The DCCC is in NY-25 in a big way. Here’s their latest ad buys:

For: Media Buy
SUPPORTING: Daniel Benjamin Maffei
New York - 25
This Buy = $91,558
Total For This Race = $334,059

For: Media Buy
SUPPORTING: Daniel Benjamin Maffei
New York - 25
This Buy = $68,473
Total For This Race = $334,059

Presumably, one of the buys is for Rochester t.v., the other for Syracuse t.v.

(Hat tip to Daily Kos)

I also just read that Charlie Cook now has NY-25 listed as “leans Republican” — previously, they had it listed as “likely Republican.”

Although his district is about 200 miles east of here, I’ve always had a soft spot for Republican Congressman John Sweeney (NY-20). Anyway, I’m in a pan-Upstate mood tonight, so I thought I’d pass this along (via Talking Points Memo). It looks like Randy Kuhl’s not the only wife-beating Republican Congressman in this state:

The wife of U.S. Rep. John Sweeney called police last December to complain her husband was “knocking her around” during a late-night argument at the couple’s home, according to a document obtained last week by the Times Union.

Here’s the whole story (from the excellent Albany Times-Union paper, which we don’t link to enough, mostly because we haven’t been covering state government that much).

Update: Daily Politics has more.

Here’s the link to the big New York Times piece on NY-29. Surprisingly, Bob Lonsberry has the money quote:

“Frankly, a lot of Republicans, especially the traditional ones, feel betrayed,” said Bob Lonsberry, a conservative talk radio host on WHAM-AM (1180) in Rochester. “They don’t feel the party is fighting for their values.”

There’s a pretty good summary of Kuhl’s shameless flip-flop on immigration:

The farmers were upset at Congress — and disappointed in Mr. Kuhl — for approving an immigration bill that is heavy on enforcement, but does not provide for a guest-worker program that they say would solve their labor-shortage problems. President Bush signed the bill into law on Thursday.

(snip)

Mr. Kuhl told the farmers that he had been convinced that a such a guest worker program might, indeed, make sense.

“The timing is right, from my perspective, to move on a legal, temporary work force for agriculture,” Mr. Kuhl said in an interview after the meeting.

(I can’t get enough of these pictures of Kuhl — this one looks like it’s straight out of a Robert Altman movie from the 70s.)

The Rural Patriot has a good piece up on the robocalls she’s getting from the National Rebublican Congressional Committee.

Well, the “Where y’all from” poll is closed, and here’s the results:

Being a progressive blog, it’s no wonder that Brighton and Rochester represent in force, but I feel really happy knowing that EVERY area round these parts has someone progressive checking us out.  The only area unrepresented in the poll is Mendon, and I know at least 3 progressives there, even if they haven’t seen fit to vote.  So we’re covered.

We have 3 new polls now, one for each of the hotly constested congressional races in our area: NY-25, NY-26, and NY-29.

You’re the pundit today, vote and let us know what you think.

One final note– thanks to everyone emailing our blog.  We’re experiencing higher than normal mail coming in, no doubt due to the election, so if we don’t get to you right away, it’s nothing personal. 

I’m really excited– there’s a bunch of interesting things in the works for RT once the election is over.  We’re all about building infrastructure, and as much as the elections are important and all-consuming right now, what comes next is, in my opinion, going to be even better.  Stay tuned…

Update: Reader jag posted in the comments:

the enormous disparity between brighton and pittsford surprised me.

I should note that this poll is more informational than anything else.  Every day, many times more people visit us than voted in the poll, so I wouldn’t say it’s representative. Folks may not have scrolled down enough to see the poll, or didn’t want to take the time to vote.  I’m just happy to see we’ve got someone from just about everywhere around here representing their area.

I think this might be playing in the Rochester area now, I’m not sure though…

The Ad

-J

PS - Be sure to vote in our Congressional Picks Polls on the lower right side of this page.

