Dates and Places and Stuff

Not much time, but some things that need wider distribution:

Obama at Genoa Park - Columbus - Friday. Gates open at 11am. Genoa Park is the riverfront area right behind COSI on the Franklinton side of the Scioto.

Hoedown with David Robinson - Westerville - Friday 6-10pm. More details available here.

I missed a chance to highlight a Garland/Neuhardt event with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida in Whitehall on Tuesday. Whenever I try to explain how Big Bear disappeared and was replaced in large part by Giant Eagle, I always feel like I'm telling some faux-Native American parable. I should have been in the audiaence on Tuesday.

Stains on the Notebook

1) This is totally true! My brother-in-law was a police officer before he got fired for something that had absolutely nothing whatsoever with him being my brother-in-law, and he told my sister to warn everyone about this! If you see someone driving with their high-beams on, don't flick your high beams on-and-off at them, because it's Barack Obama, and HE WILL SHOOT YOU! Send this to all of your friends and loved ones!!! -SP

2) David Goodman has turned into a sleazy asshole:

Connor plans to file a complaint with the Ohio Elections Commission. He went Thursday to the Columbus Bar Association's Judicial Campaign Advertising Committee to discredit the ad.

The committee, which aims to prevent mud-slinging in judicial races, heard Connor's complaint yesterday and voted to condemn the ad.

"The statements made in these phone calls conducted on behalf of Goodman's campaign were false and misleading to voters," said Kristy Swope, committee chairwoman.

Both Goodman and Connor signed the bar's good-conduct pledges. Goodman said he did submit his ad for review, as required by that pledge.

He defended its accuracy, saying he pulled the facts from a 2006 Associated Press story.

The panel has no power to punish him, he said. "They just don't like me criticizing a judge. To say I have been misleading is, in fact, false and misleading."

I don't need a judge who lacks ethics and is proud of his ability to act unethically with impunity. I've been ambivalent about this race, but not any longer. I know that Goodman is one of the more popular Republicans among ticket-splitters who read this blog and/or reside in Bexley, but seriously - He's defending the tactics of Bill O'Reilly and denouncing the tactics of the Columbus Bar Association. Vote John Connor for Appeals Court. We'll deal with Goodman in the Senate for another couple of years.

3) As Pat Tiberi has started to flop around like a fish in terms of legislating through the financial crisis, David Robinson is starting to get a little more love from the Dem establishment. Sherrod Brown and a cast of heavy hitters called the Womens Forum Host Committee are sponsoring a fund-raising event for Robinson on October 20, featuring a policy discussion on Critical Issues Facing Women Today. This announcement came just a day after Robinson shared a stage with Chris Redfern and Mary Jo Kilroy getting the crowd fired up for Bruce Springsteen.

4) OhioDems have posted a bunch of photos of the Bexley response to last week's GOP rally at Capital. Does anyone have photos of Luke Perry (OMG Dillon!? as someone I know responded when I mentioned the visit) at Nancy Garland's HQ?

Stop Going to the Well, You Idiots.

I got an email this morning from someone affiliated with the same cause Ann Fisher wrote up in Today's Dispatch: A group trying to protect folks from campaign calls, particularly robo-calls.

Not an unsympathetic cause, but I'm not going to be helping out with that, for a rather ironic reason. Somebody else has pretty much ruined it for them.

I posted several days ago about getting "cause spam" asking me to highlight a campaign against clusterbombs. I did a minimal amount of research, fell for the pitch and posted. Since then, I've gotten the same email plea, practically cut-and-pasted, from a different advocacy group. This afternoon I got an e-mail asking me to embed a poll about "Sara Palin" (sic).

As you may guess, just like the recipients of multiple campaign calls, I've gone from friendly to ticked off. How do I know that this afternoon's mail is from the same people as the two cut-and-paste campaigns? I have already mentioned that I get these solicitations from multiple sources. Well, I know because the weird Palin poll is sponsored by an online PR company who touts their success with the clusterbomb group on their webpage. Blue Bexley is one of the "122 earned media mentions."

That company? Abraham & Harrison.

If you're thinking of hiring Abraham and Harrison, you should be aware that one successful campaign is a whole lot easier than getting bloggers to repeatedly flog for free the stories you're paid to get out. We, meaning I, don't like it one bit. When that happens, bloggers will post every permutation of your name that they can think of, like Abraham/Harrison, Abraham Harrison LLC, ahpoll.com, etc. to make sure that your intended audience has an easy time determining whether what they're reading is propaganda.

You'll then have to hire a company like Abraham & Harison, or even Abraham & Harisson or Abraham and Harrisson to clean up your search engine results.

Of course, if they could really do that, you wouldn't be here now, would you?

Though My Lack of Education Never Hurt Me None...

I was doing a bit of quick research on a fun post following up BSB's assertion that Steve Stivers is claiming that MJK is a Socialist, in part because she was in law school at OSU at the same time (1979-1981) as the French Director who made a film about American Socialism was teaching photography at OSU. By that token a certain member of the U.S. House who began studies at OSU in 1981 is also a Socialist. I'm sure Mr. Tiberi's staff will be as surprised as anyone.

