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From the category archives:
Multiple reports of ODP excutive committee email accounts being shut down by the volume of emails from Jennifer Brunner supporters demanding no endorsement in the Senate primary. Perhaps ODP Executive Committee member Amy Groya’s email account is one of them.
Probably wanna redirect that anger, Amy.
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Multiple sources are confirming that within the first hour of Brunner’s email to her supporters, ODP Executive Committee members’ email inboxes are being hammered with not dozens, but hundreds of emails asking them to stay out of the US Senate primary in Ohio. By the time this thing finishes rolling out, I would not be surprised if some email accounts literally get shut down.
Ted Strickland needs to step in right now and bring this endorsement process to a halt.
Ted’s about to lose half of his political party right before a tough re-election battle. That’s the short term. Medium term, if Lee Fisher gets this blatantly stitched up ODP endorsement, and wins this primary, that half of the party will lift precisely zero fingers for this ticket. The long term effects of Lee’s little game will stick around for years. Jennifer Garrison’s saga last year is a direct result of this exact endorsement process in the 2006 AG race – the 2006 ODP endorsement for Marc Dann not only gave us Marc Dann and pineapple pizzas, it resulted in Subodh Chandra spending 3 years telling everyone within ear shot how Garrison declared no one where she came from would vote for someone “who looks like you”. ODP paid for the Rob Burch endorsement in 1994 for more than a decade. These battles do not disappear.
I’m getting conflicting reports about where Chris Redfern and his votes on the executive committee stand in all this, but I am confident that if this endorsement happens for Lee Fisher, Chris Redfern’s days as chairman of ODP are numbered. Whether or not Redfern tried stave off this endorsement and is only being forced to go there now, or kept it in the pocket until this point for some bizarre reason, an endorsement now is just ODP suicide.
And Lee Fisher? Sir, you are a fool. You have conducted your primary campaign as if you had won it already, and now you are telling the world that you really haven’t won it, that ODP’s postage rate has to come to your rescue, and that you are so desperate you feel the need to split ODP deep and long to pull your ass out of the fire. If in fact you were on your way to winning anyway, Lee, that just changed. Because of your actions.
Ted – time to step in and do the right thing.
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Go to HandsOffOurPrimary.com, sign the petition, and click “next”. You will then be able to email a letter to every single member of the ODP executive committee for whom the Brunner campaign has an email address. Browse the list – you can even decide who you want to get your email, and who you don’t want to get your email. I, of course, emailed all of them. So should you – tell them in no uncertain terms, an ODP endorsement in the US Senate primary, this late in the game, is a very bad idea.
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Stay tuned! While the world thought that the Ohio Democratic Primary for US Senate in 2010 would be a nice quiet tip toe through the tulips of democracy, a lot of stories about the Lee Fisher campaign have gone unblogged. Now that Lee Fisher is trying to throw a stink bomb into our tulip patch, by forcing ODP to endorse him, well, that’s over.
Today, I announce the Lee Fisher UNBLOGGED! series. Stories Lee Fisher probably doesn’t want to see blogged, and wouldn’t have seen blogged if he’d just act like an adult, but will now see blogged because he insists on getting ODP to endorse his campaign of epic fail.
First episode tomorrow….the paid “coordinators”! It’s a tale of daring do, thrills and spills around every corner, and of course, the Lee Fisher FAIL TRAIN makes its inevitable appearance.
Lee Fisher UNBLOGGED!
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’s better than Cats.
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I must say, watching a small government conservative who’s spent his entire life sucking on the government teat argue for John Kasich can get tedious. But this level of hypocrisy, to the point of personally embodying every level of fiction that Republicanism has become, does have its good days.
Like today, as Jon Keeling goes catatonic over John Kasich’s claiming that, unlike Ted Strickland, he’d know the names of everyone he met with, while not knowing the names of anyone he was meeting with at the moment he claimed it. That, in itself, is sublime. Keeling’s response?
For those unclear of what I mean when I say “false equivalence”, equivalence is defined as such: the state or fact of being equivalent; equality in value, force, significance, etc. Falsely equivocating something encourages the perception that two situations are “equal in significance”, when in reality, they aren’t.
