Larry Craig is gone tomorrow.

Should he resign? I don’t know. He keeps saying he didn’t do anything wrong. What seems to be clear is this is designed to minimize the damage and maximize the time a replacement can be in office going forward to 2008 elections.

I wonder what the D&C Editorial page will say. It said Michael Vick shouldn’t be banned from the NFL and then tied gangsta rap to Michael Vick’s actions

I wonder what they were playing over the sound system in the bathroom. Maybe that is the cause of this too.

At this point, most of you know that Rudy Giuliani is not accustomed to a modest life style. A few months ago, we wrote about how, when he travels, he makes Paris Hilton look like Willie Loman. To counter this (accurate) perception, America’s ex-husband recently had himself filmed while shoping at Walmart. All went well until the PA system began asking “the owner of the two black SUV’s parked out front” to “please move them.”

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/Q2qPJWWWIMA"][/gv]

(h/t Liz Benjamin of the Daily Politics)

Meet these these two women from the protest at the Brighton 12 corners. One is very active- one is not. Well at least not yet.

2 women

I start chatting with the one on the right. She is a pistol. Rapid fire responses about all things Bush, the loss of civil rights, and the cost of the Iraq war. She is yearning for other opportunities to air her views - this as I recall was her second protest. I’m told she isn’t aware of all the vigils and demonstrations that happen here in Rochester.

Then there is the women on the left.

Look - the war is just wrong. I’m just becoming active - looking to do more. Why am I here? “Google Marine Wedding that is why I’m here”. This is why she came.

But do protests make a difference?

Not if the media doesn’t cover it says the women on the right. Sure - media coverage is important but I want to offer a different perspective.

Without this protest these two women would likely have not met. Instead, someone very active and some who is looking to do more - stood together on a street corner, learned each others names and chatted. I know sign-up sheets were circulated so maybe they will end up at another event togeter.
I didn’t ask this at the time but would assume that the women just becoming active would be receiving reinforcement that there are other people like her. So she will likely head further down the road to involvement. That on-ramp I keep talking about.

Do protests make a difference? Sure - it gets people outside their comfort zone and bonds them to each other. Over time it creates a common bond for a group of people. It gets people together.

Is it going to change Randy Kuhl’s (ed. note: or Jim Walsh’s or Tom Reynolds’) mind? Probably not. Like I said in this post. These participants are speaking for others that are not ready to speak. This is an on-ramp to further involvement.

There are two group bike rides tonight, both should appeal to urbanists and progressives:

Critical Mass meets at 6:00pm at the Liberty Pole, or 5:30pm at the U of R Clocktower.

Down By The River: Obscure Rochester River History meets at RoCo (137 East Ave) at 6:00pm.

Both are totally, completely, 100% free, and a guaranteed good time.

There’s yet another scandal involving influence peddling in the Bush White House:

In an attempt to raise the nation’s historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.

Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.

The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. In a February 2004 letter, the lobbyists told then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson they were “grateful” for his staff’s intervention to stop health officials from “scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding,” and asked for help in scaling back more of the ads.

We’ll have more about this later.   Here’s the local angle:

Speaking to the International Lactation Consultant Association in 2005, Haynes, of the HHS women’s health office, said she was “overruled.” Veteran pediatrician and breast-feeding researcher Ruth A. Lawrence of the University of Rochester, who was on the initial advisory committee brought together by Haynes, said the science undergirding the ads was “entirely convincing. Everyone on the committee had to agree on a finding before it was approved. We were very distressed by what happened.”

Did you catch the article in the D&C today?

We rate an F according to The Business Council of New York State Inc. (Yep - the Business council is incorporated - OK - weird but we are moving on). Here is a table from the article (my emphasis) .

County grades
Here is how area counties were graded in the economic rating:

Genesee: F
Livingston: D
Monroe: F
Niagara: F
Ontario: D
Orleans: F
Steuben: C
Wayne: F
Wyoming: D
Yates: F

SOURCE: Public Policy Institute of the state Business Council

So Jay Gallagher provides detailed above the fold, coverage of upstate’s economic woes. You can read the original Business Council’s Press release here. I would encourage you to read both and compare.

Tell me what you think in the comments.

Here is what I think about the article. No kidding.

What was missing is an interview with Maggie Brooks. In fact - I didn’t see a comment or anything from Ms Brooks. Presumably the Monroe County Executive’s office would have been contacted. Presumably she would have made a statement - or the D&C would have said - Hey we contacted the County Exec’s office and they refused to comment.

