Hosting a party for Jill’s birthday, so you are on your own.
I’m the fat guy taking the picture.
Open Thread: Rove’s Base (But We Knew That)
Via Gawker, Salon follows the money behind Karl Rove’s latest Astroturf outfit:
Virtually all of the $4.7 million raised by Karl Rove’s new conservative outfit was contributed by just four billionaires, three of whom are based in Dallas, Texas, and two of whom made their fortune in the oil and gas industry.
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The IRS filing of American Crossroads, an outside 527 group that was conceived by Rove and ex-RNC chair Ed Gillespie, gives a good taste of who is funding the GOP effort to make big gains in the House and Senate come the fall. The group has already burned through $600,000 on ads attacking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is facing a reelection contest against Republican Sharron Angle… Chaired by another ex-RNC chair, Mike Duncan, American Crossroads has pledged to raise $50 million to beat Democrats in the midterms and has been seen by some as a competitor to the Republican National Committee itself…
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[…] It’s also important to note that American Crossroads has set up a partner organization called American Crossroads GPS that, because it has a different tax status, does not have to reveal any donor information and is also more limited in spending its money on campaigns. American Crossroads GPS took in over $5 million in June, and we’ll likely never know who is putting up the money.
Video and further juicy details at the link. Makes Michael Steele’s accounting difficulties look positively penny-ante, eh?
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Open Thread: Rove’s Base (But We Knew That)Post + Comments (26)
Barack & Hamid’s Excellent Adventure
Everybody should run out and buy a copy of the August Harper’s Magazine. I want to write a separate post about Dan Baum’s “Happiness Is A Worn Gun: My Concealed Weapon and Me”, but I can’t resist pimping the positively Menckenian David Samuels:
… The reporters practice their questions, as if this were still the old days and raising their hands meant that there was even a slight chance they might be called upon. In fact, Obama hasn’t had a real press conference in almost a year, which is the longest period of such abstinence since anyone began keeping track. The reporters who get to ask questions are selected weeks in advance by the White House. Still, pretending is helpful for morale.
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“How about negotiating with the Taliban? You still good with that?”
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“Is your brother a CIA agent?”
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The question refers to Hamid Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is regularly portrayed in the American press as a corrupt drug lord who charges huge fees for allowing trucks full of opium to cross the bridges over the Helmand River to Kandahar. Last fall, President Obama duly warned that he expected Karzai to establish tough new anti-corruption laws and remove his brother from the government of a country into which the United States would soon be sending 30,000 additional troops. Never mind that Afghanistan produces an estimated 90 percent of the world’s supply of opium; and that the Taliban pays Wali Karzai to ship opium through the territories he governs; and that the U.S. Army, under the ill-fated General Stanley McChrystal, relies on Wali Karzai for logistical support and subcontracts special tasks, which include killing people, to gunmen under his direct control; and that as a courtesy we no longer destroy the poppy crop; and that Wali Karzai happens to be the CIA’s landlord in Kandahar, renting them Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s old villa. After a few months of back-and-forth, the message got through, and on March 30 the New York Times reported that “Afghan and American officials have decided that the president’s brother will be allowed to stay in place,” quoting a senior NATO official as saying that Wali Karzai could be a big help to the ongoing American reconstruction effort. “One thing, he is a successful businessman,” the official said. “He can create jobs.”
Open Thread: Cartoon of the Week
Exile on Downing Street
I like reading FrumForum in general, but why is every conservative sob story about a rich person?
Now that Conrad Black is released from prison, where does he go?
He’d like to go home, to the house his parents built and that he lovingly enlarged….
What follows is a long explanation of why Black should be reinstated as a Canadian citizen, even though he renounced Canadian citizenship in 2001 so that he could serve in the House of Lords in England. Otherwise, poor Black will have to live as a rich exile in back in England, assuming that his conviction is overturned so that he’s not sent back to jail.
What a sad story this is.
(Yes, I know the House of Lords does not actually meet on Downing Street, but close enough.)
Open Thread
It’s 95 degrees and the humidity makes it hard to breathe it is so miserable. HAHAHA Al Gore is fat. Where are all the jokers who find it funny when it snows?
In other news, via Digby, some straight talk from the folks at Slate: “Breitbart lied about Shirley Sherrod. Now he’s lying about the NAACP.” That wasn’t so hard now folks, was it?
Open Thread
Here’s some music for an open thread. This video takes a turn at about 1:00 if you can handle the preciousness until then.