Hello, Michael Putney, meet the Democrat running for Congress in District 18

It was pretty funny to hear the tremendously well-informed Michael Putney say to US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen that she was running unopposed for Congress. Oh. no, replied the ever-alert member of the US House. I have an opponent. This was on live TV (I'm guessing it was live) Sunday mid-day, WPLG Local 10.

Well, here's the well-informed Democrat running to unseat the vastly incumbent Ms Ros. He's Rolando Banciella, born in Cuba, resident in South Florida since age 10.

If you look at his specs on http://banciella2010.info/, you'll see that his background is in real estate, and unlike the rich Democrat running for the US Senate, Banciella (click on the Who/Why link) didn't try to make a billion betting against home-owners and the banks but rather suggests that the government bail out the people with mortgages.

Sounds reasonable. He also has ideas for how to bring Social Security back to good health. Not to kill it, like Ms. Ros's party -- to bring it back to good health. And it sounds reasonable.

So, Michael Putney, how about retrieving your fumble on the Congressional races in your bailiwick, and inviting Rolando Banciella up for a talk. You've given his opponent a ton of time. Now's the time for fair.

FL-18: Ros-Lehtinen's economic knowledge leaves out Great Depression

Thanks to the Miami Beach Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club we have some better understanding of how poor our representation in Congress is. My representative, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, now over 20 years in the US House, spoke to us last Tuesday and put out a ton of verbiage revealing how little she and her Republican colleagues understand of economics.

Her main theme was the deficit, and if you look at these clips you’ll see that she wants to freeze spending, and to do it now. She apparently hasn’t heard that the Great Depression of the 1930s was on the road to recovery in FDR’s first term until he was nagged to distraction by criticism of his spending, and so his administration put on the brakes and then came the double-dip of 1937, I believe. I’m not even looking it up -- it’s such common knowledge. But not among today’s Republicans. Their mantra is stop deficits now. NOW!

OK, we know that the family budget should be balanced. But that’s not really applicable to running the world’s biggest economy, and families, too, have to borrow for major expenditures. Ros-Lehtinen led off her  speech with the stop-deficit talking point, and then in the Q-and-A she was given two chances to modify it, but instead she mischaracterized economic thought.

No, Congresswoman, no economists think that deficits are OK, as you say. They may say that deficits are necessary to help end a recession, but then you’re supposed to get to a balance of income and outgo.

Anyway, check out this clip. Note that she’s reading from a paper but still says clearly false things about the national debt and the size of President Obama’s budget proposal in relation to the national debt.




It has taken me forever to process this, and I apologize. New computer gear slowed me down, plus winter visitors from the frozen North.

Inspiration to finish came Saturday evening as C-Span replayed another Republican member of the US House, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, the deputy whip of her party. She had done the Friday morning call-in program, and my, was she an eloquent spouter of the party line, leading with the deficit. I was struck by the way her message was identical to what Ros-Lehtinen had said on Tuesday in Miami Beach.

The Republicans all have been told what to say. This is the balky line we will hear until the Obama administration brings out the hammers of logic and a disciplined majority.

Blackburn was asked what should happen in the summit President Obama has called for Feb. 25, and I was stunned to hear her say that the Tennessee governor should be called in to explain how health care should be run. Yes -- she wants to go back to Year Zero and start from scratch.

I think this is going to be one heck of a year in the US Congress, and we should gear up to let even our Republican members of Congress know what we think of their no-knothing, er, know-nothing way of representation.

Blackburn said there would be town halls during this break for Presidents Day. We should find out where the Republicans are appearing and let them know their knowledge of economics gets an F.

Thanks, by the way, to Ros-Lehtinen for coming out and speaking to the general public in Miami Beach. There are more good clips of her talk that I’ll try to grind out. She has been in the US House since 1988, and my member of Congress since 2002, and this is the first appearance I know of outside her usual friendly circle.

The first question to her was about her husband Dexter Lehtinen and his legal work for the Miccosukee Indian tribe, which does a lot of business with the federal government, and whether that might be a conflict of interest.

“It’s about ethics,” the questioner, Mike Burke, cried when she didn’t know what he was asking about. Ethics? She didn’t know, just like her economics. I’ll try to get this clip up, too.

Final note: While the rest of you were glued to the screen watching the snow games, your blogger was editing his crude video and looking at C-Span. Such is devotion.

FL-18: Ros-Lehtinen still on the lavish junket list

My flawed Republican member of Congress, US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, is high on the list of miscreants in this story about congressional junkets that leads Monday's NY Times.

