Comments (27)

Anonymous wrote on October 30, 2007 12:47 PM:

Sounds like Monica Goodling. "I crossed the line."

The turkeys are coming home to roost. The Admin has done its damage and the "career staff" - the government civil servants that compromised their principles and drank the Kool Aid - are now going down.

Today it was John Tanner, 30 year employee of DOJ.

Yesterday it was John "Pat" Philbin, FEMA employee but 21 year Coast Guard veteran.

Who's next?

Anonymous wrote on October 30, 2007 12:54 PM:

Did Trent Franks just quote Mark Hearne, as in Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, II, the bamboozler that ran the fraudulent "American Center For Voting Rights?"

Ahem?

Anonymous wrote on October 30, 2007 12:57 PM:

If Tanner made the racist comments to detract from discussing the 2000 and 2004 purging of African-American voters and the likely altering of the Florida 2000 outcome due to illegal purging, well, frankly, the strategy is working perfectly.

What needs discussing is how illegal purging has altered the course of American history, installing an illegitamate junta.

biggerbox wrote on October 30, 2007 1:30 PM:

I love the line "He's black."

With a guy as dumb as Tanner seems, it seemed appropriate to make that clear.

Tanner's wrinkled brow as he tries to understand what the Congressmen are asking makes it seem like maybe he doesn't speak English. It's pathetic.

Mimikatz wrote on October 30, 2007 2:00 PM:

He's actually pretty wrong. A higher percentage of Black people survive into very old age, not lower. At birth, whites do have a greater life expectancy than Blacks. This persists to about age 20, when the difference slowly begins to shrink (younger for females) and by about age 80 Blacks actually have a higher life expectancy than whites.

The difference between the races is smaller than the difference within each race by sex. Black women have about the same survival rates and white men until old age, when Black women pull ahead of white men, as Black men do by age 80 or so.

The tables are here

Barry Champlain wrote on October 30, 2007 2:18 PM:

Look, since I was a small child I've been watching politicians do everything in their power to come up with smarmy reasons like Tanner's why Blacks should have/aren't really having their votes suppressed or denied. This is now 2007, for Christ's sake. I'm into my "Golden Years".

I've watched these bastards defend Jim Crow in one form or another since the 1950's. "Handful o'senators won't pass legislation.." My God, that song was 1965! I didn't watch these hearings, but dollars to donuts there was a Republican or two kissing-up to this racist pig. Am I right??

It's about time that these goober tyrants are smacked-away in front of Congress, in full view of the world. It's long overdue; THIS HAS TO END, PERMANENTLY.

What the hell does it take? Look, we passed a Voting Rights Act over 40 years ago. There are today minorities at every occupational level of society (one Black man just got rewarded for his incompetence as a failed Wall Street CEO, with a $250 million severance package! Now THAT'S equality!)

"Turkeys coming home to roost", indeed. We made the mistake of not letting the Confederacy just go get lost, the first time. With any luck, at long last, we can finally defeat them. "Defeat", defined as "make them understand that whatever it is they don't like about American society... TOO DAMNED BAD."

Westclox wrote on October 30, 2007 2:40 PM:

These soundbyte 'gotcha' games ARE working perfectly. The Birkenstock Left in the USA get their pointless little victories, and the wealthy class go on draining the Treasury by running up a Forever Debt.

Forget about what Bushler's War is costing in human lives, and in environmental tolls. Forget all the uranium-tipped munitions that $ammy pops off 24/7/365, against 'Ghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

Think instead like a banker. USA has run up more debt than even Chancellor Adolf Hitler, circa 1938. The world's most expensive military machine has been constructed, and all on c-r-e-d-i-t.

Hitler ran up a skull-popping 'national debt' when he built the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe out of the bankrupt Weimar's ashes. His Kriegsmarine expenditures were a lot less practical...if Perfidious Albion had thirty-five battleships in 1937, what was the point of Adolf's investing so many precious Reichsmarks in the grossly-outnumbered Bismarck and Tirpitz? Was such an enormous amount of money spent just for show, for a propaganda coup?

And now we've got Bushler spending funny-money just like his toothbrush-moustached 20th Century counterpart did. You have to ask yourself if his madman's spending ways are in his mind justified by his conviction that the money will never have to be paid back? Seems so....

The USA presently has only one 'asset' that's worth more than the numerous stains gracing Bill O'Reilly's mangy, yellowed drawers. That asset is The Bomb.

To model the upcoming White House moves in the mobster vernacular, let's go back to the 1980's, and gangland Chicago. There was a kindly, non-violent crook named Ken Ito. He made a good living in the loan sharking business, though kneecaps and thumbs were beneath his dignity. If a debt really got bad, he'd take what he could by verbal intimidation but wouldn't extract the rest as blood, unlike his counterparts of the time.

