In 2004, I was co-convenor for the largest caucus in the Northeast:  Portland, Maine.  A convenor, for the non-caucus-goers among us, is the person who, prior to and during the event, runs the caucus.  Each precinct also has a convenor, and those convenors all were trained by, and reported to me.  I held this position solely because I was a member of the Democratic City Committee's four-person executive board (de facto three-person at the time,) and the other two members were organizing the rally/candidate forum which preceded the caucus.  Frankly, I had never attended a caucus before.

I'd like to share some of that experience, and some thoughts on Thursday's Iowa caucuses.
 

The marriage of two former Interior Department appointees, Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles and Solicitor and Deputy Chief of Staff Sue Ellen Wooldridge made headlines last spring, as it occurred three days after Griles entered into a plea agreement with Wooldridge's most recent employer, the Department of Justice.  Talking heads abound suggested that it was an attempt by Griles, who had once been Wooldridge's boss, to protect himself from further prosecution by envoking spousal privilege.

I've been following the Wyoming GOP central committee meeting all day, as the 71 members whittled the field of 31 applicants first down to ten, then five, then the final three.

Now why would I, an American Indian gal from Maine, do such a thing?  

Because I already knew who was going to be the top dog, and wasn't any of the names tossed around in the immediate wake of Senator Craig Thomas' death two weeks ago.  In fact, I speculated as much that very day at my home blog.

I ran across this article on Indianz.com yesterday, and then decided to do some extra digging.

Probe: Local Indian Affairs office troubled
Woes highlighted in 1992 audit persist today
Diana Marrero
Desert Sun Washington Bureau
April 10, 2007

The Bureau of Indian Affairs in Palm Springs, which manages millions of dollars in commercial leases for Indian landowners in the area, continues to be plagued with problems found in an audit 15 years ago, documents show.

The local agency was the subject of a recent investigation by an internal auditor who found the office had not yet implemented all recommendations made in a 1992 audit report that found serious deficiencies in the agency's handling of leases.

Management problems at the BIA are costing members of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians untold amounts of money because of delays on lease agreements, overdue payments and the failure to assess proper annual rent increases, documents show.

Central to a great deal of the malfeasance which has occurred at the Interior Department over the past six-plus years is the question of unpaid or underpaid royalties by extraction industry leasees on federal and Indian land.  While mostly shuffled under the bed by the previous Republican Congresses, the issue gained greater scrutiny just last week, when the House Committee on Natural Resources called witnesses, including former MMS investigator-turned-whistleblower, Bobby Maxwell.  Maxwell recently prevailed in a multi-million dollar case against oil and gas giant Kerr-McKee, which Maxwell filed as a private citizen when his superiors at Interior refused to address the issue.  He was fired after filing the suit.

My friend Dengre emailed me yesterday, asking if I'd read the latest CREW announcement on my favorite criminal subject, Italia Federici.  Seeing that we'd spent Sunday travelling from Mojave NP back to the coast at Malibu, and then Monday running errands all day, I'd missed it.  Bad me.

Acting Associate Attorney General of the Department of Justice, William Mercer, testified before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee today when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refused to appear and answer questions relating to a proposal on Tribal Trust "reform"; specifically, a letter with his name on it, offering a $7 billion dollar "settlement" for all claims, past, current and future, from both individuals and tribes, as well as monies to deal with "fractionation" and updated computer systems.  

A little background on William Mercer.  He is acting (not yet confirmed) Associate General for DoJ, the number three man.  He has also, since 2001, held the position of U.S. Attorney for the state of Montana, recommended for the position by former Senator Conrad Burns.  He had never testified before the Committee on this subject.

When the going gets tough, Republicans drop even their bestest friends like a lump of burning coal:

Lobbying Firm Cuts Ties to Name Partner Under Investigation in Abramoff Probe
Jason McLure
Legal Times
January 18, 2007

Lobbying firm Lundquist, Nethercutt & Griles has severed ties with former Department of the Interior Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles.

Griles has been targeted in the Justice Department's ongoing corruption probe stemming from the lobbying activities of Jack Abramoff.

(More after the jump.)

Last week, I wrote this diary on the news that former Deputy Secretary of the Interior J. Stephen Griles had received a letter from the Justice Department indicating he was a target of an investigation, and may well be indicted, we assume, for false statements he made while under oath before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.  The gist of that false testimony was that Griles was not in contact with Jack Abramoff and had not provided assistance for Abramoff's tribal clients within the Interior (which oversees federal Indian tribes.)

The real shocker was the news that Department of Justice lawyer, and former Interior Solicitor and Counselor to Secretary Gale Norton, Sue Ellen Wooldridge, was also being investigated by the grand jury, and thus had submitted her resignation.  The cherry on the cake?  Wooldridge and Griles are romantically involved.

This morning, the New York Times posted a detailed story on the Director of the Mineral Management Service, Rejane "Johnnie" Burton, who, it seems, may soon be leaving Interior in order to spend more time with her lawyer.

