The Des Moines Register is claiming the Democratic Caucus
held in Iowa stinks, but it appears the editorial staff must have worn nose
plugs for Republican caucus. What stinks
to high hell is the Iowa Caucus itself.
From Bushwhacked in 2000 to Cruz Control in 2016 the Iowa Caucus is a phony
baloney election that any banana republic would be embarrassed about. According to the Des Moines Register:
Excerpt:
Once again the world is laughing at
Iowa. Late-night comedians and social media mavens are having a field day with
jokes about missing caucus goers and coin flips.
That’s fine. We can take ribbing
over our quirky process. But what we
can’t stomach is even the whiff of impropriety or error.
What happened Monday night at the
Democratic caucuses was a debacle, period. Democracy, particularly at the local
party level, can be slow, messy and obscure. But the refusal to undergo
scrutiny or allow for an appeal reeks of autocracy.
The Iowa Democratic Party must act
quickly to assure the accuracy of the caucus results, beyond a shadow of a
doubt.
Oh the horrors, head for the fainting couch. The Des Moines Register is outraged I tell
you. Funny though the Register has lost
their sense of smell when it comes to the Republican Caucus and Ted Cruz Campaign
informing Ben Carson supporters prior to the vote that Carson had dropped
out. From The Conservative Treehouse:
Excerpt:
Explosive Audio Surfaces – Cruz Campaign Telling Iowa Precinct Captains
Carson Had Dropped Out of Race…
Breitbart.com is reporting on audio
they have obtained which shows Ted Cruz Headquarters telling Iowa precinct
captains that Ben Carson had dropped out of the race. The messages were sent at
7:07pm (CST), and 7:29 (CST) before the votes were cast.
This factual evidence refutes the
claims made by Ted Cruz and his campaign team:
Transcript [inaudible]…from the Ted Cruz campaign, calling to get to a
precinct captain, and it has just been announced that Ben Carson is taking a
leave of absence from the campaign trail, so it is very important that you tell
any Ben Carson voters that for tonight, uh, that they not waste a vote on Ben
Carson, and vote for Ted Cruz. He is taking a leave of absence from his
campaign. All right? Thank you. Bye.
[Transcript] Hello, this is the Cruz campaign with breaking news: Dr.
Ben Carson will be [garbled] suspending campaigning following tonight’s
caucuses. Please inform any Carson caucus goers of this news and urge them to
caucus for Ted instead. Thank you. Good night. (link)
Well, this essentially proves Ted
Cruz and Rick Tyler were lying for the past 48 hours.
I guess that information escaped the editorial board at the
Des Moines Register. And I guess they
weren’t reporting in 2012 when they announced Mitt Romney the winner only to
have to retract and announce that in fact, Rick Santorum had won.
The Iowa caucus is a great big two-party sham designed to
maintain the status quo. I’m not the
only one to question the Iowa Caucus scam, the late Christopher Hitchens had
this to say in 2008:
Excerpt:
The Iowa Scam
The undemocratic caucuses are a
terrible way to choose a presidential candidate.
By Christopher Hitchens
It is quite astonishing to see with
what deadpan and neutral a tone our press and television report the open
corruption—and the flagrantly anti-democratic character—of the Iowa caucuses….
It's also that campaign aides are
showing up at Iowan homes "with DVD's that [explain] how the caucuses work…"
Nobody needs a DVD to understand one-person-one-vote, a level playing field,
and a secret ballot. The DVD and the other gifts and goodies (Sen. Barack Obama
is promising free baby-sitting on Thursday) are required precisely because none
of those conditions applies in Iowa.
In a genuine democratic process, these Tammany tactics would long ago
have been declared illegal. But this is not a democratic process…
[T]he Hawkeye Poll of the University
of Iowa was published. Huckabee had 13 percent, in a virtual tie with Rudy
Giuliani for second place, behind Mitt Romney with 36….
About 45 percent of 85,000 or so
Republican caucus voters are evangelical Christians. Roughly half of them
automatically vote for the most socially conservative candidate in the race,
and it looks like they have decided that's Huckabee….
"It stinks," says veteran
political reporter Jack Germond…. Between
the coverage and the hyper-compressed campaign calendar, he says, "the
whole system this year is absolutely a disgrace…"
It's only when you read an honest
reporter like Dan Balz that you appreciate the depth and extent of the fraud
that is being practiced on us all. "In a primary," as he put it,
"voters quietly fill out their ballots and leave. In the caucuses, they
are required to come and stay for several hours, and there are no secret
ballots.
[F]or Democrats, it is not a one-person,
one-vote system. … Inducements are allowed; bribes are not." One has to
love that last sentence.
