Koster's Ex-wife Drops $200K on Negative Ads

Would your ex go after you like this?

If Missouri state Sen. Chris Koster didn't make enough enemies when he switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party last year, now his ex-wife is weighing in against him.

Koster, in the midst of fiercely contested race for the Democratic nomination for attorney general, is bracing for $187,500 in television ads paid for by ex-wife Rebecca Bowman Nassikas.

Nassikas, who now lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., ponied up $200,000 last week to oppose his candidacy. She gave the money to a dormant political committee called Missourians for Honest Leadership.

Koster spokesman Danny Kanner said it was just another example of Koster's political rivals trying to undermine his candidacy.

"Our opponents are doing anything they can to throw trash against the wall about Chris to see if anything sticks," Kanner said. "Rebecca is a private citizen who can do whatever she wants with her money."

Ouch...

--WS

Midwest Flood Photos

These photos come from a variety of places and sources throughout the affected areas. Sometimes the aftermath is just as bad as the event itself.

Cedar Rapids IA:



Clarksville MO:




Hannibal MO:


Amana Refridgeration Plant, Middle Amana IA:


Cedar Rapids IA:


Hannibal MO:

So much for the horse race, let's look at track conditions

All right Democrats. It is time to get our collective act together and put the past behind us. It isn't about anyones hurt feelings. I voted for Hillary in the primary and one of the checks I wrote this primary season was to her campaign. But I can read the tea leaves, and Obama is going to be the nominee.

So take the long weekend to lick your wounds, and when Tuesday rolls around, start with mending fences. It is time to get over yourself. It isn't about you, or me, or even the candidates. It is about electing a Democrat and saving the Supreme Court.

Looked at through that lens, Obama is perfectly suited for the job, because he was a Constitutional Law professor. That is hugely important with a Supreme Court that has a liberal wing that is as chronologically advanced as our liberal justices are. Especially with Roberts as Chief. Ugh...


McClatchy has an article on the importance of Missouri this fall. Obama carried the state - narrowly - on Super Tuesday - because of St. Louis and Kansas City. In the outstate areas, Hillary is the overwhelming choice. At the State Democratic Convention I saw Hillbillies for Hillary t-shirts, and my father in law, who has voted in the primary for the guy who eventually won the White House since 1980 is a huge Hillary Clinton supporter. I have been telling everyone since September, when we went to the country for bow season, that she is the outstate favorite.

Obama - and the state and national party apparatus - have challenges in this bellwether state - but they can be overcome with grassroots organization, and most importantly - presence. When Missouri voters in outstate areas are asked about Obama and the response ranges from

"I feel like I just don't know him yet."

to

"I can't vote Republican. I'll either vote for Obama or not vote. If it were today, I would not vote. There's still six months . ... He's gonna' have to convince me. I haven't seen it yet."

Our mission is clearly defined. Convince voters. I spoke to my father in law before the state convention and asked him if there was anything he wanted me to impart to the leaders of the party. He said I should tell them to make their presence known, that no one was going to vote for them if they didn't bother to ask.

So here is how Obama wins in Missouri, and helps deliver the Missouri Sixth congressional seat to Kay Barnes, the Democrat opposing the odious Sam "96%" Graves, (as in he votes the way aWol wants him to 96% 0f the time), and takes a congressional enemy off the chessboard.

It's politics 101. What Howard Dean did for the nation with the brilliant 50 State Strategy, the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party (national and state need to get their act together and combine resources for this) need to do in Missouri. Call it a 114 County Strategy.

Get someone on the ground in every county - it can be as simple as a dedicated cell phone and someone willing to answer and return calls, and store yard signs, bumper stickers, lapel pins and campaign literature in their garage or basement and pass it out when people ask for it, and put an add in every county paper every single week.

