This will be more-or-less my last post at RT. I’m going to be blogging at TAP for the immediate future and then starting up a local project with some other bloggers some time after the election. I may stop by here from time to time depending on whether or not I still have posting privileges. I’ll certainly show up in the comments.

Thank you for all the comments and support you’ve given.

This is a small sample poll so take it with a BIG grain of salt, but it shows, at the very least, that NY-26 should be a competitive race:

A Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies poll of 400 likely voters shows that Alice Kryzan holds a 10-point lead over Republican candidate for Congress Chris Lee with 39 percent to 29 percent and 32 percent undecided. The poll, which was commissioned by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and EMILY’s List, was conducted September 15-17 with a 4.9 percent margin of error.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee slams Kuhl for getting money for a bowling alley in Canandaigua and not getting so much for the VA hospital there:

I’m not completely sure that zydeco music is appropriate for Canandaigua, but it’s an amusing web ad.

Sorry for the delay on this.  Here’s Part II of our interview with former Chili Town Supervisor Tracy Logel.  You can read Part I here. You may recall that, after a tough campaign, and an inappropriate (IMHO) battering on the D&C blogs, she was defeated by then Democrat David Dunning, who promptly changed parties and became a Republican shortly after his election.

RT: What role did the Monroe County GOP, and specifically higher ups like Steve Minarik, play in all of this?

TL: I mentioned both Steve Minarik, Republican County Chairman and Bernie Iacovangelo, Chili Republican Chairman in answering the previous questions. Personally I believe the Chili Republican Chair was behind Dunning from the time he first declared his candidacy. Bernie had been at odds with me from the day I declared my candidacy in the Primary against Hendershott back in 2003. He told me then NOT to run and as he said I would lose. I didn’t of course. Then I helped get Mary Valerio appointed to my seat in the Legislature. Again, Bernie was unhappy as he had a different candidate he wanted and NOT a woman especially Mary as she is the wife of one of Bernie’s ex- partners in the building business.

Not long after I took office, Bernie began calling caucus meetings at his office every Monday before Town Board meetings. These lasted for hours while the entire board was indoctrinated into his plan for the design and future of the Town of Chili. I stopped attending along with our Town Clerk, Richard Brongo and this is when Bernie began working on his plan to replace me. I complained that the caucus meetings were illegal, violating the Open Meetings Law and had contacted Freeman’s office in Albany to confirm that they shouldn’t be happening. Freeman agreed with me. As far as Steve Minarik is concerned, the Iacovangelo’s make large contributions to the party - need I say more. As long as Bernie could deliver a Republican Supervisor that was all that mannered. Just before this last election year, Bernie set up a meeting with Steve Minarik to have him ask me to step aside and let the Town Clerk, Richard Brongo run for my seat. Dick and I discussed it. We decided to stay with the positions we had so Bernie worked overtime to see that I was defeated. He promised to deliver Dunning to the Republicans the very night he won.

RT: What did you make of the constant attacks on you (and enthusiastic support for Dunning) in the D&C Chili blog?

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

See the ad below:

This is truly pathetic:

Monroe County’s Clerk wanted TV cameras there when she made her announcement.

“Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I am proud to announce that the county clerk’s office has completed a review of our online office and has removed all Social Security numbers that were discovered,” Dinolfo said.

Except, all numbers weren’t removed. Just minutes after her announcement, her political opponent, Democrat Tom Hasman, showed us that it doesn’t take more than two minutes to find social security numbers from documents filed in 1993.

“If she’s pulled these numbers off the web site, then what are these doing here,” Hasman said.

For God’s sake, how hard is it for the clerk’s office to keep Social Security numbers off of its websites?

You’ve probably read about the proposed plan for the Treasury to buy approximately $700 billion in distressed mortgage-related assets from private firms. That makes this news very troubling:

Titans of the financial industry are battling to influence the government’s financial rescue plan, a package that will create new winners and losers in the sector.

[...]

