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ObamaIsASadJoke
15 years ago
over at ace of spades, they have a post about how the dems in this district are trying to suppress the military absentee ballots.
They’ve been doing that same crap all the way back at least as far as FL 2000.
Rendell and his merry band did the same in PA.
The Dims claw, scratch, and fight to get convicted, and sometimes still incarcerated, criminals the right to vote. They bellyache, scream, and caterwaul over imagined, unproven, and unsubstantiated voter suppression, yet they engage in much, much worse on a routine, regular basis.
I am sure that any minute now the resident Leftists will come by and cry foul over the blatant disenfranchisement of military voters.
Dems up to their usual dirty work of trying to prevent our military from voting. Shameless, disgusting and really truly UNPATRIOTIC.
tfhr
15 years ago
No surprise on the efforts to block absentee ballots from troops stationed or deployed overseas as we have seen it before. Next: “Bring out your dead!” Look for a sudden influx of dead voters reincarnated courtesy of ACORN INC.!
Groan
15 years ago
Gillibrand won as a pro-First and Second Amendment moderate Democrat. In short, everything she opposes now. The people of NY-20 I doubt will fall for it a second time.
MSCatLady
15 years ago
My heart is in Mississippi but I happen to be up in the Capital Region of the Empire (state) just now, and I figured Tedisco was toast. You would not believe how much ad coverage soaked the airwaves with ads for Murphy. They really hit him hard on opposing “Barack Obama’s stimulus plan,” and accused him of distorting the facts, yaddayaddadyaddah. It was sickening but all too typical (I lived up here for many years before moving South).
There was a remarkable Internet campaign, too. I visit conservative sites, but in the last few days, it was amazing how many ads for Scott Murphy under a picture of Mr. Obama appeared at those sites. Very, very sophisticated support was available for Scott Murphy. I never heard or saw a Tedisco ad.
I don’t follow New York state politics any more, but just based on the ads for Murphy, I hope Tedisco wins. Maybe a lot of voters up here felt the same.
It’s astonishing that it’s this close. Whether Tedisco wins or loses, the fact that the election is this close in what is basically a Democrat stronghold, where the machine has long lingered as in Illinois, and with such saturation coverage prominently featuring Barack Obama in support of one candidate, is already very, very bad news for the Democrats in general and the president in particular. Barack Obama not only has no coat-tails in New York state, of all places; he may actually be the kiss of death to party candidates. Wow.
Hard Right
15 years ago
Hopefully the usual ballot counting fraud by the dems will not
prevail.
@MSCatLady: Thanks for that report from the scene. If Tedisco prevails, we can dig up one of those ads showing Obama and Murphy and point out how it was the DEMS who made this a referendum on Obama.
From the recent voting history it’s already clear that any support for Dems in this district, and by extension for Obama, has taken a HUGE HIT.
It reminds me of the famous words of Abraham Lincoln who said “You can’t fool all the people all the time.” People are waking up to who and what Obama really is and they don’t like it.
I hope this one doesn’t take as long as the Minnesota Senate election is taking!
MSCatLady
15 years ago
Dramatic news: Tedisco is stepping down from his post as Assembly minority leader, allegedly to prepare for his transition to Congress, even though the race is officially a dead heat, with voting machines still being recanvassed and thousands of absentee ballots yet to be counted. He did not get to such a high position by being foolish, so I believe rather the speculation at the Albany Times-Union that he is doing it to focus on an upcoming recount fight.
Note on the Times-Union slant: They were quoted in a radio ad for Scott Murphy that I heard last Monday saying that Tedisco “slanted the news against” Obama’s stimulus (meaning he made no bones about disagreeing with the party line and telling it like it is). That tells you everything you need to know about the TU slant. Also, they broke a “story” Friday, just in time for the election, about Assembly Republicans supposedly challenging Tedisco’s leadership. Hey, what can I say: they play politics as a contact sport up here.
But the TU also prides itself justly on good political reporting and generally their stories will give you the most info, once you can adjust for their slant. Just don’t let them mess with your head and emotions, and try to get other sources for confirmation and background, if you follow them for news on this.
This TU article also gives a heads-up to the next development in all this: “The Republican State Committee wants the absentee ballots impounded until a judge can rule on how they’ll be opened. State Supreme Court Justice James Brands of Dutchess County will consider the issue Monday.”
MSCatLady
15 years ago
PS: I put a little comic note at the bottom of the above post about popping some popcorn, and I used left and right pointy-brackets. It didn’t come through, though the rest of the post did. I just want to apologize in case that caused any problems with the blog. Hope it didn’t mistake it for HTML or something and cause something to malfunction. Sorry!!!!! I won’t do that again.
@MSCatLady: Any HTML the comment interface doesn’t understand it ignores.
Tedisco sounds pretty confident and many of us are keeping our fingers crossed.
Please do keep us updated on the news from NY20. I guess the big day will come on April 13th when they finish the count of absentees.
