberately misquoted.

Take Friday night for example — Jo Mannies, who didn’t sit with us lowlife bloggers at a table, but chose to hug the wall just inside the ballroom doors instead — decried Democratic Governor Jay Nixon for lapsing into “partisanship” because he dared say the words “right wing extremists” and call out the nutjobs in the state legislature for what they are during his address Friday night…Even though he wasn’t speaking at a campaign rally, he was speaking to a room full of 500-plus of the most hard-core Democrats in the state, all of whom paid $125 per plate to attend.

When that sort of money is shelled out, red meat is expected, and since the menu was chicken and shrimp, that red meat came from the speakers. And did they ever deliver!

Governor Nixon gave one of the best speeches I have heard him give, and I have been covering him since he was our Attorney General, campaigning for Governor. He is in Jefferson City with the right-wing extremists who want to return us to the era before the New Deal and the Wagner Act, to the cutthroat era of the robber barons and union busting and the systematic disenfranchisement of the “wrong” people who tend to vote the opposite way that the rich and powerful do.

Nixon appeared before a crowd of Democrats just hours after vetoing the right wing extremists’ latest attempt to disenfranchise anywhere between 170-240,000 Missouri voters. hell, yeah, he was going to deliver some partisanship and get these people — you know, the folks who open their wallets and man the phones and go door to door and basically and keep the Missouri Democratic Party functioning — fired up!

I was also impressed with Claire McCaskill’s more pugnacious tone. Of course, the fact that 200 people were outside her office in 90-degree heat with 190% humidity for over an hour “encouraging” her to stand up for the safety net didn’t discourage her any from kicking it up a notch or two, either. When she said that teachers and police officers and firemen aren’t the problem, and that “their pensions sure as HELL aren’t the problem!” the crowd was on it’s feet and she had to pause before going on and wait for them to take their seats.

It’s not this guy’s fault we’re in this mess.

What I heard from the speakers who addressed the rank and file who, while in their finery on Friday night, in the coming months will be in jeans and sneakers canvassing neighborhoods, and manning phone banks, and working for candidates and raising money and donating money, and time, and talent — was that they are going to work as hard as we are and they will fight for us.

Jay Nixon fought for us on Thursday when he addressed boys state and told them something I hope they take with them the rest of their lives. He pointed out to them that they were going to be okay no matter what. Their tickets are punched, it’s all in front of them and it’s all theirs if they don’t piss it away. But, he told them, “you have to have compassion. You don’t make yourself any taller by cutting off the heads of those around you.”

Then he fought for us on Friday when he vetoed the odious Voter ID bill.

I hope he is just getting started and spends a little of his political capital to fight back in the rural areas where they are a natural Democratic constituency. They have potable water, electricity, gas, roads, mail delivery, phone service, internet access, hospitals and doctors and nurses to work in them, Social Security, Medicare, S-CHIP and Medicaid to access them and they can get drugs from a pharmacy that is regulated so they are sure they are getting what the doctor prescribed and not baking soda because Democrats didn’t just make those things happen — Democrats made those things possible.

The thesis of one of the first posts I wrote when we launched Show Me Progress was me arguing that the Missouri Democratic Party needs a concerted 114 County Strategy, that we need to get offices back on the square in Albany and Bethany and Princeton and Trenton and Gallatin and Grant City and all the other small counties that lost their long-term Democratic Senators and Representatives in 2000 when term limits took over because — lets face it — term limits caught us unawares. We were content with the “old bulls” like Harold Kaske running things for decades on end. There was comity and things got done and worked pretty well. And in those rural areas, no new talent was being recruited and groomed by the Democrats, but the republicans were doing just that on school boards and municipal boards and county legislatures. Then they sprung term limits and they had their candidates ready to go.

And the state party responded by…abdicating the rural areas to the wingers.

I hope some of that pugnacious talk I heard Friday night means that the days of that nonsense are over. Instead, I hope it gets repeated in every county seat of all 114 counties by every statewide official on the 08 ballot at least twice between now and then, and I hope they have an aggressive social media presence, because every one of my country cousins uses Facebook five times as much as I do, and I use it every day.

There are votes to be had outstate — but only if you go and ask for them and talk to them about the issues that matter to them. And for god’s sake, they deserve better than the likes of Casey freakin’ Guernsey.

DAY 7: Steelman Holding the Line on Plan to End Medicare, Raise Prescription Drug Costs by $1 Billion

FACT:  Missouri Seniors Would Pay Additional $1 Billion Over Next 10 Years Under Plan to End Medicare

Jefferson City, Mo.— Sarah Steelman’s lips are sealed when it comes to her support for the Republican Plan to end Medicare. The Republican Plan to End Medicare would cost seniors in Missouri an additional $1 billion in prescription drug costs over the next 10 years and $50 million in 2012 alone.

