Franklin County Democrats

Ezra Klein:

[...] What’s been uncommon about the past two years is that the Democrats in Congress managed to do more than argue: they legislated. They took the agenda they’d run on and made much of it law. This was no do-nothing Congress. This Congress did lots.

Polls have found that the public doesn’t realize how extraordinary this was. Most voters—and that holds for Democrats, too—don’t think the 111th got more accomplished than most Congresses. But they’re wrong. The 111th came to Washington promising to get things done on behalf of the American people. More than any other Congress in decades, it did.

This is the single most frustrating thing for me. We elect politicians expecting them to get things done. And that’s what the 111th Congress did. And as reward voters effectively dismantled a working Congress without understanding how extraordinary the last two years have been legislatively, and put back in charge the very same people who caused most of our problems in the first place, the very same people who are likely to get very little done in the next two years (save playing political games to gain more power in 2012).

People may disagree with some of the legislation that was passed but no one can argue that Democrats did not accomplish most of what they campaigned on in 2008 and were ultimately elected to do — and they somehow managed to do it with relentless opposition from the right.

Welcome to our new digs. I’ve been wanting to make this move for several years now and just never found the time. The old site was built with proprietary software that was obsolete and it was well past time for an upgrade.

There are several big changes with our new system. The first is that comments are now tied to user accounts. In order to leave a comment you’ll need to register by supplying your email address and a user name. No worry though, your email will not be made public and your user name is as anonymous as you want it to be. Your email address is only needed to send you your password. Once you receive a password you can log in and change it to one of your choosing.

The good news about the new comments section is that they are now threaded. That means users can reply to other users within the same thread, instead of having a single flat conversation like the old site. The bad news is that I could not port the comments from the old site to this one since they weren’t tied to any specific user account. That sucks because there is some good information in those comments. If you want to log in and re-post them that’d be great; otherwise, we are basically starting from scratch.

The archived posts have not been ported either. As with comments there is no logical path to move the data from the old system to the new one seamlessly. I will have do that manually over time or on an as-needed basis. For now, posts from the last two months have been ported. BTW, since I started this blog in 2005 I have posted 610 articles. That’s just me. It doesn’t include what Darin, Susan or anyone else has contributed. So moving everything will be a huge task and take some time.

One of the best things about the new system is all the search features. You can use the search field at the top to do keywords searches across the entire site. Each post comes with linked keywords listed at the bottom called “Tags” that you can click to find other stories with the same tags. Additionally, a “Tag Cloud” appears in the sidebar on the right. The more the tags have been used the larger the text, so you can see which topics have been written about the most.

There is also a calendar in the sidebar that lets you search for posts by date and an archive that lets you search for posts by month.

Another important feature is that the URLs for each post are now human-readable. This is important for two reason: 1) It makes it easier for search engines such as Google to find our site, and 2) it makes it easier to share the link in emails. The links on the old system were horrid. That alone is enough to make this move worthwhile.

Information about the committee is linked at the top of the page and external links, our blogroll, and important documents can be found in the sidebar.

I hope you enjoy the new look and all the new features. Happy blogging.

Our newly-elected county commissioner naps at public meeting on the county master plan

Gov. Jay Nixon has decided to appoint Sleepy John Griesheimer to fill the vacancy left by former county presiding commissioner, Ed Hillhouse. At the October meeting of the Franklin County Democratic Central Committee, former county presiding commissioner, Gene Scott, was nominated by members to fill the vacancy and his name was later submitted to the governor for consideration.

All things considered this makes the most sense. For one thing it would look awfully partisan of Nixon to appoint a Democrat over a Republican who just won the office only two days ago by 70 percent of the vote.

And secondly, Griesheimer can get an early start on representing the interests of the citizens of Labadie against AmerenUE’s proposed toxic waste dump in the Labadie Bottoms floodplain. (Perhaps the FCD’s should send John a gift basket of coffee as congratulations, you know, to help keep him focused).

Thanks again to Gene Scott for stepping up and accepting the nomination when he was called upon. He needs to get off the tractor and back into politics. His breadth of knowledge of Missouri law and policy is invaluable to Franklin Countians.

According to Randy Downs, Treasurer for Citizens to Elect Teresa Connelly (for County Clerk), libertarian activist, BJ Lawrence, published a website that makes it appear as though Connelly is endorsing the candidacy of Republican Paul Curtman in the 105th. Curtman is challenging the Democratic incumbent Mike Frame. I grabbed the screen shot on the left for posterity.

continue reading…

For months we have been hearing media pundits relentlessly pushing the “Democrats are doomed” narrative. Now that there appears to be a shift in the polling data and the so-called “enthusiasm gap” seems to be closing in the final days of the campaign, a new narrative is emerging from the right: “Democrats are going to steal the election through voter fraud.” They are even making the wild claim that the now de-funded and defunct community organizing group, ACORN, has re-emerged.

Here’s a video sample of the nuttery from TPM:

I’ve never bought into the enthusiasm gap nonsense. The enthusiasm is still here for Democrats it’s just been more measured (and also we tend not to be a bunch of media-hog loud mouths). Make no mistake, Republicans are going to have a good night next Tuesday, so it seems especially ridiculous that they would be banging the massive voter fraud drum ahead of that. One would think Democrats would be doing it. But there may be some method to this madness.

Expectations have been raised so high for Republicans this year that anything short of a total rout will be seen as a colossal failure. Remember, conservatives can never be wrong. Therefore, there must be some external and sinister force at work in the world to explain why reality did not match expectations. Allegations of voter fraud this soon may be the GOP laying the groundwork for that effort if things don’t go as planned.

A better possibility for these kooky claims is that the GOP is less likely to take control of the Senate than the House, and many of the Senate races they do lose will be by razor thin margins. If they can allege voter fraud they can prevent some of the winners from being seated for months or even a year and further gum up the works, as they did with Sen. Al Franken in 2008-09.

Keep an eye on this one, especially if there are some surprises next Tuesday. And I think there are going to be.