MSCatLady
15 years ago
I will, Mike’s America. And in the meantime (barring something unexpected or really outrageous), here is an article just to balance those hopes, entitled “How To Lose Congress,” from the “Washington Times” pointing out that the closeness of the race does not reflect well on New York State Republicans, either:
“What was happening in Albany stunningly complemented events in President Obama’s Washington in recent months, where the pork-filled stimulus package united every single House Republican in opposition to Mr. Obama’s spending spree.
“In the 20th District, Republicans could not have hoped for a better setup. Democratic candidate Scott Murphy endorsed Mr. Obama’s stimulus spending from the beginning. The president endorsed him. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made taped advertisements. The special election set up beautifully as a referendum on the outrageous spend-and-tax policies in Washington and Albany. Except for one problem.
“For the bulk of the congressional campaign, Republican candidate Jim Tedisco couldn’t decide whether as a member of the House he would have been the only Republican to vote for the wasteful Obama stimulus package. I am not making this up. Mr. Tedisco refused to say he would have voted against the stimulus package – until the last days of the campaign.
“How did the Republican Party end up with this guy? ”
I don’t know that Tedisco is a typical “blue-state Republican.” Certainly the 26 years during which Tedisco served in the State Assembly didn’t produce much to make New York State Republicans glowing examples of Republican principles, and his rise to power shows that he knows how to “go along and get along.” Unfortunately, all politics is like that. I do know for a fact that he could *always* be relied on to stand up for Second Amendment rights, which was what I followed up here closely when I lived up here and during the Clinton years. This could not always be said about other Republicans in the state senate and assembly. Some would support you with words and work against you behind the scenes; others were just spineless talk-out-of-both-mouthers. Tedisco spoke his mind and appeared to walk his talk, even though he usually lost.
I had forgotten about Solomon and his legacy. Still, that was a long time ago, and the demographics there have changed, I’m sure. I think the Washington Times writer isn’t taking demographics into account and is also using a purist standard to measure Tedisco, who after all is running for Congress, not for the presidency. Still, it’s worth thinking about, but I think we could do a lot worse than Jim Tedisco in the House.
I checked out his Vote Smart candidacy pages and his 1996 political courage test, so you all could decide better for yourselves:
I’ve been looking into Scott Murphy, too. The guy is an outsider, born in Missouri and had a political career that extended into working for two Democrat governors there until 2001, when he joined a company, Advantage Capital Partners, where he still works. The company has offices in both New York state and Missouri, so I don’t know when he moved to New York, but he’s no more a New Yorker than Hillary was.
Frankly, all that investment stuff is over my head, but providing “senior debt, mezzanine debt, and equity capital to real estate development firms and real estate projects,” among other things, and specializing in “states and communities that are underserved by traditional sources of risk capital,” which means they’re considered bad risks by everybody else in the busines, sure sounds a lot like the razmatazz that got us into this financial mess in the first place.
What is Obama doing, endorsing somebody in that business?
And why, in this overall background, is this race close? Murphy sounds like the sort of candidate a really hardball political player would have a ball with in these times.
Ah well. At least he isn’t a comedian. It’s a pretty sad state of civic affairs in a country where the likes of Al Franken and Scott Murphy can actually cause tight races.
@MSCatLady: You’re right that we should have chewed up the carpetbagger Murphy and spit him out. Instead, Tedisco appears to have taken the advice of the play it safe crowd who have NEVER been very successful at winning elections.
Pollster John McLaughlin sees enormous potential for Republican candidates for Congress in 2010 – but his optimism is accompanied with a sobering warning. Republican candidates should not be linked to the party’s recently disastrous political past. And they had better have a reform vision for the future.
There has never been a time when Republicans more needed a Contract With America-type pact that would pledge an end to pork-barrel earmarks and oppose the spend-and-tax philosophy that has absorbed Mr. Obama’s Washington. All this will require vision – and planning – which ought not require rocket science to accomplish.
We tried the play it safe routine in 2006 and 2008 and look what happened. I’ll put my money on a more aggressive approach even if that risks us being tagged as “negative” campaigners. It’s worth noting that Dems did nothing but spew hate at President Bush for 8 years and somehow managed to win elections in 2006 and 2008.
MSCatLady
15 years ago
You’ve got that right, Mike’s America. The thing the Democrats have worked out is how to spew hate and have it not be recognized as such, even by many apolitical or nonaligned Americans. They’ve been working on that for decades. It’s remarkable, really: a major propaganda coup, but my heart’s with the ones who speak plainly, even if they get vilified for it. The apologists among Republicans in general and conservatives in particular still haven’t realized that they’re only apologizing for not being as good hypocrites as the current leadership and much of the rest of the Democrat party are today. That’s hardly something to apologize for, but it still needs to be turned end over end into something positive, like pride in and a strong stance for principles. Heck, just some self-confidence would be nice to see nowadays.
Here’s an update as we wait for the absentee votes to be counted, Tedisco had been as high as 97 votes ahead, after the race became tied at one point, but now he is only up by 17. Per the Albany Business Journal about 40 minutes ago, at http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2009/04/06/daily21.html :
“The most recent update came late Tuesday. Now, Tedisco has 77,034 votes; Murphy has 77,017.
