Eye on Ileana

Farewell

2009-10-22T21:04:00.000-07:00

This blog is being closed and further updates will be featured on Florida Congress Watch. Check us out over there.

Good Illeana

2009-09-25T21:24:00.000-07:00

Doing the right thing on her one good issue:

Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) has issued a scathing statement against the new president of the United Nations General Assembly, Ali Abdessalam Treki (who is a former foreign minister of Libya) for recent remarks that seemed to favor the criminalization of homosexuality:

The anti-gay bigotry spewed by this Qaddafi shill demonstrates once again that the UN has been hijacked by advocates of hate and intolerance. Congress must demand better by enacting pending legislation that would leverage our contributions to the UN to produce sweeping, meaningful reform of that body.

From the Blogs

2009-09-03T21:02:00.000-07:00

The latest stories from the Florida blogs...

Discourse.net: Ros-Lehtinen's Almost-Fair Health Care Survey

Bilerico Project Florida (Nadine Smith): Rep Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Reaffirms Support for Repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell

FLA Politics (spaterni): Florida ONE Members drop by to visit Rep. Ros-Lehtinen!

Miami-Dade Dems: Worrying about the "institutional gravities of Congress"

Miami-Dade Dems: FL-18: Ros-Lehtinen hosts MoveOn/Dems and enjoys

Capitol Offense: Where Is Congress on the Public Option

2009-06-17T08:39:00.000-07:00

Today, I'm joining with Democracy for America, Health Care for America Now and Open Left in supporting the Stand With Dr. Dean Campaign. The idea is to put pressure on our members of Congress to find out where they stand on health care reform and whether or not they support Dr. Howard Dean's call for a reform that includes a public option. See Dean's statement here:

Chris Bowers has suggested that we use crowdsourcing techniques to find out where everyone in Congress stands, which also helps pressure them to take the right stand. So here's the plan:

1. Contact your member of Congress via e-mail and ask them the following questions:

1--Do you support a public healthcare option as part of healthcare reform?
2--If so, do you support a public healthcare option that is available on day one?
3--Do you support a public healthcare option that is national, available everywhere, and accountable to Congress?
4--Do you support a public healthcare option that can bargain for rates from providers and big drug companies?

Don't call, do this via e-mail because we want a written response. If they are vague in answering these questions, contact them again and ask for clarification. If they don't answer you, keep contacting them (and have your friends and family contact them) until they do give you the answers.

2. Forward the responses to me at quinnelk@hotmail.com. We're going to publish an official response from as many of our members as possible so we know where everyone is. And we'll keep a track of who isn't responding so we know who to put pressure on. Similarly, once we find out who is on board and who isn't, we know who to put further pressure on down the road.

3. If you have your own blog, post the responses there, too. The more public pressure we can put on Congress, the easier we make it for them to do the right thing.

Here is the public contact info for each of our Florida members of Congress:

Rep Gus Bilirakis R FL-9 http://bilirakis.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=212&Itemid=44

Rep Allen Boyd D FL-2 http://www.house.gov/boyd/zip_authen.html

Rep Corrine Brown D FL-3 http://www.house.gov/corrinebrown/IMA/issue.shtml

Rep Virginia Brown-Waite R FL-5 https://forms.house.gov/brown-waite/IMA/issue_subscribe.htm

Rep Vern Buchanan R FL-13 http://buchanan.house.gov/contact.shtml

Rep Kathy Castor D FL-11 https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml

Rep Ander Crenshaw R FL-4 https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml

Rep Lincoln Diaz-Balart R FL-21 http://diaz-balart.house.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Offices.Contact

Rep Mario Diaz-Balart R FL-25 http://www.house.gov/formmariodiaz-balart/ic_zip_auth.htm

Rep Alan Grayson D FL-8 https://forms.house.gov/grayson/contact-form.shtml

Rep Alcee Hastings D FL-23 http://www.alceehastings.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=104&Itemid=

Rep Ron Klein D FL-22 klein.ron.web@flsenate.gov

Rep Suzanne Kosmas D FL-24 https://forms.house.gov/kosmas/contact-form.shtml

Rep Connie Mack R FL-14 http://mack.house.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactConnie.ContactForm

Sen Melquiades Martinez R FL http://martinez.senate.gov/public/?p=EmailSenatorMartinez

Rep Kendrick Meek D FL-17 http://kendrickmeek.house.gov/contact1.shtml

Rep John Mica R FL-7 http://www.house.gov/mica/messageform.shtml

Rep Jeff Miller R FL-1 http://jeffmiller.house.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home

Sen Bill Nelson D FL http://billnelson.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm

Rep Bill Posey R FL-15 http://posey.house.gov/Contact/

Rep Adam Putnam R FL-12 http://adamputnam.house.gov/contact.shtml

Rep Tom Rooney R FL-16 https://forms.house.gov/rooney/contact-form.shtml

Rep Ileana Ros-Lehtinen R FL-18 http://www.house.gov/writerep

Rep Clifford Stearns R FL-6 http://www.house.gov/writerep

Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz D FL-20 schultz.debbie.web@flsenate.gov

Rep Robert Wexler D FL-19 http://wexler.house.gov/email.shtml

Rep C. W. Bill Young R FL-10 bill.young@mail.house.gov

We'll also post the results of these at the WatchBlogs dedicated to each Republican member and at the Florida Democratic News blog.

You can also sign the petition on health care here.

I'm Kenneth Quinnell and I approve this message.

Read more on Florida politics at the Florida Progressive Coalition blog (http://flaprogressives.org) and the Florida Progressive Coalition Wiki (http://quinnell.us/sspb/wiki/).

Tell the Party of No - "Yes We Can"

2009-04-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

From the Blogs

2009-01-11T13:23:00.000-08:00

Re/Creating Tampa: Who’s Florida’s Most Maverick Rep?

From the Blogs

2009-01-03T20:14:00.000-08:00

ReidBlog: To do list: prank call Ileana, stat

Blast Off!: Today's Daily Schadenfreude: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

Discourse.net: In Which I Do the Inconceivable and Rise to the Defense of the Otherwise Indefensible Illeana Ros-Lehtinen

Thank You from DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen

2009-01-02T10:56:00.000-08:00

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Stripper Pole Dance

2008-11-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

Wish I were making this one up...

A Post-Election Message From Annette Taddeo

2008-11-06T15:58:00.000-08:00

Dear Friend,

Thank you for all of your hard work and support throughout this campaign. I will always be proud of what we achieved, and I will always be grateful to you for your support.

We never stopped fighting to bring a new beginning to South Florida and our country. We know that the work we did helped elect Barack Obama. We didn’t win the final battle, but we did help make history.

On Election Day, more than 100,000 voters in District 18 voted in support of my campaign. You need to know that together we made a difference - we made history, together.

In my life, what I value came from only two places: love and hard work.

And because I love America, I will continue to work hard for America.

I won’t be doing it in Congress, but I will not stop working.

We have waited long enough for change. We have waited long enough for the future. We have waited long enough for our American dream to be made real.

If we work – if we work hard, if we work smart, and if we work together – we will rebuild the American dream. We will make our own dreams come true. And we will ensure that our children’s dreams come true.

Thank you with all my heart,

Annette

FL-18: Wasserman Shultz in public endorsement of Annette Taddeo for US House; Closing difficult chapter?

2008-10-31T12:04:00.000-07:00

l-r: Annette Taddeo, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Raul Martinez, Kendrick Meek, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Garcia.

This was a long time coming, and so quite choreographed. A rising star among Democratic congresswomen, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of Florida District 20, stood on a stage in Little Havana on Oct. 23 and publicly endorsed the candidacy of the Democratic challenger to one of Wasserman Shultz’ friends in the House.

This is an observation and supposition I’m making without having interviewed her or knowing all the influences that brought her to this new point. I hope it means that she’s decided that Annette Taddeo, a successful businesswoman making her first foray into elective politics, is going to defeat the 19-year veteran, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, in District 18.

District 18 is where I live. I campaign some for Taddeo, whose half-Colombian, half-American background is perfect for this district that spans from Key West in the Florida Keys to Miami Beach and a good bulge of Little Havana and downtown Miami on the mainland. The district is majority Hispanic but not quite as Cuban as before, so Ros-Lehtinen, who’s Cuban American, is fighting hard with a mass of TV ads that fail to mention her links to neo-con misleaders and play up her “service” to the district.

As I try to persuade some brilliantly intelligent people to vote for Taddeo, they often reveal themselves as having been conned by Ros-Lehtinen’s supposed “service.” They ignore or are unaware of her repeated votes for the Iraq war, for torture, against the expansion of children’s health insurance. Hardly anyone seems aware of her hardline position on Iran, and they profess to admire her ability to get the Miami River dredged. (Big deal – some say it’s the shortest river in the USA, at 4 miles. Though it certainly needed dredging. Took forever. Anyway…) Once in a while they can change their minds after hearing her voting record. More have been swayed by her saccharine manner, and if they go to her office in Washington, they get such a nice cup of coffee.

It’s disgusting what dupes we are. How so many of us agree to be bribed by federal dollars. How we vote against our interests. I know, this behavior has been analyzed to hell and gone, and Americans are well established as having a tendency to let their vote be swayed by vague feelings of patriotism or by which candidate presents as a good social pal. Not that we’d ever get close to the snob. But we’ll take our emotional leaning as somehow related to attaining the American Dream, and we throw away our chance to vote for someone who has a solid and intelligent view of our situation. Well, I’m thinking of good old wooden Al Gore there, but he’s not a very good example, since he really won.

Let’s get back to what’s publicly known about Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her many months of reluctance to get on the side of Annette Taddeo and her two fellow strong Democratic challengers, Joe Garcia against Mario Diaz-Balart in District 25 (the outer suburbs and the Everglades) and Raul Martinez against Lincoln Diaz-Balart in District 21 (inner suburbs of Miami).

This came into the public eye in March, started by the Miami Herald’s featuring it on the front page. This blog picked that up pretty quickly (first post on March 9) and the story ran repeatedly on Daily Kos and elsewhere in the blogosphere. Wasserman Schultz was regularly creamed for not using her position of influence in the DCCC – Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee – to help the Democrats challenging in her neighboring districts.

At one point I was quietly happy about it, because it got Taddeo, Garcia and Martinez much more publicity locally and nationally than the little-known challengers had two years earlier. I know that too well, as I was nominal campaign manager for Dave Patlak, who didn’t quite get 40 percent against Ros-Lehtinen in the 2006 midterm election. We made her spend over $1 million – so there was some satisfaction for that.

