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It ended back in May of 2003. I know this because John Sununu told me so:
"It is the end of the formal combat phase, but there's a lot more work to be done. The Iraqi people have been given a wonderful gift - an opportunity for representational government and for freedom. This opportunity needs to be taken advantage of quickly through reconstruction, the organization of an interim government, and by making sure that the rights of all Iraqis - ethnic groups and religious groups included - are respected by the new government."
Since then, several thousand American men and women and scores of thousands of Iraqis have died in not formal combat.
So now that the head of the new Iraqi representative government, Maliki, has endorsed Barack Obama's withdrawal plan, will "the rights of all Iraqis" be respected?
Does he think that them thar farmer folk are a bunch of red-neck rubes?
Sununu introduced himself as an engineer who had worked in small business and who had focused on paring down federal taxes and regulation. In particular, he railed on the estate tax, dubbed the "death tax," which he said put pressure on farmers to sell to developers.
I always love it when protectors of the rich try to scare farmers into voting for their schemes to keep the wealthy from paying their fair share. The "death tax" bogeyman is a common refrain among New Hampshire Republicans. Which is why I always keep this handy:
Despite oft-repeated claims that the estate tax has dire consequences for family farms and small businesses, there is in fact very little evidence that it has an outsize impact on these groups. Indeed, the American Farm Bureau Federation acknowledged to the New York Times that it could not cite a single example of a farm having to be sold to pay estate taxes.
When the Congressional Budget Office researched the issue in 2000, they discovered that 13 farms faced pressure from the estate tax. That's 13 out of all of the farms in the U.S. of A.
And if you don't want to believe me or the Center for Budget Priorities, then go to WaPo or FactCheck. Or know that the already very generous exemption on the tax will be increased to 3.5 million in 2009. For one person. Double it for a couple filing jointly. And what's more:
Michael J. Graetz, a professor at Yale Law School who was a tax policy official in the administration of President George Bush, said that repeal was primarily a benefit to people with large estates held in stocks and other securities, not to farmers. He also said that rather than repeal the tax, Congress should raise the threshold of exemptions. The image of a grieving heir packing up his belongings and trudging off is not an accurate one.
Federal estate tax affects a small number of farmers, but elimination would affect every farm in the country. And to quote Maria Cantwell, a U.S. senator from Washington:
"The lost revenue could be made up in three ways: through higher income taxes, reduced government services, or more borrowing, which would pass the burden of current government spending to future generations."
But what difference does reality make? Our junior senator engineer would rather frighten Grandma into thinking she might lose her family farm and 40 acres if she votes for Jeanne Shaheen.
[Pat] Roberts joins a handful of vulnerable Senate Republicans who have flatly said they will not attend the [Republican] convention, including Susan Collins of Maine, Gordon Smith of Oregon, Ted Stevens of Alaska, and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina.
Two other vulnerable Republicans - New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker - have yet to announce if they will attend.
Who thought the most entertaining contest during the Olympics would be "Am I a Republican, or Not?"
p.s. Gordon Smith definitely earned the bronze today, though.
Of the 12 Republicans running in competitive Senate races - five of whom are incumbents - only three have said they will be attending the convention. Six are definite no-shows, and three are on the fence.
"Nobody likes a funeral," said a Senate Republican press secretary who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing "the overall climate of general malaise about the party" as the reason for hesitance on the part of Republicans.
Last we heard, he was sprinting away from a decision on attending the funeral convention, along with five others.
Of course, if he does go, maybe he can entertain half the GOP delegation, since they'll have nothing else to do.
Poor Ted Stevens, undone again by the very tubes he loved.
Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, I have put the 2004 Kenai Guest list below the fold.
Part of the reason for doing this is to get this info out of the Wayback Machine and back into a Google-friendly place.
But I'd love some discussion on the list as well (formatted version is here). Notice, for instance, how absolutely brazen the 2004 list is in its original format, separating Senators and VIPs (the main attraction) from the CEO and executive guests. There's no attempt to conceal this is a dating service for CEOs looking for a Senator.
Here's a couple things you can do in the comments:
1) For the bold, just take a minute and run one or two corporation names below through opencongress.org, govtrack.us, or even just the Google [for say Sununu + Fannie Mae], and let us know if you find anything of interest.
2) For the more time-limited: Just scan the list and make an observation. Any observation. The observations don't have to be about Sununu either. I found it amazing how many Administration officials were involved here, and find it particularly interesting they brought the Deputy Secretary of the Interior to this oil-fest.
List below the fold...Thanks in advance for your help. If everyone can pitch in a comment, the effect here could be huge.
Darn those pesky foreign conflicts. They have a way of bringing up news GOPers would prefer not be so:
John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randall Scheunemann, lobbied for the nation of Georgia for four years, including for about a year after he joined the Republican senator's presidential campaign staff in early 2007.