Well, it came to pass that Ken had lent a LOT of money to his fellow mobsters, people whom he knew to be 'men of honor' and all that guff. When the 'men of honor' decided that they were in too deep with Ken, their feral nature offered them only one logical solution, the same one that Bushie-Cheney see as Murkuh's future: Ken, the creditor, had to be enticed into the front seat of a car, and the 'man of honor' in the back seat would have to pump several bullets into good ol' kindly Ken's head.

In the banking trade there's a saying: if you owe your bank ten thousand dollars, you have a problem, but if you owe your bank ten *million* dollars, your *bank* has a problem.

Bushie screwed up the the theft of Iraq, which was supposed to provide the cash-strapped USA with both the means to pay off debts and the reputation for being an effective hit man.

The guys who owed Ken Ito too much money screwed up in exactly the same way---they put the proper .22 slugs into his head, but Ken's head was harder than they expected. He lived, and repaid the 'mob honor' of his debtors by ratting them all out to the G.

See how it applies to the USA?

1) Threaten to devalue the national currency to the point where the trillion-trillion bucks that $am owes Beijing becomes eighty bucks when converted to yuan. Of course to do that one must starve and bankrupt his own people, but when has that ever been a problem for the Marie Antoinette social class?

2) Threaten your creditors with The Bomb, and with stealthy biological warfare. Have you asked yourself how the Anthrax Murders could have been so successful? Mega-billions spent on 'defense' and the whole colossus is/was helpless when facing down a thimble-full of white powder?

3) Threaten your own people with financial extinction. Have you added up your various 'taxes' lately? The rich pay none, thanks to tax lawyers and tax codes written by the rich for the rich.

Btw, have you seen even one peep about the IRS protest movement, on liberal darling Amy 'Lamey' Goodman's Democracy Now! show? The Treasury Department and IRS simply can't point to any l-a-w that makes paying the Federal Income Tax m-a-n-d-a-t-o-r-y, and every year many hundreds of people are made paupers and are sent to prison because they have read the whole complicated tax code with their lawyers and they can't find the part about 'mandatory'.

A guy named Ed Brown just vanished into the U.S. prison/gulag system, along with his dentist wife...for questioning the IRS. So did Irwin Schiff. Has Bill Maher or Jon Stewart even uttered the names of the resisters, on the air? Nah.

What about the Fedex air cargo pilot, Vernice Kuglin, who WON a tax evasion case against the IRS, by exactly the same
arguments as were brought by the Browns and Schiff? Her alleged tax liability was set by the government at over a million dollars...Kuglin walked out of the courtroom a free woman, and kept the money too.

I wrote to Millionairess Liberal Amy Goodman about that case, asked Her why She doesn't think tax protest is a moral way of stopping the extermination machine. Do you think she even bothered to answer?

It's all about the money, dear reader. The wealthy class pine for the Middle Ages again, except with a modern twist..when Rupert Murdoch needs a kidney (I hope he needs two, like yesterday) he'll just stroll down to the local soup line and pick him out a healthy homeless teenager and 'buy' the needed organ for a pittance. Like a Muscovite buys a live goose from the poultry stand on Dzerzhinsky street, today.

The wealthy have it all, except for three things: they're not physically free unless they own a spacious island, their health is always at risk on this planet that they've polluted, and they don't yet have a monarch's control over their government. That is, once in a blue moon a Leona Helmsly still does fall afoul of the IRS.

Can you see how Life Since Jimmy Carter is a steady march toward securing for the Two Per Cent of the USA's population their three point wish list?

1) They want to live longer, in order to better enjoy their riches,

2) They want the peasants confined to the least desirable land,

3) They want the (few, but still dangerous) interfering mavericks in the Federal Government neutralized. The Dennis Kucinich types, for example. Every one in a while, some party pooper will come along and spoil the fun by asking why there are human eyes floating in the champagne punch, and why the lamp shades are made from the skin of brown babies. Those few with *inconveniently good vision*, like Cynthia McKinney and crazy old Jim 'I Say No To Desert Storm' Trafficant, must be culled from the herd as class traitors.

Then the stealing can go on night and day, why the Nation Of Imbeciles names Matt Groening an official 'Genius'.

Why hasn't TPM touched even the tiny tippy-top of the IRS/Income Tax Legitimacy issue? There's no 'muck' at the IRS????? The Kuglin case isn't noteworthy? The Browns' Stand wasn't, er, 'news'? Nyuk, Nyuk.

It's ALL kabuki, especially the Internet Opposition Movement.

yaya wrote on October 30, 2007 2:46 PM:

so glad he's my congressman. Nice work Keith.

seriously, how does Tanner get into that position without serious cronyism?