What it does is give the whip hand to the moneyed political
professionals, to the full-time party hacks and manipulators, to the shady
pollsters and the cynical media boosters, and to the supporters of fringe and
crackpot candidates.
It is impossible that the
Republican Party could be saddled with a clown like Huckabee if there were a
serious primary in Iowa, let alone if the process were kicked off in Chicago or
Los Angeles or Atlanta.
It is an absolutely terrible way in
which to select candidates for the presidency, and it makes the United States
look and feel like a banana republic both at home and overseas.
Ah yes indeed. The
United States primary process makes our country look like a banana republic
globally. And it’s not just the Iowa
Caucus scam it’s a process rife with corruption and dirty money from dark and
dirty players. And while the 2016
primary is not an exception, it certainly is exceptional in the level of
corruption.
Case in point Ted Cruz is clearly not eligible to be
President of the United States since he is not a natural born citizen. So why is he even on the ballot? Well let’s take a look at who Ted Cruz is and
who is backing him financially. From Alternet:
Excerpt:
How Ted Cruz Helped The Rehnquist Supreme Court Tear Down Church-State
Separation
In 1999, Bush for President
campaign aide Ted Cruz helped lock down the Christian conservative vote for
Bush, by arranging a meeting between his friend Paul Weyrich, a key architect
of the religious right and new right -- who co-founded the Moral Majority, the
Heritage Foundation, and ALEC -- and Bush campaign member Timothy Goeglein, who
went on to serve in the presidential administration of George W. Bush.
Soon after, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist presided over the
wildly controversial Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, which effectively
shut down the 2000 election vote recount in Florida, thus handing the
presidency to Bush.
Serving on the elite Republican legal team during the legal battles
leading up to the Rehnquist Court decision was
Ted Cruz, a former legal aide to Justice Rehnquist, who moved on to become
Texas Solicitor General.
My, my, my. Sounds
like a quid pro quo to me. So how did
the crooked Cruz get from Texas Solicitor General to a United States Senator
from Texas? Where did the money come
from to fund Cruz’ senatorial campaign?
From U.S. News:
Excerpt:
Cruz Financed 2012 Campaign With Loans from Goldman Sachs, Citibank
The previously undisclosed $1 million
in loans undercut Cruz's anti-establishment image.
Ted Cruz's defiant self-description
as a populist willing to put his personal financial security on the line to win
elected office is under fire amid disclosures that the Texas Republican senator
financed his anti-establishment 2012 Senate campaign in the most establishment
of ways: by getting a big loan from Goldman Sachs.
Cruz's Federal Election Commission
filings show that he and his wife, Heidi, dumped a total of $1.2 million of
their own money into his upstart, ultimately successful, bid for the Senate,
which has provided the tea party darling a platform for his current
presidential campaign.
But personal financial disclosures
show that the Cruzes took out loans from both Goldman Sachs, where Mrs. Cruz is
managing director, and Citibank, the New York Times reported…
Candidates are required to report to the FEC any loans taken out to
finance their federal campaigns, and must continue to report outstanding debt
even after the initial disclosure of the loan. Cruz did not do so, but called the discrepancy
"inadvertent…"
But Larry Noble, general counsel at
the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said the failure to report the loans is illegal, and not subject to
interpretation…
Gee, one would think that a former Texas Solicitor General
and clerk for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would know the law,
especially if the “loan was illegal and not subject to interpretation.”
"It's a failure to report.
It's not a question of semantics. It's a question of law," Noble says.
"You have to report all loans, that includes a loan the candidate takes
out ... for his committee."
The violation is not necessarily a
one-time thing, either, Noble says, since the loans needed to be continuously
reported. "As long as it's outstanding, it has to be reported as
debt," Noble says…
Tsk, tsk makes that Iowa win look a little smelly, that
along with telling Iowa caucus goers that candidate Ben Carson dropped out of
the race prior to the “votes” being taken.
But I guess the editorial board of the Des Moines Register had their
nose plugs on.
And who else benefitted from the false report that Ben
Carson had dropped out of the race at the Iowa Caucus? Why none other than that other political
outsider and stalwart of Republican Christianity and honesty, Senator Marco
Rubio of Florida. From Gregory Palast:
Rubio's Billionaire Vulture
Paul Singer, the GOP's Baddie Sugar
Daddie
It's out of the closet –– or, more
accurately, out of the coven. The list
of the billionaires who have given at least $2.5 million to Conservative
Solutions, the pro-Rubio Super PAC, is headed by Paul Singer….
And this is the key fact you need
to know about the man whose cash would pick our President: Paul Singer likes to breakfast on decayed
carcasses….
Singer made his first billion, his
first killing (and I don't mean that metaphorically): via an attack on victims
of asbestos poisoning.
