Prog Blogs, Orgs & Alumni
Bank Slate
Betsy Devine
birch, finch, beech
Democracy for NH
Live Free or Die
Mike Caulfield
Miscellany Blue
Granite State Progress
Seacoast for Change
Still No Going Back
Susan the Bruce
Tomorrow's Progressives
Politicos & Punditry
The Burt Cohen Show
John Gregg
Krauss
Landrigan
Lawson
Pindell
Primary Monitor
Primary Wire
Scala
Schoenberg
Spiliotes
Welch
Campaigns, Et Alia.
Paul Hodes
Carol Shea-Porter
Ann McLane Kuster
John Lynch
Jennifer Daler
ActBlue Hampshire
NHDP
DCCC
DSCC
DNC
National
Balloon Juice
billmon
Congress Matters
DailyKos
Digby
Hold Fast
Eschaton
FiveThirtyEight
MyDD
The Next Hurrah
Open Left
Senate Guru
Swing State Project
Talking Points Memo
50 State Blog Network
Alabama
Arizona
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Missouri
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
So Pindell has the scoop that our own Kathy Sullivan slapped Americans for Job Security with a complaint to the Attorney General's office about their alleged failure to follow basic procedures as required by state law.
Predictably, the response from DeMaura was to go on the attack (in part):
"If nothing else this shows why we need real tort reform in this country so hack attorneys cannot file frivolous complaints without recourse."
Kathy's response is priceless (also in part):
"All he has to do is file a three page form and pay a small fee like every other company doing business in NH!... The time it took Demaura to have his temper tantrum is about the time it would take to file and write a check," she said.
But this is not why I wrote this post.
I wrote this post because AJS attacked Craig Benson protege and former attorney general Kelly Ayotte.
Yet Craig Benson protege and former New Hampshire attorney general Kelly Ayotte didn't think to file a complaint over AJS's adherence to New Hampshire state law in her response to this attack.
Kathy Sullivan and James Pindell were all over yesterday's breakout of open civil war in the senate race.
Me, I continue to find it LOL funny, especially DiStaso's later update that tries to round up the likely culprits.
Think about it. The local, coordinated GOP response to having Judd Gregg's DC orchestrated successor campaign forced on them without contest is to launch a well-funded, anonymous, multi-platform attack from Virginia. Was it that Ayotte-Lamontagne wasn't mirroring Crist-Rubio fast enough?
And although Patrick Hynes and Dave Carney are intimately involved with Steve DeMaura's Americans for Job Security, gosh darn it, no one knows where this is coming from.
The fact that some in the NHGOP have to hide behind out-of-state front groups to go after the establishment sector of the NHGOP is really telling. Try to imagine the toxic dump this would be if done on the D side, how quickly it would poison the well.
This civil war has already damaged Ayotte, who responded late, and badly, to the news. But it also damages Ayotte's opponents, because of the general lack of honesty and integrity clouding up the picture until we know who exactly is behind this.
* Online NewsHour gives Sununu some (undoubtedly unintentional) resume padding:
To hold his seat, Sununu -- who was White House chief of staff for President George H.W. Bush and whose father John H. Sununu served as New Hampshire's governor -- is trying to distance himself from the policies of the current Bush administration.
* Speaking of distancing himself from Republican presidents, does anyone else get the feeling that there is a story emerging on Sununu and McCain keeping each other at arm's length? First, Sununu is careful not to appear onstage with McCain at the event in Nashua. Then, Mother Jones noticed how neither senator was used as standard issue surrogate pushback on the Unity event. But then elwood made a good point: maybe they chose Jane Swift because they needed to counter Hillary with another woman?
Except now I see that wasn't the case either. turns out Charlie Bass also held a different McCain surrogate conference call with reporters about the Unity event (reporters who feel free to call Unity a "hippie town" from a safe distance, btw). My current theory is that John E. is worried that McSame carries too much Bush radiation on him, and so it doesn't help him to be next to him, even if he might believe in a more generic way that McCain was the best GOP choice from a strategic point of view for NH. Or to put it another way, in a post-Bush world, it's every man for himself.
* Matthew Bell from Public Radio International's The World did a Unity piece on Iraq and McCain, with some side mentions of Sununu as well. It's well worth a listen, both the piece as well as an extended talk with Dante Scala. Let's just say I would not want to be Fergus Cullen this cycle.
* Finally, don't miss Kathy's HuffPo piece on Americans for Sununu's Job Security.
AJS recently began airing nearly $90,000 in radio ads attacking Gov. Shaheen's record. The same group spent over $1 million attacking Shaheen in the 2002 Senate race. AJS has a long history of illegal campaign tactics. Public Citizen filed a complaint with the IRS in 2007 requesting that they revoke AJS's tax status because they were breaking election laws. And AJS had to pay a fine in 2006 for breaking Oklahoma's Telephone Consumer Protection Act in connection with a congressional race.
AJS has not filed with the FEC as a political campaign committee, which means they cannot run advertisements to influence the outcome of a federal campaign. Instead, AJS has hidden behind another section of the tax code in order to hide the identities of their campaign contributors. This means AJS can hide their contributors from public scrutiny, and may be illegally funneling corporate money into the election.