Can anyone give me an answer to that?

moondancer wrote on October 30, 2007 3:04 PM:

Haven't even got to the part where they ask why a remedy for a non-existent problem. Tanner needs to admit he was ordered by fredo and rove to put the chimps imprimatur on an overtly racist act.

Jones wrote on October 30, 2007 3:14 PM:

'I love the line "He's black."'

So do the people behind Ellison.

ahem wrote on October 30, 2007 3:22 PM:

I also liked Ellison making the point -- as he's made before on this subject -- that the LouDobbsian specter of 'illegals voting' makes no sense: you add precisely one vote to the total, while committing a felony in clear view of many, many people. Lots of risk, not much reward.

(As opposed to voter suppression efforts, which remove hundreds and thousands from the total, with very little risk of punishment.)

A DC Wonk wrote on October 30, 2007 3:36 PM:

A slightly contrary view:

Enough already by slamming him for his line. It's much more important to slam him for the bigger picture. How about some questions such as: "do you think voter ID laws have a negative impact on voting?" "do you think they have a disparate impact on any race?" and, most importantly, "where is the evidence that there was any voter fraud that allegedly necessitated this law"?

C'mon, folks (meaning, both the commentators here and the Congressfolk), let's keep our eye on the ball. It's not one stupid statement he made, it's that he supported the voter ID Law that is the real issue!

Sheesh!!

Austin Cooper wrote on October 30, 2007 3:59 PM:

Any enculturated set of beliefs (or assumptions) is transparent to the believer: These beliefs simply *are*, and they're as automatic and unnoticed as breathing.

It isn't necessary to be a skinheaded white power nazi to support racist assumptions; I remember, before moving to New York, being counseled by an outwardly sweet, elderly woman neighbor to "be careful walking to work". When I asked why, she said primly, "Well, because of the N------ and Jews, dear.")

Most people, myself included, hold or have held certain "notions" about people who are different from us -- notions of race, or class, or nationality, or religious belief. 99% of the time, they're absolutely dead wrong.

I think that's what Tanner epitomizes here -- ant that's why Congressman Ellison's remark about his father ("He's Black") has a specific resonance for me: *Tanner isn't even aware how his enculturated beliefs are shaping his policymaking.*

We need to show this person the door.

jimbo92107 wrote on October 30, 2007 4:08 PM:

Kieth Ellison is way cool, although I'm sure he'd rather spend his time on meaningful legislation than chopping up rotten white meat like Tanner.

It's important to note how both Ellison and Rep. Artur Davis attacked Tanner, which was to examine the intent underlying his rhetoric. Tanner kept insisting that he was sorry that he expressed himself clumsily.

Perhaps so, yet Tanner's intent was always to justify suppressing minority voting rights, thus, apologizing for his poor wording was never satisfactory. Is there a smoother way to say "black people don't deserve to vote"? Maybe, but it's still a racist sentiment.

I'm glad to see that a couple skillful young US reps were able to pin down another wiggling Bush weasel.

apishapa wrote on October 30, 2007 4:52 PM:

I come from a tiny town in Colorado. Our oldest citizen is also one of the oldest people in the state. She is 109 years old. She is black

Henk wrote on October 30, 2007 6:42 PM:

Of course A DC Wonk would get it wrong. They are always telling us we don't see the big picture, while they themselves are so caught up in the trees they will never see the forest.
Here let me give you Tanner's answers: "do you think voter ID laws have a negative impact on voting?" NO!

"do you think they have a disparate impact on any race?" NO!

"where is the evidence that there was any voter fraud that allegedly necessitated this law"? I'll get back to you on that.

Damn, that's much better than having him try to explain a blatantly racist comment and looking like an idiot doing it. Not that Wonks care about these things, but seeing a man of limited intelligence at the head of the DOJ's voting rights division re-enforces the "Big Picture" image of Bush appointees as incompetent political hacks.

hotfootharp wrote on October 30, 2007 7:02 PM:

My gaydar is signaling me on this Tanner guy. Do I hear foot tapping?

Yvette & the Toaster wrote on October 30, 2007 8:26 PM:

Just a tale from the Voting Section to highlight the character, or lack thereof, of Acting Deputy Chief of Section 5, YVETTE RIVERA. A black staffer noticed that her toaster was missing. She sent around an email to the Section, asking if anyone had seen it. Some staffers consequently learned that an intern took the toaster, after being told by RIVERA that he could, even though it was not hers to give. Now when the email went around asking for the toaster, and when a note was placed on the bulletin board, a normal, moral person would send an email to the staffer saying "oh, I'm so sorry I did not realize that belonged to you, and I gave an intern permission to take it. Let me know how much it cost, and I will be happy to replace it." That is what I would do, and what I assume you all reading would do as well. But no, not RIVERA. She clearly read the email, has seen the bulletin board, yet weeks continue to pass, and she remains silent...Yvette, we know you read these, and we want you to know that WE KNOW you are behind this! And you want us to respect you when you lie and hide little mistakes like this? Now how can we respect you when you tell lie after lie, ask staff to spy on each other, and treat black staff SO differently than non-black staff?