What was Wasserman Schultz’ justification this year? Best guess was some collegial loyalty among fellow members of the U.S. House. They were all in the business of promoting federal bucks for South Florida and had to act together. There may have been some socializing. She told a skeptical audience once that it was a difficult balance. Not convincing. Many of us walked out because she came down on the wrong side of that teeter-totter. A report from March 21 at this link.

This affair caused me to think a lot about our political predicament. And it’s not just South Florida. This is all over our beloved country: the invulnerable incumbent. Their districts are so gerrymandered that they worry little about re-election. Wasserman Schultz and her Democratic colleague, Kendrick Meek of District 17, do not even get Republican opponents. Their districts are 70-percent safe Democratic.

They don’t benefit from the American tonic of competition. (Remedy: there’s a petition circulating to amend the Florida state constitution to ban political considerations in laying new district boundaries. This must be a priority after this election.)

If the two Democrats are invulnerable, the three Republican incumbents have less of a built-in advantage nowadays, though they started out with more solidly Republican districts. Demographic changes have put them in danger, and their three challengers, with strong campaign staffs and decent financing, are evidence that all three Republicans are seen as vulnerable, like their fellows most everywhere in the last months of George W. Bush.

Yet it still took forever for Wasserman Schultz to be more open in backing first Martinez, then Garcia and finally Taddeo. She wasted a lot of time being unnecessarily tenacious in backing Hillary Clinton. Then she spoke in favor of Taddeo at a meeting of Florida delegates at the Denver convention, where she somehow also cadged a slot to second Barack Obama’s nomination. Now it’s the last lap before election day, early voting is already under way, and finally Wasserman Schultz is in public at home in Florida before the TV cameras. And not alone.

Before I name her companions, here’s the quote:

“We need to make sure that we have leaders in the Congress who will stand up and be your voice. To make sure that the middle class ... that they have members of Congress who are in Washington fighting for them. And these three candidates, Raul Martinez, Joe Garcia and Annette Taddeo, are the people that we need to elect so that we can make sure that they do that…

“This is the most important election of our lives. We are at a turning point in the United States of America. The wealthy have had their leaders in Washington. The wealthy have been taken care of for a long time. It is time to elect these three candidates to Congress so that we can have a voice for people who have not had one for a very long time.”

You can see from her words that all three Democratic challengers were in the room with her, Annette Taddeo, Raul Martinez and Joe Garcia, along with Rep. Kendrick Meek. The star in the room was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who for months has been trooping to South Florida doing fund-raisers for Garcia and Martinez. This was her first for Taddeo, I believe, and she also did fundraisers for Garcia and Martinez during a busy day.

Taddeo stood beside Wasserman Schultz and served as interpreter for the largely Cuban audience in the Little Havana Center for Activities and Nutrition, a senior center. Joe Garcia handled interpretation duty for Nancy Pelosi, who gave ringing endorsements of all three Democratic challengers, touting Taddeo’s strong business background, Garcia’s work in community organizing and Martinez for his long public service as mayor of Hialeah.

It’s time to say Thank You, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz. I fervently hope you’re right in guessing that Annette Taddeo is going to win.

One last question, though. Those ads that the DCCC is running on TV here … the ones that criticize the Diaz-Balart brothers for their rotten votes in Congress. Why don’t they also mention Ileana Ros-Lehtinen? After all, she voted the same way as the rubber-stamp brothers. The ads run in the very same TV market that serves potential voters for Annette Taddeo. You’re a big wheel in the DCCC. Why, O why, don’t the ads also mention the third rubber-stamper, and maybe give your fellow Democrat a little boost? Why?

FL-18: Annette Taddeo campaigns with big sign

2008-10-20T12:09:00.000-07:00

Annette Taddeo with a supporter and TV reporter in front of giant sign on wheels.

My favorite congressional candidate, Annette Taddeo, campaigned Sunday evening with a lively party at Kaffe Krystal in Kendall. At the end, clipboards were passed around and quite a few people signed up to be Taddeo Troopers -- volunteers for the final push to election day.

Regular readers will know that I live in FL-18, which Taddeo is fighting to wrest from the rubber-stamp Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. If you, too, live in FL-18, look for this sign being towed around your neighborhood.

UPDATE: The Obama campaign chimed in for Annette on Mnday, sending an email to some of us in District 18 urging that we help her campaign.

The email said:
You can change politics in this country at every level -- up and down the ballot.

Our records show that you live in Florida's 18th district.

There's a candidate in Florida who's working to bring the change this country needs, and that candidate is Annette Taddeo. Get involved and help bring change now.

Annette Taddeo for Congress:
Visit the website

Don't wait until Election Day to support Taddeo. Get involved today to make sure Florida has a strong representative to take our country in a new direction.

Thanks,

Obama for America

P.S. -- To get involved with Obama for America in your community, visit your state page:

http://.barackobama.com

This teamwork is great!

Fla. Dems Good on Environment, Reps Not So Much

2008-10-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

The League of Conservation Voters released their scorecards for Congress. Can you guess what the pattern is? Of Florida Republicans, only Ileana Ros-Lehtinen does as good as any Democrat and that's only one person. Beyond that, all Democrats do way better than all Republicans. No shocker there.

Alcee Hastings (D), 92%
Ron Klein (D), 92%
Timothy Mahoney (D), 92%
Kendrick Meek (D), 92%
Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D), 92%
Bill Nelson (D), 91%
F. Allen Boyd (D), 85%
Corrine Brown (D), 85%
Kathy Castor (D), 85%
Robert Wexler (D), 69%
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R), 69%
Vern Buchanan (R), 62%
Gus Bilirakis (R), 38%
Ginny Brown-Waite (R), 38%
Mario Diaz-Balart (R), 38%
C.W. Bill Young (R), 38%
Mel Martinez (R), 36%
Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R), 31%
Ander Crenshaw (R), 15%
Ric Keller (R), 15%
Connie Mack (R), 8%
John Mica (R), 8%
Adam Putnam (R), 8%
Dave Weldon (R), 8%
Tom Feeney (R), 0%
Jeff Miller (R), 0%
Cliff Stearns (R), 0%

From the Blogs

2008-10-13T11:13:00.000-07:00

Discourse.net: Video: Taddeo Smacks Down Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on Social Security

Miami-Dade Dems: FL-18: Another reason to reject the incumbent and vote for Annette Taddeo

Miami-Dade Dems: FL-18: Annette Taddeo instructs incumbent on Social Security

Daily Kos: FL-18, FL-25: Bushraiser III

Daily Kos: FL-18, FL-25: Bushraiser II

Daily Kos: FL-18, FL-25: Bushraiser

Daily Kos: FL-18: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen thinks people don’t like Social Security

Miami-Dade Dems: DailyKos takes up donation drive for Joe Garcia and Annette Taddeo

Ybor City Stogie: The Three Amigos vs. The Dynamic Duo

Discourse.net: Local Congressional Race Update

AMERICAblog: In Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen sticks with Bush/McCain on privatizing social security

Blue Herald 2.0: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Finds Time to Get Her Ass Kicked

Down With Tyranny: South Florida: 6 Candidates Debate And 1 Gets Caught Up In A Major Bribery Scandal

South Florida Daily Blog: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Is A Criminal

Ybor City Stogie: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen And George Bush Are Two Peas In A Pod

Ybor City Stogie: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Now Supporting The Great Swindle of 2008

Another reason to vote for Annette Taddeo

2008-10-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

Michael Froomkin has posted on his superb blog, Discourse.net, a denunciation of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the Florida Republican Party for the slimy mailer going out to Congressional District 18. It accuses us Democrats of surrendering to terrorists — what else do they have in their bag of dirty Republican tricks?!?

There’s an image of the mailer at the link above to Discourse.net, and I’ll encourage traffic thataway by not showing the rotten thing on this blog. It’s also being picked up nationally by Hullabaloo, where Digby is encouraging a response by donating to Annette Taddeo’s campaign to unseat Ros-Lehtinen. I’ll second that with a helpful URL.

Though I also live in FL-18, this mailer hasn’t hit me yet. But my dining table is starting to groan under the weight of the lies rolling in from Ros-Lehtinen’s campaign. This weekend came one extolling her for “helping middle class home owners, improve our health care system, invest in alternative and efficient energy sources and facilitate an affordable college education for our youth.” All the stuff she doesn’t do.

And there’s a photo of her with her family and the slogan, “Together we will make the necessary changes.”

Y’all catch the “changes” that she’s asserting? Beware, there’s no mention of retiring her rubber stamp.

By contrast, mailers from Annette Taddeo are factual and persuasive. I can only hope that people have their minds open as they decide how to vote

Republicans Don't Support Troops As Well As Dems

2008-10-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

Check out the latest scorecards from Disabled American Veterans and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America...

DAV:

Bill Nelson, 100
Allen Boyd, 100
Corrine Brown, 100
Kendrick Meek, 100
Robert Wexler, 100
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, 100
Alcee Hastings, 100

Mel Martinez, 60
Jeff Miller, 66
Ander Crenshaw, 66
Ginny Brown-Waite, 66
Cliff Stearns, 66
John Mica, 66
Ric Keller, 50
C.W. Bill Young, 66
Adam Putnam, 66
Connie Mack, 66
David Weldon, 66
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, 66
Lincoln Diaz-Balart, 66
Tom Feeney, 66
Mario Diaz-Balart, 66

Notice a pattern here? All of the Dems have 100%, while none of the Republicans has anything better than a mid-range "D." So much for supporting disabled troops.

IAVA:

Bill Nelson, A+
Allen Boyd, A
Corrine Brown, A
Kathy Castor, A
Timothy Mahoney, A
Kendrick Meek, B
Robert Wexler, A
D. Wasserman Schultz, A+
Ron Klein, A+
Alcee Hastings, A

Mel Martinez, B
Jeff Miller, B
Ander Crenshaw, B
G. Brown-Waite, B
Cliff Stearns, B
John Mica, B
Ric Keller, A
Gus Bilirakis, A
C.W. Bill Young, B
Adam Putnam, C
Vern Buchanan, B
Connie Mack, B
Dave Weldon, C
I. Ros-Lehtinen, A
L. Diaz-Balart, B
Tom Feeney, B
M. Diaz-Balart, B

Republicans do a little better on this one, with Keller, Bilirakis and Ros-Lehtinen all getting an "A." Dems still do better, Meek has the lowest grade on our side of the aisle, and he still has a "B." The only "A+" grades amongst Florida's delegation are Dems and the only grades below "B" are all Republicans. Again, which party actually supports the troops?

