Content by kmaher
Posted at 7:05pm on Dec. 14, 2007 Mr. DSCC Blog Inspector Guy
By kmaher
For Bud Light's next commercial:
Bud Light presents ... Real Men of Genius!
(Real Men of Geeeeenius!)
Today we salute you, Mr. DSCC Blog Inspector Guy.
(Mr. DSCC Blog Inspector Guy)
With your poli sci degree from Harvard's Kennedy School, you could've joined a K Street consulting firm, but you wanted to make a difference. So you took that internship with the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.
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Posted at 6:08pm on Nov. 9, 2007 There's oil in them thar rocks
By kmaher
You've probably heard of oil shale. It's basically limestone infused with goop that you can extract and turn into fuel. It's been a strategic resource for the United States since the Taft administration. The Navy needed a secure source of fuel, so in 1910 Congress set aside a big chunk of Colorado and Utah where shale is plentiful.
Extracting oil from shale is contoversial, because in the past you had to strip-mine it and dispose of a lot of waste. Shell Oil has come up with a process that's much more environmentally friendly.
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Posted at 10:29pm on Nov. 6, 2007 Protection racket
By kmaher
Labor news from Colorado: Gov. Bill Ritter, elected as a moderate with substantial business support, issued an executive order late Friday afternoon granting state employees collective bargaining rights.
Regarding the move, the Denver Post, the city's liberal newspaper and the biggest publication in the state, ran this blistering editorial on Sunday. On the front page. Go read it. Really, read it. I mean this is blue on blue regicide of the highest order. Then come back and wonder with me why Ritter did what he did.
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Posted at 2:32pm on Oct. 16, 2007 Nowhere to hide
By kmaher
I'm sure everyone reading this knows about Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Ricardo Sanchez's speech the other day, from which the traditional news media excerpted a few desperate-sounding lines that could be used to bash Bush.
And I'm sure you've also probably seen the immediate blog follow-ups in which the speech was examined a little more closely, and in which it was discovered that the entire first half of the speech was a blistering critique of the news media, delivered to a media audience: a luncheon of military reporters and editors. And that most of the second half of the speech was a blistering critique of partisan political games.
All of which, of course, went unmentioned in the major news outlets, which pretty much proved his point.
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Posted at 2:19pm on Oct. 1, 2007 Udall v Limbaugh
By kmaher
At Schaffer v Udall this morning, I saw that Mark Udall, Colorado's Democratic Senate candidate, will apparently introduce a resolution today condemning Rush Limbaugh for his reference to "phony soldiers."
I can't add anything to the phony soldiers story, but it strikes me as odd that news of Udall's sponsorship of this resolution appears in neither the Rocky Mountain News or the Denver Post. Yet a Google News search turns up a mention of it on a lefty website on Friday.
The Rocky's kinda conservative and the Post is liberal, so I doubt there's any concerted effort to bury the story. Did Udall's office not tell the papers about this hard-left pander? (And do the papers' political reporters really not have Google News alerts for Udall and Schaffer?)
There's no reason for anyone outside Colorado to know this, but Udall has been catching a lot of grief from the anti-war left lately: He represents one of the nation's most liberal congressional districts, yet he's had protesters arrested at his office, had protesters take over his media events, and been the subject of withering criticism for voting to fund a war he continues to say he's been against all along.
So he needs to throw the base a bone. Does he really expect to do so without the rest of the state finding out?
Cross-posted at Can't See the Center.
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Posted at 7:49am on Sep. 18, 2007 Mark Udall, meet Google Cache
By kmaher
Promoted from blogs, with a screen shot after the fold. - Moe Lane
I was at Mark Udall's House of Representatives website the other day and was taken aback at his description of the War on Terror. Taking a page from Reuters, his position statement said:
I am deeply interested in helping Colorado and our nation win the so-called "war on terrorism."
Udall's the Democratic candidate for Colorado's open Senate seat, and that's not an attitude I want in my senator. So I printed it out then and blogged it today at Can't See the Center, where a lefty blogger challenged me on it. I went back to Udall's website, and the quote was gone.
Which doesn't surprise me: I had several hits from the House server today from people googling Mark Udall. You don't think ...
Anyway, Mark apparently didn't know that one of the tubes on the internets is used to hold cached page copies.
And there it was. Thank God.
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Posted at 6:59pm on Sep. 13, 2007 About that NYT MoveOn discount
By kmaher
This is a modified version of my original post at Can't See the Center.
1. The "General Betray Us" ad in the New York Times was paid for by MoveOn.Org Political Action.
2. Moveon.Org Political Action is a Political Action Committee.
3. PACs are regulated by the FEC and MoveOn.org Political Action seems to fit the FEC's definition of an Nonconnected Political Committee. That's a link to a pdf of the FEC's Campaign Guide for Nonconnected Committees.
4. PACs may not receive corporate contributions, nor may they receive contributions exceeding $5,000.
4. On page 16 of the FEC Guide is this admonition:
DISCOUNTS
If a corporation or labor organization sells goods or services to a political committee at a price below the usual or normal charge, a prohibited contribution results in the amount of the discount. 100.52(d). A reduced price is not considered a contribution, however, if it is offered by the vendor in the ordinary course of business and at the same amount charged to nonpolitical clients. See, e.g., AO 1989-14.
5. The New York Times, a corporation, gave MoveOn, a PAC, a discount exceeding $100,000 for a full-page ad.
Talk among yourselves.
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Posted at 1:05pm on Sep. 11, 2007 Why did the Times run the ad?
By kmaher
I'm sure you've heard about the MoveOn.org ad in the New York Times. I found it sad: Sad that the Democrats and news media have done such a good job of destroying the credibility not just of George Bush but of the presidency itself and the U.S. military that such an ad would find any audience at all. And the audience that finds this ad unremarkable is quite large.
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Posted at 5:59pm on Sep. 6, 2007 CO Senate: Schaffer (R) 38, Udall (D) 40
By kmaher
If you don't think that's good news, you haven't been reading what the lefty blogs have been saying about this race (see the Senate line at ColoradoPols, for example).
The survey was done by David Hill's firm, with a sample of 603 likely voters. A couple of other interesting notes:
-- Coloradans prefer a conservative to a liberal by 44-38.
-- Sixty-one percent can identify Mark Udall as a liberal.
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Posted at 5:02pm on Sep. 5, 2007 Down the memory hole
By kmaher
Doing a little research here in Denver about the Iraq War. And I'm sure this is something historians will be looking at a lot.
Well, one of the seminal documents, I guess you'd call it, is the text of the Congressional debate over the war. I wanted to see how a particular congressman voted and what, if anything, he contributed to the debate.
So I go to thomas.loc.gov ...