Election Diary Rescue 10/30/12

Mike Huckabee says vote for Republicans or else

Huckabee's ad, via Slate Mike Huckabee continues the GOP pre-election push to make sure everyone knows Republican "leaders" are just horrible, miserable human beings. He's cut a new ad claiming in that usual, not-terribly-subtle Republican pseudopreacher way, that if you vote the wrong way on Nov. 6 you're probably going to go to hell.

HUCKABEE: Many issues are at stake, but some issues are not negotiable: The right to life from conception to natural death. Marriage should be reinforced, not redefined. It is an egregious violation of our cherished principle of religious liberty for the government to force the Church to buy the kind of insurance that leads to the taking of innocent human life.

Your vote will affect the future and be recorded in eternity. Will you vote the values that will stand the test of fire? This is Mike Huckabee asking you to join me November 6th and vote based on values that will stand the test of fire.

Ah, that famous right to life that never quite extends to wars, the death penalty, or anything else. That "redefinition" of marriage that can never quite fathom how often marriage has been "redefined" over the years and how what Mike Huckabee thinks of as "marriage" is not the be-all, end-all of what everyone else has to think about the subject. The religious liberty that now sees "having my employees get insurance coverage that upsets my own pre-Victorian sensibilities on what birth control means, and I think maybe it means abortion because I am a lying, anti-scientific imbecile" as the defining moral battle of our times. So you either do what Mike Huckabee says or it's off to the hellfires for you.

I would take these moral scolds a wee bit more seriously'just a bit, mind you'if I had, say, ever heard of someone being evicted from their religion over their unwavering public support for torture. Or if public endorsement of the death penalty was an excommunication-worthy offense, because hey, life is life. But it's not, and it never will be, because modern religious conservatism is about sex, sex, and sex. I have never heard Mike Huckabee or any of these other moral scolds get a tenth as worked up over anything'human rights, torture, mass bombings, assassinations, industrialized slavery, deportations, worker exploitation, child poverty, other poverty, fouled water, insufficient food, or ostentatious fake preachers taking the Lord's name in vain to beg for a few more million dollars on the teevee'as they do over the notion that somebody, somewhere, is having sex in an unapproved fashion.

Test of fire, indeed.

Union workers save lives and power Hurricane Sandy recovery

A human chain passes containers of fuel up 13 flights of stairs to the backup generator at Bellevue Hospital. The recovery from Hurricane Sandy is going to require time, money and effort. And, like so many of the heroic rescues that happened during the storm, much of the effort is going to come from union members, and especially from the unionized public workers that the Republican Party has worked so hard to hurt over the past couple of years.

Already we've seen fire fighters, police, EMTs, nurses and other health care workers saving lives. They've gone into flooded streets to rescue people, fought fires, carried patients down flight after flight of stairs to evacuate them. New York City fire fighters belong to the Uniformed Firefighters Association. Many of the health care workers carrying patients out of NYU Langone Medical Center as it was evacuated belong to SEIU1199.

Major theme of tonight: NYC's public and private sector union workers stepping up and saving lives #Sandy #1u #heroes
' @JackieKessel via Twitter for BlackBerry Shoutout to @uwua @ibew @iaffnewsdesk police and all other first responders who are abt to begin a tough few days. Best wishes!
' @mwilli via web Now the hard work of getting back to normal has begun. Garbage collectors are out clearing debris from city streets. Bridges and tunnels are being inspected for safety. Railroad tracks and roads are being assessed and repaired. New York City buses will begin running again Tuesday afternoon, driven by unionized transit workers. Members of more than a dozen unions were involved in rescue or are involved in recovery. These union members are people whose jobs Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and congressional Republicans would cut, whose pensions and benefits have been slashed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose right to bargain has been under attack across the country.

Make no mistake about it: The fact that these are union workers is important. Unions bargain for the tools their workers need to do the best job possible, from having enough workers on the job to having adequate equipment and training. The wage and benefits improvements union members get help keep workers on the job for longer, so that they develop the skills and experience to handle worst-case scenarios like the one we're seeing now. Having health care keeps them healthy enough to do physically taxing jobs like carrying patients down 17 flights of stairs.

