Slimy and Dark Arts: Texas GOP State Chairman Munisteri's Desperate Database Deception

by Nomad
The Wall Street Journal reported last week about a fundraising letter by the Texas GOP state chairman, Steve Munisteri.

Although you might not have heard of him, as an activist for conservative grassroots movements, Munisteri has been around forever. According to his bio:

As State Chairman of the Texas chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, Munisteri begun the practice of issuing legislative rankings for members of the Texas House of Representatives and State Senate. In 1980, Munisteri founded Young Conservatives of Texas, a group which continues to produce the future generations of our conservative leaders and elected officials in college campuses across the State.

Most recently he was elected to chair the Republican Party of Texas in 2010. For a conservative in Texas, the future looks rather grim. 

Texas is slowly but surely turning from a conservative red to a decidedly liberal blue. Apparently, as Texas slips from the Republican fingers, Munisteri is ready to pull out all stops; hence the letter. 

That letter, aimed at poaching the last dollar from the Texas rich, was full of the predictable fear-mongering about Democrats “ coming to take away your guns,” and more than that, “they’re coming to hijack your rights and freedoms.” 

He called the new Democratic voter-mobilization effort, Battleground Texas, “a clear and present threat to you and your family.” 

It’s the kind of rhetoric that doesn’t hold up to too much analysis or critical thinking but, to a certain type of Texas Republican, it really tends to stir the blood. To outsiders, it just smells like the sour BO of desperation. (At least the Texas Democrats behind Battleground thought so.)

However, there was another detail in the article about the letter that caught my eye.

To fight back, the GOP letter urges Republicans to give anywhere from $15 to $5,000 so the party can “immediately undertake our own effort to identify thousands of Texas conservatives.”

The letter warns that the former Obama operatives “have become masters of the slimy ‘dark arts’ of campaigning: creating massive databases; collecting information on every voter and non-voter; and then using that information to do whatever it takes to drive these voters away from Republican candidates and principles.”

That’s a rather interesting claim for Munisteri to make against the Democratic Party. While there is nothing illegal about collecting information in “massive databases,” Munisteri is playing on the ignorance of his constituents about modern political campaigning. As Mr. Munisteri well knows, these so-called dark and slimy arts have become a long feature of the Republican campaigns since the Bush administration. 

Republican Faust: The Rise and Fall of Mike Connell -3

by Nomad

Part One and Part Two of the Series. In this last part of the series, I'd like to take a closer look at the strange circumstances of the airplane crash that took the life of Mike Connell.

Accident or Conspiracy?

The timing of Mike Connell's sudden death in a plane crash was. given the situation he was involved in, remarkably coincidental. So coincidental that it is the kind of event that naturally creates speculation about conspiracy. All the elements are certainly there.

On the other hand, planes all too often do fall out of the sky. Pilots make misjudgements about their abilities, or the weather. Planes may be poorly maintained. Planes crashes involving light aircraft are much more common than you'd think.
In the year of Connell's death, there were 156 other crashes and 884 other deaths. And the most likely scenario- as opposed to sabotage- would be problems with ice on the wings.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report speculates that the most probable cause of the crash was a combination of pilot error and weather conditions. 

In this case, Connell was faulted for deciding to conduct the flight into "known icing conditions."

Republican Faust: The Rise and Fall of Mike Connell -2

by Nomad

In Part One of this three part series, we discussed the rise of one of the GOP's insider, who quite possibly helped to engineer the 2004 presidential election fraud.

Taking the Fall

After agreeing initially to give critical information in a vote-rigging case in Ohio, Mike Connell, for whatever reasons, apparently had a change of heart. Given the potentially disastrous consequences of defying his former bosses, it is perhaps understandable.

Back in Ohio courts, King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell was an ongoing case filed on August 31, 2006 and dragged on and on. The former Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell the defendant, was accused of 

"having conspired to deprive and continue to deprive Ohioans of their right to vote and have, in fact, deprived and continue to deprive Ohioans of their right to vote by, in a selective and discriminatory manner, unfairly allocate election resources (such as voting machines), institute a system of provisional ballots, purge voter registrations, and broke the bi-partisan chain of custody ballots."

Republican Faust: The Rise and Fall of Mike Connell - 1/3

by Nomad

The story of the rise and fall of Republican insider, Mike Connell isn't a familiar one. This investigation looks at the life and death of one of the people who was implicated in the rigging of the Ohio results in the 2004 presidential election. 

At about 6 p.m. on Friday, 19 December 2008, a single-engine 1997 Piper Saratoga aircraft, with only the pilot aboard, crashed into a residential area in Uniontown, Ohio as it was preparing to land at Akron-Canton airport.

Arriving  at the scene, fire crews found only burning wreckage of the plane scattered between homes on Charolais Street. The pilot had been thrown upon impact and had died instantly of massive blunt force trauma, his belongings scattered in the yards.

First responders arrived on the scene immediately after the crash. Even then, irregularities began. Simon Worrall in an article The Mysterious Death of Bush's Cyber-Guru, writes of those first minutes:

Capt. Lorin Geisner of the Greentown Fire Department was the first person to arrive at the scene. “We received a 911 call, so we contacted the tower and asked what size plane it was and how many souls were on board,” he recalls. “But we were informed that the tower was in lockdown and that no information was available.”

This was to be the first of many abnormalities in a case that would send shock waves through the blogosphere with speculations of sabotage and foul play. In the bewildering reality-bending world of conspiracy theories, the events that surround the Connell crash belong in a class all their own.