It's back. Like a bad zombie movie, Missourians for Fair Elections has arisen, this time with new coordinators. The old site, http://mofairelections.blogspot.com/, is still on Blogger but is now FTP'd to a new site: http://www.mofairelections.org/. Check out the whois and you see the new site was purchased by a domain proxy February 16th, and posting resumed shortly after (doesn't anyone use their real name anymore?). After erasing blogposts (and footprints) last year, Missourians for Fair Elections has returned and started posting under new leadership.
Why new leadership? Because the leaders of the astroturf coalition were hired by Robin Carnahan and Jay Nixon, and new paid political activists had to step up.
With new press releases and even an opinion piece in the Post Dispatch to riff off of, this deeply dishonest group is back pushing stories to the Missouri media. Missourians for Fair Elections was an astroturf coalition run by Robin Carnahan's current Director of Communications, Laura Egerdal in tandem with Jeff Mazur (husband of Robin's former chief of staff and now Jay Nixon's disciple) and Julie Terbrock, legislative director of ACORN. These three created a fake coalition to hammer Republicans, working in tandem with other liberal groups to give the impression of a grassroots, non-partisan organization. Both Mazur and Egerdal were employed by SEIU at the time, and they even bragged about it to Art Levine on Alternet (see link above).
That Bob Quinn now runs it, another professional progressive activist who spends his time creating new groups and joining new coalitions, is a sign of just how fake this coalition really is. Bob is the executive director of the Missouri Association for Social Welfare, and of course his group supports, Missourians for Fair Electric Rates, another of these bogus coalitions that pops up around the Carnahans like mushrooms around, - well, you know what I'm talking about. Quinn has been in Missouri politics a long time, and is just about as far away from grassroots as one can get without actually taking flight. Still - tapping him to serve as the spokesperson is an easy decision, as he can easily get the ear of the PD editorial board. My question is Who actually writes the blogposts? Which young partisan progressive is now in charge? And what is their promised reward?
Transparency is something we hear a lot about, but it's clear that in Missouri, the Democrats have no interest in ever simply standing up and saying what they believe and who pays them. From ACORN to SEIU to Missouri ProVote and beyond, a small band of committed progressives pretend to be average citizens, when in fact they are the seedy underbelly of the Democratic Left, funded far too often by the state to elect more Democrats.
You can bet these groups will be in full force to elect Robin Carnahan in 2010. The question is how will she run as the same kind of "moderate" Democrat as Claire McCaskill when she so clearly is indebted to radical groups so tainted by scandal they have to create new groups to hide behind? While the media reports falsely again and again about the Tea Parties, the real astroturf organizations are feeding their press releases and columns and quotes directly into the bloodstream of the state's papers.
We deserve better.
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