If someone you love was rescued from a flooded area, chances are it was a union member who rescued them. When your power goes back on, chances are a union member will have done the work. Mitt Romney will probably once again encourage you to embrace the line that we like workers, but just hate their unions. But the workers are the unions, and the collective power of unions helped individual workers rescue people or restore power or mobility by making sure they had the tools to get the job done and the pay and benefits such important work deserves.

Bill Clinton helps Tammy Baldwin put focus on Tommy Thompson's special interests

Tammy Baldwin gets a valuable assist in her campaign for the Wisconsin senate seat:

CLINTON:  One big difference between Tammy Baldwin and Tommy Thompson is that she stood up to the special interests, and he's stood up for them. If you put people first, it works better than trickle-down economics.... Thanks to Tammy Baldwin, there are three-million young people under the age of 26 who are now on their parents' health insurance policy.... We will bring America back in a fair, balanced, progressive way'with Tammy Baldwin, you can count on it."

The narrative that Thompson is out for himself and out for the special interests has real traction in this race, fueled by Thompson. He's refused to release his tax returns, has forgotten how many houses he owns, and has been hurt by having significant investments in companies doing business in Iran. Then, of course, there's how he profited off of 9/11 first responders.

Now there's a new revelation about his private finances that's going to sting.

Madison -- U.S. Senate candidate Tommy Thompson took ownership of more than $125,000 in stock this month for sitting on the board of a medical device company that has faced lawsuits and federal investigations.

Thompson in 2005 joined the board of C.R. Bard Inc., a New Jersey medical device maker that last year paid $184 million to resolve 2,600 lawsuits, has about 1,000 other lawsuits pending and has faced investigations by federal prosecutors.

He received the 1,200 shares of stock on Oct. 1, taking ownership of them without having to pay for them. Apparently they're a perk of board membership. His campaign has been clear in stating that as a board member "Governor Thompson is not involved in the daily operations of these companies."

He apparently just gets to sit on the board and profit handsomely, while doing nothing to oversee those operations and to make sure these companies don't break the law. Nice work, if you can get it.

Click here to donate $3 to Tammy Baldwin on Act Blue.

Romney goes up in PA and MI, because he's losing

Remember the primary? Not a battleground. The Romney campaign and his allies are making a late play in Pennsylvania and Michigan, which they are spinning as some kind of momentum.

Here's the current state of the race, per the TPM polltracker. I did one of these yesterday, so the trends only span one day.

The states that have polls all show the trends continuing in Obama's direction. I re-added Michigan and Pennsylvania at the bottom. Pennsylvania Michigan looks tight! But it's skewed by one of those bullshit baby Rasmussen pollsters, in this case Foster-McCollum for the local Fox affiliate. Their influence on the composite is particularly outsized because few people have polled the state recently. Take them out, and it's Obama 48.7-44.8, or a nearly four-point edge.

Heck, even Rasmussen has Obama up 52-45 (and 51-46 in Pennsylvania, for that matter).

So why would Republicans dump several million into two states that sport wider spreads than the current crop of battlegrounds?

Because they are losing. Even if they can hold on to North Carolina and eke out a victory in Florida, Romney's campaign would still be only at 235 electoral votes, 35 short of what they need for victory. The next closest state is Colorado with nine Electoral Votes. That's just 244. After that, the states look pretty tough for Romney. If North Carolina's 2.5-point advantage is a dominant one for Romney, then so are those 2-4 point Obama leads elsewhere. And remember, the trends are still moving toward Obama.

Pennsylvania is not a good pickup opportunity for Team Red, nor is Michigan. But they have no choice as they see other key states trend away from them.

If Romney's campaign was winning, they would focus on the states above and bring the trophy home. But they don't have the EVs they need, and are desperately casting for other states to bring into play.

The Chronicles of Mitt: Oct 30, 2012

  Hello, human diary. It is I, Mitt Romney, your better.