As the Times says, they tightened up the rules in the wake of scandals associated with jailbird Jack Abramoff, but the lobbyists figured out ways to keep on sending members of Congress on junkets worth big sums. Read the details of Ros-Lehtinen's trip to Israel, and it looks like she went all-out on behalf of her benefactor.

Let us also record here that the Miami Herald Naked Politics blog has taken note of this, and we can hope that the Herald will pester Ros-Lehtinen until she explains what this was about. She stonewalled the Times.

FL-18 Ros-Lehtinen: Saving the Atlantic and its fisheries is “unacceptable”

Talk about short-sighted. And this is my member of Congress, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-FL-18. As always, except for her very reluctant vote in favor of expanding children’s health insurance after numerous votes against it, she is on the wrong side of an issue. O woe, she bleats in the US House. If they impose these rules limiting fishing for grouper, her constituent in the Florida Keys will have to give up his charter fishing business. Exactly. Her constituent has been over-fishing since he was able to start an outboard motor, and it’s got to stop.

I don’t see that this foolishness has made it into the Miami Herald, so thanks to Keys newspapers  for bringing up Ros-Lehtinen’s willful neglect of the world we live in. She prefers the narrow interests of a few of her constituents to maintenance of the food chain we all inhabit. Check out the story linked above. She says it’s “unacceptable” for rules against over-fishing to drive commercial fishermen away from their boats. Well, that’s how she’s quoted, and it sounds like her.

Here’s a different analysis, from the Dec. 3 issue of the New York Review of Books, a review by John Terborgh, a Duke professor whose passion is preservation of the tropical world. Sorry to report that his trenchant article is available only to subscribers. He laments the failure of (no less than) modern democracy to protect natural resources.

“This is because both the regulators and the regulated are inextricably linked as each side pursues its self-interest. Fishers, many of whom are paying mortages on expensive boats and gear, fear a loss of income if limits are imposed. Staying afloat financially in the present takes priority over prospects of a more bountiful future. Thus, the industry reflexively resists any imposition of limits and makes sure the politicians understand this priority. In turn, the politicians fear losing their seats if their constituents rise up in wrath against them. The upshot is that the resource loses nearly every time.”

Did we all get that? “The upshot is that the resource loses nearly every time.”

The overall message of Terborg’s article is that the world is in overshoot in practically all areas. Too bad we don’t have wiser representatives in Washington than Ros-Lehtinen.

There are meetings soon of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council to consider these rules on over-fishing. There still may be time for you to send in a public comment. Don't forget to send a note to Ros-Lehtinen.
 .

Wheels starting to turn in US House Districts 18 and 25

I think there were two developments on Tuesday in the coming races for the US House of Representatives from Miami-Dade County, involving Joe Garcia and Annette Taddeo, the Democratic candidates who waged strong campaigns in 2008 but lost in FL-25 and FL-18, respectively.

I’m guessing that Joe Garcia took himself out of the House race in 2010 by accepting a nomination for a job in the Obama administration, and Annette Taddeo declared, once again, that she’s mad at the incumbent Republican, and she squashed talk that she’d run for chief financial officer of Florida.

Taddeo’s stump speech in her brave battle to unseat Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in 2008 always included the story of her decision to run. It was because Ros-Lehtinen had voted repeatedly against expanding children’s health insurance coverage. Taddeo would bring tears to her listeners’ eyes by recalling her many surgeries to repair a cleft lip, and she would say this experience convinced her to challenge Ros-Lehtinen, who’s been in the US House now for 20 years.

Now the issue is the environment, Taddeo said in a statement ruling out a run to succeed Alex Sink as Florida’s CFO. She didn’t declare outright for Congress, but it sure sounds like the next thing in her sights.

Here’s most of what she said:

I have taken time to seriously examine this [CFO] opportunity and to confer with family, friends and supporters. I’ve had an opportunity to do some soul searching about my future and I’ve come to some clear realizations. I am most passionate about my family, my business and public service. I’ve dedicated my entire life to family, while dedicating my professional life to building and growing my company, LanguageSpeak. Through my service on a variety of public boards and groups and then my run for Congress, I have been able to follow my passion for public service.

The Chief Financial Officer position is very appealing to me. I believe my background as the owner and active CEO of a small business gives me the skills I would need to serve the people of Florida in this position. As I examined the opportunity, I felt confident I could raise the money to be competitive and that I could do the job well and with vision.

