Liz Benjamin has a great rundown of all the angles on the Fossella story over at Daily Politics. The bottom line is that Fossella is resisting calls to step down or at least decline to seek reelection. It seems to me that there’s no way he can win in November so the Republicans need to get him out as quickly as possible.

Anyway, there’s a lot of good stuff, so much that I don’t have time to summarize it. So just go over to Daily Politics if you’re as into this story as I am.

Now, Vito Fossella is saying he won’t get out of the race (for NY-13) after all! I still say he’s out by midweek. Blowing a point one seven and then getting bailed out by your baby mama — while your wife’s back in New York — is political suicide.

I will say this, though: Vito could probably stick it out and make it til November (where he’d lose, of course) were it not for the increasingly dire straights House Republicans are facing. But the House Republican leadership is under the gun and can’t afford to give away the seat. The Washington Post has an article about how NRCC head Tom Cole may get sacked if Democrats win Tuesday’s special election in Mississippi.

The stakes in the 1st District special election couldn’t be higher, strategically or symbolically. The loss of a traditionally GOP seat to a Democrat would be the third in a special election this spring and the second in the Deep South after the May 3 victory of Rep. Don Cazayoux (D-La.).

Rank-and-file Republicans say that would force a day of reckoning for their leadership.

“When you connect three dots in anything, that’s a bad thing. This connects the dots. At that point, everybody’s got to come together and have a come-to-Jesus meeting,” said Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), a retiring centrist who will help form a new advisory panel at the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Surveying the local landscape, I’ve wondered for weeks why Kuhl raises so little money and why the Republicans can’t get better candidates in NY-25 and NY-29. I don’t wonder about that anymore. Democrats hold every advantage in House races going into the fall. If you’re a local progressive who’s interested in changing the make-up of the House, there’s never been a better time to get involved in the process.

I’d also like to add some funny commentary from some House Republicans about all of this:

“When Bush tries to articulate a vision,” Davis said, pausing to choose his words carefully, “he will butcher the Gettysburg Address. Obama, he will make an A&P grocery list sing.”

[…]

I don’t want to tap dance ‘The Good Ship Lollipop,’ ” he (Rep. Jeb Hensarling) said. “But I don’t want to crawl into a fetal position.”

The Politico has still more on Vito Fossella’s (R-Staten Island) legal woes:

Fossella was arrested last Thursday in Virginia, with a blood alcohol level of 0.17 — over twice the legal limit in the state. If found guilty, he would have to serve five days in jail, an outcome analysts said could present major political problems.

“The prospect of jail time would make it very hard for him to run again,” said Cook Political Report House analyst David Wasserman. “The difference between serving jail time and pleading down to a lesser charge makes a huge difference in Fossella’s political future.”

I find a 0.17 blood alcohol while driving completely unacceptable. The Washington Post’s Sleuth blog digs up a great quote from former Senator Conrad Burns: “There’s drunk, and then there’s knee-walking drunk.”

Fossella was in a bit of a political trouble even before this. Like many Republicans this cycle, he can’t raise any money:

Fossella’s scandal also puts his lagging fundraising in greater focus. Fossella has been one of the weakest Republican fundraisers, and he has less cash on hand than (likely opponent, Domenic) Recchia. At the end of March, Fossella reported just $248,000 in his campaign account, while Recchia had banked $325,000.

Earlier, Rotten and we concurred that Randy Kuhl and other Congressional Republicans will have to move past childish name-calling and adopt an actual agenda if they’re going to have any chance to survive in November. It seems that Newt Gingrich, of all people agrees with us. Problem is, the agenda he suggests is even more absurd than Randy’s current rhetoric and will have little appeal in this area beyond the D&C blog crowd. Here are some of Newt’s suggestions:

1. Repeal the gas tax for the summer

5. Overhaul the census and cut its budget radically.

7. Declare English the official language of government.

In fairness, they’re not all quite this ridiculous. But let’s focus on these for now. We’ve seen before that everyone with half a brain knows number one is a stupid idea. As for number two, the census is in fact badly underfunded and only the 28 percenters will get excited cutting it further. Number 7, like all anti-immigrant measures, is a slow form of political suicide.

It’s amazing. Even when Republicans agree that they have to do something serious, they don’t talk about real issues like Iraq, or health care, or the financial crisis, or the rising cost of food and fuel. They come up with distractions.

Voters will see through this, at least in this part of the country.

There could be big news in the race tonight — the epic battle referred to in the last post. Hillary’s up 40K votes over Obama in Indiana with all of Lake County set to report. Lake County is demographically similar to Marion County where Obama picked up 60K votes. My calculations estimate he’ll pick up 40K in Lake County, making it a tie. I still think Hillary may win by picking up votes in some else of what is left.

But the next 30 minutes may be the most exciting of the whole election. If the Indiana primary ends in an Obama win or close to a head heat — as I think it will — that makes the case for Hillary go on a lot weaker.

There’s a nice interactive map over at the Politico. (It will probably not be there if you check in the morning, but it’s up for now — I can’t find a direct link to it but it’s on the top of the page.)