I was too distracted to campaign today. Instead, I flew to Ohio to finally reunite with Mr. Bus. He is just as I remember! The strong smell of diesel reminds me of job creating, or the smell of the large trucks that carry old equipment out of factories that need to be moved to China. It is a good smell. Unfortunately, we had to eventually turn off the engine as we were parked and some members of the staff began to complain of lightheadedness. I am beginning to suspect they do not appreciate job creators as much as they have previously claimed.

In order to justify visiting Mr. Bus instead of campaigning, I made an appearance at our Ohio campaign rally to acquire various foodstuffs for hurricane victims. The plan is still to use Mr. Bus to deliver these supplies to the commoners of hurricane-affected states. After seeing the damage on the television, it occurs to me that one bus filled with canned foods may not be enough. Still, I am loathe to expand the effort. While it is possible we could rent other vehicles in order to transport more canned items, there is no time left between now and the election to have my name painted on the side of those other vehicles, and so the commoners would not know who was helping them by transporting those goods.

Some reporters tried to ask me questions today, even though I have made it quite clear that I have already answered the right number of questions during this campaign and would not be answering any others. As retaliation, I instructed the staff to wait until the campaign event was over, then throw cans of food at them. It is going to be quite uproarious.

Elizabeth Warren pushes for rescheduling post-Sandy debate, Scott Brown doubtful

Elizabeth Warren The final debate of the Massachusetts Senate race was supposed to have been tonight, but yesterday Sen. Scott Brown pulled out of the debate citing the need to focus on Hurricane Sandy, and Elizabeth Warren's campaign shortly thereafter agreed. Brown, however, wanted the debate to be cancelled. Warren believes it should be rescheduled. Here's an emailed statement from her campaign.

"Our focus over the next 48 hours must be on public safety and holding the utilities accountable for restoring power as soon as possible. Elizabeth believes that the final televised debate should occur, and we have contacted the debate organizers and let them know she would be available to participate on Thursday evening."

Brown has not directly ruled it out, but clearly doesn't want to do it, saying it's unnecessary.

'We've already had three debates. I had two radio debates that she didn't participate in,' Brown said in Westport, where he was touring storm damage. He said voters now know where the candidates stand.

'There's only a few days left and we have a very, very busy schedule,' said Brown, who otherwise referred the issue to his campaign staff. The staff has not returned calls today.

He's sounding just a tad defensive there, no? Of course Brown doesn't want a final debate. The last three haven't helped him at all, and a fourth could cause even more damage. At a point in which Warren is opening her lead in polling (the latest from Suffolk has her leading 53-47, up from 48-44 a month ago), a big gaffe from Brown in a debate could be the final nail.

6:06 PM PT: And Brown says it's no go. The Warren campaign sends this statement:

"It is unfortunate voters will not have the chance to hear from both candidates on the important issues facing Massachusetts.  Elizabeth was working with the debate organizers to move forward on Thursday. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, Scott Brown is again ducking questions about his record voting on the side of big oil and billionaires and against equal pay for equal work, against a pro-choice Supreme Court Justice and against  insurance coverage for birth control.  Elizabeth agreed to additional debates that Brown refused in Worcester and the South Coast as well as a forum hosted by the NAACP. Scott Brown doesn't want to have to talk about his record'plain and simple."

Hurricane Sandy proves that yes, the Connecticut Senate race can get nastier

Linda McMahon, who would never, ever, tell a lie. One Connecticut voter is not amused by the latest "outreach" effort by Republicans on behalf of Linda McMahon in that state's senate race. The voter, "Lisa," got a phone call on Sunday afternoon, in the middle of her disaster preparations, from a Republican polling firm in New York called Central Research.

'They asked all the standard questions. 'Are you a man or woman?' 'How old?' Blah, blah, blah. Then they got to these really weird questions. 'If I told you that Chris Murphy accepted 'x' amount of money from Connecticut Light & Power and did not hold them accountable in the last power outage, would you be more likely/less likely to vote for Murphy?'' [...]

'I was like, 'I'm sorry, what?!?!'' Lisa said. 'And there were a few other questions like that ' I'm not stupid. They're not asking that question on the eve of the hurricane for nothing. And it's so offensive. I don't agree with their statement (and) all they're doing is fishing for a way to use this hurricane to political advantage. That's just wrong.'