Georgia has paid Scheunemann's firm, Orion Strategies, LLC, nearly $900,000 since 2004, including $200,000 for an eight-month contract that began on May 1, two weeks after McCain issued a strong statement criticizing Russia and supporting Georgia.
And look out, Ted Stevens. You're not the only Sununu mentor in town:
The briefings picked up in the summer of 2006, when Scheunemann briefed McCain and his aides several times before McCain took another trip to Georgia, this time with Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mel Martinez of Florida, Richard Burr of North Carolina and John Sununu of New Hampshire. Scheunemann joined them in Georgia, where they met with Saakashvili.
Saakashvili has been criticized for authoritarian tendencies following a crackdown on demonstrators last year, but McCain has been a staunch ally, sternly criticizing Moscow for its backing of pro-Russian, separatists.
It looks like Sununu's Kenai trip has caught the interest of the national media. From Politico:
Already, most Republicans running for re-election this year have given thousands in Stevens- and VECO-linked donations to charity. Senators Elizabeth Dole, Gordon Smith, Susan Collins, Norm Coleman, Mitch McConnell and Pat Roberts have joined Sununu in contributing a total of about $75,000 to charity.
Stevens isn't a lobbyist with a penchant for black trench coats and fedoras, but he is the most senior Republican in the U.S. Senate and any voter can understand the seven felony counts he faces. Abramoff was a symbol for all that was wrong with Washington in 2006, and if Shaheen is lucky, her campaign can help make Stevens that symbol this year.
I still maintain the problem is not so much the cost of the fishing trip as it is what Kenai was -- a dating service to hook Big Oil and defense contractors up with legislators that could help them. And a show of power for Stevens -- a way for Stevens to signal to his backers that he had all these legislators in his pocket.
Actually "dating service" doesn't quite hit it. I'll let you all think of some other names in the comments. Nice to see this story finally working its way up the chain though.
Since the GOP has, with some success, managed to derail the emerging national attention towards the environment to the more primal Republican addiction to Big Oil and increased drilling, it's perhaps not a bad idea to step back from our terror at the gas pump and consider what our marriage to fossil fuels has gotten us.
Today, a seven year old girl was killed in New Hampshire, swept away by flooding. And in the middle of the dog days of summer, we are receiving so much rain, so quickly, and so often, that mudslides have become a new source of danger.
This is one of the reasons the phrase "climate change" is more descriptive than "global warming." The carbon dioxide we have tossed into the atmosphere for so many decades affects different parts of the globe differently. In New England, one sorry consequence to our oil ways is the rise of extreme precipitation events. Here's a chart from a 2005 UNH study (.pdf) on the effects of climate change on the Northeast. One look at it helps to understand the kind of summer we have been having:
Around the same time that study came out "the smartest man in the Senate" voted against the McCain-Lieberman climate change bill. Why was Sununu to the right of McCain on this? Because he's so blinded by ideology he actually refuses to acknowledge the human influence on our atmosphere:
While average global temperatures have increased by one degree over the last century, it is difficult to determine how much of this increase is due to human influence.
Either we will get new represenatation in the Senate, or we will have to build an ark.
Morning Update: Looks like last night's fatal weather was an extreme precipitation event worthy of a red line on those charts:
There were no rainfall meters in Ashland or Holderness, but meteorologists estimated that 5.69 inches fell in three hours at Harper Brook, and 4.5 inches fell at Ames Brook.
The largest recorded rainfall in the region was 3.55 inches in 90 minutes until 8 p.m., at Weirs Beach.
Anyone who's read this site for a while knows I've probably racked up at least a couple of hundred blog posts on Sununu and his record.
But even for me, and even without the emerging scandal of Johnny's fishin' buds, the flurry of shadow GOTV groups helping him out can get confusing.
So I spent some quality time with Sununu's Dirty Tricks, a handy blueprint to the engineer's re-election plans. I actually learned quite a bit I didn't know before. Like the pic I grabbed above of how interconnected all these shadow groups are.
Sununu spokesperson Julie Teer, practicing her best strawman disassembly skills in today's Granite Status:
Sununu spokesman Julie Teer said Sununu's 2004 trip [to the Kenai event] was funded by a joint fundraising committee comprising Stevens for Senate, Stevens' Northern Lights PAC and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's campaign committee. She said his 2006 trip was funded by Stevens for Senate and said payment for both trips "fully met Senate rules."
That's great, but actually that's not what's being implied here.
What's being implied is not that Sununu was the audience for this event, but that he was the talent.
Here, maybe it'll be clear if Ted "Tubes" Stevens explains the Kenai event to you:
''We invite people we think can afford to put a contribution into the till,'' [Stevens] said, ''and people they want to meet.''