Sorry, can’t stop the Letterman influence sometimes…

Holy cripes, they’ve got a lot of letters about Massa and Kuhl over at the Elmira S-G today.

Has anyone noticed how high the wacko letter quotient is these days at the D&C? Today’s letters were fine, but yesterday (I can’t find a link) someone wrote in to say that Clinton had “lied” when he said he’d create 200,000 new jobs. Strange, given that 22.3 million new jobs were created under Clinton, an average of about 245,000 per month. Last week, someone wrote in to say “we now know that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.” Why do they run such silly letters?

More good numbers for Maffei and Massa from Constituent Dynamics.

Maffei 53%, Walsh 44%.
Massa 53%, Kuhl 42%

I think these are optimistic from a Democratic standpoint, but it does jibe with a lot of what Charlie Cook has been saying, e.g.

With the election just eight days away, there are no signs that this wave is abating. Barring a dramatic event, we are looking at the prospect of GOP losses in the House of at least 20 to 35 seats, possibly more, and at least four in the Senate, with five or six most likely.

Over at the Washington Post, Michael McDonald reports that only a fool believes all the boo-hoo baloney about Karl Rove’s unbeatable 72 Hour Get Out The Vote machine (okay, it’s not really that Michael McDonald):

Republicans supposedly have a super-sophisticated last-minute get-out-the-vote effort that identifies voters who’ll be pivotal in electing their candidates. Studies of a campaign’s personal contact with voters through phone calls, door-to-door solicitation and the like find that it does have some positive effect on turnout. But people vote for many reasons other than meeting a campaign worker, such as the issues, the closeness of the election and the candidates’ likeability. Further, these studies focus on get-out-the-vote drives in low-turnout elections, when contacts from other campaigns and outside groups are minimal.

The City paper has a pretty good piece on the disaster that is New York State government. This is just silly, though:

In place of endorsements, then, for the State Assembly and State Senate we suggest that voters join the citizen reform movement and write in the word “reform” on the ballot. It’s easy to do that on voting machines. There’s a tab above individual offices at the top of the machine; push that up to expose paper for the write-in vote. The slot will close automatically when you pull the red lever to record all of your votes.

Losers talk about pie-in-the-sky write-in campaigns. Maybe after we write in “reform” we can all join hands and sing “The Answer Is Blowing In the Wind” together. That’ll show those crooks in Albany!

If you want to change Albany, make sure the Democrats win the State Senate. The Democrats have little incentive to gerrymander since the state has nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans (the precise ratio is 5:3). If the districts are drawn by a panel of judges (or in some other fair fashion), the Democrats will have control of both houses. That’s not to say there won’t be some hanky panky to protect incumbents, but everything I’ve read suggests that it is the Republicans in the State Senate who want to keep the current gerrymandered lines of the state government in place. I don’t blame them — a redrawing would radically reduce their power.

I’m not so naive as to think that the Democrats aren’t a huge part of the problem in Albany. I don’t think Shelly Silver is any less of a tyrant than Joe Bruno. But the only hope for change we have is if the Democrats take over both state houses as well as the governor’s mansion.

Remember that ridiculous ad the Republicans tried to run against Arcuri in NY-24? The one so full of lies that even the largely right-wing t.v. stations of Syracuse and Binghamton refused to run it? Well, now it’s become a mailer, which means that Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman think it will boost Republican turn-out. It just goes to show that (to paraphrase H. L. Mencken) no one ever lost an election underestimating the intelligence of Republican voters.  Scratch that — maybe there’s a first time for everything.

I just received a tip that we can expect to start seeing either Dan Maffei or DCCC ads about the race in the 25th on Rochester stations… There isn’t a story to link to yet, but we’ll post more information as it becomes available.
Keep your eyes peeled…

Update: Here’s the DCCC ad (hat tip to The Walsh Watch).  I don’t know yet if it’s running in Rochester.

