Miami Herald is catching up with Annette Taddeo

Annette Taddeo's appeal as a candidate is so strong that when the big media finally listen to her, they see the logic -- she is a winner, and she's running against an incumbent with a long history on the wrong side of a ton of issues.

Here's a link to a solid report in the Miami Herald from Taddeo's appearance at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The same line has been appearing for months in this blog, the watch blog dedicated to the defeat of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the incumbent in FL-18. Thank you, Miami Herald political reporters, for catching on. Here's a link to one of my posts on this race, this one in early July.

I am one of a large crowd of Taddeo supporters who go out and canvass and phone-bank for her. My home is in FL-18, but you don't have to be a resident to help her. Check out her website, Annette2008.com, and sign up. This is the way Annette Taddeo will win, and so will we.

Kos reports on "Democratic resurgence" in Miami-Dade

DailyKos, thanks to Kos himself, Markos Molitsas, has a wonderful rundown of the latest voter registration statistics for Miami-Dade County.

This is the DailyKos Link. We all should study these numbers as we campaign our hearts out for our three congressional candidates, and the DailyKos article is the best place to get it in full detail and nicely laid out with hyperlinks to the official sources.

For this blog I’m only going to report the three districts’ Democratic deficits and show how they’ve shrunk.

• District 18, where Annette Taddeo challenges long-time Republican rubber-stamp Ileana Ros Lehtinen. The Democrats are only behind 7,129 souls, much better than the deficit of 18,006 in January.
• District 21, where Raul Martinez has what Kos regards as the hardest role to oust Lincoln Diaz-Balart. The Democrats are behind 24,643, against a deficit of 31,045 in January. It sounds like a big deficit until it’s clear that Republicans always have voted like crazy for Raul Martinez in the district, where he was mayor of Hialeah for many terms.
• District 25, where Joe Garcia is taking on Mario Diaz-Balart (he who brags untruthfully that our two Democratic congressmen won’t support Garcia). Here the margin has narrowed the most of the three districts, down to 3,624 from 13,348 in January.

No excuses will be accepted for slowing our efforts to recruit new Democratic voters.

Along those lines, I have to say I was sent out to canvass for Annette Taddeo last Saturday and the kit handed to me did not include voter registration forms. There’s no excuse for that. At least a couple.

Canvassing for Annette Taddeo on the Beach

At the lunch break on Saturday, Annette rallied with canvassers before another hour knocking on doors in Miami Beach


Annette is the one in the center, behind the arm with a tiny red camera.

This was a busy and hot day of canvassing -- a day? Not really, 3-4 hours was as much heat and humidity at most could tolerate.

The candidate brought a lot of good news to the lunch break.

• Voter registration figures for FL-18 show the Republicans continue to lose their lead, now down to some 8,000 people. Ms. Taddeo feels the non-party group will go for her 2-1, so she's very encouraged by the developments in the numbers. I'll wrap up the numbers in detail as soon as I can, for all three of our Democratic challenges.
  
• She's received a donation and promises of support from U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, Fl-17, who was a holdout along with Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-20), supposedly bound by collegiality with the three Republican Bush rubber-stamps.
• A new national group called Accountability Now has sprung up to raise money to help defeat particular Bush Rubber-stamps, and we're happy to declare that the FL-18 incumbent, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, is among them. The group should run print media ads making the case for voting her out of office.

This, I'd say, made my case of heat prostration feel better.

From the Blogs

Discourse.net: The Medicare Fraud/Ros-Lehtinen Connection

Miami-Dade Dems: US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen rejects Medicare fraud remedy

Discourse.net: Emily's List endorsed Annette Taddeo

US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen rejects Medicare fraud remedy

The Miami Herald is outdoing itself lately with investigations. As the staff shrinks, will the good work still have a chance to continue? The answer will have telling effect on our civic culture, and on the jail population. Fewer crooks will be incarcerated if the Herald isn’t able to keep on exposing fraud.