“As of April 3, the two had been tied. On April 6, the state said Tedisco led by 97 votes.
“Absentee ballots are expected to decide the election. About 6,760 have been returned to date; close to half of those came from registered Republicans.
“Military and overseas absentee ballots are still scheduled to be counted on April 14.”
Close to half is not more than half, which will be needed. Registered Independents might swing this. Tedisco is ahead by a small margin in Rensselaer County, and it’s the Independents that have put him there; I know it even without having access to the breakdown, because I used to live over there and know that it has the highest number of Independents of all state counties (well, this was true in the 90s anyway). Many of us then were mobilized with the city of Troy, the county seat, tried to sneak a gun ban through; I’ll bet many still there haven’t forgotten how Jim Tedisco stood by them. And, too, maybe more people than I had already recognized Murphy for the carpetbagger he is.
Still, the margin for Tedisco over there isn’t as large as for other counties. However, a huge number of people have migrated into Troy from downstate, while I doubt the rest of the county, which is rural, has grown at all, if it hasn’t shrunk some; and that may be why it’s such a small lead currently.
From what you are saying it sounds like Tedisco’s rather aggravating tepidness about the stimulus bill may have been the right thing to appeal to Independents in his district. I hope so.
I just wonder how many of the military ballots will not be counted because the Dems refused to give enough time to get many of them returned from remote battlefields?
MSCatLady
15 years ago
That’s a real good article, Mike’s America. Nice picture of Mr. Tedisco, too (BG).
Here is the state board of elections page where the update they mention should be posted at 10 a.m. Eastern: http://www.elections.state.ny.us/ (I haven’t checked out the detailed results yet, as there are some problems with Adobe Reader on this computer.)
It’s reassuring that both campaigns are going to be getting such detailed information. Apparently it was Murphy’s campaign that announced the 20-vote lead in Delaware County, but we’ll see what the official count there is. Looks like Saratoga County is going to be a key one, too.
Get this, though! “The counties also have yet to receive all military and overseas ballots, which are not due until April 13. Of 1,045 such absentee ballots mailed out, only 201 have been mailed back, the state board of elections reported on Wednesday evening.” Jeesh!
Other information about the other absentee ballots (looks like I was wrong about the Independents, at least on this plane): “Of the absentee ballots returned, 3,188 belong to voters registered with the Republican or Conservative parties, which endorsed Tedisco, and 2,405 are from registered Democrats or Working Family Party voters, which backed Murphy. Independent voters also submitted 157 absentee ballots.”
Thanks for the additional information on absentee ballots. Very disturbed about the military ballots. Over 800 have still not been returned? Only 4 days left before the deadline. No wonder Dems fought so hard to force a deadline that was nearly impossible to meet.
Yep, currently Murphy’s a wee bit ahead but two counties have yet to be heard from and some other counties have only posted partial returns, plus they haven’t counted the military ballots yet; I have yet to find a simple, straightforward explanation in the news about the status of those ballots but by reading between the lines from a couple sources, and using a tea leaves, psychic researchers, and a water dowser (BG), at least 60 of those are already in and Monday is the deadline for the rest to be mailed, which means it will still be a few days. I could be wrong – correct me, please, if I’ve misunderstood about those.
The “Albany Times-Union” is not too obviously but clearly boosting Dems in an article at http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=789212&category=SARATOGA and reporting on how mean those Republicans are for challenging ballots; and apparently the TU is also helping to prepare the battlefield for space an upcoming legal battle (as in “Ken Dow, a former elections commissioner and Democratic committee chairman, said the Republicans are ‘acting in bad faith’ because state law is clear on the matter. In 1983 the Court of Appeals ruled in Ferguson v. McNab….”).
Meanwhile, “The Saratogian” today has an interesting article up on what would happen if there is an actual tie: What we have here is a “failure to elect”…. http://www.saratogian.com/articles/2009/04/11/news/doc49e00a129f744192217984.txt I think an actual tie is pretty unlikely, but it’s interesting. I’ll bet Paterson is wishing he’d gone with Princess Caroline after all. 🙂
@MSCatLady:
That was an interesting article about the possibility of a tie. Statistically it is tied. This is why states with runoff provisions have a much better system. A runoff would also have avoided the mess in Minnesota were Coleman would be the clear winner in a two man race with Franken.
I know it’s difficult to get hard facts in an election like this where we depend on multiple boards of elections for information but I would be very interested to learn just how many military ballots were mailed out and then received AFTER the Monday, April 13th cutoff.
1,005 absentee ballots sent to military personnel serving overseas. I’d like to know just how many arrived back in time to be counted and how long it took all of them to be returned?
MSCatLady
15 years ago
That Corner Review article, “The Shameful Disenfranchise” is excellent; thanks for sharing it. I hadn’t heard all the details about this aspect of the election.
“The only thing DOJ leaders essentially asked for (and got in a consent decree) was an extension of time for the receipt of overseas ballots, from April 7 to April 13. In other words, despite the fact that almost every expert in this area now recommends at least a 45-day transit time for absentee ballots for military voters, Justice asked only for 30.” WTF????
