Foliage on the banks of the Queens River in Exeter. (Photo by Bob Plain)
I’m starting to get the feeling that Brendan Doherty doesn’t even want to serve in Congress. If he did, he’d probably audition for the job a just little bit rather than just trying to convince voters to reject incumbent David Cicilline. This campaign has become ridiculously negative, and their debates remind me of when my brother and I would fight as children – the primary difference being me and my bro, even then, seemed to understand public policy better than Doherty…
But if negative campaigning was an Olympic event, the gold medal may well go to my friend Mark Binder. The line between disavowing the hardball politics of Smith Hill and engaging in them is pretty clear; Binder crossed it a long time ago .. he proably doesn’t know who’s responsible for the anonymous ad attack ad running on WPRO, but candidates can and do set a tone for their campaigns.
There are few places I would rather be a fly on the wall than the editorial board meetings at the Providence Journal … for example, how did the typically very conservative ed. board endorse progressive Democrat Elizabeth Warren over moderate Republican Scott Brown?
Obviously us progressives wholeheartedly agree, but the ProJo lays out really good reasons why even moderates who may be more philosophically aligned with Brown should still vote for Warren. By the way, this reasoning applies locally too!
Elizabeth Warren could help prevent a Republican takeover of the Senate, at a time when extremists have inordinate sway in the GOP. Republican control could spell damaging rollbacks of environmental and other regulations, and set back health-care reform. Further, one or more Supreme Court justices could retire soon. Senator Brown named fiery conservative Antonin Scalia as his idea of a model justice, and voted against confirming Elena Kagan. A vote for Ms. Warren would keep the court in more centrist territory. In this race, she is the better choice.
And this is also great from today’s ProJo op/ed page … Cicilline talks up the progressive congressional budget proposal: “This plan would eliminate the deficit in 10 years, end the war in Afghanistan safely and expeditiously restore investments in education and infrastructure, strengthen Social Security and Medicare without cutting benefits, require millionaires, Wall Street and Big Oil to pay their fair share, and enact corporate-tax reforms that seek to make it harder for companies to ship American jobs overseas.
Prototypical DINO Jon Brien had three chances to win back his House seat this campaign season … the first was to win in the primary, which he didn’t. The second was to knock out primary winner Stephen Casey on a technicality, and that didn’t work either. Now, his last chance is to win a write-in campaign. If I were Brien, I wouldn’t invest too much time working on my victory speech…
Rhode Island just got a little greener, thanks to three new wind turbines at the waste water treatment plant in Providence.
NEA-RI President Larry Purtill pens a letter to North Kingstown Patch responding to the school superintendent’s letter in the local weekly paper. Evidently, the superintendent thinks the custodians whose jobs were outsourced should move on – which shows a little bit of ignorance to the dynamics at play … while management might swing a bigger bat, labor bats last.
Trial of the century: US v. Bank of America
To paraphrase Bill Clinton, who was paraphrasing Mitt Romney’s meta-campaign message: We broke the economy and Obama didn’t fix it quick enough so give it back to us.
Looks like I’ve been validated on Brien’s Hatch Act shenanigan! DogDiesel probably still wants to let things “play out.” LOL!
For me, the latest big news in the Fox/Binder race is that Fox one of only four general assembly candidates endorsed by RI-Can – definitely a minus. Of course, Binder says his views on charters is “convoluted”. Still, RI-Can? I don’t think so.
Interesting story down in N K. I wish someone could provide an analysis of the privatization of the Pawtucket sanitation department, though. One wonders how the 800,000 to 1,000,000 a year will be saved. Will property taxes go down in Pawtucket as a result? If not, who will that 800,000 to 1,000,000 go to? Will it stay in the local economy? If people are to be laid off, will MTG Disposal be subsidized by the state and federal government with unemployment funds provided to the workers who are laid off? How can these private sector companies take over public operations that pay no tax on the revenue used to carry out their mission, pay taxes on their income, cut costs and still turn a profit? Five years down the road when there is no public sector competition, will the same amount of savings be realized or do private sector takeovers simply result in private monopolies based on the old Standard Oil Trust/Walmart models?
“Looks like I’ve been validated on Brien’s Hatch Act shenanigan! DogDiesel probably still wants to let things “play out.” LOL! “
I’m glad you received you’re validation if that’s what you needed. I’m no Brien fan. I thought it was despicable what he did to Woonsocket. I never bet on decisions like these because you never really know until the answer actually comes down. Thanks for thinking of me.
By the way, I saw this comment in the Providence Journal and thought it summed up the Cicilline campaign pretty well:
Let’s review:
- Lied about Providence finances as it sunk into the abyss
- Doled out millions in loans from the PEDP to political insiders that the city now has to back to the feds because of defaults
- Takes campaign contributions from strip club owners and brothels while claiming to protect women
- Approves a strip club license for a campaign donor against advice from city attorneys.
…and some of you people still support him???
I guess I should give credit to MrGman otherwise you’d accuse me of plagiarism.
Whether or not Doherty wants to serve in Congress, he has to lay low in his commenting especially if you read this article where the state trooper never contributed to his pension of $8K a month or 100,000 a year. He would not be able to convince any union people who lost their colas and pensions that he is on their side! ha ha
wrnipoliticsblog.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/dohertys-democratic-big-government-bonnanza/