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Pindell reports (subscription only) the National Republican Senatorial Committee is setting up a fund-raising account for Kelly Ayotte.
The "Ayotte Greyson Victory Committee" will distribute money three ways: to Ayotte's campaign, the NRSC, and Kentucky Senate candidate Trey Greyson, who faces a primary against Ron Paul's son.
The committee was filed with the Secretary of the Senate on Nov. 16th and lists an address in Northern Virginia.
The NRSC is not officially endorsing Ayotte, mind you.
(Michael Marsh knows a great deal about financial issues, tax policy and similar subjects. He makes this stuff understandable, and was a wonderful resource and asset to the state during his time as a representative. - promoted by Jennifer Daler)
This week the U.S. House passed a landmark bill that gives the government the power to better regulate the banking and financial industries. (Remember them- the guys who brought us this wonderful recession?) The bill includes meaningful consumer protection provisions, creates controls on the derivatives market (the thingies that got Bear Stearns, Lehman and AIG in such deep doo-doo in 2008) and gives the government the power to wind down too-big-to-fail banking firms whose collapse could destroy the entire financial system (this was a power we lacked last year when AIG was in such big trouble).
Watching the sausage making process of the health care reform bill has often been nauseating. I don't remember witnessing the major and minor details of other bills as they went through Congress. There wasn't this level of examination of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest (with the lone voice of protest being billionaire Warren Buffet), nor of the various "reforms" and deregulation over the last 28 years.
This is most likely because there wasn't the staunch opposition to these policies as there is to providing universal health coverage to American citizens, something most of the world enjoys, in many places for over a century.
In any event, although Senator Jim Demint (R-SC) declared health care reform would be Obama's "Waterloo", it seems it's the GOP playing the part of Napoleon.
Sam Stein at the Huffington Post
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-K.Y.) sent out a press release on Sunday, titled: "Cutting Medicare is not what Americans want." That was followed by a new press release on Monday. Its title: "Expanding Medicare 'a plan for financial ruin.'
In August, Republicans came to the conclusion that they could win political traction by framing their party as a defender of the government-run system, despite having decried it for decades. RNC Chairman Michael Steele released a "seniors' health care bill of rights" and held a testy exchange with an NPR reporter to drive this home his Medicare support.
It seemed like opportunism then. Now, however, it has the potential to trip the GOP up. Having spent the last two weeks insisting that Democrats were destroying the bedrock of health care coverage for seniors, Republicans may soon be forced to explain why expanding Medicare coverage would be a bad thing.
The party of "no" doesn't know which way to go on this. No matter what happens with health care reform, to be against it is to be for allowing a crippling cancer of spiraling cost to drag our economy down. That is a fact borne out by years of research at Dartmouth and the work of health care economists such as Princeton's Uwe Reinhardt.
It seems most of the haggling over the bill has been among progressive and conservative Democrats with the Republicans relegated to spouting stale rhetoric from the sidelines. Only Maine Republican Olympia Snowe has weighed in with any attempt to shape the policy.
It must be a drag to be on the wrong side of history.
(I saw this poll as well. Wonder how this will play out in 2010 and beyond. - promoted by Jennifer Daler)
How discredited is the Grand Old Party brand name these days? This discredited:
According to a just-released Rasmussen poll (I know... Rasmussen, but still), in a three-way ballot test a "Tea Party" candidate would outpoll his Republican opponent by 23% to 18%. A Democrat finishes first with 33% and the other 22% are undecided. Among independents, 33% would prefer the Tea Party candidate while only 12% prefer the GOP.
Dede Scozzafava, the Republican and Independence parties candidate, announced Saturday that she is suspending her campaign for the 23rd Congressional District and releasing all her supporters.
FORMER SENATOR ALAN SIMPSON from Wyoming was one of the few conservative GOP senators I respected - being pro-choice, he complained about the "Hundred-Percenters" who got on his case for any deviation from the party line.
This past Friday he had an Op-Ed essay in the Washington Post, explaining why he submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in a case coming before the US Supreme Court. It will determine whether it is constitutional to sentence a teenager to life-without-parole (for a crime that did not involve the taking of a life). Alan Simpson explains why he believes the answer is no .....
I noticed today a piece in MSNBC's excellent politics blog First Read about a new Charlie Bass-penned opinion piece about how the GOP should proceed in order to avoid permament minority/regional rump status and recover in New England. To those of us familiar with Bass's career, there is little to surprise.