In fact, fraud seems to be a major industry in South Florida. Look at two of our most important economic sectors:

· Real estate. Mortgage fraud on all sides has been exposed in the Herald as a reason for the steep rise of home prices a few years ago and now the drop. This was accomplished by our neighbors the bankers, mortgage brokers, borrowers and lenders. Working together and individually to get rich like good Americans or just to be housed, they came close to wrecking the whole national economy. Rampant was the word the Herald used to characterize the level of mortgage fraud.

· Health care. Now the Herald has chronicled billions of dollars defrauded from Medicare – that’s from our pockets, fellow citizens – by our neighbors, the fraudsters. This was billions annually in South Florida, not the whole country. An incredible haul. Perhaps it explains the big houses and fancy yachts in our splendid part of the land.

And what is the remedy? Congress! At least in the case of Medicare fraud. So it says on the front page of Monday’s Herald. Headline: Fraud Remedy Denied.

Headlines often are written in the passive voice without full verb forms. Let’s do a little exercise here and put this in the active voice. Congress Denied Fraud Remedy.

As the Herald’s Jay Weaver reported exhaustively, the Medicare agency tried repeatedly for more money to combat fraud, and Congress always throttled the attempt. Weaver shows fine enterprise in interviewing two local members of Congress to delve into the reasons.

Interestingly, Republican Sen. Mel Martinez is on the good side (first-termer behavior?) of this issue, and is backing legislation to stop fraud. He says $1 invested in anti-fraud measures will yield $10 in fraud-reduction, the Herald reports.

Then Weaver turns to my congresswoman, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, FL-18, in the U.S. House since 1989, and she speaks out of both sides of her Republican mouth. Medicare needs help to fight fraud, but it’s risky for lawmakers to give money to an agency recognized for incompetence, she says:

“If you increase the money for oversight, then it looks like you’re fattening up the bureaucracy, even when it’s really for oversight and fighting fraud,” she said. “It’s a difficult choice.”

She then chose according to the ideology of small-government-is-best, and voted against it.

Perhaps it’s not ideology. Campaign donations could be another motivation. And thanks to research from the Florida Democratic Party, we have some detail on Ros-Lehtinen’s connection to Medicare fraud via past donations for her re-election.

From an FDP news release last week:

“In 1998, the largest home health care provider in South Florida was charged with bilking Medicare for more than $45 million in fake services. The company's founder had been a donor to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's campaign for re-election to Congress.

“Congress did have the opportunity to fight back against Medicare fraud before it reached crisis proportions, but Ros-Lehtinen voted against allowing Congress to pursue its Constitutionally-mandated oversight role. In 1995, she voted for the so-called Medicare Preservation Act (HR 2421, Roll Call 731, 1995). The Act that Ros-Lehtinen voted for "crippled the efforts of law enforcement agencies to control health-care fraud abuse in the Medicare program," according to the then-inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Even then, Ros-Lehtinen voted with the Republican Party line and against the best interest of the people of her district, a pattern that continues almost 15 years later.”

The FDP release reports that Ros-Lehtinen has banked $180,000 from Big Pharma and HMOs.

The charge:

“Ros-Lehtinen is either complicit or easily bamboozled, but any way you cut it she has no business representing South Florida in the United States Congress,” said Eric Jotkoff, FDP spokesman.

Amen.

Back to the remedy for Congress: Annette Taddeo is a brilliant businesswoman, passionate Democrat, unsullied by Big Pharma donations, and she’s running a strong challenge to Ros-Lehtinen. Now is the time to pop over to annette2008.com and give some honest money to her campaign.

And don’t forget Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez, who need your support to take out Mario (FL-25) and Lincoln (FL-21) Diaz-Balart (Lincoln declined to be interviewed for the Herald takeout), our two other rubber-stamps in Congress.

From the Blogs

Incertus (Brian): Rubber Stamp Ros-Lehtinen

Pushing Rope: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Against Amendment 2

Discourse.net: The Whisper Campaign Against Taddeo

Open Left: The Democratic Campaign Against Progressive Democrat Annette Taddeo