Spencer Meads's blog

Over the weekend, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) was a keynote speaker at the NetRoots Nation conference in Las Vegas where he said his 2008 campaign was “the most efficient campaign I think in the history of the Senate. We won by 312 votes. We didn’t waste one bit of effort.”

That’s for sure. In December 2009, NLPC President Peter Flaherty wrote:

After a legal battle and a selective recount, Democrat Al Franken was declared the winner over incumbent Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) by 312 votes. ACORN-endorsed Franken no doubt benefitted from the 43,000 new voters that ACORN and its affiliates claimed to have registered in Minnesota before the election.  Even assuming only half of these people voted, and the level of fraud was only 2%, it is likely Franken would have lost. Of course, ACORN voter-registration fraud rates have been shown to be exponentially higher. For instance, of the 1.3 million new registrations generated by ACORN-affiliate Project Vote last year, 400,000 were thrown out.

Josef Stalin’s bust remains at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia despite mounting criticism. A chorus of voices is asking what Stalin had to do with D-Day, and why a mass murderer is being honored at all.

The National D-Day Memorial officially opened in June 2001. Congress authorized the small town of Bedford as the site of the memorial because it proportionally suffered the severest D-Day losses. Nineteen soldiers from Bedford’s town of about 3,200 died on D-Day.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is reportedly considering a ban on former auto czar Steven Rattner from working in the securities industry for up to three years. Even if he gets the three years, it would be pitifully short.

Rattner oversaw the bailouts of Chrysler and GM, which were conducted to the benefit of the United Auto Workers. In the GM bailout, billions of dollars were simply stolen from bondholders and turned over to the union-controlled funds.

Former Mayor of Detroit Kwame Kilpatrick was sentenced to 18 months to five years in prison two weeks ago for violating probation. Kilpatrick was on probation for lying under oath in 2008 about a text messages to and from his then Chief of Staff Christine Beatty, with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

His mother, Rep. Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick (D-MI), has been luckier. She was cleared by the House Ethics Committee in February after taking part in a Caribbean junket, the same 2008 trip for which Charles Rangel was admonished, costing him his chairmanship of the Ways and Means committee.

“I don’t have anything to add to what I said in March,” said a tight-lipped White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs last Friday. Reporters pressed Gibbs to comment on allegations that the Obama administration offered Joe Sestak (D-PA) a “high ranking” government job if Sestak would drop out of the Senate primary race against Arlen Specter (D-PA).

Gibbs, sounding like a broken record, repeated this or some similar phrase eight times during the White House briefing.