Period of Adjustment

It's been a weird couple of months, and I'm still adjusting to new routines. Plus, I got a cold, which puts my brain into sleep mode. There's been a lot to be outraged about, and I may try to catch up on some of it, but this one just hit me today. The story's around, but this report, via Balloon Juice, caught my attention. From the LA Times report:

Strategic Allied Consulting was hired to do voter registration drives in Florida, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada, and had been planning get-out-the-vote drives in Ohio and Wisconsin, according to Sproul.

Sproul owns another company, Lincoln Strategy Group, that was paid about $70,000 by the Mitt Romney campaign during the primaries to gather signatures. He said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the request of the Republican National Committee because of the bad publicity stemming from the past allegations. In 2004, there were allegations in states such as Nevada and Oregon that employees of his firm -- which had a similar contract with the RNC -- registered Democratic voters and then destroyed their forms. (Sproul noted that no criminal charges were ever filed.)

Strategic Allied was set up at an address in Glen Allen, Va., and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.

“In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet,” Sproul said.

(Emphasis mine.)

Two things about this: You'll note that the RNC and the state party organizations did not decline to do business with Sproul because of past allegations of fraud and other improprieties -- they just asked him to change his name, which is pretty revealing: they have no problem doing business with shady characters if it gets the results they want, and they haven't figured out that this is the Information Age -- you can't hide shit like this.

Also, too, the stress on the fact that no criminal charges were ever brought: It's a sad statement on the degree of cynicism in this country about our justice system that this carries no weight whatsoever. Perhaps I'm more cynical than most, but my first question was, "Were the state Attorneys General, or the DAs in charge of the investigations, Republicans?" If they were Democrats, then maybe there's no fire, in spite of the smoke. If they were, big whip.

And "distraction"? Yeah, I guess if you're going back to the same shady character and it's public information, it might be a distraction -- that is, it would distract from your own distractions about "voter fraud."

The mindset here is staggering.

Now that I'm feeling better, maybe I'll go after the Catholic bishops -- they've been in rare form lately.