Sununu is "people they want to meet."
And there's nothing wrong with that I suppose. It's like a charity dinner, except it lasts for a weekend. And except that it was run by a guy that has been indicted for corruption. Corruption involving people at the event who paid to see Sununu. Who were some of the same people that donated to Sununu's campaign.
People that are also up on charges of corruption for trading favors to promote more Alaskan drilling.
But hey, keep moving, nothing to see here. I'm sure with Stevens at the helm, nothing untoward happened at the little expedition, right?
The smartest man in the Senate, in Tuesday's Sentinel:
"The simple committment to pursue those reserves will have an effect on prices nationally and worldwide, because energy futures are just that, a forecast on the way the market is headed."
So a drilling policy that a decade away from now may be supplying 0.2% of the world's oil will affect futures by dropping gas prices now?
By how much, Engineer Sununu?
I have a new theory about Sununu and the Republicans -- they can't possibly be this stupid. But they are desperately afraid the Stop Excessive Energy Speculation Act will drop gas prices.
The amendment for drilling has to go on so that they have something to point to if oil prices do drop. Because on the off-chance the anti-speculation bill goes through w/o drilling and gas prices drop, they are finished. It will have meant that regulation, not deregulation, was the answer here, and provide a powerful parable for this and future elections.
Found the timeline on this interesting, and I hadn't seen it covered before.
On June 24th, 2002, John Sununu was named by the League of Conservation Voters as one of the "Dirty Dozen", one of the politicians with the worst environmental records of any person running for Congress or Senate:
"Republicans and Independents who care about New Hampshire's air and water should know about his votes for almost $6 billion in taxpayer handouts to the air-polluting coal industry, against less arsenic in drinking water and against holding polluters accountable for their actions," said League president Deb Callahan.
That was June 24th.
Here's some donations that came in for Sununu over the next 6 days:
June 25
$5,000 -- Northern Lights (Ted Stevens' PAC)
$1,000 -- Roger J. Chan, VECO Corporation
June 28
$1,000 -- Richard M. Hobbs II, Alutiiq Management Services (Stevens loyalist, I think)
$2,000 -- Jim Jansen, Lynden Inc. (fishing trip buddy)
June 29
$1,000 -- Steven J. Leathard, VECO Corporation
June 30
$2,000 -- Carl H. Marrs, Cook Inlet Region Inc. (fishing trip buddy).
$1,000 -- Bill J. Allen, VECO Corporation (fishing trip buddy)
$1,000 -- Mark J. Allen, VECO Corporation
$1,000 -- Peter Leathard, VECO Corporation
$1,000 -- Richard L. Smith, VECO Corporation
I could be wrong, but doesn't that look like Sununu being named one of the "Dirty Dozen" set VECO's heart aflutter? And convinced Ted Stevens to double-down?
I had no idea that the League's Dirty Dozen awards were the Miss America pageant for Big Oil. But I'm really not surprised.
Of course, that was merely how they met. Soon their love would blossom:
Between mid October and late November of 2002 Northern Lights' non federal account received a $25,000 contribution from VECO. Northern Light sent the Sununu Victory Fund $25,000.
And all Sununu did in return, apparently, was take a little fishing trip with the people that gave him tens of thousands of dollars, so that they could all talk about, um ... "fish" ...
I've been sitting on a post for the last couple of days that discusses the problems with Obama chasing a bipartisan compromise on offshore drilling. It wasn't all that flattering.
I'm glad I waited though. I just saw the tail end of his speech today, and I was impressed. In the portion I saw, he managed to frame his position on offshore drilling as being against the massive giveaway to the oil companies that it represents -- which I believe is the correct frame. It's a massive giveaway for very little gain. We can argue about the safety and environmental concerns, but the economics of it are undisputed -- millions in profits for oil companies exploiting our national resources in exchange for a 0.2% increase in global production.
Here's the issue for our state though. This bipartisan compromise he's speaking of supporting -- will the Sprinter sprint towards it?
If so, and if the frame of that compromise is based on what we saw today, that's a great thing for New Hampshire, which desperately needs the aid for this winter the Republicans have been blocking, and of course it's the right thing for the country, which has to move forward into the energy economy. But such a compromise may come at the expense of papering over Sununu's dismal record on energy issues in the past six years. It's a trade I'm happy to make, but I'm wondering if anyone here has some thoughts on whether:
a) Senator* Sununu will sprint towards the compromise, and
b) He will be able to use that as cover, despite his record as Big Oil's BFF.
Today's NYT provides an introduction to the race. It pulls together the conventional wisdom: New Hampshire is moving strongly Democratic; Sununu is an engineer and one of the smartest people in the Senate; he has more cash and will use it for a big ad blitz after Labor Day.