Well it’s true, I survived a Republican pep rally. Although I wasn’t one of the fortunate few to walk away with an autographed photo of Barney, or Miss Beazley, I did manage to come away with a bad taste in my mouth (and it wasn’t from the coffee earlier). I guess without getting too carried away, I’ll let you folks know what actually happened.

 

I picked up a progressive pal (I’ll call her Karen for the sake of anonymity) at around 8:30 on Saturday morning and we headed over. At the door, we were ushered into a long line where they checked our names against a list of approved ticket holders. Even though Karen braved the Kuhl Campaign office and got us tickets, she was somehow not on their list… the first of many blunders. Fortunately they just wrote our names down and let us in (they didn’t even bother copying our contact info… HELLO, that’s breaking rule #1 if you’re trying to get more volunteers and donors). We were shepherded into a gymnasium for what promised to be an exciting event.

The first thing we noticed upon arriving at our spot in the crowd for the next two hours was the lack of chairs. I don’t mean we missed the chance to sit in the front, I mean there were NO CHAIRS. There was a poor old man right in front of me who must have been in his upper 80’s. Karen asked an organizer if he could have a chair, but she was told that nobody was allowed to sit down. He was all hunched over and wobbly, standing there for 2 hours. To be perfectly frank, I cannot even fathom why they wouldn’t have any chairs available when about 35% of the attendees were fairly elderly. I’d have to assume they wanted to make the gym look fuller than it was (probably about 150 people total I’d guess), even if it comes at the cost of their constituents health and safety… that’s just plain inconsiderate. So just for the record, the Reynolds and Kuhl campaign required that an old man stand for over two hours because it makes them look better on camera.

 

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

Two quick things from the D&C article:

Organizers had said Rep. Jim Walsh from Onondaga County would also be at the rally, but he was not in attendance.

Uh-oh.  Missing a visit by the leader of the (previously) free world’s wife can’t be a good thing.

And,

“There must be something the presidential family likes about Greece,” Coco said. “And we hope they know they have our support.”

Would that be that it’s the most densely populated Republican stronghold in the area?

How about a report from RT-ers that were there?

That’s the question on a lot of progressives’ minds these days.  Personally, I can’t in good conscience vote for Hevesi, but at this point I can’t vote for Callaghan either.  In the past I could’ve considered voting for a Republican, but I’ve just learned too much in the past few years to trust them.  I can still trust a person who’s a Republican– my next door neighbors are decent folks and we get along great– but something seems to happen once they get elected. 

And as stlo7 and others have pointed out, it’s bad news up and down the ticket– from Bush & crew lying us into a war without a plan for getting out, to Reynolds protecting a sex offender and encouraging him to run again, to Pirro wanting to wiretap her husband, to Kuhl lying or forgetting about his championing Social Security privatization, to Joe Robach appearing to be a savior but tied for last place on middle class issues, to the Monroe County Lej Republicans voting to hide the budget unveiling till after the election. 

I’m sure I could find something down to the level of Dog Catcher but my hands are getting cramped.  The point is that the Republican brand is destroyed for me, for now.  There may be a time, in the future, when this bad taste and lost trust will be gone, but it’ll be a while.

The best answer to the question of the State Comptroller’s race?  I found it in the Roch-cha-cha Rant.  I don’t agree with all of the Man About Town’s endorsements, but this one’s a goodie:

Comptroller
H. Carl McCall (D, Write-In) - My previous post explained why I cannot support Alan Hevesi in this race. My update on the post briefly explained why I cannot support J. Christopher Callaghan or Julia Willebrand. While John J. Cain’s experience is a plus, his Libertarian ideals are far out-of-touch with reality. The only other remaining candidate, Willie Cotton, is the Socialist Workers candidate and I only support anarchy in the UK. Thus, let us turn back the clock to the previous NYS Comptroller, let’s recall H. Carl McCall.

It even lends itself to a catchy campaign slogan: “Recall McCall!”