Then there was no mention of some of our supposedly economic growth engines - like COMIDA. How with all the jobs they supposedly are creating we still rate an F by the business council.

Predictably the D&C Story Chatline as of this time stamp didn’t mention any local Monroe County leadership as having anything to do with it. Such wonderful ideas as NYC out of New York and blame Hillary for the economic woes.

The other thing is this is a Friday where a negative Monroe County report appears above the fold. Will the D&C follow-up next week? We will.

On September 11 (how tasteful a choice of date is that?), David Petraeus will deliver will deliver what most observers expect to be an overly optimistic report on how things stand in Iraq. Though the report is widely called the “Petraeus report”, it will be written by the White House.

People who don’t work directly for The Decider — as Petraeus does — are already disagreeing with what will likely be a whitewash:

On Thursday, former Defense Secretary William Perry and other military experts sent a letter to congressional leaders, accusing the administration of misreporting the statistics in an effort to spin next month’s report.

The letter calls for “inquiry and attention into the exact nature and methodology that is being used to track the security situation in Iraq and specifically the assertions that sectarian violence is down.”

The letter was signed by Perry, former Assistant Secretary of State Rand Beers, former Assistant Defense Secretary Mort Halperin and others.

On Thursday, The Washington Post obtained a copy of an upcoming General Accountability Office report on Iraq which contained a “strikingly negative” assessment of the security situation on the ground, forcing the White House to quickly play down the findings.

What can we do to try to stop the country from wasting hundreds of billions more dollars? What can we do to save hundreds of American lives? Tell local Congressmen Tom Reynolds, Jim Walsh, and Randy Kuhl to vote to end the occupation of Iraq.

Over at the D&C blogs, Petrena Hayes has a nice discussion with Jon Powers. Here’s a snippet:

Jon believes that the war has been mismanaged. That he’s not anti-war but anti-war if that means sending our troops overseas without the right equipment or body armor. He said, ” the military is supposed to be a tool, not the tool” with regards to foreign policy.

He said (I’m paraphrasing) “that the war was mismanaged when we took our attention away from Afganistan and Osama Bin Laden and that we are making things worse and creating more terrorists.”

Petrena’s planning on doing discussions with many candidates whose districts include Greece. Kudos to her for doing so. We will be watching and providing links to these.

President Bush wants to take health insurance away from more children. Yep, that’s the bottom line. Health insurance for kids is baaaad. And I say, “right on!”. Who wants their tax money going to help children? Mealy mouthed little rug rats-we’ve already gotten rid of polio and maybe smallpox-sheesh, what more do they want? It’s my policy to only care about children BEFORE they’re born. Once you leave the womb-sorry, you’re on your own. This Governor of ours-Spitzer wants MORE kids to be covered by Health Insurance!! What’s with that? How am I supposed to afford my lattes and 2 dinners out a week if all my money is going to help those who can’t help themselves? Looks like I’ll Have to cut the pool-boy, gardener and cleaning lady back to once a week too.

Like many progressives, I have mixed feelings about New York State Senator Chuck Schumer. On the one hand, he’ll do anything for a campaign dollar. On the other, he’s tough as nail, has a liberal voting record, and pulled out one of the greatest political feats of our generation when he led the Democrats to six Senate seats in 2006 (as head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee).

And I’ll give him this: he’s been a major thorn in The Decider’s side (via the Politico):

He was the first senator to call for a special prosecutor to investigate the exposure of former CIA agent Valerie Plame. And he was a leading face of the congressional push to investigate the firings of several United States attorneys, convening hearings that eventually produced Monday’s resignation of Gonzales.
“The ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ crowd thinks they’re tough. Meet Brooklyn hardball,” said Ken Baer, a Democratic strategist.

The Gonzales affair was, for Schumer, a textbook case of his modus operandi. He was a loud, early voice raising the question of firings of U.S. attorneys, diving into the details of the story when the scandal was still bubbling up on liberal blogs. And he followed it relentlessly to the end, emerging Monday as the Democrats lead voice on Gonzales’s resignation.

And let’s face it: “Brooklyn hardball” is game of catch compared with Albany hardball.