Two days ago, LeftWingNut posted a diary which informed dKos readers that former Deputy Secretary of the Interior J. Steven Griles had received a target letter from the Justice Department, indicating he might be soon indicted for lying about his relationship with the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff (see WaPo1, WaPo2, or NYTimes for details.)  I was rather surprised to see the diary slide off the page with only a few comments, as this may be the first breach of the dam in the biggest corruption scandal Washington has seen in many years.

My spouse doesn't have a dKos account.  He did once, but sometime back before the switch to Scoop, he pissed off Kos enough with his anti-Dean rants (for Pres that is, we love him as DNC Chair) that Kos banned him.  He was okay with that, as he wasn't much of a blogger anyway.  

But then he started for fill in for me at Wampum when I ran for the Maine Leg in 2004, and the blogging bug bit pretty bad.  He's been writing over there ever since, often on military matters (as a Vietnam-era Navy vet, having grown up at the Naval Post Graduate School (where his mom taught until retiring recently.))  A few hours ago, he wrote something I thought deserved a much greater audience than our pre-Koufax-period pulls, so am using my daily diary to do just that.  It's rather short, but sweet.  His words, below the jump.

Then we'd better deal first and foremost with this:

New Telemarketing Ploy Steers Voters on Republican Path
By CHRISTOPHER DREW

An automated voice at the other end of the telephone line asks whether you believe that judges who "push homosexual marriage and create new rights like abortion and sodomy" should be controlled. If your reply is "yes," the voice lets you know that the Democratic candidate in the Senate race in Montana, Jon Tester, is not your man.

In Maryland, a similar question-and-answer sequence suggests that only the Republican Senate candidate would keep the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. In Tennessee, another paints the Democrat as wanting to give foreign terrorists "the same legal rights and privileges" as Americans.

Over the past few weeks, there have been a plethora of Abramoff goodies - first, the House Committee on Government Reform released a scathing, scathing report on over 400 contacts Abramoff and his crew at Greenberg-Traurig had with Bush Administration officials.  Then, last Friday, current White House, and former Rove and Abramoff "executive assistant" Susan Ralston resigned, apparently in response to the aforementioned report documenting contacts between Ralston and Abramoff while she was "assisting" Rove.

Today, came a report from the Senate Finance Committee that various Abramoff/Norquist related groups, including former Interior Secretary Gale Norton's pet project, the Council for Republicans for Environmental Advocacy and Amy Ridenour's National Center for Public Policy Research were, well, front groups.  Egads, say it isn't true!

So, gee, I guess there now is one.  Of course, as many Kossacks know, I wrote about it last week, and even that was much, much too long to wait.  But it's good to know that now that the Times has reported on it, it must be true.

But even the Times finds ways to trivialize the suffering:

Last week, I wrote, from a first-hand perspective as we travel about the country, about the developing catastrophic drought centered in the US Great Plains.  During my research, I came across a plethora of climate data, some of which I included in my post, such as the US Drought Monitor.

Mumon has posted an excellent follow-up diary this morning prompted by a new Reuters report by Christine Stebbins, "Drought, water worries cloud skies for US farmers."  I had planned on writing up the Reuter's report, but was happy to see it already addressed, as I had something else on my mind for today already, something born out of another, very different, "article" I came across this morning on Google News.

Back in July, when we spent the month in Iowa for the Draft Gore 2008 PAC, I volunteered for a local Congressional campaign.  Although in a heavily Democratic district, the race barely made Charlie Cook's Competitive House Race Chart, due in part to the perception of the Republican incumbent as a moderate, and in part to general naivete (our Political Director's view) or inexperience (my conclusion) of the candidate and staff.  However, I was a bit surprised to learn that at least one potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidate viewed the race as significant enough to place one of his own staff members, beginning in September, in the Congressional candidate's campaign office, to be reported to the FEC as an "in-kind contribution."  I also recalled that when I worked on previous Democratic Presidential campaigns, we had a few staffers "loaned" to us by PACs, such as Emily's List.

To see how the drought has developed over the three months, the Drought Monitor site also provides a nifty animation.

If not, you're not alone.

In fact, we knew there were "concerns," pockets of dry conditions here and there, but really had no clue how bad and widespread until recently.  See, we (myself, spouse and four children, ages 4-9) have been traveling via RV for throughout the US for ten of the past 15 months (the last four for Draft Gore 2008 PAC), starting in Maine last June, and have visited most states east of the Mississippi, and, more recently, a half dozen on the west side.  We're currently holed up in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, having traversed the state from East to West earlier this week.  Earlier this month, we spent time in Wisconsin, the U.P. of Michigan and Minnesota, and the entire month of July in Iowa.

Because it's going to take 2157 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August 2008 to secure the nomination and you have 138 days, from the opening of the Iowa caucuses to the closing of the polls in the California primary, to do it. You're going to have to juggle campaigns in two to three dozen states (most of them concurrent), recruiting and training thousands of volunteers and field staff. In each targeted state, you'll need to contact tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters and caucus participants, and identify those who are leaning your way and those who need a little persuasion. Then, well, you need to persuade the persuadable. Then you need to make sure you get all these identified voters and caucus participants to their polling/caucus venues on caucus and primary days. If they can't get there, they'll need rides to the polls, or maybe absentee ballots.