The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

Reader Elmer sends Randy Kuhl's op-ed from today's Corning Leader [pdf].  Kuhl's topic is the budget.

Eric Massa is one of a group of congressional challengers who are supporting an Iraq re-deployment plan.  The plan will be unveiled later today at the Take Back America conference.

The whole Sanford Dickert/Eric Massa mess has ended with a whimper, 16 months after it emerged with a bang.

Long-time readers probably recall that Eric Massa fired his first campaign manager, Sanford Dickert, shortly after Dickert came to Corning to work on the campaign.  The firing resulted in the filing of two legal actions by Dickert, one with an arbitrator, and the other in NY court.  At the time, I wrote a long analysis of the case based on legal documents that Dickert had posted on a website he created devoted to the action.  That website is long gone, but Dickert continues to post updates on the case to his personal blog.

In January of 2007, Dickert posted the news that he and the Massa campaign had settled the first dispute over what he was owed by the campaign.  Dickert got a $40,000 settlement, even though he says that spent over $50,000 in lawyers' fees to litigate the matter.

In the latest post on the matter, Dickert released a settlement document where both parties affirm that the other is just absolutely swell.  This document apparently settles the libel suit filed by Dickert, and it signals the end of all the legal disputes between the two parties.

I've exchanged a number of emails with Dickert, who was trying to convince me to pull down the original story about the Dickert/Massa controversy.  I stand by that story, which is the result of carefully reading every word of the legal documents he provided.  I also stand by the conclusion I made there, which is that Massa made a rookie mistake by using a pretty thin employment agreement to back up a handshake with Dickert, but he did nothing illegal or immoral.  I think Dickert got the best possible outcome he could, and it's a pyrrhic victory at best.

The House just passed an amendment to the Senate Amendment to the Protect America Act that strips out immunity for telecommunications providers.  Instead, the new provision allows a secure court to review evidence explaining why telecoms provided wiretaps for the government without proper authorization.

The Republicans pulled out the stops, procedural and rhetorical, to pass this bill with immunity intact.  Today, the House had a secret session for the first time in 25 years, where Republicans tried to explain why retroactive immunity is necessary.  Last month, they walked out of the chamber in protest.  Back then, Randy Kuhl posted a blog entry which warned that the expiration of the PAA would have dire consequences for the nation, yet he voted against an extension. Today, President Bush said that the PAA is needed for "our children to be safe from terror."  Bush maintains this line even after repeated audits have shown that the current surveillance powers have been consistently abused by the FBI.

The Senate could still try to strip out immunity, but it sounds like the House has come to a compromise that might work.  Of course, Kuhl voted against it, along with every other Republican in Congress, even though his position a month ago was that we are in dire peril if the PAA isn't passed.  He hasn't posted anything on his blog yet, but I'm eager to hear how this vote kept us safer.

I realize that this might not be the best of times.  You've got forensic accountants crawling all over the place trying to figure out how your treasurer managed to embezzle a million bucks.  House members have been sitting on "their dead asses" instead of  fundraising.  And your former leader, Tom Davis, told the Washington Post, "The House Republican brand is so bad right now that if it were a dog food, they'd take it off the shelf."

With all the bad news floating around, you guys must be feeling like that old Doors song, "Been down so Goddam long it feels like up to me."  But don't let your understandable situational depression cloud your judgment.   This is not good news for you or Randy Kuhl, and there's no reason for you to reprint it on your web site.

As I explained it yesterday in this post, which you might want to review, when you start throwing mud around, some of it gets splattered on you. 

The Corning Leader has two stories about Eric Massa and Eliot Spitzer.  The first reports that Massa returned Spitzer's donation, and the second gets his response to the resignation.

Massa's appearance on the DCCC "Red-to-Blue" list is also mentioned in a Congressional Quarterly item.

Update:  The Messenger-Post also has a story on the Spitzer resignation quoting Massa and Kuhl.

Today's Washington Post delivers the headline lesson to the NRCC (National Republican Congressional Committee) and Randy Kuhl.  Immediately after Spitzer's announcement on Monday, the NRCC began flooding reporters' mailboxes with spin emails calling for New York Democrats to return Spitzer contributions.   As the story notes, most of Democrats did, and quickly.  But reporters, being reporters, look for balance in their stories, so the Post runs this:

Earlier this week, the NRCC attacked three freshman New York House Democrats -- Reps. Michael Arcuri, Kirsten Gillibrand and John Hall-- and two New York Democratic House candidates, Dan Maffei and Eric Massa, for taking money from Spitzer.