If Obama campaigns hard in Kansas City, St. Louis, and the Sixth Congressional District...He wins. KC and StL are reliably Democratic. The Sixth is vulnerable and due to flip. The Sixth is also huge in area - the population isn't dense, but the people aren't either. They know that republican policies have damaged them economically and sent their kids to fight and die in a senseless conflict that should never have been undertaken. A couple of stops in St. Joseph would pull supporters for both Kay Barnes and Representative Nancy Boyda of the KS 02 and fill the stadium at Missouri Western. Do the same thing in Hannibal and bolster democratic turnout among rural voters in three states. What's not to love about this plan?

Now the Democratic Party needs to get their act together and start plotting strategy. Ask any veteran and they will tell you - It is always - always - a bad idea to cede the hill country in any fight.


[Crossposted from Show Me Progress]

Primary Importance

This is it, Missouri. Super Tuesday is February 5. That day we join 23 other states to cast our primary ballots or attend caucuses to decide who will be the nominees for our respective parties for the presidency.

If you are not registered to vote, or you have moved since you last voted, you have until January 9th to get registered to participate in the primary. You can register to vote at your county election board headquarters, or, in Kansas City, you can register at any branch of the Kansas City Public Library. In outlying areas, you should call your county elections board, or check the Secretary of State's website for information on registering to vote.

This is the most important presidential election of our generation. The next president has a huge mess to clean up, and we must choose wisely. We start by choosing wisely in the primary.

In 2006, I remember opening up the Kansas City Star a few days before the midterm primary and seeing in the sidebar a sampling of "person on the street" interviews. When asked if they were going to vote in the primary, all but one of the people interviewed dismissed the primary as "unimportant." They were all too busy, the primaries don't matter, blah, blah, blah.

I read that, and had to be sedated.

The fact that four of five people couldn't be bothered to vote in the primary set me off. I believe saying at the time that they all needed to be "bitch-slapped" or something along those lines. It's fuzzy now, that's about the time the tranquilizer dart kicked in. My husband is a smart man - he keeps a supply on hand during election season and presidential administrations headed up by Republicans named "Bush."

Now, let me give a bit of background. I grew up in a family that preached the gospel of the electoral process, and intoned the mantra of the importance of the local election. Not very many people spent their tenth summer campaigning for Jerry Litton and Kit Bond (on alternate evenings) in 1972 - my yellow-dog Democrat Grandmother and belt-and-suspenders Republican Grandfather had a mixed marriage, and a passel of grandkids that got shipped to them them every summer, where we learned to put up hay early in the morning; and then learned the nuts and bolts of localized, retail politics in the evening.

I grew up in that politically charged environment, and it took. It took so well that I am a missionary for the cause, intent on spreading that word, until I am convinced that somebody besides me gets it!

That is why I was so ecstatic to see the turnout in Iowa on Thursday night. Maybe my Grandma's message of "Primary Importance" is catching on? I'm going to go ahead and optimistically hope so, and try to make the case that the primary is the most important election, not the least, as those misguided souls interviewed by the Star seemed to believe.

Before anyone gets to face us in the general, they have to walk neighborhoods and attend rallies and ice-cream socials and box suppers and let their potential constituents get to know them, at least those of us who live in "important" states - meaning swing states like Missouri and states that vote on or before Super Tuesday, which pretty much decides the whole shooting match, especially now that New York and California have joined the Super Tuesday festivities.

If we are lucky, something like 20 percent of registered voters will come out to vote in the primary on February 5 to select our respective parties presidential candidates.

It makes me absolutely livid when a voter dismisses the primaries as "too minor" to waste his or her precious time on.

Five will get you ten, when the general heats up, at least half of those who were "too busy" to help select their parties candidate, will complain that the General election is a regular "Sophie's Choice." Then they will proceed to whine endlessly about how much they hate being "forced to select between the lesser of two evils...just to exercise his god-damned constitutionally guaranteed right to vote!"

On many occasions, I have asked such people, ever so sweetly (this is how I reel 'em in) "who did you vote for in the primary?"

This is almost always met with a blank stare.

Followed by a tap-dance about the General election being the important one.

I disagree.