Background: The executives of a few
asbestos companies, WR Grace, USG and Owens-Corning, knew that their asbestos
factories were killing their workers. When caught and sued, the companies filed
for bankruptcy, agreeing to pay almost
all their earnings to those dying and injured by their asbestos.
But Singer had a better idea. These
companies, as you can imagine, were worth next to nothing; and Singer bought
Owens-Corning for a song.
If he could cut the amount paid to
the victims, Singer could boost Corning's value big time. So, a PR campaign was
begun attacking the dying workers, saying they were all faking it.
One attacker was a guy named George
W. Bush.
In January 2005, President Dubya
held a televised meeting to promote an "expert" who pronounced that
over half a million workers suing Singer's industry were liars. If workers
couldn't breathe, he said to the grinning President, it wasn't the fault of
asbestos.
The "expert" was not a
doctor, but notably, his "research" was partly funded by ...Paul
Singer. And so was Bush…
The legal, political and PR attacks
on the dying workers chiseled away the compensation expected to be paid by the
asbestos companies, boosting their net worth. Singer then flipped Corning,
selling it for a neat billion-dollar profit….
Paul Singer had placed a big bet on
the asbestos industry; then, set out to fix the casino, helping install Bush in
the White House. That is, he had a President willing to beat up on asbestos
workers and push for so-called "tort reform" that undermined these
victims' claims. What the victims lost, Singer gained.
But there's trouble on the horizon
for Singer. In 2007, Britain outlawed Singer and all other Vulture speculators
in Third World debt from collecting their pound of flesh in the United Kingdom.
Other European nations are following suit.
Several US Congressmen are pushing
a UK-style prohibition on Singer's activities. (Even Chevron Corporation is
complaining about the Vulture attacks. When Chevron calls bankers unscrupulous,
they've got to be really unscrupulous.) Without a veto pen over Congress,
Singer stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.
Singer plays defense, but is best
at offense: To collect on some of his claims against Argentina, his lobbyists
have pushed a bill in Congress to put an economic choke-hold on trade with the
South American nation. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blocked
this crazy attack on our ally. As a result, Singer is not a happy gaucho. There
will be blood. Obama will have to pay….
There's one thing that every
billionaire wants: another billion. And that's threatened by Obama's plan to
tax the "carried interest" tax deferment.
Guys like Singer don't pay taxes
like you and I do. While we pay taxes on income, the profits from vulture
speculation and arbitrage are often recorded as "carried interest,"
effectively not taxed for years, then when collected, only at a low rate. It's
a billion-dollar benefit for the billionaires, and every Republican candidate
has sworn to keep this loophole open and make sure you and I pay Singers' taxes
for him.
Well I guess Marco Rubio is the billionaire’s ace in the
hole in case Cruz is found to be ineligible due to being born in Canada to a
Cuban father and an American mother, where until recently he was a Canadian
citizen. But a lot of moneyed interests
are looking to have that Constitutional requirement overturned for good. From Washington Times:
Excerpt:
Arnold Schwarzenegger lobbies for law change to seek presidency
Hollywood action star and former
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been quietly lobbying key politicos
for a legal loophole or a constitutional change that would clear the path for
him to run for president in 2016.
If allowed, Mr. Schwarzenegger
would face off against Hillary Rodham Clinton, The New York Post reported.
“Schwarzenegger has been talking
openly about working on getting the constitutional rules changed so he can run
for president in 2016,” a source said, The Post reported. “He is ready to file
legal paperwork to challenge the rules.”
The actor was born in Austria,
making him ineligible to seek the high office. The Constitution states plainly that one of the requirements for a
U.S. president is to be a natural born citizen. Section One Article Two
states: “No person except a natural born
citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this
Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of president.”
I wonder for what reason is the GOP so anxious to change the
constitution so Arnold can run for President of the United States? Bingo, I think I found it in this 2003 Greg
Palast article in Alternet:
Excerpt:
Arnold's Enron Secret
If Arnold wins, it's hasta la vista
baby, to the $9 billion owed to the state of California by Enron and the other
electricity barons.
By Greg Palast / AlterNet October
4, 2003
It's not what Arnold Schwarzenegger
did to the girls a decade back that should raise an eyebrow. According to a
series of memoranda our office obtained today, it's his dalliance with the boys
in a hotel room just two years ago that's the real scandal.
The wannabe governor has yet to
deny that on May 17, 2001, at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles, he had
consensual political intercourse with Enron chieftain Kenneth Lay. Also
frolicking with Arnold and Ken was convicted stock swindler Mike Milken.
Now, 34 pages of internal Enron
memoranda have just come through this reporter's fax machine that tell all
about the tryst between Maria's husband and the corporate con men.