FL-18: Annette Taddeo instructs incumbent on Social Security

2008-10-10T20:46:00.000-07:00

This was a telling moment in this week's forum for congressional candidates. The question was about the future of Social Security. Democratic challenger Annette Taddeo defended it with passion and logic. Then incumbent Ileana Ros-Lehtinen hopped up and asked the audience if they were happy with their return from Social Security.

Surprise!

How out of touch can she be? This was on a day when the stock market tanked after tanking the day before. Big headlines. No hint that Ros-Lehtinen saw the foot heading for her mouth, even though it was hers.

One of Annette Taddeo's top qualifications for Congress is that she's not a politician, but rather a successful owner of a thriving business providing language services. More of her sort of expertise is badly needed in the U.S. House, and out with the unthinking rubber-stamps who need to look at their scripts to know what to say.

Miami Debate

2008-10-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

Video of the Miami congressional candidates debate with Annette Taddeo, Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez.

Great New Ad From Annette Taddeo

2008-10-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

Check it out:

FL-21, FL-25: Good news for Martinez and Garcia campaigns

2008-09-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

Here we are at five weeks to election day – meaning three weeks to start of early voting – and the momentum looks positive for the Raul Martinez and Joe Garcia challenges to the Diaz-Balart rubber-stamps.

Very proud, the Martinez campaign announced a promotion by one of the handicappers on Tuesday. No longer “lean Republican” to the Rothenberg Political Report, this race in FL-21 now is “Pure Toss-Up.”

” The race's inclusion as one of only ten races in the country ranked as ‘Pure Toss-Up’ signifies that this race is more competitive than ever,” the Martinez campaign said.

That doesn’t make it easy. Incumbent Lincoln Diaz-Balart has run an ad about as sleazy as they come, and Raul Martinez is asking donors to help in the stretch to Election Day. You can see how Miami’s Channel 10 skewered the ad in a post a few days ago on this blog.

And at Joe Garcia’s shop – also contending with gross distortions from Mario Diaz-Balart’s ads – they’re announcing good news from another of the handicappers, Real Clear Politics, which is calling the race in FL-25 one of the most competitive House races in the country.

This race, according to the Rothenberg Political Report (linked above), is still in the “lean Republican” category. But there’s yet another piece of good news for Joe Garcia. Mario DB is polling below 50%, which is a classic sign of trouble for incumbent members of Congress. If I recall correctly, this has been true for several months, so the incumbent has not done himself any good with his crummy ads (also linked in the same post as for Raul Martinez).

Here’s part of a statement from the Joe Garcia campaign:

A poll that was conducted by a non-partisan firm was recently released that shows Mario Diaz-Balart is only getting 45% support, and that Joe Garcia is polling within the margin of error. As you know, “polling under 50 percent generally spells trouble for incumbents.” [Rasmussen Reports, 9/22/2008].

This explains why MDB is running scared and has resorted to lying about Joe Garcia's record of fighting for Florida's families. The fact that a career politician like Mario Diaz-Balart is polling below 50% provides proof that South Florida is ready for a change. The poll also states that Joe Garcia's favorability is higher than Mario Diaz-Balart’s.

Don’t forget that Joe needs money, too.

Speaking of momentum, my favorite Congressional candidate, Annette Taddeo in FL-18 where I live, is advertising on radio and TV, so I expect her to start taking big bites out of incumbent Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Taddeo is getting help from the national Democratic Party establishment, having been promoted to the Red to Blue list of top Democratic challengers, and her internal polls have shown for months that the incumbent has meager support. Once voters see and hear the ads for Taddeo, they will realize there’s a powerful challenge and bid Ros-Lehtinen an unfond farewell.

Taddeo has been getting coverage in the Miami Herald and in the Florida Keys, so the word is getting out. Now it’s time to step on the gas, and that’s what the campaign is doing. You can pitch in with money and time. Sign up at Annette2008.com.

Meet the Patriot Corps Staffer Assigned to the Taddeo Campaign

2008-09-25T19:52:00.000-07:00

Kento Azegami: "I am a sophomore at Portland State University, majoring in Political Science. I am happily engaged to my boyfriend Kyle. In 2004 I worked, as a campus organizer for the 21st Century Democrats Young Voter Project. I've interned with Basic Rights Oregon and worked as a lead canvasser for Larry Galizio for State Representative. I have served as President of the College Democrats of Portland State University and as the President of the Oregon Federation of College Democrats."

First Ad Up from Annette Taddeo

2008-09-25T18:09:00.001-07:00

In Spanish:

From the Blogs

2008-09-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

Incertus (Brian): Annette Taddeo: A Better Democrat

Miami-Dade Dems: Candidate Annette Taddeo and US Rep Hilda Solis on the economy

madfloridian: Jeb Bush, Ileana Ros Lehtinen, and Orlando Bosch...strange companions

Miami-Dade Dems: Good prospects for three Democrats in South Florida congressional races

Taddeo Not Happy About Bailout

2008-09-22T15:08:00.000-07:00

They aren't happy.

We will not be forced into acting on a $700 billion bill without even examining what the bill does. The American people need protection so that this emergency does not turn into a boondoggle give-away to corporate insiders. Congress should send President Bush a bill that includes transaction standards, independent oversight, protections for homeowners, and constraints on excessive executive compensation.

The bill is inadequate because while doing nothing for homeowners, it gives the Treasury Department a blank check for Wall Street - it authorizes purchases "on such terms and conditions as determined by the [Administration]." There would be no guidelines, no standards, no conditions. The Treasury would be permitted to purchase assets at any price it wanted, even if it provided a huge profit to the same corporate entities that got us into this mess in the first place, entities like commercial banks, investment banking firms - even hedge funds -- that have acted recklessly or worse.

I oppose, and call on Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to oppose - the Bush Administration's proposed legislation giving the Treasury the power to spend up to $700 billion to buy "mortgage-related assets" from U.S.-based financial institutions, until the proposed bill is strengthened to protect homeowners, and to protect the American taxpayer from sweetheart deals, cronyism and outright waste.

Finally, if the bailout is to be expanded to cover foreign-headquartered companies, then our allies must share the burden. Unfortunately, after seven and a half years of Cowboy diplomacy and a war in Iraq based on lies, we have little if any leverage left with our allies. They have no desire and little incentive to help us in our moment of need. It is time for a new beginning.

Candidate Annette Taddeo and US Rep Hilda Solis on the economy

2008-09-22T11:24:00.000-07:00

Click to Play

Annette Taddeo, Democratic challenger in FL-18, and U.S. Rep. Hilda Solis, CA-32, address the economic crisis in remarks near downtown Miami. Building in background is office of Foreclosure Relief System.

Good prospects for three Democrats in South Florida congressional races

2008-09-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

Click to Play

Joe Garcia, running in District 25, speaks at fundraiser on the key nature of Annette Taddeo's candidacy in District 18. He says she is doing the heavy lifting that will help him win and also help Raul Martinez in District 21.

Cry foul: Lincoln Diaz-Balart won't debate Raul Martinez

2008-09-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry, little mistake in the headline. Replace the word foul with fowl, for chicken. That should be the modifier for Lincoln Diaz-Balart, who's not up to the challenge of meeting his challenger in the debate arena.

Close readers of this blog may remember back on Sept. 10 when there was a post reporting at least two debates scheduled between the rubber-stamp incumbent and the Democratic contender for FL-21's seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The post quoted from the Miami Herald column by Channel 10's respected political reporter Michael Putney, who was himself to be moderator or co-moderator of two debates between Martinez and L. Diaz-Balart.

Sorry to report now that the Martinez campaign says it's all off. As I suspected back on Sept. 10. Too good to be true. The Diaz-Balarts never have the fortitude to meet a challenger.

Last night I was at a fundraiser for Annette Taddeo, challenging Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in FL-18, and a welcome guest was Joe Garcia, who's running against Mario Diaz-Balart in FL-25. No surprise to hear both Annette and Joe report no luck in enticing their opponents to debate. They may hint at this date or that, only to pull back.

Why do they do this? My guess is that they may fool some few voters who will approvingly remember the little news story saying the Republicans had agreed to debate, but not see the one reporting the debate had been called off.

Thanks to the Raul Martinez campaign for rounding up links to various news stories about the "debates," as follows:

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/story/692549.html

http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2008/09/get-ready-to-ru.html

http://www.local10.com/editorials/17503337/detail.html

http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2008/09/channel-10-miam.html

From the Blogs

2008-09-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

The Ybor City Stogie: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Orlando Bosch And The Bush Family

The Ybor City Stogie: ¡Todos Unidos!

madfloridian: FL candidate long ignored by Wasserman Schultz...becomes Red to Blue now

madfloridian: FL 18th Annette Taddeo won Blue America's contest...received $15,813

Miami-Dade Dems: Walk for Annette Taddeo: Red to Blue winner in FL-18

Walk for Annette Taddeo: Red to Blue winner in FL-18

2008-09-11T14:52:00.001-07:00

Terrific news for Annette Taddeo, our brilliant challenger against a Bush rubber-stamp in Washington. Taddeo now has full backing of the Democratic Party establishment’s Red to Blue program. It was leaked out today on The Politico and the Down with Tyranny blogs. This will mean more funding for her campaign against Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and equal footing with the other Democratic challengers in South Florida, Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez, who have been on the Red to Blue list for some time.

We all can help build momentum in this important race by canvassing for Annette Taddeo, who’s a multiple winner this week – certified also after winning a national contest among progressives to show whose backers would work the hardest.

First, the canvassing details. This event is primarily backed by the Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Florida but everyone’s welcome to join.

· When: 1:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday Sept. 14

· Where: Little Havana, at the Ayesteran restaurant, 706 SW 27^th Ave.

· Who: Millie Herrera 305 972-4162

Thanks to the readers of this blog and those receiving Democracy For America-Miami-Dade newsletters and others who boosted Taddeo in the Blue America contest among nine progressive candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives.

This is also a chance to introduce you to some nationally known blogs that were sponsors of the contest: Down With Tyranny, Crooks and Liars, Firedoglake and Digby.

The idea in the contest was to register an individual’s support for one of the nine candidates by making a donation of as little as $1 to that candidate. Taddeo, who made calls herself to backers asking for a buck (I know, I got one of her calls), came out ahead in this national contest and will receive over $15,000 including a $5,000 matching check from Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The DCCC now also has promoted Annette Taddeo from the category of “Emerging Races” to the fully emerged status of the Red to Blue program. This will call for the long-reluctant Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, FL-20, to become a full backer of Taddeo’s campaign to unseat Ros-Lehtinen, whom Wasserman Schultz has been reluctant to oppose.

