The Curious Case of Alvin Greene

[Lunar]

Sometimes parties also allow a petitioning alternative, like Kendrick Meek forwent the $5,000 fee and collected the thousands of signatures instead.  It's a fee that the South Carolina Democratic Party charges for automatic ballot access on a statewide, federal race, not sure if there is a petitioning alternative.

[Lunar]

He claims he got the money from his military benefits. No entirely impossible.

But someone with $10k wouldn't have qualified for a public defense attorney

[Lunar]

Lunar, he could have had an unaccounted for account or maybe military benefits don't count for that particular rule.

Perhaps.  But even then, why wouldn't he say that when asked [multiple times] instead of refusing to answer how he qualified for a public defender?

And why would someone who's been unemployed for the last 9 months spend that crucial money to register for a Senate Race for a non-existent campaign, one that involves no appearences at political events, outreach, 0 fundraising, 0 expenditures, and not even a website?  That sounds psychotic at best.

[Lunar]

Something that should be said, of the 20% of the electorate [the entire electorate, both parties, I believe] that has heard of Vic Rawls, something like three quarters hold a disfavorable view if I remember correctly...so if that higher disapproval/approval number held true to the Democratic primary, it's possible that those who voted based on name recognition voted for the other guy, and everyone else just picked a name.

[Lunar]

Well, that part doesn't trouble me because it's obvious he got the money from someone else or lied to the court to qualify for a public defender during his felony charge, unless there's some mystery law that protects military pay from counting as money in your possession for that sort of monetary evaluation.  I read an article where a South Carolina lawyer said directly that anyone with $10k in their bank account would not qualify for a public defender, if he legally qualified for the defender and had $10k in his bank account, I don't see why he wouldn't have made that argument himself instead of hanging up/refusing to answer when reporters ask him that kind of question.  

[Lunar]

great interview on the Mark Levin Show

http://www.marklevinshow.com/goout.asp?u=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/06/14/sc-sen_alvin_greene_cant_immediately_name_gop_opponent_jim_demint.html

I cannot listen to any more of these.

[Lunar]

This story is sad.  It's amazing to me how all the dems are trying to question this guys background as if he isn't good enough to be on their ticket.  It's pretty close to racist with some of the questions in the media like where did this black man get his money?  He's a republican plant. etc.

No one seemed to be asking these questions when dems were electing another certain black man who came from nowhere and had an even shadier background than Greene.

Congratulations!

Your post was so hackishly anti-Obama, you've earned a rare honor, a spot on my personal ignore list.

Uh since youre ignoring me you probably wont read this but Ive been on here for months, and if you didnt know I was spectacularly anti-Obama until now, I think youve been living under a giant rock.  Whether its hackish or not, what about what I wrote isn't true?  

Greene lives with his mom and Obama is a Harvard/Columbia graduate...Obama actually has charisma...

Very sick father, I believe...?  Lots of misinformation out there, I can't immediately figure out the facts with a glance at Google.

[Lunar]

EVERYBODY JOIN JOIN JOIN JOIN

http://www.facebook.com/pages/1000000-Strong-for-Alvin-Greene/115195921858046

[Lunar]

I'm beginning to move into the pity camp on this guy.

Anyway, I can think of two theories, one super-paranoid and one more mundane.

Super-paranoid: the guy took a bachelor degree in pol sci, so he was once smart. Then he got into the intelligence service and he emerges dumb as a door-knob and with seeming memory loss of his time in the service. So, maybe he was involved in something top secret and weird and was brain-washed/damaged so as to not leak something. Someone with money did this in order to set the limelight on him and make it public without having to come forward themselves.

Mundane: the guy is a weirdo who has saved money for a long time in order to run because, it is a fixation of his. He lied about the public defense thing. And that's pretty much it. Maybe some Republican guy put him upto it, maybe not.

Or the normal: Some operative paid him a little money to file his name on the petition.

[Lunar]

Lunar's is the only theory worth paying attention to (not the voter fraud crap), imo, but the facts present to us right now fail to provide the connection that he suspects is going on.

Something that may be interesting though, is that $10,000 is, I believe, the exact amount that someone can write you a check for that causes the bank to automatically red flag the transaction and pass it along to the government for inspection.

It's how Eliot was caught.  So if an AG's office were to inspect, they might not have to even subpoena very far, depending on how well the tracks were covered

[Lunar]

Hell, I mean, Eliot Spitzer did it, and he was a high-level lawyer with familiarity with this kind of thing.  But to use his words, maybe he was just "Icarus" and "flew too close to the Sun"

The idea that Alvin Greene may not have covered his tracks perfectly wouldn't surprise me.

And again, this could be either a Democratic operative (as without Greene, Rawls wouldn't have his name appear on the primary ballot in South Carolina) or a Republican one.

[Lunar]

Good points here...  Weigel's talking about Cohen when he mentions Illinois fwiw

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-now/2010/06/what_if_alvin_greene_just_won.html

You see what Democrats are doing. It's possible, as happened in Illinois earlier this year, that a party can become saddled with a bad nominee and shame him/her into stepping down. But let's be clear -- the Democratic claim that Greene was planted is based on a lot of vapor and little evidence. Sure, it's possible that South Carolina's warring Republican consultants have taken a blood oath and are revealing nothing about the plan to help Greene get on the ballot. But the best explanation for Greene's win remains the easy one -- Democrats who didn't care about the race marked the first and (marginally) more familiar name on the ballot.

How often does this happen? It happened one month ago in Indiana. Democrats held a low-interest primary for the right to take on Rep. Dan Burton. Everyone in the party backed Nasser Hanna, a professor who raised $110,995 and spent a little less than a third of that. Nobody endorsed Tim Crawford, an unemployed conservative activist who spent no money. Yet Crawford not only won -- he crushed him with 60.9 percent of the vote, a bigger margin than Greene scored in South Carolina. He won every single county.

What happened? Crawford's name was first on the ballot and -- though we're getting into rougher territory -- it resembles those of voters in the district more than "Nasser Hanna." (Hillary Clinton won this district over Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary.)

It's frustrating for party strategists to realize that its electorate is so sleepy, their candidates so disengaged, that stuff like this can happen. But the day after Greene won, before this spinning started, DSCC Chairman Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) explained that Democrats simply didn't engage in the race. The subsequent charges of GOP trickery don't have a basis in the facts.

[Lunar]

Roger Stone brings up a great point about Alvin Greene: the fact that his name begins with the letter "A" shows that he was very likely picked under the process he knows as "Aardvarking"

http://stonezone.com/

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[Lunar]

Come on, DSSC, this is just mean

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/23/alvin-greene-nomination-b_n_657629.html