I did a Google News search and learned a bit more it from a Politico post at http://www.politico.com/blogs/scorecard/0409/MiniMinnesota.html (note that it quotes the “Albany Times-Union” as a source, which tells me all I need to know about their own credibility; again, there is a mention of legal battles in terms of the hearing tomorrow in Poughkeepsie…more battlespace preparing?) They mention an open letter from US veterans about this disenfranchisement issued on Thursday, but the link doesn’t work. I found it at a Gathering of Eagles: http://gatheringofeagles.org/view701247r6071524660.html
I don’t know which is more stirring, the text of the letter or the names of those who signed it. I wonder if Curt might be interested in posting that in full? This really needs all the publicity it can get, as the media sure aren’t covering it, and it is an outrage.
Keep in mind that the deadline for receiving overseas and military ballots is Monday and that they won’t be counted until Tuesday. As of 1:00 pm Friday, only 403 out of the 1918 that had been requested had been received.
I thought the the number of military ballots was 1,005. If there is a much higher number of military ballots that were not able to be returned by today then that could certainly throw the election to the Democrat.
Believe it or not we had one dim wit liberal on another thread claim that the military supported Obama by 6 to 1. No doubt he and others like him will claim that if we don’t count all the military votes in this race it only disadvantaged them. But that raises the question as to why Dems fought so hard to force an unreasonable deadline on the return of military absentee ballots.
@MSCatLady: I’m disgusted with this result. It should have been a clear win for us. We made remarkable strides and yet once again we see how a Dem just games the system with absentee ballots and wins.
Did we ever determine how many military ballots failed to be return by the unreasonable deadline Dems insisted on?
I’m wondering if we suffered this narrow loss because we were so afraid of offending people with a stronger campaign that we simply stood by and watched as the Dems threw everything including the kitchen sink into the race?
MSCatLady
14 years ago
The “elephant in the room” in coverage of this particular from all regular media quarters seems to have been the military ballot issue. Nobody wants to cover it. I didn’t know too much about it myself until this election, and it seems the issue might be picking up steam from sources like NRO and the Heritage Foundation, but you really have to search to find it. This is from a Newsmax article at http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/tedisco_absentee_ballots/2009/04/14/202691.html
“Liberals scream about disenfranchised voters,” Fund tells Newsmax, “but they largely fall silent when it comes to the shameful fact that many of our military servicemen and women and their families can’t vote if they are overseas because of bureaucratic barriers.
There’s another positive lesson to come out of this and that is what happens when citizens shirk their duties. I tend to rant about this and will try not to here. Anyway, voters in earlier state constitutional conventions wrote in a requirement to the state constitution that the legislature must ask the voters every 20 years if they want to convene one. They did in the 70s, and the legislators took it over and made it a zoo, and the people could not or did not (I don’t know, I was too new to things at that time). The question again came up in 1997. The unions all came out against it, and there was a big push to say no because the legislators would just take it over again…as if a “no” vote wouldn’t just allow them to continue to run things and take over even more for another 20 years! But the citizenry voted “no.” I left as soon as I could, which turned out to be 2 years later. It’s not fun to live among Americans who seem to be broken and without a taste for liberty.
Not long after that vote, the First Lady of those days, a Chicago lady, with apparently the only exposure to NY being on Wall Street, just waltzed right into a US Senate seat here. She was first carpetbagger. Murphy from Missouri is only the latest. Had the citizens of New York State shown some backbone in 1997, I suspect neither coup by an out-of-stater would ever have happened. An in-depth analysis by experts would be very interesting, but it’s not likely to happen any time soon.
Anyway, it all boils down to the voters. “We” didn’t lose; the voters of New York State did, again. Of course, besides such heavy-handed stuff as legislative control and so forth being wrong, it is also bad economically. The state’s about broke to the point where it can’t tax its way back into the good old days. That needn’t have happened either, and again, the voters have only themselves to blame.
There is much other Americans can learn from the greatly underpublicized lessons coming from the Empire (state) these days.
It has a lot of what you were saying earlier about how Tedisco shot himself in the foot by not figuring out what kind of candidate he was until the very last moment.
It sort of reminds me of McCain who tried about three various campaign strategies and always backed off the effective stuff when Dems complained about negative attacks.
But apparently no one minds if Dems are using negative campaign tactics or if they disenfranchise military voters.
There are just too many Republican candidates so afraid to do the wrong thing that they do nothing at all.
over at ace of spades, they have a post about how the dems in this district are trying to suppress the military absentee ballots.
Yeah, they support the troops.
Right.
@ObamaIsASadJoke:
I read that story a little while ago.
Those bastards have no shame.
No shame whatsoever.
They’ve been doing that same crap all the way back at least as far as FL 2000.
Rendell and his merry band did the same in PA.
The Dims claw, scratch, and fight to get convicted, and sometimes still incarcerated, criminals the right to vote. They bellyache, scream, and caterwaul over imagined, unproven, and unsubstantiated voter suppression, yet they engage in much, much worse on a routine, regular basis.