It turns out that Schwarzenegger knowingly joined the
hush-hush encounter as part of a campaign to sabotage a Davis-Bustamante plan
to make Enron and other power pirates then ravaging California pay back the $9
billion in illicit profits they carried off.
Here's the story Arnold doesn't
want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and the electricity
lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code
provision 17200, the "Unfair Business Practices Act." This
litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies
return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas
customers…
Who's the plaintiff taking on the
bad guys? Cruz Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate
against Schwarzenegger…
One month after Cruz brings suit,
Enron's Lay calls an emergency secret meeting in L.A. of his political
buck-buddies, including Arnold. Their plan, to undercut Davis (according to Enron
memos) and "solve" the energy crisis -- that is, make the Bustamante
legal threat go away…
While Bustamante's kicking Enron
butt in court, the Davis Administration
is simultaneously demanding that George Bush's energy regulators order the $9
billion refund. Don't hold your breath: Bush's Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission is headed by a guy proposed by ... Ken Lay.
But Bush's boys on the commission
have a problem. The evidence against the electricity barons is rock solid:
fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, megawatt "laundering,"
fake power delivery scheduling and straight out conspiracy (including meetings
in hotel rooms). So the Bush commissioners cook up a terrific scheme: charge
the companies with conspiracy but offer them, behind closed doors, deals in
which they have to pay only 2 cents on each dollar they filched.
Problem: the slap-on-the-wrist
refunds won't sail if the governor of California won't play along. Solution:
Recall the Governor…
So think about this. The state of
California is in the hole by $8 billion for the coming year. That's chump change next to the $8 trillion in deficits and surplus
losses planned and incurred by
George Bush. Nevertheless, the $8 billion deficit is the hanging rope
California's rightwing is using to lynch Governor Davis…
And the only thing keeping America from a President Muscle
Head is the Constitution, and boy Republicans hate that pesky
Constitution. So if they can get a legal
challenge to what constitutes a “natural born citizen” before the Roberts
Supreme Court what do you think the chance is that the Supreme Court would rule
in Ted Cruz favor? From the Texas Tribune:
Excerpt:
Cruz, Justice Roberts Have History
Within two hours of the U.S.
Supreme Court releasing its opinion on the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act last month, former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz spoke out about
the decision.
Cruz, a Republican competing
against Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in a July 31 primary runoff for an open U.S.
Senate seat, called the decision “shameful” and described it as a “sad day for
the court.” He accused the court’s justices of being motivated by politics
rather than upholding the U.S.
Constitution.
It was a harsh assessment
considering that Chief Justice John Roberts, a man whom Cruz has described as a
mentor and friend, played a pivotal role in the law being upheld…
Both Cruz and Roberts clerked for
Chief Justice William Rehnquist early in their careers, Roberts from 1980 to
1981, Cruz in the mid-1990s.
After Election Day in 2000, Cruz
was a lawyer working on the legal battle over the Florida recount for the
Bush/Cheney presidential campaign. Cruz told the Miami Herald that Roberts'
name was the first that came to mind when he was asked to help find lawyers to
work on the litigation. Roberts reportedly helped with legal briefs and
participated in a mock hearing to prepare Bush’s legal team.
“We needed the very best lawyers in
the country, and I called John and asked him to help,” Cruz later wrote in the
National Review. “Within hours, he was on a plane to Florida.”
When President George W. Bush
nominated Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005, Cruz was an outspoken
advocate for his confirmation, calling him “brilliant” and a “lawyer’s
lawyer."
Man, this gets uglier and scarier by the minute. So, after this Iowa Caucus sham election when
are we going to quit this banana republic style process controlled by the
elites of the two parties?
What’s really outrageous about the current system is that
the selection process goes on for almost two years and the two parties consider
the votes cast by voters to be suggestions that they, the superdelegates, can
override. From Bloomberg:
Excerpt:
For starters, superdelegates are
formally unpledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention who are chosen by position, not through
votes in primaries and caucuses. The two big groups are elected officials (members of Congress,
governors) and party officials.
Superdelegates were added in the
1980s for two reasons. One was practical: It was the only way to ensure that those party leaders could
get to the convention, at least as delegates.
The other was political:
Democrats were concerned that their new system didn’t place enough weight on
electability, and believed a larger
voice for politicians and formal party leaders would tilt the nomination in
that direction…
Yes, indeed the superdelegates are the elite members of
congress and governors who do not reflect the will of the voters and can
overrule the will of the voters like they did in 2008.
Let’s have a national primary in June where everyone goes to
the polls on the same day. Let the
people choose the candidates for the nation’s highest office of any party they
wish. Those chosen by the voters,
regardless of party affiliation advance to the general election. Otherwise American will continue to be a Bushwhacked
banana republic run by billionaire backed crooks.
By Patricia Baeten
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