The incompetence of Michael Steele and the Citizens United decision has led to a coup of the RNC by Karl Rove and associated. It creates a new form of funding campaigns that places no limits on individual or corporate contributions and allows anonymous contributions. It is sure to corrupt the mid-term elections unless the Department of Justice and FEC take action now.

Do you generally approve or disapprove of the way President Obama is leading the country?

By raising the possibility that the Afghan war is unwinnable, Steele creates an opening for news media to explore that possibility.

Chairman of the Republican Party Michael Steele made some awkward comments about Obama’s policy in Afghanistan, irking the right wing. With reaction from the left no better, we see that the War in Afghanistan is simply not a left/right issue at all.

Fact-checking Michele Bachmann and commenting on Michael Steele’s fall from power

One of the frustrating things about politics is there is a lot of conventional wisdom associated with it. This is frustrating in two ways, one it tends to tell folks who want to buck the system that they are going to lose in their efforts. The other is the fact the problem with all conventional wisdom, namely for a predictable outcome all the extraneous factors have to be similar to previous elections

The conventional wisdom is says that the party which holds the White House loses seats in the House and the Senate during the mid-term elections. This has been true most of the time, with most recent notable exception of 2002, when the Republicans rode a wave of fear from the 9/11 attacks to a larger majority.

The question becomes is the 2010 election cycle similar enough to previous cycles for the CW from folks like Charlie Cook of the Cook Report to be accurate or is this an outlier year where there are so many factors in play that the CW is not really an accurate model to predict the outcome.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

Your weekly dose of social media news and entertainment.

Apparently, the RNC doesn’t want somebody to find out they’re behind the tea parties.

It seems like disgraced bankers who engaged in Ponzi schemes are a dime a dozen these days. Still Allen Stanford is different in at least one way. Sure he was a crook, he took in money and claimed that he and his financial wizards could and did beat the market average performance, in good times and bad. Sure, that was all a lie with the new investor’s money going to pay the supposed profits to the more senior investors. That is nothing special. No, what makes Mr. Stanford special is that he was a big political donor.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

Mr. Allen knew that money only translates to real power when you have access to the legislators on the Hill. So, he was more than willing to give his money away. NPR is reporting this morning that Mr. Stanford and five of his top executives at Stanford Financial gave more than two million dollars to five party, three presidential campaigns and 82 members of Congress.

The judge in charge of the has appointed a receiver to try to get that money back from the various campaigns and politicos. So far, $89, 000 or nearly 5% been returned. As much as it pains me to say that Sen. Richard Shelby does anything right, his campaign fund returned $14,000 dollars, the second highest of any group returning money (Sen. Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign is number one with $16,000).

The issue here is should a politician or political committee return tainted funds. The answer should always be yes. It is a basic no brainer that if you find that someone who has given you money is a crook or even just a person you want your campaign or candidate to have nothing to do with you give the money back. If you do not then you have to spend time defending the actions of someone who is not part of your campaign when you should be spending time defining the opposition or yourself.

The biggest recipient of Mr. Stanford’s tainted cash is the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. They have received $950,000 dollars from Stanford and his executives. Up to today they have not returned the money. When contacted by NPR they had no comment on the story. This is not acceptable. Yes, I get that this is an election year and we just lost a self-financing candidate in Indiana. Yes, it is important to have money to run good campaigns, but the DSCC has 12.6 million in cash-in-hand. They have 3.1 million dollar advantage over the RSCC, according to Open Secrets.

Are Tim Kaine and Rahm Emanuel responsible for the losses in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia? Should they be held accountable?