I am sure that any minute now the resident Leftists will come by and cry foul over the blatant disenfranchisement of military voters.
Any. Minute. Now.
@ObamaIsASadJoke: Thanks for that heads up. Here’s a link to the original story at The Corner:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjUwYWJmMTRjNDNlOWYyMTVhNTFiOGFjMWJhYTJkZWQ=
Dems up to their usual dirty work of trying to prevent our military from voting. Shameless, disgusting and really truly UNPATRIOTIC.
No surprise on the efforts to block absentee ballots from troops stationed or deployed overseas as we have seen it before. Next: “Bring out your dead!” Look for a sudden influx of dead voters reincarnated courtesy of ACORN INC.!
Gillibrand won as a pro-First and Second Amendment moderate Democrat. In short, everything she opposes now. The people of NY-20 I doubt will fall for it a second time.
My heart is in Mississippi but I happen to be up in the Capital Region of the Empire (state) just now, and I figured Tedisco was toast. You would not believe how much ad coverage soaked the airwaves with ads for Murphy. They really hit him hard on opposing “Barack Obama’s stimulus plan,” and accused him of distorting the facts, yaddayaddadyaddah. It was sickening but all too typical (I lived up here for many years before moving South).
There was a remarkable Internet campaign, too. I visit conservative sites, but in the last few days, it was amazing how many ads for Scott Murphy under a picture of Mr. Obama appeared at those sites. Very, very sophisticated support was available for Scott Murphy. I never heard or saw a Tedisco ad.
I don’t follow New York state politics any more, but just based on the ads for Murphy, I hope Tedisco wins. Maybe a lot of voters up here felt the same.
It’s astonishing that it’s this close. Whether Tedisco wins or loses, the fact that the election is this close in what is basically a Democrat stronghold, where the machine has long lingered as in Illinois, and with such saturation coverage prominently featuring Barack Obama in support of one candidate, is already very, very bad news for the Democrats in general and the president in particular. Barack Obama not only has no coat-tails in New York state, of all places; he may actually be the kiss of death to party candidates. Wow.
Hopefully the usual ballot counting fraud by the dems will not
prevail.
Here comes ACORN!
Dems military only counts when they need them for show at campaign events.
@MSCatLady: Thanks for that report from the scene. If Tedisco prevails, we can dig up one of those ads showing Obama and Murphy and point out how it was the DEMS who made this a referendum on Obama.
From the recent voting history it’s already clear that any support for Dems in this district, and by extension for Obama, has taken a HUGE HIT.
It reminds me of the famous words of Abraham Lincoln who said “You can’t fool all the people all the time.” People are waking up to who and what Obama really is and they don’t like it.
keeping my fingers crossed…
@luva the scissors said: “keeping my fingers crossed…”
Doesn’t that make it hard to use the scissors? 🙂
Fox News reporting a tie.
I hope this one doesn’t take as long as the Minnesota Senate election is taking!
Dramatic news: Tedisco is stepping down from his post as Assembly minority leader, allegedly to prepare for his transition to Congress, even though the race is officially a dead heat, with voting machines still being recanvassed and thousands of absentee ballots yet to be counted. He did not get to such a high position by being foolish, so I believe rather the speculation at the Albany Times-Union that he is doing it to focus on an upcoming recount fight.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=786833
Note on the Times-Union slant: They were quoted in a radio ad for Scott Murphy that I heard last Monday saying that Tedisco “slanted the news against” Obama’s stimulus (meaning he made no bones about disagreeing with the party line and telling it like it is). That tells you everything you need to know about the TU slant. Also, they broke a “story” Friday, just in time for the election, about Assembly Republicans supposedly challenging Tedisco’s leadership. Hey, what can I say: they play politics as a contact sport up here.
But the TU also prides itself justly on good political reporting and generally their stories will give you the most info, once you can adjust for their slant. Just don’t let them mess with your head and emotions, and try to get other sources for confirmation and background, if you follow them for news on this.
This TU article also gives a heads-up to the next development in all this: “The Republican State Committee wants the absentee ballots impounded until a judge can rule on how they’ll be opened. State Supreme Court Justice James Brands of Dutchess County will consider the issue Monday.”
PS: I put a little comic note at the bottom of the above post about popping some popcorn, and I used left and right pointy-brackets. It didn’t come through, though the rest of the post did. I just want to apologize in case that caused any problems with the blog. Hope it didn’t mistake it for HTML or something and cause something to malfunction. Sorry!!!!! I won’t do that again.
@MSCatLady: Any HTML the comment interface doesn’t understand it ignores.
Tedisco sounds pretty confident and many of us are keeping our fingers crossed.
Please do keep us updated on the news from NY20. I guess the big day will come on April 13th when they finish the count of absentees.
I will, Mike’s America. And in the meantime (barring something unexpected or really outrageous), here is an article just to balance those hopes, entitled “How To Lose Congress,” from the “Washington Times” pointing out that the closeness of the race does not reflect well on New York State Republicans, either:
“What was happening in Albany stunningly complemented events in President Obama’s Washington in recent months, where the pork-filled stimulus package united every single House Republican in opposition to Mr. Obama’s spending spree.