This excuse for journalism showed up on Politico. Maybe it's supposed to be an op-ed. Anyway, Bill Duncan has diaried it here as an example of GOP strategy for CD-01 in 2010.
I see it as showing how out of touch with New Hampshire the national press, or at least Politico is. Or maybe they're just running Republican press releases?
The gist of the article is that former grass roots activist Rep. Carol Shea-Porter is part of the Washington establishment because she didn't hold any so-called "town hall" meetings last summer until "pressured". If she hadn't held the meetings, who could blame her? They were less about explaining issues than providing a forum for disruptive, bordering on violent, behavior, brought to you by the health insurance lobby, among others. Astro-turf, in other words. Oh, and the DCCC spent money on ads for her.
So in the GOP's desperation to get something going next time around, now Shea-Porter is being painted as an inside the Beltway type by those inside the Beltway. (and those who wish to get back there)
[W}hy Gregg thinks he has any credibility on this issue is a mystery. Policymakers are "creating these massive debts which we're passing on to our children"? What a convenient time for Gregg to notice. It was, after all, Judd Gregg who voted for massive tax cuts the country couldn't afford. It was also Judd Gregg who voted to finance two costly wars entirely through deficit spending. Judd Gregg also didn't hesitate to put Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind on the national charge card, left for some future generation to worry about.
He's referring to Gregg's appearance yesterday on CNN. You can see the video here.
The Wall Street Journal has an article about the effect the tea party movement is having on the Republican Party. Most of the piece deals with the race for US Rep from NY-23, where moderate Republican Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava is trailing Democrat Bill Owens in polls. Doug Hoffman, who is running on the Conservative line is nipping at her heels, with 23% to her 29%, according to a Siena College poll.
"I am not your run-of-the-mill politician, and maybe that's why the Republican bosses didn't like me," Mr. Hoffman told a recent health-care forum sponsored by the Upstate New York Tea Party. In an interview, Ms. Scozzafava acknowledged her discomfort at the event. "I knew it wasn't going to be an easy audience for me," she said.
This we know:
Republican leaders in Washington, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, are trying to align the GOP with the protesters' frustrations, praising their actions and echoing their arguments.
But it seems many tea party types are not enamored with the Republican mainstream. Either it is not conservative enough socially, or it is too "big government" for them. Finally, the extreme conservative wing that has done most of the foot soldiering for the Republican party since the ascent of Ronald Reagan has gotten fed up and is splitting off.
The NY House district (which is far north, including Potsdam ) is interesting as well. According to the article, there are 46,000 more registered Republicans there, but Obama carried it in '08 with 52% of the vote. He is set to do a fundraiser for Bill Owens in New York next week.
In New Hampshire, Republican leaders praise Senate candidate Kelly Ayotte as a new breed of telegenic Republican, even while some conservatives attack her record as state attorney general.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in NH and across the country.
Not since John McCain educated us about teh Google, has so much comedy come out of the internet. And all unintentional. (I think)
As I was surfing around some news sites, I came across this article from Columbia J-School's Daniel Sinker.
This was what got me:
My personal favorite part of the site? When Tiny Michael Steele comes strolling out from the right side of your browser window.
"Notice Anything Different?" he cries out, tiny hands pumping this way and that.
Why no, Mike, I didn't. Thanks for pointing it out.
I had to, absolutely had to have my own little Michael Steele prancing around my browser window. So I went here and there he was, although I had to press the "message from Michael Steele" button.
There was a photo of a young woman in June Cleaver pearls that changed into an Eva Longoria look-alike (kind of), then into other 20-something looking women.
In his Top Ten Reasons Why the GOP Weblaunch Site Is Fizzlin'" Marc Ambinder points out that the last GOP accomplishment on their accomplishments page was in 2004. And it was vouchers in DC. But before that,it lists "Operation Iraqi Freedom", the war based on lies that is still going on, the tax cuts for the rich that along with the war created ballooning debt and deficits, um, and "Operation Enduring Freedom" when we went into Afghanistan afer 9/11. And Osama Bin Laden was...where?
Then there's the historical snafu of claiming Jackie Robinson was a Republican when he was an Independent.
Sinker notices the graphics of "ethnics" atill have their clip-art "beta" on them
Techies will have even more fun exploring the site.
UPDATE (Dean): Did you know "Lt. Governor Tom Eaton" is a Democrat? The new GOP does. Hilarious! (a really good catch by Pindell, who also has a screenshot for posterity).
