Hullabaloo

Friday, October 24, 2008

 
Down To The Wire

by digby

Everyone has heard about Michelle Bachmann's outburst on Hardball and the ensuing outpouring of donations for her opponent. But there was another "macaca moment" that was so bad Keith Olbermann even named the perpetrator The Worst Person In The World.

Here's Howie:

It's taken him a while but he's finally gotten around to Robin "Weepy" Hayes, a kind of feudal type who represents a sprawling district that stretches from Charlotte to Fayetteville (NC-08). Apparently he had either just lost control of himself or he was trying to compete with Michele Bachmann for the GOP crazee du jour, when he introduced John McCain to an audience in North Carolina by saying "Liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and believe in God." Forgetting that we're in a different kind of media age, where things are easy recorded and checked, he flatly denied saying it.The next day witnesses came forward to say they heard him. He denied it some more...

If any member of Congress personifies a willingness to sell out his constituents' economic interests for the sake of special interests, it is Robin Hayes. Few districts anywhere have been as hard hit by unfair trade policies as NC-08. And yet Hayes was the deciding vote-- twice-- on trade agreements his party was pushing that he himself said he knew was bad for North Carolina! Once he actually voted NO and then, weeping like a little girl, changed his vote to YES when Tom Delay threatened him on the floor of the House.

Hayes' opponent, Larry Kissell, is one of the best candidates running for Congress anywhere. A laid off mill worker, Larry became a social studies teacher and later came within 325 votes of ousting Hayes from Congress in 2006. This year polls say he will complete the job. Blue America has endorsed him and I'm very nervous about this race because Hayes and his corporate allies are flooding the district with negative campaign ads-- and Larry's pretty much out of money. According to Open Secrets, on September 30 Hayes still had $1,113,272 left to spend and Larry was down to $250,134. The most recent polling shows Larry at 49% and Hayes at 41% but the NRCC is blasting away with $882,000 in television smears.

Kissel is one of the good guys. Not only would he be unseating a wingnut jackass, he's a real progressive. You can help him by donating through ACT Blue, but the most direct way to help right now is by doing this:

Place your own ad buy in the Charlotte cable market through SaysMe.tv. Just pick which ad you want to run, which network you want to run it on and what time of the day. An ad on MSNBC in the late afternoon, for example, costs $60, while a late night ad on MTV or the SciFi channel costs $31; ESPN 2 charges $60 for a spot late night or early morning.

Howie is getting some amazing feedback about this SaysMe campaign. Political gurus are totally wowed by the idea and are telling Howie that this is where the next wave of internet politics is heading. It's an amazing concept and could make the difference in some of these races in the last few days. But you have to act quickly. The ads have to be bought by Monday.

This is a really cheap and easy thing to do and it's so much fun. (You don't have to do it just with Kissel --- you can use it for other Blue American candidates as well. Check the site.) In these late days it's the best way for you to affect congressional races and get the message out in these districts.

Click below and you'll go to the Blue America SaysMe site:

Also: Down With Tyranny and Crooks and Liars have been running a $10,000 matching fund raising drive for Debbie Cook, another great Blue America candidate, who just might beat that Taliban loving jackass, Dana Rohrabacher. She would be a huge asset in the House:

Debbie doesn’t mince words about women’s issues, marriage equality, getting out of Iraq, or the need for single payer health. But her passion is energy and the need to act now to leave fossil fuels before they leave us.

We’re riding a wave of change here in Surf City, and Republicans panicked when they finally did internal polling and showed the race within the margin of error. We’ve gotten great response to our ads on cable, and we can still increase our buy for the last week. We’re on track to knock on almost every door in the district before the election more than once, and we’re getting tremendous support for GOTV from every environmental group, the unions, the nurses, PDA, and DFA.

We have targeted mail ready to go to hit the low-propensity voters and remind younger voters, women, seniors, veterans, Latinos, and Vietnamese that Rohrabacher is a ZERO while Debbie is a HERO. Every dollar you give today goes out the door to communicate to voters.

A series of donors have made a $10,000 matching dollar for dollar pledge.

You can buy ads for her too, here.


Update: And now the Republicans (and the allegedly liberal media) are smearing Darcy Burner, saying she lied about her degree from Harvard, (which is complete bullshit.) Meanwhile, Dave Reichert, the smear artist, is caught lying about his degree from Concordia Lutheran College, inflating it from an AA degree to a BA.

Where does this chutzpah come from?

Donate here to stop the insanity. Or buy some ads for Darcy on behalf of the latte sipping, intellectual elite.




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digby 10/24/2008 03:00:00 PM |