Beginning of Cain campaign founded on illegal expenditures?

A report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel indicates that Prosperity USA, a now-defunct Wisconsin firm — run by Herman Cain’s top two campaign aides, Mark Block and Linda Hansen — used what appear to many experts to have been illegal expenditures to get the Cain campaign rolling.

According to the Journal Sentinel…

Election law experts say the transactions raise a host of questions for the private organization, which billed itself as a tax-exempt nonprofit, and the Cain team.

“If the records accurately reflect what occurred, this is way out of bounds,” said a Washington, D.C.-based election lawyer who advises many Republican candidates and conservative groups on campaign issues. The lawyer asked not to be identified because of those affiliations.

Michael Maistelman, a Wisconsin campaign attorney, agreed.

“The number of questionable and possibly illegal transactions conducted on behalf of Herman Cain is staggering,” said Maistelman, a Democrat who has represented politicians from both parties on campaign issues.

Here is another tidbit that emerged from the Journal Sentinel’s investigation: Prosperity USA paid as much as $100,000 to the conservative, mostly black organization, CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, shortly before Herman Cain was chosen as the group’s featured speaker at their annual Martin Luther King dinner last January. Cain, who has supposedly been in demand as a speaker and is claimed to often have received large amounts for his public appearances, was apparently not paid for the appearance.

GOP rising star Marco Rubio caught in huge whopper

Many politicians fudge small details of their lives, rounding up, as it were, when a requirement for brevity demands a less than full answer.

But there’s a special place in political hell for the politician who bases a large part of his political identity on what turns out to be a lie.

You can welcome Replublican Governor Marco Rubio of Florida to that special circle of hell.

Today’s Washington Post features an investigation of Rubio’s background that reveals he has frequently played fast and very loose with the facts of his family history.

Rubio has often repeated the compelling story of his parents fleeing Cuba to escape the revolution that threw out the American organized crime interests that had run much of the island’s brothels, nightclubs, casinos and other tourism, with the help of their toadying accomplice, the dictator Fulgencio Batista — a revolution that ultimately brought Fidel Castro to power.

In 2006, Rubio told an audience, “in January of 1959, a thug named Fidel Castro took power in Cuba and countless Cubans were forced to flee and come here, many — most — here to America. When they arrived, they were welcomed by the most compassionate people on all the Earth.”

Just one problem…

Marco’s parents, Mario and Oriales Rubio had arrived in the United States in 1956, long before Castro came to power (he was actually still in exile in Mexico at the time).

Presumably, like so many immigrants before and since, the Rubios were seeking better economic opportunities, free of the massive corruption of Batista’s Cuba and, one might imagine, perhaps even relief from the heavy-handed repression meted out by Batista’s own thugs, the secret police that carried out a wave of public torture and executions that killed as many as 20,000 on the small island.

But that story would not have played well with the violently anti-Castro politics of Florida’s Cuban exile community…

More in the Washington Post:

Marco Rubio’s compelling family story embellishes facts, documents show

A song for the free Libyan people and the citizen soldiers of the Arab Spring…

Dedicated to the free people of Libya…

Towers of the Rich

I woke up this morning
heard a distant rumble
The walls of this city
soon will tumble

the towers of the rich
will surely crumble
the future my friend belongs
to the meek and the humble

the palaces you built
on the bones of the poor
with ivory on the walls
and blood on the floor

every thing you own
is fine and pure
I’m sure we’ll be impressed
when we kick in your door

refrain:
I woke up this morning
heard a distant rumble
The walls of this city
soon will tumble

the towers of the rich
will surely crumble
the future my friend belongs
to the meek and the humble…

16 February 2011
(C)2011, TK Major

When you’re sponsored by Big Hammer…

When you’re sponsored by Big Hammer, the whole world looks like a nail…

Rick Perry calls for increased oil and energy production to reboot U.S.economy

— Washington Post

What’s worse than electing someone who WANTS to be president?

Melinda Hennebergur, writing in the In the Moment blog in the Washington post, has a possible answer to the question of what’s worse than electing someone who wants to be president (they must be nuts, to want to be, right?)… and the answer would be someone who doesn’t want to be president, but whose wife convinced him that God told her he should be president.

Rick Perry: Does he really want to leave Texas?

This computer virus could kill…

Wired Magazine is reporting that US Predator and Reaper drone aircraft have been known for at least 2 weeks to be infected with a keystroke logging virus which records the remote pilots’ every keystroke and computer action.

So far the virus — which is of unknown origin — isn’t known to have caused problems on missions or — it is hoped — to have sent secure information to foreign powers, but military software experts and the defense contractors who make the drone aircraft have not been able to find out anything much about it — or kill it.

So much for the computer acumen of the U.S. defense establishment, eh?