Yes, Jon Keeling, whose ideology if he lived by it would make Keeling unemployed, is lecturing on something that he claims is “false”. Not even by reading Alice in Wonderland on acid can you disappear this far into cosmic folds in the time space continuum. Maybe I should try it sometime! Wait….never mind, I have Jon Keeling for that.
In the world of mainstream journalism, these kind of petty gotcha games based on false equivalence are what continues to push readers away.
Someone pass the bong.
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Lee Fisher proves once again he is all about himself. I’ve got good sourcing telling me that Fisher sent a letter to ODP chair Chris Redfern requesting the ODP endorsement. Twelve days before early voting starts, and about 6 weeks before the primary. If that’s not a sign of a pathetic campaign in big trouble, I don’t know what is.
If ODP knows what’s good for it, the executive committee which meets on March 24 to decide this issue will refuse that request. If not on principle, then there are plenty of reasons to avoid what would be a blood letting for the next 6 weeks. It is way too late in the game for a statewide candidate who hasn’t even gotten the endorsement of his own county party to come begging for help. This party was cruising to a quiet primary allowing the voters to decide who our US Senate candidate would be, united for a tough general election against a Republican Party well on its way toward its own collapse.
Now Lee Fisher wants to have a blood bath. Well, he’s gonna get it. I will refer you to Jennifer Garrison, Lee. We are in the process of getting the lists of every member of the executive committee, and if that committee votes on March 24 to create a screening committee, we’ll get that list too.
Big mistake, Lee. Big one.
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In a meeting yesterday with the Dayton Daily News yesterday John Kasich attacked Governor Strickland, blaming him for not doing enough to bring NCR to our state. “If they weren’t answering my calls I’d be starting to call boards of directors. I’d know the people’s names that I was meeting with. I’d show up on time for a meeting”, Kasich said.
John’s friends at Fox News would have let this comment slide by. The small town paper reporters that John normally talks to just let him ramble on about the evils of the Strickland Administration and the terrible state of our State under Ted. But not the news staff at the Dayton Daily News. Nope. They responded to John Kasich EXACTLY how a reporter should: with a relevant follow up question…
… when asked if he knew the names of all five people sitting at the Dayton Daily News meeting — including editorial page editor Ellen Belcher — Kasich admitted that he did not. And, Kasich called one writer by the wrong name three times.
Kasich also blamed a doctor’s appointment for his late arrival to the March 18 meeting.
And now we know why Kasich’s staff keeps him away from the press.
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Yesterday was a bad day for the Lee Fisher campaign. Their first mailer hilariously hit mailboxes including Jennifer Brunner’s Rosie the Riveter logo. But that wasn’t the big news. I attended and voted in the Cleveland Stonewall Democrats May 4 primary endorsement meeting for Jennifer Brunner last night. At least 60% (the threshold for endorsements) of the rest of the Stonewall Democrats present did too. Which means Jennifer gets a major endorsement in Lee’s home county.
The US Senate race last night was the most hotly debated race on the May 4 ballot, but in the end, there was a real sentiment that Lee Fisher can’t win in the fall against Rob Portman, among the people who know Lee best. In Lee Fisher’s home county, the largest bloc of Democratic primary voters in the state, there is at least one significant constituency willing to put its credibility behind that sentiment, and fight to get Democrats a winning candidate.
Jennifer was there, and Peggy Zone Fisher attended for Lee, which I think made a difference, particularly given something that Peggy noted about Lee’s record. Strangely, Peggy touted a hate crimes bill which Lee claims to have helped pass back in the early 90’s in response to a cross burning incident in Collinwood. Peggy said that back then, LGBT rights weren’t in the bill, but if it were introduced today, LGBT rights would be in it. The confusion in the room was palpable – it was as if Peggy wanted to point out that no one has ever heard Lee Fisher utter a single word about gay rights until he got into this primary.
It’s one thing to show up at gay events your whole career and tell people what they want to hear, quite another to put gay rights on your public agenda, draw a line, and defend that line against all comers. Tellingly, despite Don’t Ask Don’t Tell being debated at the federal level in public hearings in the Senate in which Lee Fisher wants to sit as I write this, not one word on DADT is in Lee Fisher’s first mailer. Should there be? Um….yeah. Or at least his surrogate could have mentioned it while asking for Stonewall’s endorsement last night.
