(How wonderful for Grafton 6 that she's on the ballot. Oy vey. - promoted by Dean Barker)
The contested Republican primary in Grafton 6 is over, and Ms. Shwaegler narrowly managed to secure a place on the ballot in the State Representative race for one of the two seats representing Campton, Ellsworth, Orford, Rumney and Wentworth. This Tea Party supporting blogger, whose own words concerning marriage equality drew Dean Barker's attention back in June, has expressed some other curious views on her blog: Take Back Orford NH (TBONH).
But the real question is: To what time would candidate Schwaegler have us return?
"Annie Kuster is proud of her record as a liberal, progressive activist for Barack Obama."
- Charlie Bass, from a press release issued today.
That's nice and everything, but six-term Congressman Bass has something Annie doesn't: his own Presidential nickname!
Bush quickly assigned nicknames to Washington players - most of them undignified, such as dubbing former New Hampshire Representative Charlie Bass "Bassmaster," a reference to a stomach-churning "Saturday Night Live" sketch.
Of course, only "Washington player"s get that kind of treatment, so Bass had a dozen years in the Village to get that token of affection from the President he fervently supported and for whose agenda he pushed at every turn.
This morning on NPR Linda Wertheimer was interviewing a founder of the Log Cabin Republicans. She noted that Senator John Cornyn has recently appeared before a gay rights group and wondered, is it time for you to declare victory?
Last week a young Republican activist here said that, after voting for Charlie Bass and Kelly Ayotte, he would be in a good position to urge them to change their positions and support equal rights for gays.
Today EVERY Republican Senator voted to block consideration of a measure that would have simply authorized the President and the military to end the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. The so-called "moderates" from Maine, Dick Lugar, John McCain: it was unanimous.
The Republican Party is solidly against equal rights for gay Americans. If you're comfortable in that crowd, so be it.
Adding (Dean): Why is someone who got out of Vietnam due to acne and bad knees keeping patriotic Americans from serving their country? Disgraceful.
Kelly Ayotte (R- K. Street), 12 year Congressmen Charlie Bass, and $250k Frank have all vowed to work to repeal or "repeal and replace" the historic health care reform passed early this year.
O'Brien, 52, and her husband, Matt, 55, had been uninsured for years.
"The first thing that was on my mind wasn't, 'Oh my God, I have cancer,' " Gail O'Brien said in an interview Monday. "My first thought was, 'Oh my God, how am I going to pay for it?' "
The Keene couple's jobs - she's a preschool teacher and he works part time for the city - didn't offer insurance.
It was only after O'Brien found out that the new health care reform law includes a provision allowing her to buy into a high-risk insurance pool that she knew her illness wouldn't bankrupt her family.
Please don't run on repealing "Obamacare" Kelly, Charlie, and Frank. Really whatever you do, I mean it please, don't.*
Patricia Reid is not in her 70s, an age when many Americans continue to work. She is not even in her 60s. She is just 57.
But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again.
...After other recent downturns, older people who lost jobs fretted about how long it would take to return to the work force and worried that they might never recover their former incomes. But today, because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy's recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.
Speaking of small biz, and Carol Shea-Porter's priorities like ending the tax giveaways for the wealthy, see the chart that explodes the lie the GOP is peddling on the issue.
Republicans will unveil their new "Contract with America" in Virginia on Thursday, less than two months before election day.
...The new contract, modeled after the 1994 "Contract with America" - credited with helping Republicans win the House in 1994, which they held until 2006-is intended to highlight what the Republican party would stand for if it were to return to power in Congress.
Back in the day when today's high school sophomores were not yet alive, Charlie Bass began his long infatuation with Washington DC, getting swept into power by (the later disgraced House speaker) Newt Gingirch and the Contract for America.
Congressman Bass broke his Contract with America by running for re-election, and thus a seventh term, in 2006. Voters rejected him.
And Congressman Bass is breaking it today by trying once again for a seventh term.
Should original Contract breakers be allowed to run on a new one? Or to put it another way: should a six-term Congressman like Charlie Bass who voted to balloon the deficit by green lighting tax giveaways for the rich and wars that had nothing to do with 9/11 or WMD be allowed back into Washington DC?
A new AP-GfK Poll finds that 52% of Americans support the rights of same-sex couples to marry. It's the second national poll to have found majority support for gay marriage in the last two months.
DiFruscia, a moderate, pro-gay marriage Republican who has served in the New Hampshire House for 10 years, was targeted by the right. "I had seven mailers against me," DiFruscia said.
One mailer pictured DiFruscia as a flasher at an elementary school and another made him look like he was presiding over a gay marriage.
If you think I am harping on this, you are right. If they would stoop so low on one of their own, just think of what they would do to "vermin" like you.
"If there's not a satisfactory explanation," Guinta "absolutely," should drop out, [Jeb] Bradley told POLITICO. "It would be an obstacle, I think, that would prevent any nominee that had any kind of issue, to successfully compete against Carol Shea-Porter."
And play it over and over again. I love the hyperbolic "fought off and locked up criminals" bit, as if Ayotte was New Hampshire's one woman crime fighting and prosecution machine. Part Judge Dredd part Wonder Woman.
This is an Open Thread. What are you going to do this week to help elect Democrats?
Remember when the local GOP fooled the press a little while back about our house seats being abandoned by the DCCC? Well, looky here:
Targeting key battleground districts in the wake of last week's primaries, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has added two candidates to its Red to Blue program.
According to announcements that will be released Monday, Ann McLane Kuster, of New Hampshire's Second District, and Bill Keating, of Massachusetts' 10th, will be the beneficiaries of additional "financial, communications, grassroots, and strategic support" that the program offers.
That's on top of the roughly million and a half the DCCC reserved for both house districts last summer.
And here's today's moment of absurdity: both Guinta and Bass have been named to the "Young Guns" NRCC program.
Six-term Washington insider Congressman Bass, who has been around so long he was once defeated by his current opponent's mother, is a "Young Gun." And so is Guinta, who was previously a Young Gun until his travails forced them to drop him until a nominee was named. Hilarious.
After the Cheney Administration ended, and was left uncontinued thanks to the massive rejection of McCain/Palin by the American people, the Republican party has been left largely leaderless, especially among the DC elites who normally call the shots and direct the talking points.
That left GOP "strategy," such as it is, up to FAUX News and Hate Radio and the billionaires and corporatists who sowed the astroturf of the Tea People.
As a result, the collective tactic (because it really is not a strategy) that has emerged has been to put on a two-year long shrillfest, featuring Birthers, Tenthers, Fourteenthers, race baiting, religion baiting, gun baiting, gay baiting, immigrant baiting, phony conspiracies, and most of all, an ubiquitously repeated lying campaign that somehow Barry Hussein is responsible for the economic catastrophe that Bush's eight years (and in a more general sense, the dominant fiscal paradigm since Ronald Reagan) caused.
A: This is easy to see, thanks to the Union Leader devoting it's front page real estate to a big font notice of the latest Rasmussen poll (I saw it at the check-out counter at the grocery store).
Rasmussen, which is to polls what FAUX News is to actual journalism.