But something was missing.

Just over a week ago, the House of Representatives passed landmark legislation to attack climate change and to address our dependence on foreign oil and the deadly greenhouse gasses that fossil fuels spew into our environment. I followed that debate with rapt attention and realize the legislation isn’t perfect. However, in spite of the science, in spite of the clear and present danger climate change presents to the future of Florida, my own member of Congress voted against the bill.

I realized at that moment what was missing as I considered the CFO race. I just wasn’t passionate about it at this time. I am passionate about climate change and health care and restoring our economy. I am passionate about economic development and job creation and making sure America is on the forefront of innovation for the future. I feel we are being let down, once again, by political leaders who can’t see beyond the next election.

Therefore, I have decided not to be a candidate for CFO or any other office at this time. I hope and believe that I will run for public office again in the near future. I have decided to keep my focus on my family, my business and to engage in public policy from the perspective of a wife, mother, business owner and activist for now. Thank You.

A month ago, at the Jefferson-Jackson Day event in Miami Beach, she said she wouldn’t run for Congress again without the full backing of the Democratic Party, as she had to do in 2008. Well we remember the thrashing and gnashing that went on as we in the grassroots begged and yelled for our incumbent Democrats in the US House, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-20) and Kendrick Meek (FL-17), to get behind the strong Democratic candidates challenging the three Republicans in our county’s US House delegation. It was like the poor Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the impossible mountain.

In the end, Taddeo lost 42 percent to 58 percent – the same margin that Democrat Raul Martinez lost to Lincoln Diaz-Balart in FL-21.

Joe Garcia did considerably better against Mario Diaz-Balart in FL-25, losing 47 percent to 53 percent.

Not long ago I heard Joe Garcia speak at a Democracy For America-Miami-Dade chapter meeting, and he clearly was leaving the door open to a new run for the US House. The demographics are getting more and more favorable for a Democrat in this district that includes Miami’s southwestern suburbs and through the Everglades to the eastern part of Collier County.

But now Garcia is taking an interesting chance in Washington, and I think this rules out a run for the US House. It’s already July of 2009, and within six months he’d had to have a campaign up for the November 2010 election. Somehow Joe Garcia doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d put the citizenry through the agony of confirmation hearings and then a few months later quit and run for some other position.

Yes, confirmation hearings – that’s what the Miami Herald says on the Naked Politics blog.
Click on that and you'll see that the White House said of Garcia:

"Joe Garcia's dynamic public service career spans over 20 years and consists of a diverse body of work in the fields of energy, foreign policy and human rights. As a law student, Mr. Garcia directed the Exodus Project, a non-profit refugee resettlement program that reunited over 10,000 families at no cost to American tax-payers. In 1992, the late Governor Lawton Chiles appointed Joe Garcia to the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC), where he fought for lower utility bills for the people of Florida. In 1998, Mr. Garcia's fellow commissioners elected him as chairman of the PSC. As PSC Chairman, Joe Garcia worked across party lines to pass the largest energy rate cut in Florida's history, saving Florida's families more than $1 billion. In 2001, Mr. Garcia was named as the Executive Director of the Cuban American National Foundation, where he served as a tireless proponent of freedom and improved human rights conditions in Cuba and throughout the Americas. In 2004, Mr. Garcia was named Executive Vice President and Director of the Hispanic Project for NDN, a policy research institute in Washington D.C. Joe Garcia earned his Bachelor of Arts and Juris Doctorate degrees from the University of Miami."

Oh, yeah. The job is director of the Office of Minority Economic Impact at the Department of Energy.

Cuba policy loosened a little

Finally, the Obama administration has unleashed its modest changes in Cuba policy. Yes, let’s have Cuban Americans be our grassroots diplomats. I nominate Joe Garcia to lead the soft invasion. Joe, are you going? Well, you might not be welcome to the leadership over there.

The Miami Herald was ready for this. Its website already has travel tips (Carry lots of cash!), plus a place for people to upload their videos of trips to see their family. Reminds me that I have a Cuba video up, though it was taken here in Miami almost two years ago, when Barack Obama made a speech declaring his Cuba policy changes.
Here it is, from Aug. 25, 2007:

Policy in this country moves at glacial speed. This should have been done long ago.
UPDATE: Click here for the White House fact sheet on this policy shift.

Meanwhile, I, too, was preparing for this and have some stuff ready to amaze you. Weeks ago I started wondering what we were supposed to make of all the Cuba stuff in the news.