Massa returned the cash but only after the NRCC circulated three freeze-frame photos of Massa and Spitzer together, taken from one of Massa's own campaign ads, which featured the words "trust," "integrity" and "respect."

Massa is running for a second consecutive time against Rep John R. "Randy" Kuhl, Jr. (R-N.Y.), who is no stranger to controversy himself. Kuhl's sealed divorce records were leaked weeks before the 2004 election, when Kuhl was elected for the first time. Kuhl's now-ex-wife alleged that Kuhl pulled not one but two shotguns on his wife at a dinner party and threatened to shoot her, according to media reports at the time.

Kuhl, who rushed out a press release on Spitzer the afternoon the scandal broke, could also learn a bit from Tom Reynolds.  Reynolds has said nothing that I can find on the matter.  Luckily for Reynolds, his presumptive opponent, Jon Powers, didn't get any money from Spitzer, so the NRCC didn't send out a press release about him.

Rochesterturning has a Massa press conference writeup, which details how Massa got rid of his Spitzer bumper sticker, and more importantly, Massa's view that Admiral Fallon was fired.

RT also reports that Massa has made the DCCC "Red to Blue" list, meaning that the race in the 29th is considered a likely Democratic turnover and will get extra DCCC money and attention.

Exile from Rochesterturning and Evan Dawson have both posted another installment of the Blogversation.  Evan's post is a good round-up of what's been said recently, and he even admits that sometimes, some reporters are lazy.  (Gasp!  Where are my smelling salts, I feel a faint coming on!)  Exile notes that bloggers often can tell hard truths because they're outsiders, and a lot of the press corps (in Washington at least) have become insiders. 

I think we're about ready to wrap up, though I hope we do it again.  In closing, if you think that I'm tough on the D&C and local media, let me direct you to a recent interview with the creator of the Wire, David Simon.  He's a former journalist at the Baltimore Sun, and he focused the final season of his show on his old paper.   However, he did it in a clever way, because the real point of the season was everything that the paper missed:

The main theme is that [...] it's a newspaper that is so eviscerated, so worn, so devoid of veterans, so consumed by the wrong things, and so denied the ability to replenish itself that it singularly misses every single story in the season.
[...]
This was a story about a newspaper that now -- on some fundamental basis -- fails to cover its city substantively, and guess what -- between out-of-town ownership, carpetbagging editors, the emphasis on impact journalism or Prize-culture journalism and, of course, the economic preamble that is the arrival of the internet and the resulting loss of revenue and staff, there are a fuck of a lot of newspapers that are failing to cover their cities substantively.

I hope our real media in Rochester is in better shape than the fictional media in the Wire.  Thanks to Evan, Exile and GOP for an interesting conversation.

Randy Kuhl's reaction to the Spitzer news makes WENY and the Star-Gazette.

In other topics, Kuhl was one of a small group of Republicans who crossed party lines to vote for the ethics reform bill in the House.  How that vote happened is an interesting story.

And, once again, Kuhl makes the list of the top 100 golfers in DC. 

In the "that didn't take long" department, the Massa campaign just announced that it donated the $2,000 received from Eliot Spitzer to the Net Domestic Abuse Program in Steuben County.

Update:  Here's the rest of the Press Release:

Yesterday, the National Republican Congressional Committee issued another baseless attack against Eric for receiving this money despite the fact that he clearly never would have accepted these funds had he known about this situation prior to Monday's news. Strangely, the NRCC and Randy Kuhl continue to remain silent about the $10,000 Kuhl received and refuses to return from indicted Congressman Tom DeLay.

Below is a copy of Eric's statement:

"We're both shocked and dismayed by this unexpected news about our Governor. We expect a higher standard of leadership from our elected officials, and we have been let down. If in fact these accusations are true, I hope the Governor does the right thing, but right now my thoughts and prayers are with his wife, family and the people of New York at this difficult time."

Others invoke Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy, but the most apropos literary reference I've seen recently is from a young singer name Jenny Owen Youngs.  The refrain of her song, "Fuck Was I", captures what might be going through Spitzer's head about now:

Skillet on the stove is such a temptation,
maybe I'll be the lucky one that doesnt get burned.
What the fuck was I thinking?

I've embedded the song after the break.  In addition to the refrain, the music has a slightly dirge-like quality.  The lyrics are here, and Jenny has a MySpace page.