Jane Mitakides needs your help! Jane has already received donations from Thirty six states and the District of Colombia. Now she wants to get donations form all 50 states by the June 30th filling deadline, but she can't do it without your help. If you live in Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, or Wyoming or know anyone who lives in those states we would appreciate even the smallest of donations. Be sure to tag your contributions with .01 to mark it as a dKos donation.
Some of you may remember me. I've posted on dKos for a while, though I haven't been posting for a week or two.
For the past few weeks I've been working for the congressional campaign of Jane Mitakides. Jane is running in Dayton which is one of the most competitive cities in Ohio against freshman Mike Turner who was kicked out of the mayor's office after mismanaging the city. Turner managed to get himself elected to Tony Hall's old seat after Karl Rove lured Hall away only two months before the 2002 general election. Because of Turner's victory people haven't seen the district as competitive. In fact, the district is very competitive. Its dpi is 47.4 and the counties that make it up have changed party hands four times since 1992 during which period the only other district that changed hands was Kucinich's. Democrats actually have a lead in party registration and Bush only beat Gore by a few points in the district. We are supported by the Democratic Action Team of New York, who raised almost $300K for Clark and who then chose our race as the only one they were going to focus their fundraising on, committing to raising 100K for us before the election. We have some of the best consultants working for us and the full support of the Ohio congressional delegation.
Jane has been involved in Democratic politics for decades and opened her campaign with an endorsement from Ann Richards. Just last week she met with the Ohio congressional delegation in Washington and sat in on a meeting of the Democratic Caucus. She's smart, hard working and tough and I could easily see her moving to a leadership position in Congress when she is elected.
This is going to be the first in a series of diaries. I'm an intern with the campaign. I'm between high school and college (UChicago) and I wanted to intern on a congressional campaign to get some practical experience in politics to go along with the theoretical experience I've gotten from dKos and other blogs. I decided to intern on a congressional campaign because I wanted to be close to the center of the action and have an opportunity to experience all the facets of a political campaign. I did a bit of research and chose the Mitakides campaign because I think Jane will take one of the sleeper victories of the 2004 election year. She is a strong candidate running against a bland colorless conservative who is unpopular and unknown in the district and who votes with Tom Delay 98% of the time. She is a smart and hard working and with the national climate being what it is she is poised to give us one of the 11 seats we need to retake the house and install speaker Pelosi (it is so easy to slip into the pitch because the pitch is so so true).
I took a peak over at the results of the dKos 8 senate poll and I noticed something odd. According to the site, there have only been 10 votes cast and stranger still, while Farmer is still second she only beats Mongiardo (who does terribly against everyone else) in 5 ballots out the hundreds cast. Clearly something wierd is going on, but it appears that all the votes are preserved under the "details" link so proper results should be possible to reconsturct...
The most recent issue of the Economist notes a new set of powers Chavez has gained (democratically, true) that give him and his party the unlimited right to hire and fire judges. The economist has an agenda and clearly they don't like Chavez, nonetheless their reporting is usually scrupulously fair and factual and the basic facts are difficult to question...
The article notes that the alleged coup (which it isn't sure is real or not) gives Chavez a new lever with witch to push his agenda:
Ah yes, the great Republican minds have pondered the impondrables, thought the unthinkable, plumbed the botomless depths of their infinte insight and decided that Abu Ghraib was the fault of .... drumroll.... The Farrelly Brothers!
Political wire notes a new poll showing Stephanie Herseth's 29 point lead over challenger Diedrich narrowing to 16 points. Diedrich is claiming that hes gaining on Herseth. To me this sounds inevitable as his name recognition increases. After all, did anyone think she was going to win by 29 points?
Apologies if this has been pointed out before. Bush has appointed a new archivist of the United States. The nominee, Allen Weinstein, has been criticised as secretive and unethical and his nomination is opposed by more than two dozen associations of Archivists and Historians (who knew there were that many archivists anyway).
What with Kerry taking flack for his supposed lack of policy positions I thought I'd propose a few. He needs big picture ideas, things that distinguish him from Bush, particularly on Iraq. However, he also needs straightforward, easy to understand, sensible ideas that will be relatively easy to implement. So I've tried to come up with a few. Some are related to current Kerry points. All of them might flop, but all try to take on a Bush issue head on and spin it to our advantage.
Micheal Moore's comments comparing the insurgency in Iraq to the resistance efforts of minutemen in America's revolutionary war stirred up some debate in this diary.
Over there, me and CheeseMoose got into a debate about this issue and I thought it was an interesting enough question to put in a diary. So here are the posts (slightly edited to remove extraneous information,, edits indicated with elipses).
I apologize if this has been posted allready, I looked over the last 50 entries and didn't see it.
President Bush has given up raising money for his reelection bid. He has raised $180 million all of which he will spend before his party's convention, Kerry has raised about $79 million and continues to go strong. After their respective conventions the candidates will each recieve $75 million in federal matching funds and not use any other monies.
The most traditional role for the VP is that of Attack Dog. In that vein LBJ was the dark enforcer for Kennedy's sepahic boyishness and Dick Cheney is the harder face of Bush's faux-inspirational leadership claptrap. So, shoud Kerry do the same?
After the flap about Kos's comments only one cadidate has kept her advertisements here. Show Jane Mitakides that she made the right choice by donating.
The NYT has an article about how the reeps are claiming that Kerry is coordinating his ads with moveon.org and the media fund. I apologize if this is old. The article also comes with an incredibly nifty map of where ads have been bought.
I haven't seen this posted here but Its really fascinating. A poll from Iraq tells us some interesting things about what a future Iraqi government might look like and how Iraqis feel about us...
I read an article in the LAT this morning about Gavin Newsom that made me wonder who other prominent younger Democrats are. The article quoted New Democrat Network founder Simon Rosenberg as follows:
"It's amazing how many people have said to me, 'Isn't that the guy you told us to help? We didn't know anything about him then, but he's an amazing guy,' " Rosenberg said. "I think people really have very big expectations for him in the long term. He is arguably the single most-promising Democrat under 40 in the country."
I've been worried about trade recently and begun hoping that the Democrats wouldn't slide into protectionism. That is part of the reason why I like Kerry and worry about Edwards. I know that trade creates winners and losers and that we need to help people who get hurt by it. I'm all for extending unemployment benefits and helping workers who have been outsourced find new jobs. I just think that attacking trade isn't the answer. Paul Krugman expresses this far more eloquently and authoritatively than I ever could in a recent column. I apologize if this has allready been mentioned but I don't think it has. I also got it via the New Democrat Network Blog