James Pindell's latest column for NH Magazine takes on that sacred NHGOP myth, and busts it up a little:
[New Hampshire] is directly linked to Boston commerce and sports teams and culture. The state's population growth, while slowing, is the biggest in New England. Politically, the once reliable Republican state is changing, but in an odd way where natives are voting more Democratic and it's the newbies settling on the southern border who are helping preserve the GOP tradition.
All of these underlying feelings had the chance to emerge in our politics last year. The Republican candidate for governor felt there was a sense of fear that the state was changing as Democrats in charge of the Statehouse pushed for higher spending and more liberal social policies. He came up with the campaign theme: "Keep New Hampshire, New Hampshire."
He got crushed come election time. But, really, what does he know? He was born in Massachusetts.
While the reality of voter identification as it relates to region and natives v. non-natives is different from the prevailing myth, it has received precious little attention in the press.
I thought I would riff off of what Kathleen Sullivan wrote about NH GOP leader John Sununu's speech before a group of New England Republicans over the weekend. I find his utter lack of understanding as to what is happening to the GOP amusing. In an AP wire report on this same gathering he is similarly quoted as saying:
Sununu blamed the losses on the party's tactics - not its message.
"It went blue because they did the nitty gritty of politics better than we did," he said.
I read an interesting recent poll by Public Policy Polling on extremism in America titled "Is extremism becoming more mainstream?
According to the poll, 23% of Americans believe the President wasn't born in the US. Among Republicans, the insanity level is 42%, with 21% unsure and only 37% correctly answering he is an American.
That's an amazing situation- more than 3 out 5 GOPers have doubts about whether our President is an American. I don't see how you get bi-partisanship with numbers like this. It does explain why so many GOP legislators won't say what they believe when they are questioned on the Birther issue: the choice is to be seen as crazy or to tell the truth and risk being dumped by their party. Who wants that?
Tomorrow (September 17) is the 147th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, fought outside Sharpsburg, Maryland in 1862. While not as well known as Gettysburg, this Civil War battle was the deadliest single day in American history. At least 5700 Americans died on the field that day, and thousands of others died in the weeks that followed from wounds they received in the battle. That's more than twice the number who died on 9/11, and more than the total of Americans killed in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined.
I recall as a boy visiting Antietam with my dad and seeing photos of dead soldiers lying in rows and heaps on the battlefield. They were packed so closely you could walk for hundred of yards on their bodies and never touch the ground. The names of places on the battlefield like the Bloody Lane and Burnside's Bridge will be remembered as long we are a country for the ferocity of the fighting that occurred there.
I am a slow study sometimes, but something my wife said along with something hannah wrote clicked the puzzle pieces together for me. I now know who the real Death Panels are.
I'm usually fairly critical of NPR these days, but I have to join Olbermann and Maddow in bringing to more people's attention the slap-down Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep gave to GOP Chaiman Michael Steele on yesterday's Morning Edition:
INSKEEP: I'm still having a little trouble with the notion that you're going to write that you're going to protect Medicare, that you're going to preserve this program to make sure that this government-run health care system stays solid in the long term...
Mr. STEELE: Let's get it to run right.
INSKEEP: ...and yet you are opposing quote, "government-run health care."
Mr. STEELE: Exactly. Well, wait a minute. Just because, you know, I want to protect something that's already in place and make it run better and run efficiently for the senior citizens that are in that system does not mean that I want to automatically support, you know, nationalizing or creating a similar system for everybody else in the country who currently isn't on Medicare.
Steele:... And sure, there are issues in the insurance market that we can regulate a little bit better and that we can control better to maximize the benefits to the consumers. That's something that, yeah, we can rightly reform and fix. If the...
INSKEEP: Wait a minute, wait, wait. You would trust the government to look into that?
Mr. STEELE: No. I'm talking about the - I'm talking about private - I'm talking about...
INSKEEP: Who is...
Mr. STEELE: ...citizens. I'm talking about...
INSKEEP: You said that's something that should be looked into. Who is it that should look into that?
Mr. STEELE: I'm talking about those who - well, who regulates the insurance markets?
INSKEEP: That would be the government, I believe.
You can also listen here
Good job Steve! (In the interest of full disclosure, I helped Steve make the audition tape for his first job in the WBGO news department.)
Today's State House columns by Lauren Dorgan and Tom Fahey focused on the court wrangle over the JUA money. Lynch has not indicated what his back-up plan would be, and the Republicans, true to form, are busy criticizing but not coming up with any plausible solutions of their own. The question remains whether voters will respond to criticism with no new ideas. It seems the GOP is counting on it.