This blog has been writing about this conflict for almost six months, and it will be a great relief to put this chapter behind us and step into a more unified final eight weeks of campaigning.

Here’s a link to the Taddeo campaign site with news of the Blue America win – nothing official yet on the DCCC Red to Blue program – and you can click on the Contribute button and do the right thing.

And a Florida footnote: also among those promoted from “emerging” to Red to Blue” is Alan Grayson, the Democratic challenger in FL-08. The incumbent is Rick Keller, who must now think his 53-47 margin in 2006 is looking pretty skimpy. The district is in central Florida including part of Orlando.

From the Blogs

2008-09-08T22:36:00.000-07:00

Down With Tyranny: Annette Taddeo Wins The Blue America Competition

madfloridian: Debbie Wasserman Schultz undermines FL candidate Taddeo, fails to mention her name.

Discourse.net: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Loves Palin (Someone Should Tell Debbie Wasserman-Schultz)

Miami-Dade Dems: Commentary in El Nuevo Herald hints at win for Joe Garcia

Miami-Dade Dems: Miami Herald is catching up with Annette Taddeo

Miami-Dade Dems: Glory day at Denver convention for SoFla Congressional candidates

Ybor City Stogie: Debbie Wasserman Schultz Undermines Annette Taddeo

Daily Kos: FL-18: DWS Undermines Taddeo to Florida Delegates

Down With Tyranny: Debbie Wasserman Schultz-- Corrupt, Bitter, Increasingly Alone And Filled With Venom

Down With Tyranny: Is Wasserman Schultz Changing Her Tune?

Deadline: Help Annette Taddeo on ActBlue

2008-09-06T09:57:00.001-07:00

Have you given $1 to help Annette Taddeo? (More is fine, but $1 is OK.)

http://www.actblue.com/page/blueamericacontest

Our Democratic candidate in FL-18 is in a tight race to win this contest at ActBlue. Contest ends at 3 p.m. today!

Commentary in El Nuevo Herald points to defeat for Republicans in Congress

2008-09-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Joe Garcia campaign for finding and translating this opinion piece from El Nuevo Herald this past weekend. It concentrates on Joe Garcia's strong chances in the FL-25 race against Mario Diaz-Balart but is just as relevant to Annette Taddeo in FL-18 and Raul Martinez in FL-21: Florida "will not be an island" in the ocean of change coming on election day.

The entire piece is quoted hereunder, and this link goes back to the original Spanish.

It's not hard to guess why Mario Diaz-Balart prefers to avoid Joe
Garcia these days. He doesn't want to bump into him at social gatherings at the
Versailles Restaurant in Little Havana, much less on the radio, television or
here in the Herald. Things happen when, after so many years of a family holding
political power, all of a sudden, there is fatigue of the repeated speeches, the
passing of days, generational shifts or the moment of political realignment in
the country sounds several alarms that warn that the trendy word, change, is not
only coming to the White House, but to the Congress as well. And this is going
to happen to good ol' Joe.

Let's go piece by piece. Nepotism, regardless how nice the brothers of a
dynasty may be, creates antipathy, whether it be in Florida,California, Texas,
China or Vietnam. You also have to add that the same anti-Castro focus of the
‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, no longer resonates in 2008. On the contrary, there
is a boomerang effect, and you can no longer duck your head or use the same old
story that generated votes in the past. Cuban-American voters clearly want
change in their homeland, along with liberty and democracy, so they can once
again breathe the breeze that stayed behind in Havana's piers. There is no
disagreement on this issue, but alongside this exiled voting bloc, there is now
a new voter. There is the young Cuban American that was born in the United
States, and despite the love he may have for the grandparents and uncles he may
or may not have met, he has a different vision of the problem. His origins may
be in Cuba, but his school, university, wife, kids and future are in the United
States. His first language is English, and he almost doesn't understand the
rhetoric that dates back four decades of exiles talking about the death of the
tyrant or the fall of the regime.

These young Cuban Americans are affected by the drama of their peers, and
the nostalgia less than 90 miles from Florida, but what they're more interested
in is that a young politician, that speaks their language, is ready to solve
their daily problems here in the United States. This has been the focus of Mr.
Garcia's campaign. Aside from this generational dilemma, the Diaz-Balarts' and
Ms. Ros-Lehtinen's problem, is that their Democratic opponents for Congress have
surfaced while the country has been inspired by the optimistic change that
Barack Obama signifies. During such a political climate, the standard-bearers of
exile politics represent the exact opposite.

Some things happen when a candidate arrives that was born on Miami Beach;
has longer hair; is known for being a good guy; is linked to the University of
Miami; is well prepared; and close to various groups of Cuban Americans, prefers
to speak less about the 'Cuba libre' we all want, and focuses more on speaking
to voters, whose lives are committed to the country we live in, about
pocket-book issues and their daily lives.

I'm not sure if there will be a electoral dethroning of the congressional
Republicans, but what is felt in forums, letters to the media and in polls is
that change is not only a perception, but rather a real possibility, with a
candidate that shows personal respect toward his opponents and thinks they are
not efficient and that the time for another option is now. Certain things happen
when a veteran politician that follows the line of Diaz-Balart begins to
understand that we find ourselves in a year where China changes, and that
Florida will not be an island in this cry for change, and that's why he'll find
every possible excuse not to be in the same place where he may have to debate,
confront or analyze his rival. Joe Garcia is here to win.

Miami Herald is catching up with Annette Taddeo

2008-08-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-18T20:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-16T21:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-01T14:08:00.000-07:00

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

Re-elect? NO for 2 of 3 Republicans in South Florida

2008-07-08T13:10:00.000-07:00

RING, RING: It’s my cellphone ringing Wednesday afternoon, and on the line is the third Democrat in the Congressional races referred to above, Annette Taddeo. She doesn’t like the implication that her campaign may not be doing well. So I’m going to include her comments in boldface and write through some of the material in this post from Tuesday July 8.

This is terrific news for those campaigning for a strong Democratic House of Representatives. Fresh polling shows two of the three sitting Republicans in Miami-Dade County under the 50-percent threshold of incumbent viability.

So why am I disappointed? Darn, my incumbent Republican representative, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, is not below the threshold. That’s FL-18, where Ros-Lehtinen has been in office since 1989. This is a call to renewed and more intense work on behalf of the excellent Annette Taddeo, the Democratic challenger in this district that covers the coast from Miami Beach to Key West and a chunk of mainland Miami.

Taddeo feels strongly that her campaign is on schedule for victory, and in fact that Ros-Lehtinen is far more vulnerable than the poll in Monday’s Miami Herald would have you think. Taddeo said her campaign did a poll in November that showed only 50 percent willing to re-elect Ros-Lehtinen, and a recent poll showed only 48 percent for re-electing the incumbent.

So, all three Republicans are below the waterline! This is what I’ve been calling Landslide Country for months!

And, Taddeo said, even the 31 percent she registered in the Bendixon poll (see below) was “extremely good for me” considering that she hasn’t put out any ads yet and she’s not politically well-known like her fellow challengers, Martinez and Garcia.

But her best news came from a different kind of polling, what Taddeo called “informed trial heat,” in which respondents are questioned as if a campaign had been going on and they had heard positive and negative things about the incumbent and challenger. In that case, Taddeo was ahead, 44 percent to 42 percent, she said.

This polling has been done by her own campaign, a sign of a well-financed and professional challenge to the long-serving Republican.

“We need to raise money to let people know how she votes in Congress,” Taddeo said. “Then she’s finished.” Ros-Lehtinen’s votes, of course, are for the war, for torture, for illegal wiretapping, against expanding children’s health insurance, etc. Typical Bush rubberstamp, though she denies it – a sign of a bad conscience.

That reminds me: Ring, Ring. “This is Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen … “

That was on my voicemail Tuesday, my representative in the U.S. House robo-calling me, no doubt to explain that she’s done so much that she ought to be elected again. Well, dear lady, I don’t give a fig if you’ve dredged the Miami River with a teaspoon yourself. Tell me you’ve stopped the war, stopped torture. Oh, no?? You’re very bad on the big stuff.

OK, back to the rest of the story from yesterday:
Better news for Joe Garcia in FL-25 (the outer western suburbs of Miami and The Everglades) and even better for Raul Martinez in FL-21 (inner western suburbs of Miami). They are almost within the margin of error – barely behind the brothers Mario Diaz-Balart and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, respectively.

They all need your help. Click on these links and give something. South Florida can be another of these places around the country where the Bush rubber-stampers properly are punished by the voters.

www.annette2008.com

www.joegarcia08.com

www.raul2008.com

Polling by Bendixon & Associates shows the following numbers in response to the question of which candidate you would support if the election were held today:

District 18

· Ros-Lehtinen 58 percent

· Taddeo 31 percent

· Undecided 11 percent

District 21

· Lincoln Diaz-Balart 41 percent

· Raul Martinez 37 percent

· Undecided 22 percent

District 25

· Mario Diaz-Balart 44 percent

· Joe Garcia 39 percent

· Undecided 17 percent

There are two comprehensive reports available for further provocation of your thoughts. The Miami Herald’s headline has the incumbents’ rivals “on their heels.” And CBS4 with Jim Defede is replete with advice that Garcia and Martinez concentrate on getting out the vote among undecided Anglos and African-Americans in their districts, because the Cuban voter has mostly already decided.

I want to go on and raise the question of how Barack Obama’s just-arriving campaign may affect these congressional races. Remember, Florida was not on the main burner of presidential campaigning until the Democratic nomination was decided elsewhere – thanks to the too-early primary date imposed by the Republican-dominated state legislature. So while the Obama campaign got its feet on the ground everywhere else in the country, it was only a few valiant local volunteers who stoked the flame of Obama enthusiasm with parties to watch the primary results in other states and other minor-key events.

It has been different now for a couple of weeks. There is a state campaign office and local campaign offices, with 250 Obama Fellows arriving lately in South Florida alone. These mostly young volunteers have been at meetings of our Democratic clubs, as well as running voter-registration events and recruiting more volunteers. Last night at the Miami-Dade Democratic Party’s meeting of the Executive Committee, three of the Fellows spoke, and a prominent part of their message was a promise to work for Democratic victories all along the ticket – not just the president.

All this, I’m sure, will help our Democratic Congressional candidates. And it’s earlier than we’ve had such campaign energy in the past. Certainly not in the 2004 campaign season, when the John Kerry campaign was barely visible four months before election day. Now is the time to make up some of that narrowing gap and send all three of our Republican incumbents home from Congress.