House Republican staffers met with roughly 15 lobbyists Friday afternoon, whose message to lawmakers was clear: Don’t load the legislation up with provisions not directly related to the crisis, or regulatory measures the industry has long opposed.

Randy Kuhl has received 5K from the Credit Suisse First Boston PAC, 4K from the Goldman Sachs PAC, and 2K from the Morgan Stanley PAC in this election cycle. These firms are among the largest (still existing) investment banks and certainly in line for a huge payday if this plan goes through. There are undoubtedly other financial companies that have given generously to Kuhl.

Whatever one thinks of the bailout, to have these and other companies given hundreds of billions of taxpayer money without any strings attached is absurd.

It will be interesting to see if Kuhl listens to common sense or to Wall Street lobbyists here.

DragonFlyEye catches Joe Robach bragging about how he helped Gleason Works reduce the number of people it employs in the area:

New York State Senator Joe Robach’s recent campaign advertisment, touting his record of bringing “our fair share” to Rochester, has him standing in front of Gleason Works on University Avenue in Rochester. Below him, a caption reads “650 jobs for Gleason Works.” There’s just one problem with that caption: the 650 jobs Gleason Works currently provides Rochester is actually 300 jobs less than it was two years ago.

In July of 2006, Gleason Works underwent an 18.1 million dollar renovation, upgrading equipment and modifying their 750,000 square foot University Avenue facility. According to Monroe County’s website, of that 18.1 million dollars, 2.5 million dollars came from the Empire State Development grants, 1 million came from an RG&E grant, half a million came from the City of Rochester and 1 million dollars was secured through an unspecified form of direct NYS funding. Additionally, COMIDA approved the project, meaning that Gleason has been receiving tax breaks from the County of Monroe since then.

DFE has done solid, journalistic work on this issue and I recommend reading the entire piece.

If this election is going to be about anything beyond arugula and lipstick — and I’m not sure that it is — it ought to be about things like health care and the fall-out of the financial crisis. Last time we discussed the financial crisis, we noted that John McCain supports privatizing Social Security and that Kuhl has supported it in the past.

So let’s be clear on what privatization means. Privatization means replacing some or all of the Social Security tax with private, personal investment accounts. It’s pretty simple, though many journalists seem to have trouble understanding it.

With health care, the debate might also be thought of as a public versus private. A single payer system (which I favor) would replace insurance companies with a single government payer. Neither candidate is proposing that. Obama favors a mandated system in which we’d still have insurers but everyone would have some kind of insurance (unlike now). Massachusetts already has a system along these lines. McCain proposes mostly leaving our system as is, with a bit more federal money for high risk pools and new taxes on workers’ health care benefits.

It’s quite telling that a few weeks ago McCain said that he thought our financial system was working so well that we should model our health care system after it:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

The financial crisis is believed by most nonwingnuts to have been caused by the lack of certain regulations. Imagine what deregulating the health care system can achieve.

Again, these are issues where we deserve to hear the opinions of everyone running for Congress locally.

Rochester Congresswoman Louise Slaughter was on the Rachel Maddow last night, talking about offshore drilling and drilling in ANWR. It’s worth a look.

The collapse of Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and, well, the Dow over the past few weeks illustrates the dangers of privatizing Social Security. I don’t think that requires much explanation.

Lest we forget, Randy Kuhl was an early supporter of Social Security privatization. John McCain has also expressed support for Social Security privatization. The Obama campaign has hit McCain with an ad about this:

It will be interesting to see if the DCCC or the Massa campaign hits Kuhl with ads over this.

Social Security is an important issue. Voters deserve to know which candidates would privatize it and which would keep it the way it is now. That goes for candidates in all local Congressional races.

We’ve written before about local Republican operative David Flaum. It looks like our boy has finally hit the big time. The Republican Jewish Coalition, of which Flaum is chairman, just got nabbed making nasty push poll calls:

The Republican Jewish Coalition, which is launching a campaign against Obama on behalf of Senator John McCain, sponsored the poll to “understand why Barack Obama continues to have a problem among Jewish voters,” the group’s executive director, Matt Brooks, told Politico. …

What’s the content of those calls?