That's not the bit I'm concerned about now, however, as something very disturbing (to me at least) came up when I tried to find Ohio Statehouse Reps who had been at OSU during that time period. Not many as it turns out, in part because nearly 30% of them do not actually have a bachelor's degree from an accredited college/university.

Let me say that again. Of the 99 seats currently filled in the Ohio House, 27-29 of them are held by folks without a bachelor's degree, including 33% of Republicans and 22%-26% of Democrats (two reps are unclear as to their degree status).

Perhaps I'm an elitist, but holy cow. When we tell our young people that there are no good jobs for folks without a college degree, we're apparently overlooking "legislator."

Friday Morning

I'm going to my alma mater's homecoming game (against my other alma mater, but undergrad trumps in this sort of thing) this weekend, and I expect that I'll be pretty conflicted over whether or not to blog. For the first time in several years I'm hoping my hotel doesn't have free wi-fi.

I don't spend a lot of time on national politics, but as I threw out some preview for last night's debate, I may as well follow up:

1) I must admit I missed much of the debate. When Toddler-C was not in bed by 9pm we hoped she'd get bored and fall asleep on one of us early in the debate. When that didn't happen it resulted in an attention-seeking machine in the TV room for half-an-hour followed by a not-wanting-to-fall-asleep-daddy-seeking clarion in her bedroom for 45 minutes. I heard a lot more of the debate than I saw, and my wife recapped what I missed in both modalities. Take that into account.

2) Palin came across as a mainstream Republican politician. She didn't have many more cringe-worthy moments than McCain did in his debate. If I'm the GOP, I'm thankful for her performance.

3) Joe Biden was also near the top of his game, and clearly was more engaged in the details without going off into bad college lecture mode.

I'm seeing two possible sources of voter movement as a result:

A) There is a segment of the electorate that was more likely to vote for McCain in the days following his choice of Palin and her address to the RNC. Many of those folks had drifted back into the undecided range over the past few weeks. Some of them may be reassured.

B) It is easy to get distracted by personality in the Presidential race, and it might have been easy to be distracted by personality and rhetorical style in this VP debate. In the absence of the striking personalities at the top of the ticket, and in the absence of many moments that truly drew attention to the VP candidates as candidates, the debate comes down largely to the one thing pundits won't touch with a ten foot pole - the underlying issues being discussed. What should we do in Iraq? What should we do to protect our economy? How do we regain our stature in the world? How do we help the middle class? Right now, more people agree with Democrats on those questions. When those questions are front and center, rather than McCain's temperament or Barack's religion, the choice becomes clearer. I think this moves some people to Obama.

Now let me take off my analyst hat for a second and simply go off on Governor Palin. She thinks that the Vice President has the opportunity to assume more power than even Cheney has assumed? She thinks, and I might not have followed her logic exactly here, but she seems to think that increasing American consumption of gas is good for climate change because it prevents other countries from consuming that gasoline in a less environmentally friendly way. What?!? And I know it's petty, but she said she doesn't attribute man's activities to climate change. Which would mean that she doesn't think that global warming is the major cause of man's activities, which is true but pretty irrelevant. She meant that she doesn't primarily attribute climate change to man's activities. She may be proud to not use words in the way that I or the moderator would like, but you have to wonder how all those English-as-official-language types feel about having a non-speaker potentially a heartbeat away.

Whew. Glad that's off my chest.

Anyway, in other news, the Dispatch has (1 , 2) anti-Tiberi LTE's today. They both take pretty good shots at Pat, and for the most part they're pretty accurate. I will say that I could do without the gratuitous anti-Kilroy point, but more importantly - VOTE FOR DAVID ROBINSON! Just because the Dispatch refused to name Tiberi's opponent is no reason to assume that the Dispatch will refuse to actually print it if you mention it. Those of you reading this post, you already know that Pat is not a moderate, has grown not only more conservative but more mean-spiritedly partisan in the last couple of years, and when it comes to his primary jobs, writing and voting upon legislation as a representative of voters in the 12th District, he has been woefully inadequate. I know this, you know this, the Dispatch letter writers know this, the rabble-rousers in Delaware and Licking County know this... but...

In the absence of a viable alternative, people don't/won't care. And truth be told, I'm under the impression that there are still a substantial number of people who do not realize just how viable of an alternative they have. If you have not gone to Robinson's website and watched some of the videos, or gone to the candidate forums, you might be thinking that Robinson is another Ed Brown. You'd be wrong. David Robinson, would, in fact, be a better Representative than Pat Tiberi. I highly encourage you to tune into the debate sponsored by WBNS/ONN next week, and I encourage you to talk it up to your friends and neighbors in the district. You're going to watch the next presidential debate, right? But how much new information are you really going to get? The second highest office you'll be voting for is the U.S. House of Representatives, and there's still plenty for you to learn in that race.

The case against Tiberi was made pretty well two years ago (I still giggle watching this), but if you're looking for vision, intelligence, and change in Washington, don't stop at the top of the ticket. And if you're throwing another $5 bucks to those guys this morning, what's another $5 where it'll have a bigger impact?