Ah, stay classy, Republicans. Just like Mitt Romney. You can't let a thing like a natural disaster happen without wringing the maximum crass political benefit out of it.

The McMahon campaign insists that it has nothing to do with the calls. Which is totally believable.

Loophole gets Romney big tax break for small donation to Mormon Church

In another of those moments designed to make you feel like you'd have to be a forensic accountant to have the most basic understanding of Mitt Romney's financial dealings, Bloomberg has uncovered yet another Romney tax avoidance vehicle, this one working through the Mormon Church.

Charitable remainder unitrusts allow rich people to defer capital gains taxes by basically renting a charity's tax exempt status, then investing the money in the trust free from capital gains taxes, getting an annuity for years, and then, at the end, leaving the charity whose tax exempt status made it all possible whatever crumbs are left when the funder dies. In 1997, Congress passed a law saying the charity had to get at least 10 percent of the initial investment, but grandfathered in existing trusts like Romney's. Romney is of course taking advantage of that; his trust is expected to pay the Mormon Church around 8 percent of the money that was initially invested in it. That wouldn't be legal under current law, but, like so many other Romney investments, it slides in under the wire, in this case because of the grandfather clause.

In 2011, the Romneys' trust earned just $48, due to a conservative investment strategy, but paid them $36,696.

The current investing strategy favors the Romneys over the charity because they get a guaranteed payout, said Michael Arlein, a trusts and estates lawyer at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP.

'The Romneys get theirs off the top and the charity gets what's left,' he said. 'So by definition, if it's not performing as well, the charity gets harmed more.'

The Mormon Church has received plenty of Romney money from other sources, though, and is perfectly happy to let them avoid taxes for another smallish donation at the end. Meanwhile, you have to wonder how many other tax avoidance vehicles at the outer edges of legality Romney has that we don't know about yet.

Please give the president a boost by chipping in $5 to help him close strong in the final days of this campaign.

Orange to Blue roundup, 10/30/2012

Here's your daily Orange to Blue race news. But before we get to that, a bunch of our candidates in the northeast and mid-atlantic weathered Hurricane Sandy are now watching calendar days fall away that would have been used to get Democratic voters to the polls. You can help them out.
 

Speaker Pelosi Project:

CA-07: GOTV is going to make the difference in this very close race between Ami Bera and Rep. Dan Lungren, and Bera thinks the advantage could be his.

Bera said he thinks heavy spending and attention surrounding the 7th Congressional District has put the House race at the top of voters' minds. With Obama safely in the lead in the state, the Elk Grove Democrat is banking on his campaign's own grass-roots operation, which has grown to more than 1,500 active volunteers, to get supporters to cast a ballot in the close race.

"We've always known that the presidential race would not really play out in a big way in California, that President Obama would obviously carry the state, so from day one we've really focused on building our own field organization and get-out-the-vote effort," he said.

The district is more blue after redistricting, giving Bera more of an edge than in his 2010 race against Lungren. That, and a kick-ass ground game, could force a turnover here. Help Ami Bera get there.

CA-10: Insane campaign spending, anyone? Outside groups have outstripped candidate spending here nearly 2-1. That includes a more than $2.5 million from just one source, the conservative American Action Network, intent on keeping tea party freshman Rep. Jeff Denham in office, doing their bidding. Insane. We can't match $2.5 million, but we can pitch in for Jose Hernandez.

FL-18:  Nope, not done yet. The latest PPP poll has Patrick Murphy and Rep. Allen West virtually tied, with Murphy leading by one point, 48-47.Help Patrick Murphy close out this race.

FL-26: Crooked Rep. David Rivera hasn't lost all his friends.
 

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio has recorded a robocall in support of Rivera, his longtime friend and Tallahassee housemate. The calls have been going out to voters in the Kendall-to-Key West Congressional District 26, where Rivera, a Republican, is running against Democrat Joe Garcia.

Rivera has been entangled in an FBI investigation into one of Garcia's primary opponents, Justin Lamar Sternad. Sternad has filed blank campaign finance-reports and invoked his right to remain silent to avoid incriminating himself in the probe.