On April 8 the front page of the Miami Herald reported a federal indictment linking the aged Luis Posada Carriles to tourist-site bombings in Cuba in 1997. Didn’t say he did it. No, they say he lied when he denied being part of it. Such weasely indictments have plagued the American machinery of justice at least since Al Capone was run up for tax evasion rather than murder and mayhem. But I guess we will take what we get.

The timing, however, was what intrigued your blogger. This Posada is one of the most prominent bugaboos of the Castro regime, and for the U.S. to indict him could be seen as a gesture to the Cuban government. Or maybe it’s just the result of the slow grind of the wheel of justice.

Still, it emerged as President Obama was preparing to relax Cuba policy at least a little bit in advance of the Summit of the Americas to be held in Trinidad April 17-19. All we’ve been led to expect is that Cuban Americans will be able to make family visits to Cuba more easily and to send remittances more often – that is, to remove harsh rules imposed by George W. Bush at urging of the old guard Miami exiles. But much more is possible, and there’s the usual crescendo in Congress of talk about a more general easing of the Cuba embargo.

To declare an interest, your blogger reveals ownership of a sailboat – small but Havana-capable – as well as a strong belief that his human rights include travel anywhere. And not a speck of Cuba in my family background (though I do have a shirt inscribed Democrata Cubano – Y que?)

The Cuba travel bug hit a couple weeks ago with several news stories about the Havana Biennial:
It was on the front page of the Miami Herald, along with a riveting video showing Cubans yelling for freedom as part of an art happening. That’s what I want to go to Havana to see. Spare me the cigars and rum, get me some politics!

Also, in the NY Times was an arts-section story on all the artists and gallery people who can traipse over to Havana – while I can’t. WTF? At Havana Biennial, Chelsea Takes a Field Trip to Cuba - NYTimes.com

As I say, so much is going on that it must make our Republican members of the U.S. House dizzy with despair. They are so yesterday.

FL-18: Ros-Lehtinen hosts MoveOn/Dems and enjoys

A little triumph was recorded when five members of the Miami Beach Democratic Club had a meeting with our staunchly Republican member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. It happened Thursday evening in the congresswoman’s Miami office. The occasion was to propose President Obama’s Green Jobs initiative.

Bottom Line: Ros-Lehtinen was pretty enthusiastic about it. And happy to meet a bunch of her constituents, even if they all voted against her, and our leader, Dave Patlak, was the candidate against her in 2006. And your blogger here runs several blogs that sometimes are pretty critical of her. It’s the way things are. No hard feelings.

You can see the video of it here:

This was a joint effort of a vast infrastructure of progressive endeavor, with MoveOn a big player through its current program called Power Up America. A week or so earlier we had met as a MoveOn council drawing in people with interests in green jobs and green business of small scale. Also prominent in the background was Green for All, a grassroots organization whose founder, Van Jones, now is part of the Obama administration as special adviser on green jobs. So we can say an arm of this effort reached up to the White House.

The goal is to help the economy recover as well as to redirect economic activity along environment-friendly lines.

As the congresswoman said at the end of the meeting: “Save the planet and save money too.”

Her overall positive reaction to the presentation still leaves the question of where she will put her vote when it comes down to that. Ros-Lehtinen is famous for being nice to her constituents and as helpful as possible. But then she votes the way the Republican leadership orders. So far she has been a reliable No vote on the Barack Obama programs and budget. Maybe things will be different now that she's met with us and may have a better understanding of Green Jobs as a way to stem a tide of unemployment among her constituents.

(also posted on the Florida Progressive Coalition blog.)

You can check results in your home precinct at this link, though you’ll need WinZip to unlock the statistics after you download them from the Miami-Dade Election Department. I chose to download the Excel version (marked as Details XLS) after finding the text version to be incomprehensible.

My home Precinct (lucky) 13 in the far northern and eastern blocks of Miami Beach: 2,168 registered voters, of whom 1,448 voted, a turnout rate of 67 percent, which is just what the county as a whole showed.

How about the Obama-McCain breakdown: 893 for Obama, 548 for McCain.

Absentee? McCain got 148, Obama 140 (including me).

Early? Obama 495, McCain 268

Election Day? Obama 258, McCain 132.

Those who voted absentee or early were 1,051, or 73.4 percent of the voting population.

My figures for Election Day are off by a few. I discovered late in the game that one of the columns for Election Day was for the very small number of people who voted by the Ivotronic touch-screen method rather than the optical scan fill-in-bubbles method. And I hadn’t included them in my total, as my Excel skills are pretty low.