“Like Missouri’s seniors, we’re still waiting for Sarah Steelman to explain why she won’t oppose the Republican Plan to end Medicare and raise prescription drug costs by $1 billion,” said Caitlin Legacki, Missouri Democratic Party spokeswoman.

Steelman’s primary opponent, Rep. Todd Akin, has been an outspoken supporter of the Republican plan to end Medicare.

###

In the wake of their stunning sweep of virtually every race in which they had a viable candidate in last November, the Missouri GOP has started to look like the dog that finally caught the car…Yeah, they caught it, but so what? They can’t drive, either.

They would dearly love to take the Governor’s mansion next year and remove that check on our batshit-crazy legislature. They were tea-party before there was a movement known as the tea party. Since they snagged majorities in 2000 thanks to term limits, they have been intent on turning us into a bigger laughing stock than Texas, and on more than a few occasions they have realized success, to the embarrassment and chagrin of every Democrat and non-crazy republican in the state.

As ardently as the GOP lusts after the Governorship, they don’t have a single candidate to put up against Landslide Jay.

Yes, I know that Lt. Governor Peter Kinder, bicycling enthusiast and manic Twitter user, is running but that doesn’t mean that the GOP has a candidate.

Kinder is a joke, and that is putting it kindly.

He can’t win, and the party establishment knows it.

Missouri Republicans are growing increasingly despondent about their chances of reclaiming the governor’s mansion in 2012. Peter Kinder, the front-runner for the GOP nod, hasn’t even officially launched a campaign yet — but he’s already being privately written off by members of his own party.

What’s worse: They believe the lieutenant governor’s bizarre antics and undisciplined behavior have turned him into a punchline who could become a heavy drag at the top of the ticket.

It’s not that first-term Gov. Jay Nixon is invincible. While popular and mostly noncontroversial, he’s still a Democrat in a reddening battleground state that President Obama failed to carry in 2008.

The overwhelming concern — expressed in interviews by multiple GOP lawmakers and several party insiders — is that Kinder lacks the political acumen and personal likeability necessary to upend an incumbent.

“I don’t think he has a chance to beat Gov. Nixon. Every single person that I’ve talked to feels the same way,” said one GOP state senator, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Everybody loves Jay Nixon and I have to say he’s done a pretty good job. The people I’ve talked to are just resigned to the fact that [Kinder’s] going to run and lose.”

I realize that Missouri is redder than it was when I was growing up, but I still have to take issue with Catanese on his assertion that Missouri is a “reddening battleground.” I don’t think so. I think Missouri has reached the saturation point and isn’t going to get any redder than it is right now. He points out that President Obama failed to carry the state — but doesn’t mention that he lost by less than 4000 votes out of approximately three million cast, nor does he mention that the state wasn’t called for McCain for two weeks after the election. He also leaves out that Obama probably won it, if the provisional ballots cast in inner-city St. Louis and Kansas City had been counted. Not to mention, the President picked up those 4000 votes in Joplin a couple of weeks ago, and probably would have even if Eric Cantor had kept his craven and cruel mouth shut.

We Missouri Democrats are constantly joking about sending him a gift basket because every time something hits the news that might prove embarrassing for Democrats — Jay Nixon and his travel travails or Claire McCaskill and the back-taxes issue on her husband’s privatee plane, for example — here comes Kinder to deflect attention from the Democrats by having it revealed that he spent approximately two months of last year hanging out in a luxury hotel in St. Louis and billing the taxpayers of the state.

Then there was the stolen car fiasco. He left his keys in his Ford Flex on a visit back home, and the car was not merely stolen, but used in a burglary, then abandoned and torched.

It all adds up to a state GOP that is starting to get a little bit panicked, with insiders saying among themselves that “somebody else better get in the race.” But even if they do, Kinder isn’t going to be dissuaded, even though he can’t possibly win. “He’s got a worse start than [former Rep. Kenny] Hulshof and that’s really saying something. Hulshof was a lack of excitement, not a lack of talent. He was a decent, talented guy,” said one former state senator. “The bottom’s falling out even before we’ve got the bucket under the faucet.”

President Obama embraces a survivor of last Sunday’s EF5 tornado at the memorial service held at Missouri Southern State University
on May 29, 2011 — photo by Michael Bersin, Show Me Progress

Joplin, Missouri came together today to mourn their dead and celebrate the lives of those they lost, and Governor Jay Nixon and President Barack Obama were there to mourn with them and celebrate the strength and resolve of our fellow Missourians who are recovering from an unimaginable disaster.

Governor Nixon delivered one of his better speeches, and then President Obama took the podium to deliver a 15 minute address that wove the stories of the heroes who emerged that fateful day, some sacrificing their own lives to save others, without a moment of hesitation in with stories of the Good Samaritans who came to help afterward — like the volunteers who drove straight through from Tuscaloosa to help, because when they needed help, they got it, and they were moved to return in kind the kindness they had been shown.

He ended his address with a recitation of the words to Amazing Grace, a comforting and appropriate choice, in this situation.