Rubio might come to regret that recording, if Rivera ends up serving time. Of course, this call might be the least of Rubio's worries if his best friend and roommate's various scandals start coming to light again.  Just for additional insurance, you can toss a few bucks to Garcia here.

MN-08: Rep. Michele Bachmann and Jim Graves met in their first debate today. You'll be shocked to hear that Bachmann made shit up.
 

"With Jim Graves, add about 50 percent to your tax bill; that's what you'd be looking at," she said before she was interrupted.

Graves called the allegation "a bunch of malarkey."

She also took full credit for working with a whole bunch of Democrats, including Gov. Mark Dayton, Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, for getting funding for a bridge. Because no one is more bipartisan than Michele Bachmann. Let's take this very good opportunity to kick her out of office.

OH-16: Something smelled a bit fishy when GOP Rep. Jim Renacci cancelled all of his broadcast TV ad buys for the remainder of the election last week in this race pitting him against Democratic Rep. Betty Sue Sutton. The district was redrawn to try to get rid of Sutton, but that hasn't worked out quite as planned for Republicans, led in this effort by John Boehner. Now Ohio Democrats suspect that Renacci has been coordinating, illegally, with the Congressional Leadership Fund, a conservative PAC that swooped in immediately after the cancellations, and took out $300,000 in the television time. Renacci's campaign says that of course there was no illegal cooperation with this PAC, and of course it was all part of their campaign strategy all along to pull ads in the last week weeks of the campaign. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Like most FEC complaints filed in at the tail end of a campaign, this one is unlikely to have much impact. Which doesn't mean it doesn't stink to high heaven. Let's beat Boehner, and keep Betty Sue Sutton in this seat.

WI-07: Sexist, much? I guess by GOP standards, it could be worse.

The YG Network (or Young Guns Network), a secretive 501(c)(4) group that does not disclose its donors, has a new radio ad in Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District, backing freshman Republican Rep. Sean Duffy. It features two women talking over coffee:

EMMA: Hey, Olivia. What's it gonna be?
OLIVIA: Hi Emma. Hmmm. Latte, cappuccino? I can't make up my mind.
EMMA: That's how I felt about this election' until I took a good look at the candidates.
OLIVIA: And?
EMMA: I'm for Sean Duffy. He's pretty cool, actually. He's part of this new generation of leaders, the kind we need in Washington. He's a good husband and father and he fights for small businesses, like mine. So I can keep the doors open and even hire more people.
OLIVIA: He's the cute one, right?

Sigh. Help get Pat Kreitlow in office here, you know, the guy who will actually represent women. Upgrade the Senate:

NM-Sen: Two new polls, one of which is believable and one of which is profound GOP wishful thinking, came out in this race today. The first is GBA Strategies for Democrat Martin Heinrich, in which "Heinrich leads Republican Heather Wilson 51 ' 41 percent with Independent American Party candidate Jon Barrie pulling 6 percent. In a 2-way contest, Heinrich leads 52 ' 43 percent." That's been the consistent spread for several weeks now. The other poll is an internal for Wilson, which has Wilson leading 44-43. This is the first time Wilson's internal polling has given her the lead, though it's consistently shown her closer than any other poll done by any pollster in the state. But it will keep the few donors she still has happy, I suppose. You can help Heinrich close this out here.

OH-Sen: Josh Mandel is going for the cranky old man vote against Sen. Sherrod Brown. He got Sen. John McCain to spend some time stumping for him today, while he was already in the state for Romney. So he's got that going for him. What he has going against him is, well, Mitt Romney and the continued auto bailout insanity Mitt is pushing in the state. Mandel, too, says he would have opposed the bailout. Because what do all those Ohio auto workers need with jobs? Let's keep Sherrod Brown in the Senate.

Daily Kos for Marriage Equality:

Minnesota: The attempt by the forces of evil to codify bigotry in Minnesota's constitution has gotten really expensive, like everything else this election.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) ' The two principal campaigns battling over Minnesota's constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage have raised more than $16 million combined, with opponents of the ban outraising supporters by nearly two-to-one.

At least the forces of good have raised more. You can help Minnesotans United for All Families here.