Rep. Scott Correction wrote on October 30, 2007 8:39 PM:

just a correction. rep scott asked tanner if it was true that when the civil rights division awards came out, everyone in the division got an award except two staffers. very close, but the situation is that all of the section 5 analysts in the voting section (tanner's section) received awards except the only two black analysts. Yvette Rivera, who was in charge of nominating the section 5 staffers, is at it again...but folks, she claims she cannot be racist since she is a woman of color. great defense...hope she uses that one in the EEOs filed against her.

They All Lie wrote on October 30, 2007 8:43 PM:

Yvette and the Toaster - the one clear thing to emerge from these hearing is that Tanner, Rivera and Lorenzo all lie. Whether it involves a toaster, Cape Cod or administration of the law, they are liars at their core.

It turns out that Lorenzo is not the only flunkie who has been abusing travel and leave policies. More on that should be forthcoming soon to a newspaper near you. It seems some of the chosen flunkies are blessed with being able to ignore the law associated with federal HR policies.

And remember, document the flunkies when they make any inquiry about these matters. Intimidation after they steal and are reported is one of the most prohibited types of intimidation - especially from the flunkies who abuse the HR rules - and we all know who they are.

Rep Scott II wrote on October 30, 2007 8:47 PM:

There is a counterpart occurance in the litigation side too. All but a few getting awards. You'll never guess what the unlucky folks did to disqualify themselves from getting an award?!

This will all come out in due course.

If I were Tanner and one of his cronies, I'd be very very very nervous. There is nothing quite like a con job unravelling. Everyone turns on each other. Everyone turns on the ones who are in on the con.

Bigger Thomas wrote on October 30, 2007 8:58 PM:

Yes, Mr. Tanner, your comments hurt me so much, I'm gonna got eat a whole 24-piece bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, wash it all down with a 40 ounce bottle of Malt Liquor, and see if I become another statistic for you to document.....

Rep Scott III wrote on October 30, 2007 9:20 PM:

well one very special litigator got a monetary award: sean o'donnell, tanner's boy. the voting rights act reauthorization party, which was initially set to take place at the home of a veteran black section 5 analyst was moved, by tanner, to the home of new white republican lawyer association member o'donnell. same guy who was tanner's coffee pal, same guy who is said to be the ring leader in the sexual harassment of a section 5 analyst...who better to be awarded than he? this guy managed to insult women, gays and blacks in one breath. what a talent! maybe that was why he was awarded!

comm wrote on October 30, 2007 9:57 PM:

Rep Scott III - do you have any more information on this sexual harassment incident in the voting section by this person? Can you forward the name of the victim? Do you know what was done to punish the harassment? Is there a public docket of this matter? Do you know what his statements were that were the basis of the harassment? Even if you don't know firsthand, perhaps you can put committee staff in touch with the people who do know. Please call the committee at(202)225 3951 and ask for LaShawn. There may very likely be a second hearing involving Tanner and his behavior and it is important for the committee to hear about incidents of sexual and racial harassment by these people that went unpunished, and perhaps even rewarded, it would seem.

If anyone else knows about this incident of harassment by this individual, please feel free to call the above number and share whatever information regarding it you may have. This is exactly the sort of thing that should be part of any second or follow up hearing.

to comm wrote on October 30, 2007 10:08 PM:

it is my understanding that LaShawn knows this story. people in the voting section, the civil rights division HR office, and the union all know this story. people outside the division know this story; its all over because its unbelievable. i think the victim would tell congress what happened if congress contacted her. the statements were related to her human rights campaign posters; o'donnell referred to her as a "rug-muncher" (classy guy, i know). additional statements were made in reference to dr king, malcolm x and nelson mandela pictures she has in her office; he called her "too pro-black". another attorney involved, don palmer, commented on her "boobs and ass" during the exchange. it is my understanding none of this was said in her presence, but about her, to others, while in the office. the comments then went on about why she was still in the section (she is one of the pre-tanner analysts left) and why she has not been run out. the entire section has to attend a sexual harassment training. no one is clear as to the punishment of the individuals involved, though it is clear that o'donnell was awarded.

Mark Richards wrote on October 30, 2007 11:41 PM:

Tanner - another member of the "heckuvajob" team - receives a reaming. Gonzo should have enjoyed the same treatment.

How many more of these pathetic Luddites infest the current maladministration?

Must we wait until 2009 to flush them all out?

eric wrote on October 31, 2007 11:07 AM:

You can tell that Ellison has actually spent some time in the Courtroom.