Again, Annette Taddeo is confident that she’s running strongly against Ros-Lehtinen. Taddeo’s Colombian background – she was born there to an American father and a Colombian mother – got her a lot of exposure in Spanish-language media recently after the release of the hostages in Colombia. And keep your eyes open for an important endorsement for Annette.

Endorsements in the news: labor unions, Cuban-American leaders

2008-07-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

Joe Garcia and Annette Taddeo at a community candidates' forum Saturday -- empty chair for "no show" Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

(Belatedly cross-posting this from Miami-Dade Dems dated July 1.)

Chapter I: Labor endorsement

In Tuesday’s Miami Herald it’s revealed that Lincoln Diaz-Balart was not – repeat NOT – endorsed by some of the labor unions that once endorsed him. Also it’s revealed that the Republican representing Florida’s 21^st District sorta fibbed in a news release claiming that he had been endorsed by those unions. Ooops. The Democratic challenger, Raul Martinez, asks for an apology.

And let’s be clear about the wider issue of labor endorsements. The three Democratic challengers for Congress – Raul Martinez, Joe Garcia (FL-25) and Annette Taddeo (FL-18) – are endorsed by the Florida AFL-CIO. Down with the Republican incumbents!

Way down in the Herald article is a reason why the unions reversed earlier backing of the Diaz-Balart brothers and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The three had committed to the Labor Free Choice Act, which makes it easier to form unions, and then they failed to support it in the House. This is what we call behavior of finks.

UPDATE: Click here to read the news release about the AFL-CIO endorsement of the three Democratic candidates.

Chapter II: Cuban American endorsement

Monday evening, a lively gathering at the cocktail hour at the waterfront villa of J.C. Mas and his wife Vivian de la Maza. It’s a fund-raiser for Joe Garcia, the last day of the reporting quarter, and this is a well-heeled and enthusiastic crowd for Garcia’s candidacy.

Host J.C. Mas, son of the late Jorge Mas Canosa, longtime head of the Cuban American National Foundation, introduces Joe Garcia (whom he’s known since college) by admitting that he has given to the Diaz-Balarts in the past but now he has to ask “whether I want them to represent me as a Cuban American.”

“Honestly, when you look at the fact that they only have one issue they can talk about, and they are not addressing this community or all the needs of this community, I think that is something that needs to change. I think they’ve had plenty of opportunities and plenty of time to make their impact, and their impact really is nonexistent.”

He went on to urge the crowd to support Joe Garcia – “a man of honor and of integrity and ultimately more talented to bring hope to our community and to assist us with the enormous needs in this diverse community.”

We’ll see if a few weeks how the campaigns of Joe Garcia, Raul Martinez and Annette Taddeo are faring in the fund-raising area for the second quarter. They out-raised the incumbents in the first quarter. Let’s hope that the fund-raising totals show continuing endorsement by both the well-off crowd and the smaller donors who turned out in droves early this year.

Chapter III: DCCC endorsement

And let’s not forget that the Democratic Party machinery is increasingly behind our challengers. Garcia and Martinez have been endorsed by the Red to Blue committee, an arm of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Annette Taddeo has been elevated to status of a promising candidate on that ranking. She also attended the Monday evening event in Coral Gables, and appeared with Joe Garcia Saturday at a community candidates' panel, where I snapped the photo at the top of this report.

And lest you think that all the above is in the local news media, Chapter II is not. It's my little exclusive from having been at the fund-raiser (my check is in the mail, Joe).

Ileana Hates America and Its Values

2008-06-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

It's clear that Americans generally favor more progressive values most of the time. Not Ileana. With a lifetime Progressive Punch voting score of 15.69%, it's clear she hates Americans and their values.

Ileana is Wasting Your Time in Washington

2008-06-26T11:34:00.000-07:00

According to Congress.org, Ileana is the 288th most powerful member of the House and as part of the hugely ineffectual Florida Republican delegation in Washington, helps make Florida one of the least powerful states in Congress. Thanks for the great work!

Ileana Doesn't Hate Gay People

2008-06-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

For once Ros-Lehtinen is on the right side of an issue. She's a member of the new congressional gay equality caucus.

Don't get used to it.

Ros-Lehtinen in the news: PO maintenance and not a rubber stamp

2008-06-05T15:01:00.000-07:00

Somehow these two items in the Miami Herald have an internal affinity. On Wednesday we read (way back in the Metro pages) that she’s wounded by declarations that she’s a rubber stamp, and on Thursday up pops a story saying she’s being called on to fix problems with the Post Office in Coconut Grove. Well, what is more associated with rubber stamps than Post Offices? I see appropriate written all over this connection. Yes, stamp the word appropriate on these stories.

I indulged my PO complaint mode and posted a comment on Thursday’s story suggesting that we retire Ros-Lehtinen and put her to work maintaining U.S. Post Offices. The one I attend in Miami Beach (71^st Street) needs the weeds cut.

Debating chickens

2008-06-01T13:58:00.000-07:00

Annette Taddeo and the empty chair

The photo shows the bravery – lack of it, I mean – in our Republican congressional incumbents. They assert willingness to talk, set a date, ask to change the date, agree to a new date, and finally cancel. It’s a little dirty trick, taken, no doubt, from the Richard Nixon political playbook.

Some choice words of reaction from Annette Taddeo, whose date with Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in the AFL-CIO arena last week was a bust: “Her not being here is inexcusable. … I really believe you have been ignored. … On Saturday she’s to be at the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, but she didn’t have time for you.”

It was a fine display of temper from the Democratic challenger in District 18, which spans the beaches to Key West. Her event on Thursday marked three days in a row that the Republican incumbents blew off the Democratic candidates: Joe Garcia vs. Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25) on Tuesday and Raul Martinez vs. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21) on Wednesday.

Here's how Joe Garcia describes it on his website:

For two hours, our community heard me discuss my plans to bring a safe and responsible end to the War in Iraq, revitalize our economy and pass a health care plan that covers everyone and lowers premiums. All they got from Mario Diaz-Balart was an empty podium.

Where was Diaz-Balart during this important debate? On an AM talk radio show to talk about his strategy of "dividing Cuban, and Jewish, voters."

That's not the kind of politics we need when our community is facing so many problems.

And over at Raul Martinez' website, they're accusing Lincoln Diaz-Balart of "elitist tendencies" for refusing to appear with Martinez at the labor forum. Dee-licious!

Fred Frost, who heads the union grouping, introduced Taddeo to a crowd of about 50 by noting that there are 14,000 union members in District 18. “I truly believe she (Ros-Lehtinen) has disrespected the South Florida AFL-CIO for the last time,” Frost said.

We will see. And this is not only a race for us in South Florida. The Sunday NY Times had us under the lens again. “Democrats see Cuba travel limits as a campaign issue in Florida,” was the headline.

That may be a little out of date already. Listen to Joe Garcia talking with people at last week’s naturalization ceremonies, and health care and gas prices are the first topics he pounds. But anyway, it’s at least interesting to see the national media paying attention to Cuba policy and the nuances of SoFla democraphics.

The Times article devotes a lot of space to the view that Cuba travel restrictions are on the way out. But at the end it quotes a contrary view from pollster Sergio Bendixen, who ventures that the Democratic challengers may be mistaken if they focus on Cuba policy.

“What do you gain by focusing your campaign on travel restrictions and remittance restrictions?” Mr. Bendixen said. “I don’t get it. It’s turning off more than half the electorate that’s not Cuban, and the people who would benefit from a change are a very small slice of the Cuban electorate. It’s a mistaken strategy.”

Having listened to all the challengers (repeatedly), I have to say that they are not focusing on Cuba the way Bendixen seems to think. Yes, two of them (Garcia and Martinez) are Cuban Americans, and Cuba policy is part of their stump speeches. But they know their districts and just how much is Cuban. Taddeo told her union audience last week that District 18 is “under 30 percent Cuban” and it’s far from the makeup that sent Ros-Lehtinen to Congress 18 years ago. Voters, including Cuban Americans, now have health care at the top of their priorities, she said.

Her speech opened with a telling anecdote from her background as a business leader who would travel to Washington to lobby Ros-Lehtinen on what the business community saw as top legislative priorities. Health care, for instance. “Our list of priorities was getting longer,” she said. “We are being represented by someone who does not vote in the best interest of our community.”

And, she pointed out, it was a business delegation asking for a yes vote on children’s health insurance, not a labor delegation.

Taddeo also thought it was noteworthy that Ros-Lehtinen now is changing some of her votes and talking to the Chamber of Commerce. “They all know me,” she said of the Chamber. “She doesn’t have the labor community. She doesn’t have the business community. Who does she have?”

Good question.

Ileana Hates Iraq, Loves War

2008-05-24T00:03:00.000-07:00

How else could you explain her 1.59% lifetime progressive score on votes related to the Iraq war? In addition to her original vote to authorize the war, she voted:
*against making the president work through the United Nations for a solution
*to limit Congressional authority over war spending
*against establishing civil support teams through the National Guard to guard against WMDs
*in favor of castigating France for its Iraq stance
*against investigating the president for lies about the war
*against limiting money given to Halliburton in the wake of their price-gouging
*in favor of giving Bush more power over military reconstruction projects
*against forcing Bush to justify his Iraqi reconstruction plan with an actual plan
*against increased funding for human rights protections for women and girls in Afghanistan
*against requiring competitive bidding on oil contracts in Iraq
*to declare that the United States and the world are safer because Saddam Hussein was removed from power
*against requiring accountability for harsh treatment of Iraqi prison and congressional inquiry into prison abuse
*repeatedly to increase funding for the war in Iraq
*against investigating contracts and federal spending in Iraq and Afghanistan
*against a "sense-of-the-House" resolution calling for the president to develop a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq
*in favor of the troop surge
*repeatedly against setting a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq

Debate? Republicans run and hide.

2008-05-23T21:17:00.000-07:00

Republican members of Congress in South Florida don’t look like debaters. The reference is to the Diaz-Balarts and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen -- track stars when it comes to running and hiding.

Joe Garcia, challenging Mario Diaz-Balart for District 25, said in a statement Wednesday that his opponent had backed out of a commitment to debate.

“This is an act of political cowardice. If Mario Diaz-Balart had time to vote to underfund our schools, three times against children’s healthcare and against medical benefits for veterans, then he better make time to explain himself to the people of South Florida,” the statement said.