In a very thorough interview with Mark Ballerstein, Project Director- Jeremy Moule tracks down just what’s happening with this, much maligned undertaking:

Renaissance Square, one of the biggest public-works projects in Monroe County history, is nearing a kickoff. County officials hope they’ll be able to start demolishing buildings on the site this fall. And they’ll take that step even though the public doesn’t have answers to some key questions. Among them: how much construction costs on the $230 million project have increased.

County officials have said that they have enough money to build the bus station and the Monroe Community College facility. All they need now is money for Ren Square’s two theaters. They’ve hired a fundraiser - Brakeley Brisco, a national firm whose clients have included the Smithsonian Institution, the Boston Symphony, Carnegie Hall, and, in Rochester, the George Eastman House - and they’ve started planning a funds drive. But officials aren’t saying what the goal is, or how much has been raised.

This post by btp would lead us to believe that the performing arts center is a dead issue. Not so, says Ballerstein (and I love this quote-emphasis mine):

It’s one project. It’s one design. We’re not planning on not building the theater.

(Yeah, that’s why these guys get paid the big bucks-didn’t their grammar instructors ever teach them about double negatives?)

Check out the whole article and see what you think. There’s an artist’s rendition of what it should look like. I should hold my opinion till you check it out, but man, I think it’s u-gly. No wonder it was never put to a vote.

I’m also, just a little curious about the Main and Clinton Development Corp which is overseeing the project, but more on that later as everything is illuminated. ( nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean? know what I mean? say no more.)

I was having a discussion about the upcoming 29th race recently when the comments came up that Kuhl is very much in debt. I was surprised to hear that he has a lot of money on his personal credit cards. I found the article from Politico.

I was not really surprised by the information about our Representative, but was really taken aback by the 3.9% and 4.9% interest rate he has for his maxed out ($10,000 and $15,000) credit cards. 3.9% and 4.9%!!?! How does he get such great rates?

I emailed consumer finance guru Clark Howard I asked his crew how do I get a deal like my Congressman? I did that yesterday morning and yesterday afternoon I got a live, person-to-person phone call from one of Clark’s researchers. Basically she said that they have no ideas how to get rates that low. It is really unheard of, and if I find out, they would like me to let them know.

Besides his obvious power in Congress to help the Credit Companies, does anyone out there in Rochesterturningland know how to get rates like our Congressman? In this land of equality, how do I become equal to Randy Kuhl in the Credit Card Interest Rate game?

In the Politics section of City Newspaper this week, Jeremy does a quick digest of what the DCCC’s backing means to Massa:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has put Massa’s campaign on it’s list of priority races. It’s supporting Massa in part because of his 2006 campaign against Kuhl, where he built momentum through grassroots and netroots efforts. The other reason: Massa lost by a slim margin last year. The DCCC is targeting seats that Republicans won by less than 10 percent.

Support from the DCCC means additional campaign funding, including access to a wider fund-raising network. It also means that candidates like Massa get help with research and strategy.

This piece, along with stlo7’s take on it yesterday explains how Eric will benefit from this support. Thanks to Chris Van Hollen and the Dtrip for recognizing what a treasure we have in Eric. It just shows to go ya that it’s worth holding out for a hero.

I hadn’t realized it was this much or that the surge alone would cost $50 billion. From the AP via TPM:

To keep the surge going, the administration will need to ask for more funds to support it. The Washington Post (link) reported in Wednesday’s editions, citing anonymous officials, that the administration was preparing to ask Congress after the Crocker-Petraeus report for up to $50 billion more in the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, for the war. That would be on top of $142 billion already requested for fiscal 2008.

That makes a total of nearly $200 billion spent on Iraq and Afghanistan for 2008, with the vast, vast majority just for Iraq.

Is this what voters want?

This is not how it is supposed to be..… A day after I attend a support the troops rally in Brighton - I see this crap.

Remembering the guy at the center of the Walter Reed scandal? He is still collecting a paycheck. Accountability anyone? FromThink Progress:

On March 12, the Pentagon announced that Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, who oversaw neglect at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, was resigning, effective immediately. NBC News Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reported that it was “very likely” Kiley “would be reduced in retirement, at least one rank” and “be forced to retire at that two-star level.”

[snip]

But Think Progress has learned that Kiley is still serving at the Pentagon, despite announcing his “retirement” in March. An official in the Department of the Army Public Affairs told Think Progress:

He [Kiley] is no longer serving as the Army Surgeon General but is in a transition status pending his retirement. … Currently Maj. Gen Kiley does not have a specific retirement date. He is no longer performing any duties related to The Surgeon General and is pending retirement.