MORE: The results for Congressional District 18 for Precinct 13 may show how (though not why) Annette Taddeo lost to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, which I regret very much.

Totals: Taddeo 734, Ros-Lehtinen 617. It's a nice margin for the Democratic challenger but not nearly enough to offset the incumbent's totals in more-Republican precincts. Taddeo's total of 734 is well under Obama's 893.

Still, a tip o' the hat to Taddeo's visit to the voting site on Sunday, the last day of early voting, when she greeted hundreds of people waiting in line. They will remember her charm and intelligence for the next time.

FL-18: Wasserman Shultz in public endorsement of Annette Taddeo for US House; Closing difficult chapter?

l-r: Annette Taddeo, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Raul Martinez, Kendrick Meek, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Garcia.

This was a long time coming, and so quite choreographed. A rising star among Democratic congresswomen, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of Florida District 20, stood on a stage in Little Havana Thursday and publicly endorsed the candidacy of the Democratic challenger to one of Wasserman Shultz’ friends in the House.

This is an observation and supposition I’m making without having interviewed her or knowing all the influences that brought her to this new point. I hope it means that she’s decided that Annette Taddeo, a successful businesswoman making her first foray into elective politics, is going to defeat the 19-year veteran, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, in District 18.

District 18 is where I live. I campaign some for Taddeo, whose half-Colombian, half-American background is perfect for this district that spans from Key West in the Florida Keys to Miami Beach and a good bulge of Little Havana and downtown Miami on the mainland. The district is majority Hispanic but not quite as Cuban as before, so Ros-Lehtinen, who’s Cuban American, is fighting hard with a mass of TV ads that fail to mention her links to neo-con misleaders and play up her “service” to the district.

As I try to persuade some brilliantly intelligent people to vote for Taddeo, they often reveal themselves as having been conned by Ros-Lehtinen’s supposed “service.” They ignore or are unaware of her repeated votes for the Iraq war, for torture, against the expansion of children’s health insurance. Hardly anyone seems aware of her hardline position on Iran, and they profess to admire her ability to get the Miami River dredged. (Big deal – some say it’s the shortest river in the USA, at 4 miles. Though it certainly needed dredging. Took forever. Anyway…) Once in a while they can change their minds after hearing her voting record. More have been swayed by her saccharine manner, and if they go to her office in Washington, they get such a nice cup of coffee.

It’s disgusting what dupes we are. How so many of us agree to be bribed by federal dollars. How we vote against our interests. I know, this behavior has been analyzed to hell and gone, and Americans are well established as having a tendency to let their vote be swayed by vague feelings of patriotism or by which candidate presents as a good social pal. Not that we’d ever get close to the snob. But we’ll take our emotional leaning as somehow related to attaining the American Dream, and we throw away our chance to vote for someone who has a solid and intelligent view of our situation. Well, I’m thinking of good old wooden Al Gore there, but he’s not a very good example, since he really won.

Let’s get back to what’s publicly known about Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her many months of reluctance to get on the side of Annette Taddeo and her two fellow strong Democratic challengers, Joe Garcia against Mario Diaz-Balart in District 25 (the outer suburbs and the Everglades) and Raul Martinez against Lincoln Diaz-Balart in District 21 (inner suburbs of Miami).

This came into the public eye in March, started by the Miami Herald’s featuring it on the front page. This blog picked that up pretty quickly (first post on March 9) and the story ran repeatedly on Daily Kos and elsewhere in the blogosphere. Wasserman Schultz was regularly creamed for not using her position of influence in the DCCC – Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee – to help the Democrats challenging in her neighboring districts.

At one point I was quietly happy about it, because it got Taddeo, Garcia and Martinez much more publicity locally and nationally than the little-known challengers had two years earlier. I know that too well, as I was nominal campaign manager for Dave Patlak, who didn’t quite get 40 percent against Ros-Lehtinen in the 2006 midterm election. We made her spend over $1 million – so there was some satisfaction for that.

What was Wasserman Schultz’ justification this year? Best guess was some collegial loyalty among fellow members of the U.S. House. They were all in the business of promoting federal bucks for South Florida and had to act together. There may have been some socializing. She told a skeptical audience once that it was a difficult balance. Not convincing. Many of us walked out because she came down on the wrong side of that teeter-totter. A report from March 21 at this link.