This endorsement was not taken lightly by the voting members present, or the board. The best news for me from this meeting is that the LGBT community in Ohio is really beginning to flex its muscle in the Ohio Democratic Party, and locally in Cuyahoga County, where gay votes really matter on election day. We can thank Jennifer Garrison for that. There is a sense of confidence which I have not seen before, a recognition of the power LGBT unity can bring to bear on major decisions about our party’s ticket and direction, and a weighty understanding of the responsibility that comes with it. Rob Rivera, president of Cleveland Stonewall Democrats, noted that CSD will be putting this influence to work as the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party begins to pick up the pieces and rebuild. Good.
Jennifer Brunner has that endorsement behind her. Now go make us proud, Jennifer, and win this primary. We got your back.
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Anthony got the first piece of what I suspect will be a flood of stock photo filled, cookie cutter, demographic box checking, mind numbingly vapid mail from the Lee Fisher campaign. Not only was it all of the above – Anthony noticed this, which I must apologize to Anthony for saving and posting here, it’s just too good a photoshop. And I thought the funniest thing was Lee holding a welding mask like he’s in a Devo video….silly me. Can these people do a single thing right?
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This man is doing a fine job of ruining his legacy in what used to be his own hometown.
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So I’ve had a lot of people lately ask why I keep going back to DailyKos, and why I keep getting banned, and still going back for more. Well, here’s the back story – super meta alert, but there’s some hilarity if you click through. [click to continue…]
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Voted for the health care bill before he voted against it. And Driehaus thinks this will save him his congressional seat. Pathetic. I have been in politics for a long time in this state, and I have had it up to here with the epic cowardice of elected officials in Ohio, specifically members of Congress, who pander to the basest, most marginal issues of their electorate as if it will help them win elections.
Driehaus will claim his district is pro-life, and this issue is so damn important that it should be allowed to derail the most important health care bill since the creation of Medicare. Never mind that the Stupak amendment he will certainly cite is redundant, that the bill as it exists does not fund abortion in the slightest, that the amendment itself is a legislative impossibility, and thus everything Driehaus panders to is a total fiction. No, Steve Driehaus must demonstrate that he is so concerned with the whereabouts of sperms, eggs, vaginal juices and fallopian tubes, that he will sacrifice the well being of tens of millions of Americans on the altar of letting his voters continue to believe a lie.
I understand abortion is a big issue to some people. In the context of health care reform, it is the size of a hangnail. And yet, we pray to its altar. It is thus because people like Steve Driehaus stake their political fortune on milking it, telling their voters that yes, it’s totally o.k. to be a single issue voter, it’s perfectly acceptable to flush every single piece of major legislation down the toilet if it so much as touches on abortion, even if these voters merely perceive a falsehood claiming it touches on abortion. If Driehaus were a congressman in 1940, and the lend lease act had abortion language attached to it by some opportunistic Stupakian culture warrior, Britain would be speaking German right now, which of course would be fine with Driehaus if he took a poll that told him Britain speaking German would get him re-elected among pro-lifers.
Here’s the best part. IT NEVER WORKS. Driehaus is dreaming if he thinks the teabaggers he’s trying to placate will somehow become big supporters and save his job while Democrats decide his seat isn’t worth holding so long as he’s in it. Without fail, people like Steve Driehaus play this game, refusing to lead their voters to a place where their pet issues get litigated reasonably, rather than incessantly at the cost of all else. And without fail, they are one termers. You know why they are one-termers?
Because voters respect a leader who leads, who doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator, who votes in the best interests of his voters, not his voters’ hangnails. Onto the dustbin of history Steve Driehaus’ single term in Congress will now be tossed, losing a seat that has been a target of Democrats in Ohio since as long as I’ve been in Ohio politics.
The sad part is that no one ever learns from this utterly predictable cycle. Better get Eric Fingerhut on speed dial, Steve. Ask him how long Steve LaTourette has been in his seat.
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