Political Forecast

AMERICAblog brings to my attention this rapidly developing scandal involving South Dakota freshman Senator John Thune. Check out Clean Cut Kid and ThuneWatch for the full stories and background.

Essentially, it looks like Thune and Nelson are real close pals–so close that Nelson was Thune’s campaign for Congress in 1996. And he contributed a lot. And so did MetaBank, a newly emerging powerful bank in the Des Moines area.

In case you don’t know who Dan Nelson is, he was a slimy used car dealer who got big off of predatory lending and other illegal schemes that led the Iowa Attorney General, Tom Miller, to file a lawsuit against him in January of this year. Nelson soon declared bankruptcy, but not before ripping off a couple of close friends and hundreds of others across Iowa and the Midwest.

This is one hell of a big deal. Tom Miller is an amazing AG, always on the ball and on the big cases. I sure hope that his investigation and lawsuit take him into this territory and uncover an even bigger scandal between John Thune and Dan Nelson.

I’ll try to keep as update to date on this as possible. I’m gonna start prodding the Des Moines Register to do more tomorrow.

This was expected. A 54-45 vote, definitely not down party lines.

These Democrats voted for the treaty (10): Bingaman (D-NM), Cantwell (D-WA), Carper (D-DE), Feinstein (D-CA), Lincoln (D-AR), Murray (D-WA), Nelson (D-FL), Nelson (D-NE), Pryor (D-AR), and Wyden (D-OR). Jeffords (I-VT) also voted for the bill, thus 11 essentially Democratic votes on to the bill. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) did not vote.

These Republicans voted against the treaty (12): Burns (R-MT), Collins (R-ME), Craig (R-ID), Crapo (R-ID), Enzi (R-WY), Graham (R-SC), Shelby (R-AL), Snowe (R-ME), Specter (R-PA), Thomas (R-WY), Thune (R-SD), Vitter (R-LA).

Quite an interesting breakdown, if you ask me. I expected Burns, Craig, Crapo, Enzi, and Thomas to all oppose the treaty. They have a substantial sugar beat industry in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Same goes for Graham, Shelby, and Vitter. I was surprised we didn’t see those three Senators fellow Senators from their state choose to vote against it. The vote wasn’t as close as I expected.

As for the Democrats who voted for it, I’m quite disappointed. Don’t plan on receiving any contributions from me. Jeffords vote for the bill, to me, was the most suprising.

At least I can guarantee that the treaty will not be passed in the House. I’ll post more on this later, probably.

It looks I’m among the first generation of an entirely new Internet writing system. And we’re getting big play time in the media.

CNN’s Inside the Blogs and MSNBC’s Connected Coast-to-Coast covered a lot of the blogs, especially Talk Left and a few others who will soon be joining my blogroll in the left column. Give them a visit, please. (The Talent Show blog online magazine has the CNN transcript here).

Anyway, I think this really is a good thing. First of all, it automatically gives us MSM credibility and that means we don’t have to criticize anyone and always talk about our great ethics. Secondly, we get to be real journalists who don’t have to fact check and are really great and stuff. Finally, we get to be part of the Gang of 500 and get talked about in The Note!

Ok, on the serious side now, it gets our point across to the FEC. We’re not playing games and neither should you. We’re serious about our causes–on both sides of the aisle–and individual political speech on the Internet shoudln’t be regulated, its just that plain and simple. Markos, Atrios, and Krempansky, as well as the thousands of other individual political commentators out there who sent in their comments or actually testified have stood up to the attempts to restrict our speech. And we can’t stop now. Whether or not this turns into a full-fledged movement is yet to be seen. Should the FEC inact regulations however, consider the online magazine a permanent response.

I agree with what Greg over at The Talent Show said:

“How would the FEC define “blog”? Like every other website you visit, this site is serving content via HTTP protocol on port 80. As far as the guts of the site, Movable Type considers itself a “publishing platform” these days. Like Slate, this site has multiple authors, covers a variety of topics, and updates sporadically throughout the day. If the FEC wants to draw a line between the online world and print, I’d love to see a comparison between the traffic statistics of NYTimes.com and the circulation numbers of The New York Times print version. Then again, the difference between whether or not I’m allowed to discuss politics could be as simple as not using the word “blog” anymore. Semantic restrictions are meaningless when you’re a template change away from avoiding legal scrutiny.”

These efforts are becoming meaningless. Sometimes groups like the FEC need to take the higher ground and worry about the real threats to fair political speech and campaign finance issues.

Maybe things like 527s. . .

Evidently, a good number of Americans think it wouldn’t be a bad idea, according to a recent Zogby poll.

42% think if he lied, he should be held accountable that way. Only 41% of Americans thought that way when Clinton was impeached.

Makes ya think, doesn’t it?

The next two days of work are going to be quite busy, so don’t expect too many posts during the hours of 8 AM - 4 PM unless Chase decides to become a compulsive poster like myself.

Anywho, here are some great articles/posts that I think you guys should read today:

• Bob Herbert on incompetent leaders in the NY Times
• Ezra Klein on judicial fiat and abortion
• Looks like Time will be turning over Matt Cooper’s source
• Eric Alterman’s Nation column on Rove’s comments
• Orcinus (David Neiwert) on “Hunting Liberals”

That’s it for now. Hopefully I’ll post more later.

And I’m thinking about making the transition from online magazine to blogazine–will the FEC find that acceptable or not?

UPDATE: Welcome TalkLeft-ians and others, stick around and leave some comments or thoughts.

All of this spurred by The Talent Show, Atrios, AMERICAonlinemagazine, and others.

To understand Atrios’ new format, read here.

Sen. Reid keeps throwing the punches. John has the details.