Would it affect my vote, he said, if I knew that:

Obama has had a decade long relationship with pro-Palestinian leaders in Chicago

the leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yousef, expressed support for Obama and his hope for Obama’s victory

the church Barack Obama has attended is known for its anti-Israel and anti-American remarks

Jimmy Carter’s anti-Israel national security advisor is one of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisors

Barack Obama was the member of a board (sic) that funded a pro-Palestinian chartiable organization

Barack Obama called for holding a summit of Muslim nations exlcuding Israel if elected president

It’s probably too soon to call Flaum the Roger Stone of Rochester, but clearly he’s going places.

It’s a little troubling that he’s on the Board of Trustees at Syracuse University and the University of Rochester. So much for the myth of liberal universities.

A few days ago we told you about mailer that Joe Robach sent out. Here it is

A friend of the blog sent me a better looking version of the mailer and I replaced with a link to that. I just now realized that our friend had changed the wording to say “Joe Robach knows the importance of the right to marry for all.”

In reality, Robach opposes same sex marriage.

The mailer above is the correct image (re-scanned in).

John McCain thinks so

Do Dale Sweetland, Chris Lee, and Randy Kuhl think so too? I’m guessing Dan Maffei, Alice Kryzan, and Eric Massa don’t.

Yesterday’s liquidation of Lehman Brothers was the biggest bank collapse since the 1930s and AIG may represent an even larger collapse.

Can you have large bank collapses in the context of a fundamentally strong economy? What caused this crisis and what can be done about it?

These are questions that should be answered by everyone running for federal office.

F29th links to a a piece in the Hornell Evening Tribune which points out that Kuhl has really only agreed to one debate with Eric Massa. The forum in Elmira is not a debate.

You may recall that Kuhl and Massa debated three times in 2006. You may also have noticed that the Kuhl campaign has taken to telling outright lies in its direct mail pieces, something they didn’t do last cycle.

This is hardly isolated among Republicans in this election cycle. The McCain campaign’s efforts to shield Sarah Palin from the press is unprecedented in the annals of modern American presidential campaigns. And the series of lies from the McCain campaign — about Palin’s attitude towards earmarks, about the Bridge to Nowhere, about Obama’s support or a program to protect children from predators — is changing the landscape of American politics, and not in a good way. Here’s Tom Edsall, probably America’s most respected political reporters, on that:

The McCain campaign, in running TV ads which defy prior political standards, is gambling that the traditional rules governing what is permissible in presidential contests — as defined by the mainstream media — can safely be discarded this year.

The normally cautious and even-handed Associated Press on Thursday declared, “Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain’s skirting of facts has stood out this week.” The controversies have surrounded McCain television commercials and stump speeches asserting that Barack Obama “supports” comprehensive sex education in kindergarten, that Obama called Sarah Palin a “pig in lipstick,” and that Palin stood firmly against the “bridge to nowhere” — despite videotape evidence that the Alaskan governor provided support for the earmark before she opposed it.

[....]

If, however, the current Republican strong-arm approach to this year’s contest proves effective, not only will Democratic expectations be crushed, but the triumph of image over substance, of playing to bias, and of coded rhetoric will mark a significant advance of the dominance in politics of advertising “ethics.”

[....]

The McCain campaign, however, is banking on the notion that the steady decline in trust in the media has reached the point of no return, that the press and television can no longer play the role of umpire or national arbiter of what is accurate and what is untrue, what is fair game and what is out of bounds.

I speak with people who support McCain, defend his tactics, and also say they support a strong free press. Those people are living a lie, my friends.

If Republicans are able to make an end run around the media, the truth, and previously accepted standards of political behavior, it may mark the death of the press in America and the end of our functional democracy.