Before we decide between us, we have to decide amongst ourselves who we want to bear our standard. At it's best, at it's finest, at it's core, populist roots; this is the way politics is supposed to happen in a representative democracy.

The place to winnow out the reckless and the feckless is in the primary, not the General. And if you don't participate in the primary, I would strongly advise that you not complain about your choices come November. Not in close proximity to me, anyway.

Perseveration Warning...

This morning when I sat down with my coffee to read my email, in with the usual spam, and requests to delete a comment, or to act as a conduit between two entities, and the emails from friends, one jumped out at me, and I read it four or five times, each time hoping by the time I got to the end of the missive, that I would have an answer for this woman who needs (and deserves) one.

I may not have answers, but I have a soapbox, and maybe a reader has an answer. So I am reproducing her email here, with identifying information redacted.

I read your blog on a daily basis. I'm a democrat stuck down in Fundieville (Springfield) as I call it here dead in the middle of the Ozarks. Ever since Boy Blunt took over in Jeff City and installed Logisticare to provide medicaid transportation I have fought with them every single month over transportation for my son, who has Cerebral Palsy, for transpo to and from his therapy appts here in town. Now they have struck again and want him to use public transpo to go to and from his appts and I will have to pay 3 bucks per time he goes to therapy. It's not the money that really bothers me it's the fact that they just don't seem to give a rat's ass about his care and all they want is the money they get from the state. I have contacted my local state rep and got nada help, but then again as you well know, they are all republicans so no help for the poor and sick. Is there someone I can contact outside of Logisticare to get some help with this problem? If I listed the whole litany of times I have had to fight with them over this, this email would go on for pages. Thanks for any help you may be able to give me.

Sitemeter is a wonderful thing. I know that this blog is read by people in state government. So one of you Jefferson City lurkers…If you can help this woman will you please break radio silence and send me an email, and I will put the two of you together?

Meantime…Light blogging today and tomorrow…I have a bit in my teeth and I am not letting go. A simple Google search gives me reams of material. I fully intend to make you mad as hell at the fact your tax dollars are supporting this - this - this - oh hell, I'll call it what it is - this criminal enterprise!

And although it goes without saying, I’ll say it anyway: Send your Logisticare links and horror stories to me here at bluegirl.redstate@gmail.com.

A small victory but no reason to celebrate just yet…

Yesterday a federal judge agreed to temporarily block the horrendous new law that was aimed at further restricting abortions through the regulation of clinics where the procedure is performed.

U.S. District Judge Ortrie Smith granted the request from Planned Parenthood of Kansas & Mid-Missouri and stayed the law from taking effect, and he will hold a hearing on September 10 to determine whether to make the injunction permanent or allow the law to take effect.

The new law, which Matty B. signed into law in the sanctuary of a Baptist Church, is an end run around access, pure and simple. When the courts had given the anti-choice zealots all the legal restrictions they were going to get, they set their sights on restricting access via facilities regulations. To this end, they drafted a smarmy little law that set the bar for facilities higher than most of the clinics can meet. As a result, they either have to suspend providing the service, or they have to spend a shitload of money they don’t have on a bunch of pointless facilities upgrades that aren’t needed and serve no purpose.

Facilities that provide abortions in Missouri are already licensed and regulated, but here is where it gets dicey…not all facilities that perform abortions have been defined as abortion clinics. State law has defined an abortion clinic as a facility that derives at least one-half of it’s revenue from abortion services. Under that definition, only one facility, a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis meets that definition.

The new law would alter the definition of an abortion clinic in the state code and pull other facilities under the definition, even the KC clinic that only dispenses abortifacients, and does not perform surgical abortions.

In his order, Smith warned both sides from reading too much into his ruling, saying "the state has a legitimate interest in regulating facilities that perform surgery, even if the facility in question performs surgical abortions."

"The court also believes the state may differentiate between facilities that do not primarily perform surgery based on the types of surgery they provide," he wrote.