“In the 20th District, Republicans could not have hoped for a better setup. Democratic candidate Scott Murphy endorsed Mr. Obama’s stimulus spending from the beginning. The president endorsed him. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made taped advertisements. The special election set up beautifully as a referendum on the outrageous spend-and-tax policies in Washington and Albany. Except for one problem.
“For the bulk of the congressional campaign, Republican candidate Jim Tedisco couldn’t decide whether as a member of the House he would have been the only Republican to vote for the wasteful Obama stimulus package. I am not making this up. Mr. Tedisco refused to say he would have voted against the stimulus package – until the last days of the campaign.
“How did the Republican Party end up with this guy? ”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/05/how-to-lose-congress/
I don’t know that Tedisco is a typical “blue-state Republican.” Certainly the 26 years during which Tedisco served in the State Assembly didn’t produce much to make New York State Republicans glowing examples of Republican principles, and his rise to power shows that he knows how to “go along and get along.” Unfortunately, all politics is like that. I do know for a fact that he could *always* be relied on to stand up for Second Amendment rights, which was what I followed up here closely when I lived up here and during the Clinton years. This could not always be said about other Republicans in the state senate and assembly. Some would support you with words and work against you behind the scenes; others were just spineless talk-out-of-both-mouthers. Tedisco spoke his mind and appeared to walk his talk, even though he usually lost.
I had forgotten about Solomon and his legacy. Still, that was a long time ago, and the demographics there have changed, I’m sure. I think the Washington Times writer isn’t taking demographics into account and is also using a purist standard to measure Tedisco, who after all is running for Congress, not for the presidency. Still, it’s worth thinking about, but I think we could do a lot worse than Jim Tedisco in the House.
I checked out his Vote Smart candidacy pages and his 1996 political courage test, so you all could decide better for yourselves:
Candidacy: http://www.votesmart.org/bio.php?can_id=4401
Political Courage test: http://www.votesmart.org/npat.php?can_id=4401
I’ve been looking into Scott Murphy, too. The guy is an outsider, born in Missouri and had a political career that extended into working for two Democrat governors there until 2001, when he joined a company, Advantage Capital Partners, where he still works. The company has offices in both New York state and Missouri, so I don’t know when he moved to New York, but he’s no more a New Yorker than Hillary was.
Given the current toxic asset situation, this description of Advantage Capital Partners from Business Week is interesting, too: http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=18609
Frankly, all that investment stuff is over my head, but providing “senior debt, mezzanine debt, and equity capital to real estate development firms and real estate projects,” among other things, and specializing in “states and communities that are underserved by traditional sources of risk capital,” which means they’re considered bad risks by everybody else in the busines, sure sounds a lot like the razmatazz that got us into this financial mess in the first place.
What is Obama doing, endorsing somebody in that business?
And why, in this overall background, is this race close? Murphy sounds like the sort of candidate a really hardball political player would have a ball with in these times.
Ah well. At least he isn’t a comedian. It’s a pretty sad state of civic affairs in a country where the likes of Al Franken and Scott Murphy can actually cause tight races.
@MSCatLady: You’re right that we should have chewed up the carpetbagger Murphy and spit him out. Instead, Tedisco appears to have taken the advice of the play it safe crowd who have NEVER been very successful at winning elections.
The Wash Times commentary you link is right on:
We tried the play it safe routine in 2006 and 2008 and look what happened. I’ll put my money on a more aggressive approach even if that risks us being tagged as “negative” campaigners. It’s worth noting that Dems did nothing but spew hate at President Bush for 8 years and somehow managed to win elections in 2006 and 2008.
You’ve got that right, Mike’s America. The thing the Democrats have worked out is how to spew hate and have it not be recognized as such, even by many apolitical or nonaligned Americans. They’ve been working on that for decades. It’s remarkable, really: a major propaganda coup, but my heart’s with the ones who speak plainly, even if they get vilified for it. The apologists among Republicans in general and conservatives in particular still haven’t realized that they’re only apologizing for not being as good hypocrites as the current leadership and much of the rest of the Democrat party are today. That’s hardly something to apologize for, but it still needs to be turned end over end into something positive, like pride in and a strong stance for principles. Heck, just some self-confidence would be nice to see nowadays.
Here’s an update as we wait for the absentee votes to be counted, Tedisco had been as high as 97 votes ahead, after the race became tied at one point, but now he is only up by 17. Per the Albany Business Journal about 40 minutes ago, at http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2009/04/06/daily21.html :
“The most recent update came late Tuesday. Now, Tedisco has 77,034 votes; Murphy has 77,017.
“As of April 3, the two had been tied. On April 6, the state said Tedisco led by 97 votes.
“Absentee ballots are expected to decide the election. About 6,760 have been returned to date; close to half of those came from registered Republicans.
“Military and overseas absentee ballots are still scheduled to be counted on April 14.”