The article seems to paint Sununu as a generic Republican, ignoring the right-wing extremism on issues such as Social Security and stem cells that is so far out of traditional Yankee Republicanism. Says Jennifer Duffy of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report: "He does constituent service. He shows up to work. He votes. He brings home the bacon. There are not a lot of inherent things wrong with John Sununu except that he is a Republican."
As we've pointed out here repeatedly neither Sununu nor Gregg "brings home the bacon." New Hampshire gets back only 67 cents of every dollar we send to DC, putting us in 48th place. And the NYT articles doesn't mention the phone jamming crimes that stunk up the 2002 race.
The Times wraps up its summary with a knowledgeable local observer, providing context for the polls:
...even without the straight ticket, Mike Caulfield, a co-founder of www.bluehampshire.com, a political Web site, said he expected Mrs. Shaheen to win."People kind of treasure their indecision," he said of New Hampshire residents. "They kind of hold on to it much longer than people in other places might. But if 2006 is any guide, the independents will break very hard for the Democrats."
Update: So I've been away from blogging for a while, and my context skills have waned. Here's the background: Last night Sununu, Gregg, and the Republicans voted against cloture to bring the Defense Authorization to the floor. That's a preliminary vote which should have sailed through, but Gregg and Sununu want to talk about offshore drilling. So today in the Senate they will be debating whether to fund troops, or keep talking about offshore drilling. There, context. Lovely.
A quick look at today's Senate calendar reveals the following on the schedule:
Convenes: 9:30am
Resume consideration of the motion to proceed to S.3001, Defense Authorization bill, with senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.
Luckily Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has his priorities straight:
McConnell made it clear that if Republicans and Democrats fail to reach an agreement on energy amendments, the stalemate in the Senate on a wide range of bills will continue. "We all want to do the defense authorization bill, but right now the No. 1 issue in the country is the price of gas at the pump," McConnell said. "Why would we want to get off that issue and go to anything else?"
I'm not completely sure if Reid's success in bringing this motion to the floor with the ten minute limit removes the threat of filibuster. I think it may.
If I was Sununu though, I'd be hoping that it does kill the filibuster threat. When the Republicans filibustered heating aid this weekend, he was a vulnerable Senator in the oil-heated Northeast. He was guaranteed the catch and release pass.
If they were to filibuster against the Defense Authorization Act, however, there'd be a lot of competition for those catch and release passes. Not good.
There's still a number of games the Republicans could play with the authorization though, and with Judd Gregg in the mix, there's always the possibility that a completely new perversion of parlimentary procedure will be invented. So hold on tight, and if you have C-SPAN, tune on in.
I don't have time to follow much these days, and to be honest the procedural innovations the Republicans have come up with makes tracking any legislation a bit of a brain teaser.
But it was interesting that Sununu, in his recent UL ode to filibustering to protect the interest of Big Oil, said that one of the things the Democrats have blocked in order to get an oil speculation bill passed was heating aid for New Hampshire families:
-- Heating assistance for low-income families. It may be summertime, but in New Hampshire we know that the combination of winter months and $4 per gallon heating oil will strain family budgets across the Northeast. Sen, Judd Gregg and I recently introduced legislation that would increase funding for LIHEAP by $2.53 billion, more than doubling funds for New Hampshire families most in need. By acting early, we can get these funds in place well before the cold sets in.
What a frickin liar.
As I detail here, the Republicans spent Saturday refusing to allow S. 3186, a bill that would have doubled heating aid to low income families, from coming to the floor.
Today's latest in the ongoing Republican Culture of Corruption reminded me of a Marketplace report on VECO, Ted Stevens, and our own junior senator I blogged about last October. Here's my favorite part:
In 2002, John Sununu of New Hampshire received more than $50,000 from Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska and Stevens' strongest Alaska supporters, including VECO's Bill Allen. The money flowed to Sununu's Senate campaign from Stevens' PAC, his soft money committee, and in a bundle of donations directly from Stevens loyalists.
Six other Republicans in hotly contested races for the Senate received similar support - but none got quite as much cash as Sununu.
...Between mid October and late November of 2002 Northern Lights' non federal account received a $25,000 contribution from VECO. Northern Light sent the Sununu Victory Fund $25,000.
In 2004, Sen. Sununu attended the Kenai River Classic on a fishing trip organized by Sen. Stevens and Robert Penney. Bill Allen, Carl Marrs and Jim Jansen also attended.
Now, the Sprinter was quick today to throw away the $10,000 that Steven's PAC gave to him for this election cycle.
But the $50,000 question remains: why did now indicted Senator Ted Stevens and his Big Oil pals take such an acute interest in getting Sununu elected in the first place?
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