But he said it was confusing how the state would apply the law to the Kansas City clinic, which performs only medication-induced abortions, not surgical ones.

Defense attorneys said the facility should be outfitted for surgery in case something goes wrong with the medication. Smith was not convinced.

"Of all the establishments that dispense medication (e.g. doctor’s offices, pharmacies), why is it only those that dispense medication for the purpose of inducing an abortion that must be prepared to perform surgery?" Smith asked.

He said the law should probably apply to the Columbia clinic and noted that Planned Parenthood and the department were willing to cooperate. But he said there was still disagreement over what level of regulations the clinic would have to follow.

In the mean time, we need to get organized and get loud. The rights of women to control our own bodies has been beaten, battered, and thrown under the bus under the Blunt administration.

In Missouri, reproductive freedom is under full frontal assault. Over a year ago legislation was passed that prohibited not just the distribution of contraceptives, but the dissemination of information. The legislation tied state funding to a gag order. County health departments were not only prohibited from providing birth control, they were prohibited from referring to programs that could provide those services.

Over a year ago the non-profit Guttmacher Institute released a study that showed poor women, those living below the poverty line, have a four-fold rate of unintended pregnancy over more affluent women. The study also showed that the trend coincides chronologically with actions taken at both the state and federal levels that have severely limited or entirely eliminated contraceptive programs that serve low-income women. Pregnancy prevention programs have consistently shifted the focus of their efforts from contraception to abstinence, even in marriage.

Social conservatives, meantime, continue to dismissively argue in the face of fact that all contraceptive methods have limitations to their effectiveness, so the only way to be sure an unintended pregnancy is avoided is through abstinence, so really, denying contraception doesn’t matter – God’s will is God’s will. Yes, no contraception is foolproof – but if I were a woman living below the poverty line, I would sure rather have access to the pill and it’s 98% effectiveness rate than nothing at all. Their argument is specious at best, and actually smacks of blatant intellectual dishonesty.

But let’s tote the board, shall we? The social conservatives have managed to curtail availability of contraception for poor women. They have managed to get laws passed at the state level that restrict access to abortion – actions that unfairly deny access to poor women while more affluent women are able to exercise their constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy by taking a trip across state lines. And the final cruel twist of fate: once those unintended pregnancies come to fruition, and a baby is born, that child is on his or her own because Medicaid has been cut to the bone.

Reagan was wrong – people are not “poor by choice.” They are poor by circumstance, and not everyone has the skills; social, cognitive, or otherwise, to escape those circumstances. A smaller percentage still has the ability to acquire the skills necessary to escape the circumstances of their life. The Dickensian social measures being enacted at a phenomenal clip will most surely turn on us in the near future, and we will face a snarling monster with very large teeth.

I am not willing to sit on my hands and wait for the social fallout. I have a head full of knowledge and an ability to organize. And Sisters, I am doing just that. Family planning is power in the hands of women, and I can see no reason that the power of self-determination should be limited only to women of means. I have friends who are effective hellraisers and I have enough bitchitude to foist myself on social service agencies and public health clinics and make them listen to me for 20 minutes. I have enough moxie to take information sessions to the coffee shops and the student unions…and to the shelters, too.

See, HB 1055, that apostasy of a bill – again, signed in the sanctuary of a Baptist church – did not just use the building codes to restrict a woman’s right to choose. Oh, no, Darling. It is a really nasty little piece of misogynistic work. The bill encourages abstinence-only sex education in public schools, and it bans trained sex educators from Missouri classrooms.

Ladies, we need to wake the hell up, and we need to band together. These assaults against half the population can not be allowed to stand. In the meantime, we need to raise our collective voice as one and make our displeasure known.

Sisters, get registered to vote, get informed, get organized and get loud. If you are in the St. Louis side of the state, contact Angry Black Bitch, and in KC and the northwest section of the state, contact me. We sure could use an interlocutor in the Ozarks, if anyone down that way wants to be a Feminist Warrior wielding a Sword of Knowledge.