Close to half is not more than half, which will be needed. Registered Independents might swing this. Tedisco is ahead by a small margin in Rensselaer County, and it’s the Independents that have put him there; I know it even without having access to the breakdown, because I used to live over there and know that it has the highest number of Independents of all state counties (well, this was true in the 90s anyway). Many of us then were mobilized with the city of Troy, the county seat, tried to sneak a gun ban through; I’ll bet many still there haven’t forgotten how Jim Tedisco stood by them. And, too, maybe more people than I had already recognized Murphy for the carpetbagger he is.
Still, the margin for Tedisco over there isn’t as large as for other counties. However, a huge number of people have migrated into Troy from downstate, while I doubt the rest of the county, which is rural, has grown at all, if it hasn’t shrunk some; and that may be why it’s such a small lead currently.
@MSCatLady: Thanks for that update. I was a bit alarmed yesterday when I saw news suggesting Murphy was pulling ahead.
This site has had a good roundup:
http://www.politickerny.com/tags/20th-congressional-race
From what you are saying it sounds like Tedisco’s rather aggravating tepidness about the stimulus bill may have been the right thing to appeal to Independents in his district. I hope so.
I just wonder how many of the military ballots will not be counted because the Dems refused to give enough time to get many of them returned from remote battlefields?
That’s a real good article, Mike’s America. Nice picture of Mr. Tedisco, too (BG).
Here is the state board of elections page where the update they mention should be posted at 10 a.m. Eastern: http://www.elections.state.ny.us/ (I haven’t checked out the detailed results yet, as there are some problems with Adobe Reader on this computer.)
While checking the news this morning, I found this article with some details of the absentee ballot counting, posted an hour ago: http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000003095131
It’s reassuring that both campaigns are going to be getting such detailed information. Apparently it was Murphy’s campaign that announced the 20-vote lead in Delaware County, but we’ll see what the official count there is. Looks like Saratoga County is going to be a key one, too.
Get this, though! “The counties also have yet to receive all military and overseas ballots, which are not due until April 13. Of 1,045 such absentee ballots mailed out, only 201 have been mailed back, the state board of elections reported on Wednesday evening.” Jeesh!
Other information about the other absentee ballots (looks like I was wrong about the Independents, at least on this plane): “Of the absentee ballots returned, 3,188 belong to voters registered with the Republican or Conservative parties, which endorsed Tedisco, and 2,405 are from registered Democrats or Working Family Party voters, which backed Murphy. Independent voters also submitted 157 absentee ballots.”
@MSCatLady: I’m still waiting for today’s update.
Thanks for the additional information on absentee ballots. Very disturbed about the military ballots. Over 800 have still not been returned? Only 4 days left before the deadline. No wonder Dems fought so hard to force a deadline that was nearly impossible to meet.
Just noticed a change:
http://www.elections.state.ny.us/
Tedisco now up by 24 votes. This is painful to watch!
UGH! Looks like the vote counters wrapped up the day with a lead of 8 to Murphy (D).
http://www.elections.state.ny.us/
Yep, currently Murphy’s a wee bit ahead but two counties have yet to be heard from and some other counties have only posted partial returns, plus they haven’t counted the military ballots yet; I have yet to find a simple, straightforward explanation in the news about the status of those ballots but by reading between the lines from a couple sources, and using a tea leaves, psychic researchers, and a water dowser (BG), at least 60 of those are already in and Monday is the deadline for the rest to be mailed, which means it will still be a few days. I could be wrong – correct me, please, if I’ve misunderstood about those.
The “Albany Times-Union” is not too obviously but clearly boosting Dems in an article at http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=789212&category=SARATOGA and reporting on how mean those Republicans are for challenging ballots; and apparently the TU is also helping to prepare the battlefield for space an upcoming legal battle (as in “Ken Dow, a former elections commissioner and Democratic committee chairman, said the Republicans are ‘acting in bad faith’ because state law is clear on the matter. In 1983 the Court of Appeals ruled in Ferguson v. McNab….”).
Meanwhile, “The Saratogian” today has an interesting article up on what would happen if there is an actual tie: What we have here is a “failure to elect”…. http://www.saratogian.com/articles/2009/04/11/news/doc49e00a129f744192217984.txt I think an actual tie is pretty unlikely, but it’s interesting. I’ll bet Paterson is wishing he’d gone with Princess Caroline after all. 🙂
Happy Easter, all!
@MSCatLady:
That was an interesting article about the possibility of a tie. Statistically it is tied. This is why states with runoff provisions have a much better system. A runoff would also have avoided the mess in Minnesota were Coleman would be the clear winner in a two man race with Franken.
I know it’s difficult to get hard facts in an election like this where we depend on multiple boards of elections for information but I would be very interested to learn just how many military ballots were mailed out and then received AFTER the Monday, April 13th cutoff.
Dems forced that early cutoff date knowing that it ran against all recommendations from postal officials:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjUwYWJmMTRjNDNlOWYyMTVhNTFiOGFjMWJhYTJkZWQ=
1,005 absentee ballots sent to military personnel serving overseas. I’d like to know just how many arrived back in time to be counted and how long it took all of them to be returned?
