The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

The Albany Project has an interview with Eric Massa and video from Massa's appearance at a healthcare forum.

City Newspaper and the D&C have coverage of John Conyers' appearance yesterday in Rochester with Eric Massa. Conyers was here to discuss HR 676, the single-payer health bill.

Stop the Cap is on top of the Time-Warner story. TWC's CEO is still supporting the idea of caps, and Time-Warner's customer agreement still has cap language.

Stop the Cap is also on top of a story that has major implications for the future of broadband in Rochester. Frontier purchased a bunch of rural phone lines from Verizon. As the Wall Street Journal notes, and as Stop the Cap has been covering in great depth, Fairpoint Communications, a New England telephone company, got itself in big trouble with a similar move last year.

Frontier is trying to put a positive spin on the acquisition, but there's little to celebrate here. Frontier is promising to bring new technology to rural areas, but the fact remains that Frontier's core technology, DSL, does not work well unless the user is close to a DSL access point. Rural subscribers tend to be a long distance from the "central office". Also, with Frontier staggering under a huge debt load, its unlikely that they will make the massive investment necessary to upgrade any of its service areas to cutting-edge fiber technology.

For Rochesterians, this is just another signpost in the long decline of what was once a showpiece local telephone company, Rochester Tel. Frontier is nothing but token competition to Time-Warner, which has a superior network and is phenomenally profitable. Frontier's business of delivering voice service over copper wire will soon go the way of Western Union, and they'll be left with crushing debt and fleeing subscribers. This bodes nothing but ill for the future of broadband, and businesses that rely on it, in the Rochester area.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is launching a series of robo-calls and TV ads attacking Representatives who voted to quash an investigation of Nancy Pelosi's knowledge of torture. What's interesting about the ads is that Eric Massa, who voted with his party on this one, is not included in the ads.

In fact, the list of targeted Representatives looks like someone threw darts at a Congressional directory. I can understand why Majority Leader Steny Hoyer [MD-5] was included, since the point there is merely to annoy. But Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin [SD-AL]? Her district is rated a "solid D" by Charlie Cook.

In New York, only John Hall [NY-19] made the cut, and Cook rates his district as safer than Eric Massa's, Mike Arcuri's [NY-24] and newcomer Scott Murphy's [NY-20]. In 2008, Hall beat his opponent by 18 points, compared to the nail-biters experienced by Massa, Arcuri and Murphy.

The NRCC was incompetent and ineffective in the last cycle, and this ad buy signals that we're probably in for more of the same in 2010.

Eric Massa is upset about high gas prices, happy about the Sotomayor pick, and appearing with John Conyers at a health care rally on Saturday in Rochester.

Over at the Albany Project, Robert Harding has coverage of today's Massa press conference. One of the topics was Massa's supposed reluctance in supporting Kirsten Gillibrand's 2010 run, which was the subject of a Gannett News Service article in today's D&C. Massa says he's "much more focused on my district. Period."

The Star-Gazette and WENY both have coverage of a health care rally in Elmira by Healthcare for America Now! Eric Massa received the "Golden Stethoscope Award" at the rally for his support of publicly-financed health care.

See if you can find Randy Kuhl in today's Corning Leader [pdf], sent by Reader Elmer.

Apple growers are happy about new legislation that will help with the availability of migrant labor.

Chemung County will be getting its share of the stimulus pie.

Massa is happy about the passage of credit card reform legislation.

He's also all over the district this weekend.

Finally, Massa is leading the effort to pass legislation to close US debt markets to Argentina unless it offers a better deal to creditors on whom it defaulted. Massa is being cast as a "friend of Argentina" because his father was a naval attache there.

On the heels of news that Lockheed-Martin will lay off 130 workers in Owego, Eric Massa tells the Star-Trib that there's still hope for a scaled-down version of the Presidential helicopter.