Cowardice? Goodness, tough word. But that’s exactly what Raul Martinez said Tuesday evening at a meeting of the Democrats of South Dade Club. Martinez said his opponent in District 21, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, had accepted a labor union debate invitation but then changed the date and now seems unavailable. “Why is he hiding?” Martinez asked. Later he returned to the topic and said if there is no debate, “I’m going to call him a coward. Mr. Coward. Coward, coward.”

The crowd was delighted. Just think, there are still over five months of this before election day.

Annette Taddeo’s campaign was more polite, according to the Miami Herald, which quoted the candidate’s campaign manager, Anastasia Apa, saying she hopes for a change of heart.

Ileana's In Trouble

2008-04-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is focused on the wrong things. As usual. Now she wants to indict Fidel Castro.

While there is no doubt that Castro has done a lot of horrible things over the years and should be brought to justice, but, really, is this the type of thing our representatives should be focused on? Is this a matter of doing what's best for Floridians or is it simply pointless political posturing? And why is Ros-Lehtinen posturing so much these days? Two words...

Annette Taddeo.

For once, Ros-Lehtinen has a significant challenger and this scares her.

“I think voters are hungry for new leadership and they have a chance to change the Bush-Lehtinen approach, which has obviously failed us," Taddeo recently told the Miami Herald. She's right.

Taddeo argues that while Cuba is an important issue to South Floridians, it isn't the only one, and pointless posturing on Castro won't fix the situation in Iraq, on which Ros-Lehtinen has blindly followed the president, it it won't get health care to the millions of Americans that don't have it, it won't create one new job and it won't bring down gas prices. Ros-Lehtinen can't talk about those issues, though, because she's part of the problem -- she sided with Bush and helped make all of those problems as bad as they are today. So instead of dealing with real issues, Ros-Lehtinen is pandering and posturing. That's a shame at such an important juncture in American history.

Let Ileana know that this is not what Floridians deserve, donate to the Taddeo campaign.

Ileana Hates Our Troops, Reality, Iraq

2008-04-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

Naked Politics:

To Petraeus she said: "I trust your reporting and that of our troops on the ground regarding the levels of sectarian violence, over those compiled by individuals and entities who wish to discredit the information to justify an immediate withdrawal," said Ros-Lehtinen, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "For all who have served and died defending what our nation holds dear, I hope we too, raise to the occasion and not let them down by precipitously withdrawing from the fight before the mission is completed."

What mission? Why is it that no Republican can define the mission in Iraq? They say it is to "win." But that doesn't mean anything, either. Why are our troops dying, Ileana?

Taddeo On Property Insurance

2008-03-10T17:24:00.000-07:00

Congressional Candidate Annette Taddeo has a blog.

If you live east of US1 - or just about anywhere in south Florida for that matter - you probably got your windstorm insurance bill from Citizen's recently. I got mine yesterday.

All I can say is: Wow!

It's no wonder so many of our neighbors feel like they can't keep their heads above water (no pun intended).

Thankfully, we haven't even been threatened by a major storm in two years and yet our premiums keep going up and up. To make matters worse, if you've lived in South Florida through any storm you know we can get hit with surcharges as well.

Something has to change.

There's more...

Good to see congressional candidates blogging and actually saying something. Let Annette know you appreciate it and maybe we can encourage more candidates to actually speak to the people.

Ileana Hates the Environment

2008-02-24T19:29:00.001-08:00

The League of Conservation Voters recently released scorecards for Congress. How did Ileana do? Poorly:

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (REP), 30%

Not only did all of the Democrats do better than all of the Republicans, With one exception, all of the Democrats did more than twice as good as all the Republicans. And most of the Democrats voted in favor of the environment more than four times as frequently as most of the Republicans.

I wonder how many of these Republicans own property that will be beachfront property when most of Florida is under water because of global warming? I'm just saying...

Ileana Hates Raul

2008-02-24T18:50:00.000-08:00

...Castro that is. Naked Politics:

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen calls the election a "sham" and said the "so-called" Parliament selecting the regime's "next dictator" was "selected through elections that were a total farce.

"Today's vote is once again a clear testament to the fear that the governing elite have of the ballot box," the Miami Republican said.

While she is right on this one, the faux outrage is a bit much. This shouldn't be a surprise that this was going to happen and one shouldn't act surprised.

The Economist takes note of our three Congressional races

2008-02-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

It took Castro’s resignation, but the august British weekly The Economist has taken approving note of our three congressional challengers here in South Florida. We figured we could get national attention in the United States with three strong candidates, but it’s heartening to receive attention from the European press when the election is still eight months away.

Here's what they said about us:

Three districts in south Florida have long been the dominion of hardline Cuban-American Republicans. For the first time since 1992, the Democrats are mounting a strong challenge in the persons of Raúl Martínez, a feisty former mayor of Hialeah, and Joe García, a former spokesman for the Cuban-American National Foundation. They support the embargo but are campaigning against the travel crackdown and stressing non-Cuban issues. (A third Democrat, Annette Taddeo, a Colombian-American businesswomen, has also entered the race, but is a political unknown.)

Annette Taddeo's bid for District 18 is now open

2008-02-10T10:59:00.000-08:00

I had hoped to pump out a couple quick links to good coverage Sunday of our congressional races, but for some reason the Miami Herald and Channel 10 aren’t cooperating, though both revealed that Annette Taddeo is challenging Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for the U.S. House in District 18.

No links available to the news:
--Channel 10’s “This week in South Florida” program covered Taddeo, along with a live interview with Raul Martinez, challenging for District 21 against Lincoln Diaz-Balart; and a reprise of the Thursday coverage of Joe Garcia’s launch of his run for District 25 against Mario Diaz-Balart.
--Miami-Herald’s story “Ros-Lehtinen Challenged” at the top of the front page of the metro section. As far as I can tell, this was the first time Annette Taddeo was identified in the Herald as intending to run for the District 18 seat in the U.S. House.

Maybe links will come later, and I’ll change this post.

But meanwhile, there is some digital coverage available.

Andres Oppenheimer’s Herald column in the main news section reminds us of another reason to vote against John McWar with the headline: “McCain’s advice Miami-bred.” Yes, our friends the Diaz-Balarts and Ros-Lehtinen, along with Sen. Mel Martinez, are influential advisers on McCain’s thinking about our hemisphere.

Count me as agreeing heartily with Oppenheimer’s opinion that McCain “would face an uphill battle to convince the world that he represents change and would bring a breath of fresh air to Washington.” His advisers are toeing a line drawn 40 years ago.

And over on the Reuters wire Miami correspondent Tom Brown has a long piece asking whether the Republicans are “losing grip” on our local Cuban vote. Well, yes, I’d say. And the Reuters report seems pretty much in agreement. Here’s its kicker (that’s news lingo for the last words in a story):

"Unless they (Republicans) address the issues that are important to this community they may be in for, unfortunately, a rude awakening," said Jorge Mas Santos, head of the once powerful but now lower-key Cuban American National Foundation.

Me, I would have left out the word unfortunately.

Florida Congressional District 18: famous squatting

2008-02-05T14:49:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the tip! Sorry to be late catching up with this one.

Some terrible people in Washington are making fun of my representative in the U.S. House. Darn, what is that Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18) doing to make them snarky?

She’s got all this influence, you know, from her zillion years in the House, so what’s wrong with her “squatting” there in the House so that she can get a little extra time with the Commander in Chief?

Wait, maybe it’s not exactly extra time. Maybe this is the only time she gets with Bush. So she squats there trying for a spot on the aisle so she can have a second or two with him. Then she goes home and flashes the photo – See! Me and the President having a chat!

Sorry, that’s it. All she got this year was three or four seats in from the aisle – maybe a wave or a fingertip brush – and that’s it for the last year of a presidential term.

And – people were watching and writing it up on blogs. Some with impolite terms of reference, which you may see if you Google “Ileana Ros Lehtinen squatting.”

Here’s part of Politico’s writeup:

Lawmakers like Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Todd R. Platts (R-Pa.), Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio), Mary Bono (R-Calif.), Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) are so-called State of the Union Day squatters.

Bachmann, you may recall, drew headlines last year after she kept her hand on Bush’s shoulder for a record 30 seconds and then reached in for a smooch.

...

“Being there, in that place, on that night,” Ros-Lehtinen echoed, “it’s just thrilling.”

The day of waiting, however, is not, the congresswomen said. Ros-Lehtinen always brings a “mountain of paperwork” to the chamber to kill time.

....

If Capito has to walk away, she always leaves the stack of paperwork on her seat, a signal to her colleagues that someone has already reserved that spot — or if she has to go far or use the facilities, she has Ros-Lehtinen hold her place for her.

“She watches my back and I watch hers,” Ros-Lehtinen confirmed.

But being on the aisle only goes so far. One must stand out in a room of black, steel gray and navy blue, the lawmakers said.

Despite her best efforts, Ros-Lehtinen couldn’t secure a seat soon enough. She and Capito had to settle for spots three and four seats away from the aisle.

“I’m not too disappointed,” Ros-Lehtinen said Monday evening. “I’ll still reach over and talk to the president about the [Florida] primary tomorrow.”

Next time we send someone to Washington from FL-18, how about a little depth? A person who will win influence? Not a fawner? We are so ready for change.

Ileana Hates America, Florida, Loves Eternal War

2008-01-26T19:55:00.001-08:00

Ileana has endorsed John McCain, the man who opposes a national cat fund and said that he had no problem staying in Iraq for 100 years. Thanks, Ileana, for advocating a president who, while not as bad as the other Republicans, would be horrible for America (and Florida).

Overheard: Raul Martinez announcing candidacy Tuesday in Hialeah

2008-01-21T15:02:00.000-08:00

Keep those ears open, folks. I heard today that Raul Martinez will announce his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives Tuesday morning in Hialeah. Venue: city hall.

This will start a heavy ball rolling in Florida politics, like the powerful inevitability in those Indiana Jones movies when the huge rock starts rolling down the chute. Look out, Republicans! It’s the time of the new broom.

The first to be swept will be Lincoln Diaz-Balart, currently misrepresenting Congressional District 21. The wave will rise out of Hialeah, where Raul Martinez was mayor for many terms – a Democrat beloved by Republican voters – and Lincoln will be sent to retirement.

Then, soon but I don’t know when, Joe Garcia, chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, will announce for Congressional District 25, and incumbent Mario Diaz-Balart will hear the knell of electoral doom.

