Canvassing for Annette Taddeo on the Beach

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


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

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

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

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

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

Yes to torture, says Ros-Lehtinen

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.

Here’s the story on DailyKos with a link therein to the full vote tally. A puzzle to me was why Dennis Kucinich was on the Nay side with most Republicans. I looked at his campaign web site and U.S. House web site and saw no explanation. Kendrick Meek was on the Aye side, while Debbie Wasserman Schultz was not voting.