Dorgan:
From the sidelines, former governor John Sununu declined to offer any suggestions. "I never would have put the state in such a precarious position by building a budget based on such a foolhardy gambit," he said. "This was extremely risky. This was a wing and a prayer."
But what would Sununu do from this point forward? "That's his problem," he said.
So the state budget is solely Lynch's "problem"? What's the point of having an opposition party, then? The Republicans still don't know how to be an effective minority party. They really need to stay there so they learn that. It's important to governing properly.
Dorgan cites Finance Chair Marjorie Smith and Ways and Means Chair Susan Almy as having some proposals.
House Finance Chairwoman Marjorie Smith of Durham noted that House budget-writers had passed two taxes that didn't make the final cut for the budget: a tax on estates worth more than $2 million and another on capital gains over $5,000. Together they would bring in about $85 million. House Ways and Means Chairwoman Susan Almy of Lebanon seconded that in a phone message this week.
"We've provided two perfectly good revenue sources that we have vetted," Almy said. "And we could offer them up again."
Not easy and not popular, but these are not easy times.
The state retirement system is also not doing well. Earnings are down 20%, and that is an improvement over earlier in the year.
An attempt to raise the minimum retirement age for police officers and firefighters was killed last session.
Fahey:
While it watches the bottom line, the board at NHRS is also preparing to challenge a legislative reform that set up an independent investment committee. The board voted at its July meeting to have lawyers draw up a petition to the court. Minutes of the meeting show the board thinks the investment committee is "an unconstitutional encroachment on the board's authority with regards to investments and investment decisions." The law gave the committee full power to invest NHRS funds, as long as it follows policy the board sets.
There were also reports on Ayotte's run. An invitation to a high cost fundraiser says she's a candidate for US Senate, but Foster's Daily Democrat says she isn't. Maybe they'll all make up their minds soon, but I don't see how she can ask for contributions. Why would anyone give money to someone who may be running?
It seems the Republican strategy is to criticize without offering solutions, and keeping their potential US Senate candidate a blank slate for as long as possible, trying to build support without letting the average voter know what the candidate stands for. Will people go for it? Or is it a status thing? The heavy hitters and insiders know Ayotte is running and what she stands for, but it isn't being shared with the rest of us yet.
Erstwhile Governor of New Hampshire, John "Rip Van" Sununu recently kicked off his "I hate New Hampshire" tour by publicly campaigning against our state. Like his son John E. Sununu, who lost his Senate seat last fall, "Rip Van" Sununu hasn't been in the halls of power in some time and he's not happy about it. Unhappy that his family is out of power and New Hampshire is thriving under Governor Lynch's leadership, "Rip Van" Sununu has been taking his anger out on the Granite State.
CONCORD - On one of the many stops of his "I hate New Hampshire" tour, John "Rip Van" Sununu sat down to an editorial board with the Concord Monitor and reportedly spent his time railing against the Granite State. Sununu claimed that the quality of life in New Hampshire had been diminished in recent years but didn't offer any empirical evidence to back up his assessment. Then, just days after Sununu's tirade against New Hampshire at the Monitor, the Annie E. Casey Foundation released its ranking of the best places to raise children and for the fourth time in five years our state was ranked number one. So, why is the former Governor so set on tearing down New Hampshire?
Since Sununu's time in the corner office, our state has flourished. Here are just a few examples of why it's great to live in the Granite State today:
* Personal income has more than doubled, from an average of $20,512 in 1990 to $41,512 in 2007
* Our state still has one of the lowest tax burdens in the nation
* Our population has grown significantly in the last decade, spurring tens of thousands of new home sales
* Our population is better educated, with nearly ten percent more Granite Staters holding bachelors degrees than they did in 1990
* Our environment has become a priority for our elected leaders, with a commitment to increase the use of renewable energy sources to 25 percent by 2025
* Our state has finally lived up to its "live free or die" motto, with the passage of marriage equality, strong anti-discrimination laws, and the repeal of anti-choice statutes
* Our state has one of the lowest crime rates in the nation
* Our state was once again named the best place to raise children
"Over the last two decades, New Hampshire has grown into a place where individual liberty and prosperity thrive. Just because his family is no longer running the show doesn't mean Mr. Sununu should spend his time tearing down our state. New Hampshire has changed in the last twenty years and its time that Mr. Sununu stop romanticizing the past and start appreciating all our state has to offer," said Victoria Bonney, Communications Director at the New Hampshire Democratic Party.
(Posted by Victoria Bonney, Communications Director at the New Hampshire Democratic Party)
