Pennsylvania's GOP Joins The Smear Party

Via Talking Points Memo, we find this at Attytood (one of the better blogs on the eastern part of the Commonwealth).  9:29 this evening Will Bunch recieved what he calls "the sleaziest press release" he's ever seen.

Go read it.  It's enlightening to say the least.

Bunch ends things with this:

Seriously, this is the kind of crap that people usually put on people's car windshields at 3 in the morning, unsigned in crude block letters. The fact that the Republican Party of Pennsylvania would put this out on its official letterhead is truly a rock bottom moment in American politics. It makes me wonder what the Republican Party has to hide if they are this desperate to try to cling to power at all costs to their dignity and humanity.

 

But wait it gets better. Bunch has a coda of sorts:

There's one final ironic twist in all of this.

John McCain's Pennsylvania co-chairman? He's a convicted felon. You can look it up.

Classy guys. Just classy!

Pennsylvania Connection to the Ousted Prosecutors Scandal

I found a very interesting thread over at attytood.

Here's the Readers' Digest version. Paul Krugman points out something that so far hasn't been brought to light over the scandal. If the 8 US Attorneys were ousted because they refused to play ball with the Bush White House, what of the other 85 or so? Did they PLAY ALONG? And if so, how? Here's Krugman (by way of dailykos:

The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Krugman's point is that the attorneys released were released because they refused to play along and deliver dirt to the Republicans on the Democrats just before the election. I guess there were more than 8 who were replaced. One of these, it turns out, is in Puerto Rico. It happened in June of 2006.

Attytood points out that that was the time we began to hear (from the Santorum campaign) about "Bobby Casey's financial team." Specifically, about a man named Robert Feldman. News reports from that time show that Feldman's fundraising activities were under federal review.

After the election? No news.

Attytood ends it this way:

I want to be very careful here -- I know very little about either the former U.S. Attorney in San Juan, or the one who replaced him. I also don't want to suggest that Feldman, who once had close ties to Mayor Street here in Philadelphia, is someone whose activities should not be looked into.

But I am troubled by the timing of all of this -- particularly when one looks at how the information was used by the Santorum campaign.

And so I'll try to find out some more about this. People in Washington should be asking questions, too.

I wouldn't be surprised if Attytood's suspicions turned out to be right on the money.