And then, I don’t know when and haven’t heard who, someone with a lady’s name and a Latino background will announce for District 18, and we’ll see the end of too many terms in Congress for Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

This will be South Florida’s contribution to the landslide in Congress that will support the Democrat who will be elected president in November. We can look forward to – well, I’d like to say it will be Paradise, but I’m afraid it will be Hell for a couple years trying to unstick us from the war in Iraq, to reapply for honorable membership in the world community and to wrench the economy over onto a track that benefits all while cleaning up the environment.

There’s a mission statement.

Herald: Diaz-Balart may face challenger

2008-01-09T11:13:00.000-08:00

It's tempting to rip into the Miami Herald for the headline above. Hey, that's perceptive. But no, let's look at the content.

There’s a sophomoric debating tactic called “the straw man.” The debater attempts to destroy the opponent’s argument by describing it as something different from what it really is, and defeating that (the fallacious straw man) rather than what the opponent actually argues.

We see this in Wednesday’s Miami Herald, back in the local section, where U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21) declares that the Democrats want to defeat him and his two cohorts in order to “improve relations with Cuba,” especially to get rid of the embargo.

Oh yeah? What about torture? The war in Iraq? SCHIP? We want someone with political courage to represent us in Washington, not a rubber-stamp. Someone intelligent and wise and future-oriented, not stuck in the past. Someone with true compassion, not the conservative lip-serving compassion. Someone who would complain about “signing statements” that eviscerate legislation. Someone who would save our environment, not pave it over. Yes, let’s have a reasonable Cuba policy, but that’s somewhere down in the lower half of our long list of complaints.

So, Mr. Congressman, your straw man is laid bare. And by the way, you confirmed our suspicions as to how you will campaign: with sophomoric debating tactics. Thank you for telegraphing your punch, which is a sophomoric boxing tactic.

We’ll assume that Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18) and your brother Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25) will be using the same tactics.

Why we need new members of Congress

2008-01-09T08:45:00.000-08:00

Traveling lets you learn stuff. One way I try to accomplish that is by buying the local newspaper when I’m on the road and stopping for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sometimes I get hit by a stab of envy when I see that the other town has a better deal going than my town.

This happened the other day when I pulled off I-65 in Bowling Green, Kentucky, found a motel and a restaurant, and I perused the Louisville Courier-Journal over a meal.

Front-page headline: “Bridges’ finance plan OK’d.”
First paragraph: “The federal government has approved a plan to pay for the $4.1 billion Ohio River Bridges Project, clearing the way for Kentucky and Indiana to start construction this year.”

Stab of envy arose: I have closely followed the Everglades Skyway Project to build one measly bridge on a part of the Tamiami Trail and thereby help restore natural water flow in the Everglades. This eminently fine idea is going nowhere because there’s supposedly no money in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers budget to build it.

So, I ask, how is it that Kentucky and Indiana raise a ton of federal money for their dang bridges? When they seem to have little plan for how to raise their share? And how is it that we here in South Florida, with the only Everglades in the known universe, have spent a lot of state money on restoring the Everglades but can’t get federal money?

Answer: We have feeble members of Congress, who may say they love the Everglades, but they’re not delivering. I’m referring, of course, to the infamous Republican trio of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18), Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21), and Mario Diaz-Balart (FK-25), who were in the majority in the U.S. House from 1994 until recently but haven’t done jack when it comes down to important stuff for the ages.

Solution: New members of Congress. Brilliant.

Here are links to the Courier-Journal's articles of last Friday Jan 4 and Sunday Jan 6. For good measure, here's one on Sen. Mitch McConnell's re-election campaign treasury of $11 million. Finally, here's one on a Democrat announcing to run against an incumbent Republican member of Congress -- in Kentucky, unfortunately.

Yes to torture, says Ros-Lehtinen

2007-12-14T08:08:00.000-08:00

Our three Republican members of the U.S. House have voted for torture. Yes, let’s reaffirm that: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18), Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21), and Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25) voted Thursday with 186 other Republicans on the Nay side of a measure that the Democratic majority put forward to bar CIA agents from using waterboarding while questioning suspected terrorists.

Thank goodness that the Republicans no longer are in the majority in the House – the measure passed in a 222-199 vote. Let it not be said that the Democrats are worthless in Washington.

That said, we don’t know what will happen when this measure hits the Senate with its lovely rules and scant Democratic majority.

Iran protest at Ros-Lehtinen office

2007-12-13T20:24:00.000-08:00

Door’s still open for Draft Joe Garcia – Raul Martinez, too

2007-11-18T15:45:00.000-08:00

For those not on the email list of the Miami-Dade County Democratic Party, here’s what Joe Garcia said in response to the rush of interest in drafting him for Congress: “While I am still far from making a decision, I do want to say that your kindness and support are very humbling and much appreciated!”

Regarding the on-line mention of his name having appeared in the Cuban regime newspaper Granma, he said, “Let me be clear that this paper is the communist propaganda newspaper and it makes assertions about the community and Congresspeople that are slanderous. And, although I may completely disagree with the Republican congressional delegation, these assertions by Granma are patently false.”

Granma had written an article about U.S. news reports on the South Florida congressional races and used its normal “Mafia” terminology in referring to the South Florida Republicans in Congress, This caused a little eruption of injured pride among some Cuban Americans. Garcia -- of Cuban background himself -- called one who protested, and issued his statement to make sure his distance from Havana was clear.

Garcia’s email concluded with mention of the new web site draftgarcia.com, so I think it’s safe to say he’s not against running against Mario Diaz-Balart in District 25. In an interview Friday with Nicole Sandler on WINZ AM940, he said it was a matter of convincing his wife and young daughter that it was right for the family.

Expect a decision by the second half of January, he said.

Uh, Joe, isn’t that when we’ll be in the thick of the runup to the Jan. 29 Florida presidential primary? Well, at least people will be thinking about politics.

Meanwhile, it’s heartening to hear enthusiasm for the Garcia candidacy. Nicole Sandler said on WINZ, “How awesome it would be to have Joe Garcia in the House of Representatives.”

On Stuck on the Palmetto, blogger Rick said he liked the way Joe debates the hardliners on the radio and provided a link to one of the best examples. I’ll repeat it here, along with Rick’s advice to let the link download, and then advance the slider to about 19:00. It runs for about a half-hour until the host, Henry Gomez, is so thoroughly defeated that he mutes Joe Garcia.

Rick concluded: “Joe has said he would run if he was asked. Let’s ask. Let’s start tossing out relics of the past and start looking forward.”

Meanwhile, there’s a growing web site to draft Raul Martinez, former mayor of Hialeah, to run for Congressional District 21, the seat held by Lincoln Diaz-Balart. You can hear Joe Garcia encouraging Martinez to run, in that clip on WINZ. Again, a decision likely in January.

Garcia said he knows of a handful of possible candidates to run against Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in Congressional District 18, and he’s encouraging them to consider it strongly.

What’s needed is a super majority in Congress to end the war and deal with health care – all the reverses needed after two terms of George W. Bush – and we should not shrink from thinking landslide Democratic victory in this supposed Republican stronghold.

Sweet dreams, everyone – five Democrats in the U.S. House from Miami-Dade.

We’re not the only ones thinking about it. From farther afield, hope springs from the Swing State Project, with a post that went up on Friday noting the moves to draft Garcia and Martinez. Read through the long string of comments to see how other races in Florida would be affected, and how progressives around the country will be encouraged to help us sweep the Republicans out in South Florida.

In case you forget how to get the links to draft Garcia and Martinez, they are on the main page of Miami-Dade Dems, in the Links section down in the right-hand column. Don't just sit there -- go to the sites and sign up!

Draft Joe Garcia – great idea!

2007-11-15T20:53:00.000-08:00

It’s tempting to think that this is emerging now via the “Cuban newspapers” because the mails are so slow between Washington and Havana. Ha ha. Actually, the Cuban Interests section in Washington was hot on the Internet as soon as The Hill published this topic back on Oct. 18, and Havana learned in a microsecond that Joe Garcia was tempted enough to be saying to The Hill he’d run for Congress if the party asked him.

“Ouch!” They said there in Havana. (What’s Espanol for Ouch?) “Bad for us if Joe Garcia takes over in the House of Representatives from one of those shirt-tail relatives of our Leader.” So they probably said in Havana.

And then it took them almost a month to figure out how to say it in their press.

So here’s the way I imagine their triple-twist thinking went:

“The Diaz-Balart brothers and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen – don’t forget Mel Martinez! – are so useful to keeping us Communists in power that we can’t imagine life without their neo-con faces in the House and Senate.” [This occupied them for a week.]
“But if we came out and said we favor their being re-elected in 2008, the voters there would think it was a trick, and then Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez would run and be elected.” [This took two more weeks of deep thought.]
“So we’ll publish a subtle analysis of the Miami political situation in Granma, our party organ, and appear to approve the likely challenges by Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez against the Diaz-Balarts, whom we’ll label as ‘Batista supporters,’ and, Voila! The Diaz-Balarts and their gang will be elected again as the voters react against what we endorse.” [Another week passed working this up.]

Here in peaceful South Florida, we raise our heads from the newspapers and TV screens full of news of police and criminals killing each other, and realize slowly that Cuba is messing around in our politics. Damn! That’s what they’re trying, is it? We’ll show them! Let’s Draft Joe Garcia and show them they can’t discourage us with their triple-twist trick!

Well, this may – or may not – be what happened, but in any case it’s a good idea. The Florida Politics blog has a diary up since last night with that goal – Draft Joe Garcia – and it’s also up on DailyKos with a way to vote and say whether you’d be willing to donate $5 to get him to run. Check it out. All the links are therein.

Next step: the future. Time for change.

Good Ros-Lehtinen

2007-11-05T20:19:00.000-08:00

Contrary to popular belief, the point of this blog is not to make Ileana Ros-Lehtinen look bad. The point is to draw an accurate picture of Ileana and let her make herself look bad. That means from time to time, she might actually look good on certain issues:

Sen. Mel Martinez, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart say they're ready to vote to override the presidential veto. The Water Resources Development Act HR 1495 contains more than $2 billion for Everglades restoration efforts.

Martinez said "at the end of the day, as a Floridian, Everglades restoration is such an integral part of this WRDA bill we have to take the good with the bad."

Rep. Connie Mack, R-Cape Coral, assailed the presidential veto. "I'm confident that both the House and Senate can override his veto," Mack said. "And I hope we do so without delay."

Big tobacco helps keep her in Congress

2007-10-30T19:32:00.000-07:00

I almost missed this from the Saturday Miami Herald, which was not part of my hectic day at the Florida Democratic Party convention in Orlando. Thanks for the tip, my friend.