This affair caused me to think a lot about our political predicament. And it’s not just South Florida. This is all over our beloved country: the invulnerable incumbent. Their districts are so gerrymandered that they worry little about re-election. Wasserman Schultz and her Democratic colleague, Kendrick Meek of District 17, do not even get Republican opponents. Their districts are 70-percent safe Democratic.

They don’t benefit from the American tonic of competition. (Remedy: there’s a petition circulating to amend the Florida state constitution to ban political considerations in laying new district boundaries. This must be a priority after this election.)

If the two Democrats are invulnerable, the three Republican incumbents have less of a built-in advantage nowadays, though they started out with more solidly Republican districts. Demographic changes have put them in danger, and their three challengers, with strong campaign staffs and decent financing, are evidence that all three Republicans are seen as vulnerable, like their fellows most everywhere in the last months of George W. Bush.

Yet it still took forever for Wasserman Schultz to be more open in backing first Martinez, then Garcia and finally Taddeo. She wasted a lot of time being unnecessarily tenacious in backing Hillary Clinton. Then she spoke in favor of Taddeo at a meeting of Florida delegates at the Denver convention, where she somehow also cadged a slot to second Barack Obama’s nomination. Now it’s the last lap before election day, early voting is already under way, and finally Wasserman Schultz is in public at home in Florida before the TV cameras. And not alone.

Before I name her companions, here’s the quote:

“We need to make sure that we have leaders in the Congress who will stand up and be your voice. To make sure that the middle class ... that they have members of Congress who are in Washington fighting for them. And these three candidates, Raul Martinez, Joe Garcia and Annette Taddeo, are the people that we need to elect so that we can make sure that they do that…

“This is the most important election of our lives. We are at a turning point in the United States of America. The wealthy have had their leaders in Washington. The wealthy have been taken care of for a long time. It is time to elect these three candidates to Congress so that we can have a voice for people who have not had one for a very long time.”

You can see from her words that all three Democratic challengers were in the room with her, Annette Taddeo, Raul Martinez and Joe Garcia, along with Rep. Kendrick Meek. The star in the room was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who for months has been trooping to South Florida doing fund-raisers for Garcia and Martinez. This was her first for Taddeo, I believe, and she also did fundraisers for Garcia and Martinez during a busy day.

Taddeo stood beside Wasserman Schultz and served as interpreter for the largely Cuban audience in the Little Havana Center for Activities and Nutrition, a senior center. Joe Garcia handled interpretation duty for Nancy Pelosi, who gave ringing endorsements of all three Democratic challengers, touting Taddeo’s strong business background, Garcia’s work in community organizing and Martinez for his long public service as mayor of Hialeah.

It’s time to say Thank You, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz. I fervently hope you’re right in guessing that Annette Taddeo is going to win.

One last question, though. Those ads that the DCCC is running on TV here … the ones that criticize the Diaz-Balart brothers for their rotten votes in Congress. Why don’t they also mention Ileana Ros-Lehtinen? After all, she voted the same way as the rubber-stamp brothers. The ads run in the very same TV market that serves potential voters for Annette Taddeo. You’re a big wheel in the DCCC. Why, O why, don’t the ads also mention the third rubber-stamper, and maybe give your fellow Democrat a little boost? Why?

FL-18: Annette Taddeo campaigns with big sign

Annette Taddeo with a supporter and TV reporter in front of giant sign on wheels.



My favorite congressional candidate, Annette Taddeo, campaigned Sunday evening with a lively party at Kaffe Krystal in Kendall. At the end, clipboards were passed around and quite a few people signed up to be Taddeo Troopers -- volunteers for the final push to election day.

Regular readers will know that I live in FL-18, which Taddeo is fighting to wrest from the rubber-stamp Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. If you, too, live in FL-18, look for this sign being towed around your neighborhood.

UPDATE: The Obama campaign chimed in for Annette today, sending an email to some of us in District 18 urging that we help her campaign.


The email said:
You can change politics in this country at every level -- up and down the ballot.

Our records show that you live in Florida's 18th district.

There's a candidate in Florida who's working to bring the change this country needs, and that candidate is Annette Taddeo. Get involved and help bring change now.

Annette Taddeo for Congress:
Visit the website

Don't wait until Election Day to support Taddeo. Get involved today to make sure Florida has a strong representative to take our country in a new direction.

Thanks,

Obama for America

P.S. -- To get involved with Obama for America in your community, visit your state page:

http://.barackobama.com

This teamwork is great!