Friday, August 29, 2008

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.

Monday, August 18, 2008

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.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

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.


Tuesday, August 12, 2008

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.