Update: CNN has an interactive map you can link directly to.

Update update: Hillary wins in a squeaker, 638K to 615K.

There have been some new developments in the story of Congressman Vito Fossella’s (R-Staten Island) recent drunk driving arrest. The Daily News reports:

A hammered Vito Fossella and a stumbling drinking buddy were asked to leave a Washington bar hours before the Staten Island congressman was busted for drunken driving, witnesses said Monday.

“I can’t imagine him [Fossella] getting into a car. They were [both] incapable of driving,” Josh Hahn, a waiter who was working Wednesday night at the Logan Tavern, said of Fossella and his plastered pal named “Brian.”

[…]

Employees at the Logan Tavern said Brian, whose last name they did not know, passed out at the bar after arriving with Fossella.

Fossella roused his pal, who made it to the men’s room, where he passed out again in a chair outside the bathroom door. Tavern staff woke Brian, who returned to the main room and promptly belly-flopped onto a table, Hahn said.

The Politico writes:

Obviously that’s the question being whispered all over the Hill today about good ole Vito Fossella. Will he resign?

From the Post-Standard:

Republican congressional candidate Dale Sweetland’s campaign picked up steam Monday as his most formidable Republican opponent, Assemblyman Bob Oaks, withdrew from the race and endorsed him.

Sweetland also pocketed the endorsement of the man he hopes to succeed - 10-term incumbent Rep. James Walsh, R-Onondaga.

Never fear, though, punk rock fans: David Gay is still in the race.

Walsh urged two other Republicans, David Gay and Mark-Paul Serafin, to withdraw from the race.

Serafin and Gay said Monday they will continue campaigning. Neither has ruled out forcing a Republican primary election.

Update: btp here. Overheard, music playing at Gay’s campaign HQ:

 Rise above, we’re gonna rise above

We’re sick, and tired, of your, abuse

Try and stop us, it’s no use

Here’s further evidence that the long Democratic primary is tearing the party apart:

Voter excitement, always up before a presidential election, is pushing registration through the roof so far this year — with more than 3.5 million people rushing to join in the historic balloting, according to an Associated Press survey that offers the first national snapshot.

[…]

New voter registrations favored Democrats in North Carolina, which holds its primary Tuesday. In the first three months of the year, the number of new Democratic registrants nearly tripled — to 74,590 — from those during the same period of 2004. New Republican registrations were up, too, but they only doubled.

More than 49,558 unaffiliated voters signed up in the Tar Heel state, compared with just 16,858 in the first three months of 2004. The Democratic primary was the obvious draw, with 85 percent of unaffiliated voters who cast early ballots doing so on that ticket.

[…]

In Pennsylvania, where Clinton’s victory in the April 22 primary kept her campaign alive, there were 40,000 more Republicans than Democrats in Bucks County in April 2004.

Among the new registrants in the first three months of this year, 6,537 signed up as Democrats while 2,200 did so as members of the GOP in the county north of Philadelphia. And 12,554 filed applications to switch to the Democratic Party. By the beginning of April, Bucks had become a Democratic county by a margin of nearly 4,000 registered voters.

They better end this thing soon before another million new progressive voters register.

As we told you earlier, Democrats won a special election in a heavily Republican district in Louisiana over the weekend. We’ve offered our own thoughts on the impact this may have in NY-25 (I tend to believe it may mean that Republicans essentially give up on NY-25), now Rottenchester has some musings about what it means for NY-29:

… if I were the Kuhl campaign, I’d be wondering about running the NRCC playbook this fall. Saying a Democrat will raise taxes, that he’ll allow a horde of immigrants to cross the border, and trying to link him to supposedly toxic figures like Pelosi and Obama didn’t work in two recent elections. And Republican voters are electing Democrats who say they’ll end the war in Iraq and do something about healthcare. When you’re on the wrong side of too many issues, the usual distractions won’t work. Perhaps its time for Republicans to start talking about their positive agenda, if they have one.

Personally, I find Republican attempts to blame high oil prices on Nancy Pelosi laughable, not just from the standpoint of factual accuracy but also from the standpoint of reaching voters. Republicans have essentially controlled Washington for 7 seven years and now they’re whining about the one Democrat in the city with any real power? The contrast with his opponent Eric Massa, who has offered substantive plans for both Iraq and health care, could hardly be more stark.

A quadrillion is a thousand trillion. You rarely see that number spoken of because it is about twenty times the world’s gross domestic product. But if you do the math on some of John McCain’s suggestions for Iraq, it is indeed their approximate cost. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that over the next 50 years, our continued presence in Iraq will cost the country about 2 trillion dollars.

You may have heard that McCain proposes that the United States may stay in Iraq for a hundred years. What you may not know is that he didn’t stop there. On the “Today Show”, a few months ago, he upped the ante, saying that a thousand or million years would be okay, too (here and here). If we agree on a cost of 2 trillion dollars for fifty years (which seems low to me, that’s only 40 billion a year, which is less than a third of what we’re spending right now), then a million years would cost 20 thousand times 2 trillion, which is….40 quadrillion dollars. That’s five thousand times as large as the federal debt. It’s eight thousand times as large as the the projected Social Security deficit over 75 years.

