Progress Report: Ugly Campaign Olympics; Brien Down to Last Strike, ProJo for Warren; NEA-RI to NK: We Bat Last

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.