We're starting to see more clearly into the haze around our three Republican members of the U.S. House, and it's cigar smoke and money in that haze. It's why (they say) they vote against SCHIP. Golly, it's "an attack on the Cuban-American community," Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25) is quoted as saying in Beth Reinhard's weekly column in the Miami Herald.

Many posts back I was puzzled at a fragment I heard on the radio in which one of the D-B brothers said something about cigar-rollers being the victims of the SCHIP bill. How so? I wondered. Then I heard that the connection was that increased tobacco taxes would fund the extra outlay for children's health insurance, and our South Florida cigar-rollers would fall by the wayside.

Now the Herald column makes it even more clear: tobacco interests are big donors to Lincoln (FL-21) and Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18).

Well, let's try to develop that more in the coming days.

Will Raul run? And Joe? The Hill asks

2007-10-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

This article in The Hill, the congressional newspaper, lays out what may be our races for the U.S. House of Representatives in Miami-Dade County. Raul Martinez vs. Lincoln Diaz-Balart. Joe Garcia vs. Mario Diaz-Balart. Someone vs. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

Raul Martinez has been mentioned before as a potential candidate for Congress. Joe Garcia hasn’t. Now, as many of you know, Joe Garcia is my boss, and I could ask him what he intends. But I’m waiting for him to tell me, and what he told me was that The Hill article has it right.

And what does Joe say in The Hill article? He would run if the party asked him.

Raul says he will decide in the next few weeks, so that someone else who’s thinking about the challenge will have plenty of time.

Read it here and factor it into your plan for political donations for the ‘o8 campaign. And keep in mind that the national party sent a nice signal of future support when the DCCC took out ads on Spanish radio this week against the three Republican House members. That hasn't happened in many years.

And, oh yes, drop in to the DCCC website and see what they announced for their fund-raising accomplishments in the third quarter. "Record fund-raising" brought in $16 million in the third quarter and the DCCC has $28.3 million on hand. This was the third consecutive strong quarter.

No more free ride for Ros-Lehtinen at election time

2007-10-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

We’ve been demonstrating in the streets against them -- the three Republican members of Congress from Miami-Dade County. The Democrats up in Washington must have heard us: The Democratic Party is starting to run radio ads against the three for their support of President Bush’s veto of the SCHIP bill on children’s health insurance.

And true to their ghastly form, they trotted out all the tired adjectives and adverbs in response: “extreme left,” “pathetic partisan,” “distorting the truth,” “massively raising taxes.”

Don’t you wonder what they’d say if something really were wrong? Why don’t they say that about the disastrous war? The humongous deficit?

Hey, folks -- we’re talking about health insurance for children here. A ton of your Republican colleagues in the House voted for the bill that Bush vetoed. Are they all pathetic left-wingers too?

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced Tuesday it was buying ad time on Spanish-language radio to target Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18), Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21) and Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25).

"In their districts, Republicans are feeling the heat for supporting President Bush instead of the health care for Florida's kids," DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen said. "We will continue to go district by district to hold Republicans who continue to vote in lockstep with President Bush and against children accountable."

The name of the campaign is “Putting Children First." The initial ad buy is for one week.

The ad running against Lincoln Diaz-Balart says: "El Presidente Bush en contra de los niños estadounidenses. El Congresista Diaz-Balart tiene que tomar una decisión entre el seguro médico para 10 millones de niños o en continuar su apoyo a Presidente Bush, quien esta dispuesto a quitárselos. Dígale a Lincoln Diaz-Balart que escoja a nuestros niños."

English Translation: "President Bush versus America's kids. Congressman Diaz-Balart has a choice: health care for 10 million children or continue to stand with Bush to block it. Tell Lincoln Diaz-Balart to choose our kids."

Mario Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen have similar ads targeting them.

And of course, they’re running with a disclaimer: “The DCCC is responsible for the content of this advertising, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.”

Which brings up the fact that there are no Democratic announced candidates for the three seats. Former Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez has been in the news as a possible candidate against Lincoln Diaz-Balart, but hasn’t announced.

The election is still 13 months away. But the campaigns have started. Look out, you anti-kid Republicans! There’s a landslide coming!

The Miami Herald hopped on the story quickly -- a link to the Herald story.

Facebook group grows like topsy against Republican congressmen

2007-10-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

They called it "South Floridians for New Leadership" and got it started on Facebook last week, Oct. 4. Its targets are the three Republican members of Congress in Miami-Dade County, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18), Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21) and Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25). Within a few hours it had more Facebook signups than its targets did, and now it's around 150. If you're on FaceBook, sign up and join. Otherwise, sign up for Facebook, and then join. Here's the link to the site.

Thanks to the students at Florida International University for starting the group.

Ileana Loves Bush

2007-10-05T12:50:00.000-07:00

Pushing Rope notes the percentage of the time Florida Republicans vote in line with President Bush, one of the worst presidents in American history. Not surprisingly, Ileana loves Bush:

2007 - 65%
2006 - 85%

Our rep misses another chance to talk about the war

2007-09-11T09:48:00.001-07:00

Here is what Ileana Ros-Lehtinen wants us to think about her, and it's up on YouTube where her smile and bobbing head make the viewer sleepy.

It's possible to comment on YouTube postings with another video. So, dear friends out there with video cameras, do you have anything to say?

We could start out by noting that she didn't say anything about the war.

For the record, Ros-Lehtinen is mentioned herein

2007-09-08T20:21:00.001-07:00

This will take you over to the Miami-Dade Dems blog where our congresswoman from District 18 gets a brief mention. This blog is wondering why she apparently did not take the August trip to Budapest etc., where her Cuba policy gets more backing than at home. Has she lost her taste for joint politics with the Diaz-Balart brothers?

This blog also wonders when Ms. Ros-Lehtinen last held a town hall meeting to hear her constituents' concerns.

More on GAO vs. Ros-Lehtinen

2007-09-07T10:42:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the Herald's Naked Politics blog for posting this link to the Think Progress website where you can watch video of the congresswoman's rambling and the tidy riposte by Comptroller General David Walker, who declares Ros-Lehtinen guilty of a "false claim" and also notes the lack of military experience of our current president, vice president and secretary of defense.

Delicious.

Gotta read Army Times for coverage of Ros-Lehtinen

2007-09-07T10:33:00.000-07:00

The Miami Herald sees the polls that say the public doesn’t respect Congress, and apparently they stop covering our members of Congress. So thanks to a Yahoo! Alert, I got news of the Army Times story today reporting how South Florida’s own Ileana Ros-Lehtinen follows the military-industrial-complex script in questioning a witness.

“Lawmaker criticizes GAO over war expertise” was the headline on the story, and you can read the whole thing at this link.

At one point she said, “I’m not saying you’re bean counters.” Translation: You are bean counters. This is called a cheap rhetorical trick.

Problem for her was, the Government Accountability Office is supposed to look into student loan programs, not the war in Iraq.

So when witness David Walker, the U.S. Comptroller General, reported that the Army is “stressed, stretched, strained,” our representative in Congress said, “What in the world qualifies you to say that?”

Well, hasn’t everyone in the Pentagon been saying that? Where has she been? I guess our representative in Congress was over at the Leadership Institute learning the script, because soon she brought out one of the biggest neo-con talking points: The Good War.

“I just can’t imagine at one point during World War II, if we would have gotten a report from the General Accountability Office about whether we’re meeting the benchmarks on D-Day,” she was quoted as saying, and here she must have wandered off in her mind because the Army Times report says she then wondered about the effect on public morale.

She attacks the credibility of the GAO rather than the war it was tasked (by Congress) to examine, and a Democrat from Texas, Gene Green, reminded her of that and added, “You’re attacking the messenger instead of the message.”

Yes, she was over there learning the neo-con script, which of course features attacking the messenger right up with cheap rhetorical tricks and mentioning The Good War in the chapter about pulling the wool over the public’s eye.

Maybe it’s too hard for the Miami Herald to write about this stuff without laughing. Problem is, though, it’s too serious. Thank you, Army Times.

UPDATE: Was I too quick to nag the Herald on this topic? One hour and 17 minutes after I put up this post on Miami-Dade-Dems.blogspot.com the Herald's Naked Politics blog posted something, too -- noting that Ros-Lehtinen is catching heck from the blogs for her treatment of the GAO.

UPDATE II: My friend Dave Patlak invites all to assemble near Ros-Lehtinen's office next Tuesday, Sept. 11, and urge her to do the right thing when it comes time to vote on bringing the troops home. The time is 4-7 p.m. at 8660 W. Flagler St. (at 87th Avenue), Miami.

Ileana Hates Children and the Elderly

2007-08-15T18:05:00.000-07:00

Congress recently had a chance to help out children and seniors across the country. Guess which way the Florida delegation voted?

FL-1: Jeff Miller (R) - Nay
FL-2: Allen Boyd (D) - Yea
FL-3: Corrine Brown (D) - Yea
FL-4: Ander Crenshaw (R) - Did not vote
FL-5: Ginny Brown-Waite (R) - Nay
FL-6: Cliff Stearns (R) - Nay
FL-7: John Mica (R) - Nay
FL-8: Ric Keller (R) - Nay
FL-9: Gus Bilirakis (R) - Nay
FL-10: CW Bill Young (R) - Nay
FL-11: Kathy Castor (D) - Yea
FL-12: Adam Putnam (R) - Nay
FL-13: Vern Buchanan (R) - Nay
FL-14: Connie Mack (R) - Nay
FL-15: Dave Weldon (R) - Nay
FL-16: Tim Mahoney (D) - Yea
FL-17: Kendrick Meek (D) - Yea
FL-18: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R) - Nay
FL-19: Robert Wexler (D) - Yea
FL-20: Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D) - Yea
FL-21: Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R) - Nay
FL-22: Ron Klein (D) - Yea
FL-23: Alcee Hastings (D) - Yea
FL-24: Tom Feeney (R) - Nay
FL-25: Mario Diaz-Balart (R) - Nay

Let these people know what you think about them. Go to their page at the FPC Wiki to find their contact info.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Resources

2007-08-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

For those interested in learning more about Ileana, here are a list of relevant resources:

FPC Wiki Page

Official House Site

Official Campaign Site

Wikipedia Page

Congresspedia Page

WaPo Voting Database

FEC Report

On the Issues

Open Secrets.org

Project Vote Smart

dKospedia

Welcome

2007-08-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

This is a new local blog for Florida's eighteenth Congressional district and watching the actions of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican representative who misserves us in Washington.

If you are interested in posting at Eye on Ileana, drop me a line at quinnelk@hotmail.com with some idea of your Democratic and/or progressive credentials and I'll add you as a blogger.