Don’t Act Surprised

“A chief of staff to former Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich (R) was found guilty on Tuesday on four counts, including election fraud, for his role in setting up robocalls intended to surpress minority voting turnout in the final hours of Election Day last year.” [TPM]

The Shocking! discovery:

A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.

The Loophole:

Internal company documents show that the company made those sales through foreign subsidiaries, thwarting a U.S. trade ban.

So the teabagger-funding Koch Brothers are — Gasp! — evil. But we already knew that. It’ll certainly be fun watching their supplicants dance around the news, but unless wingnuts take up the cause, this ain’t goin’ nowhere.

Koch Brothers Flout Law With Secret Iran Sales [Bloomberg]

Missouri’s Republican lieutenant governor Peter Kinder, recently photographed at a family establishment where “Every night’s a pantless party!”, would like you to know that he was really doing God’s Work:

In his first interview on the topic, Kinder, a Republican from Cape Girardeau who is widely expected to run for governor next year, said he first visited Diamond Cabaret in Sauget after a baseball game in St. Louis when he was a state senator in the mid-1990s. After that, he said, he returned about 10 times. He said he saw [Tammy] Chapman, a former Penthouse Magazine model who worked there as a dancer.

Kinder said he stopped visiting the club after he concluded that it contradicted his religious beliefs.

“I came to realize that this is not consistent with my upbringing. I’m a Christian,” he said. “I was raised in a good family, and I thought, you know, continuing to go there is leading me down the wrong path.”

Mr. Kinder was born in 1954, which would make his Peter in its forties when he visited the strip joint ten times before The Lord informed him that Jesus would keep it zipped.

Peter Kinder answers stripper allegations [STL Today, via TPM]

In yet another victory for the plutocracy that controls both political parties, President Barack Obama has decided not to back Elizabeth Warren as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which opens on Thursday, according to sources who were briefed on the subject.  Warren is reviled by Wall Street and Republicans for having the audacity of speaking up for the little people getting shafted by shady mortgages and credit card companies, and for her ability to speak cogently to people across the country.  The bankruptcy and tax law professor at Harvard has been a longtime advocate of consumers’ rights, and was the person who conceived of and led the creation of the new bureau.

[Bloomberg]

Subhead of the Day: “The former California first lady has moved out after 25 years of marriage. Maria Shriver helped bolster Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign against charges that he groped women during his movie career.” [LAT]

“In another jab at the federal judge who ruled against Proposition 8, sponsors of the gay marriage initiative asked a district court Monday to set aside the ruling on the grounds the judge was in a long-term same-sex relationship that posed a conflict of interest.” [LAT]

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