I cite the numbers here not to be hyperbolic, but to make the basic point that the Iraq war is unbelievably expensive. The Republicans can put on their flag pins and sing along with Lee Greenwood and Toby Keith all they want to, but the country simply cannot afford another 100 years in Iraq, let alone another a million, even if these hundred or million years are peaceful, as McCain insists they will be.

Republicans protest that he said that in the context of a “peaceful occupation”. Fair enough, but “peaceful occupations” cost money too.

The argument pro-occupation Republicans won’t openly make but which is, I think, what they really believe is that we can somehow finance all of by taking all the Iraqi oil. We’ve debunked this idea before. Currently, Iraq pumps about 800 million barrels of oil a year. Even if the US was able to steal all of it and sell it for $100 beyond what it costs to extract it, that would only net $80 billion a year, about half of what we’re spending on the war each year right now.

Iraqi oil reserves are estimate to last about another 150 years. That leaves under 999,850 years of occupation when there isn’t even any oil there anymore.

Democrat Don Cazayoux won the special election in Louisiana’s sixth Congressional district that we wrote about earlier today.

This is extremely bad news for Congressional Republicans. They threw everything but the kitchen sink at Cazayoux, including ads from Freedom Watch (which may have been illegally coordinated with the RNCC) and still lost. What that means locally is hard to say, but it may mean that the Republicans give up on NY-25 to adopt a more defensive posture.

Update: The Politico has more, including this statement from DCCC head Chris Van Hollen:

“For the second time this cycle, Republicans were reminded that ‘all politics is local,’” said Van Hollen. “House Republicans tried to nationalize this election, illegally coordinated with Freedom’s Watch, used false and deceptive special interest smears, and funneled nearly a million dollars into a district that Republicans held for more than three decades. Don won by focusing on the concerns of LA-06 voters – good paying jobs, affordable health care, and better education.”

While this is more or less boiler plate, it is worth remembering that progressives need to make this (and all elections) referendums on real issues, rather than the shouting matches about flag pins that pundits and D&C ed board members love so much.

We’ve written before about the surprising Democratic successes in special elections in the south and midwest and what these might tell us about the races in NY-25, NY-26, and NY-29. There’s another one today in Louisiana’s sixth Congressional district. The Democratic candidate is favored although the district is very conservative. Here’s a bit about the way the way race is going from Congressional Quarterly:

That makes Saturday’s primary something of a test of a strategy that the Republicans hope to deploy widely in this fall’s national House campaign. Though the Democrats hold major advantages at this point in the national campaign — in terms of fundraising, candidate recruitment, incumbent retention and public opinion concerning the two parties — Republican planners contend they have a trump card: There are 61 seats currently held by Democrats in districts that favored President Bush in 2004, compared to just eight currently held by Republicans in districts that went for Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry .

When I hear this kind of thing, I wonder how many of those 61 districts that went for Bush in 2004 would go for him now. I think that number is pretty close to zero.

For all you Kuhl/Massa observers out there, here’s a question: how would Bush do against a Democratic candidate in 2008? My feeling is that he’d lose badly.

Update: A Survey USA poll has Democrat Don Cazayoux with 50% support, with 41% for GOP candidate Woody Jenkins.

The American people are celebrating Mission Accomplished day by handing George W. Bush yet another record for disapproval:

A new poll suggests that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush his handling his job as president.

“No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president’s disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

[…]

CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider adds, “He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974.” President Nixon’s disapproval rating in August 1974 stood at 67 percent.

If this feels like deja vu all over again, it’s because The Decider set the all time disapproval rating for Gallup polls a few weeks ago.

Continuing with our coverage of Mission Accomplished day, here’s Eric Massa’s YouTube ad about the Iraq war. It’s quite thoughtful.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Fq2n0QMnJ3Q" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

A few weeks ago, we wrote about a typically misinformed D&C piece about the proposal that gas taxes be temporarily suspended. The D&C wrote in favor of the proposal, perhaps not surprisingly, given its superficial appeal.

Now, some more serious journalists have taken on the issue and they’re arriving at very different conclusions. Here’s Paul Krugman:

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that. So it’s Econ 101: the tax cut really goes to the oil companies.

Here’s Tom Friedman (yes, I know he’s not really a serious journalist):

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

Perhaps the best piece I’ve read comes from Evan Dawson of Channel 13 (via F29th):

Delaying the pain could hurt more

If the cost of gas goes down, consumers will feel a sharp hit when it goes back up come Labor Day. Any consumers adjusting their budgets for lower gas prices — or sustained prices — would feel the sting of a sharp jump in prices after the gas taxes are renewed.

You might not actually save a penny

(Economist Kim) Gardner says New York state in particular is ripe for distributors to control the prices. “Cutting the gas tax would open the door for distributors to raise prices, erasing any savings for the consumer,” Gardner explains. “New York state is not exactly suited for competition and free market when it comes to gasoline.”

The bottom line is that no serious observer thinks the gas tax holiday proposal is anything other than an absurd gimmick.