That Corner Review article, “The Shameful Disenfranchise” is excellent; thanks for sharing it. I hadn’t heard all the details about this aspect of the election.
“The only thing DOJ leaders essentially asked for (and got in a consent decree) was an extension of time for the receipt of overseas ballots, from April 7 to April 13. In other words, despite the fact that almost every expert in this area now recommends at least a 45-day transit time for absentee ballots for military voters, Justice asked only for 30.” WTF????
I did a Google News search and learned a bit more it from a Politico post at http://www.politico.com/blogs/scorecard/0409/MiniMinnesota.html (note that it quotes the “Albany Times-Union” as a source, which tells me all I need to know about their own credibility; again, there is a mention of legal battles in terms of the hearing tomorrow in Poughkeepsie…more battlespace preparing?) They mention an open letter from US veterans about this disenfranchisement issued on Thursday, but the link doesn’t work. I found it at a Gathering of Eagles: http://gatheringofeagles.org/view701247r6071524660.html
I don’t know which is more stirring, the text of the letter or the names of those who signed it. I wonder if Curt might be interested in posting that in full? This really needs all the publicity it can get, as the media sure aren’t covering it, and it is an outrage.
@MSCatLady: The Politico link had some new information:
I thought the the number of military ballots was 1,005. If there is a much higher number of military ballots that were not able to be returned by today then that could certainly throw the election to the Democrat.
I’ll keep that letter from veterans and POW’s handy until we know more.
Believe it or not we had one dim wit liberal on another thread claim that the military supported Obama by 6 to 1. No doubt he and others like him will claim that if we don’t count all the military votes in this race it only disadvantaged them. But that raises the question as to why Dems fought so hard to force an unreasonable deadline on the return of military absentee ballots.
Tedisco has abandoned the race: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j3-h_lUUzLANYAPtVzQjjD462HhQ
Well, it is kind of consistent with the race run anyway; he should have won it by a landslide.
Obama chortled and Steele talked meaningless generalities, per the article.
Sigh.
@MSCatLady: I’m disgusted with this result. It should have been a clear win for us. We made remarkable strides and yet once again we see how a Dem just games the system with absentee ballots and wins.
Did we ever determine how many military ballots failed to be return by the unreasonable deadline Dems insisted on?
I’m wondering if we suffered this narrow loss because we were so afraid of offending people with a stronger campaign that we simply stood by and watched as the Dems threw everything including the kitchen sink into the race?
The “elephant in the room” in coverage of this particular from all regular media quarters seems to have been the military ballot issue. Nobody wants to cover it. I didn’t know too much about it myself until this election, and it seems the issue might be picking up steam from sources like NRO and the Heritage Foundation, but you really have to search to find it. This is from a Newsmax article at http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/tedisco_absentee_ballots/2009/04/14/202691.html
“Liberals scream about disenfranchised voters,” Fund tells Newsmax, “but they largely fall silent when it comes to the shameful fact that many of our military servicemen and women and their families can’t vote if they are overseas because of bureaucratic barriers.
There’s another positive lesson to come out of this and that is what happens when citizens shirk their duties. I tend to rant about this and will try not to here. Anyway, voters in earlier state constitutional conventions wrote in a requirement to the state constitution that the legislature must ask the voters every 20 years if they want to convene one. They did in the 70s, and the legislators took it over and made it a zoo, and the people could not or did not (I don’t know, I was too new to things at that time). The question again came up in 1997. The unions all came out against it, and there was a big push to say no because the legislators would just take it over again…as if a “no” vote wouldn’t just allow them to continue to run things and take over even more for another 20 years! But the citizenry voted “no.” I left as soon as I could, which turned out to be 2 years later. It’s not fun to live among Americans who seem to be broken and without a taste for liberty.
Not long after that vote, the First Lady of those days, a Chicago lady, with apparently the only exposure to NY being on Wall Street, just waltzed right into a US Senate seat here. She was first carpetbagger. Murphy from Missouri is only the latest. Had the citizens of New York State shown some backbone in 1997, I suspect neither coup by an out-of-stater would ever have happened. An in-depth analysis by experts would be very interesting, but it’s not likely to happen any time soon.
Anyway, it all boils down to the voters. “We” didn’t lose; the voters of New York State did, again. Of course, besides such heavy-handed stuff as legislative control and so forth being wrong, it is also bad economically. The state’s about broke to the point where it can’t tax its way back into the good old days. That needn’t have happened either, and again, the voters have only themselves to blame.
There is much other Americans can learn from the greatly underpublicized lessons coming from the Empire (state) these days.
@MSCatLady: I found this at the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124078946691457509.html
It has a lot of what you were saying earlier about how Tedisco shot himself in the foot by not figuring out what kind of candidate he was until the very last moment.
It sort of reminds me of McCain who tried about three various campaign strategies and always backed off the effective stuff when Dems complained about negative attacks.
But apparently no one minds if Dems are using negative campaign tactics or if they disenfranchise military voters.
There are just too many Republican candidates so afraid to do the wrong thing that they do nothing at all.