Oregon's senior U.S. Senator, Ron Wyden, made his endorsement official Saturday when he tapped fellow Democrat Jeff Merkley in the race for the Senate seat currently held by Republican Gordon Smith.
Wyden -- who has also benefited politically from his bipartisan friendship with Smith -- told the crowd, "I will not be criticizing (Smith's) service as a senator, or anybody else's.
"But just as Gordon supported my opponents in 1998 and 2004 because those gentlemen shared Gordon Smith's Republican values," added Wyden, "it is important I support the person who supports my progressive values, and that person is Jeff Merkley."
Merkley called Wyden a "huge asset" to his campaign and said the senator has promised to help in "multiple ways." Merkley aides say they expect help with fundraising and with additional appearances at campaign events. They also didn't rule out using Wyden in campaign advertising.
Oregonian reporter Jeff Mpaes also points out that Democrat Bill Bradbury received this same kind of endorsement from Wyden in his unsuccesful 2002 campaign to unseat Smith.
Former Oregon Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Steve Novick had a special request in the post-primary letter below.
Thank you so much for making one hell of a campaign possible. We won well over 200,000 votes. We proved there is a constituency for courage, a constituency for truth, and a constituency for laughter. We ran a campaign based on the assumption that people are ready to do what it takes to make America America again—and we were right.
...We came within three percentage points of winning, even though our opponent had vastly more money, based on the support of the national power structure. Jeff Mapes of the Oregonian wrote Wednesday that "Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, hates to lose—and he went to great efforts to make sure his guy, House Speaker Jeff Merkley, made it across the finish line."
...I thought we could win despite our opponent’s establishment support. We knew what we were up against, but I thought that if we all worked our tails off, put our hearts and souls into this, we could make it happen in spite of the disparity in armaments. Based on that belief, I asked for your energy, your time and your money, and you gave generously of all three — and we lost.
But I hope, as I told our crowd on Election Night, that you won’t think investing in this campaign was a waste.
...I am looking forward to talking to and seeing you in the future without asking you for money. But since that has become such a habit, there are two causes I would like to draw to your attention. Jeff Merkley did a great job winning back the State House for us; he was a darned good Speaker, delivering solid victories on issues ranging from payday loan sharking to labor law reform; and he will be a heck of a United States Senator. But we need to help him get there. I encourage all of you to donate to Jeff’s campaign. Yes, the DSCC helped him a lot, and will continue to do so—but they can’t do it all!
Second, in the course of this campaign, since I had no time for anything else, I had to leave my post as a board member of the Oregon Environmental Council, dedicated to fighting global warming and toxic pollutants in the air, water and even consumer products. I feel guilty about that, so if you feel like helping a terrific environmental organization, please make it the OEC.
But again—I’m looking forward to keeping in touch without asking you for money. I am so grateful for all the friends, old and new, who have helped in this campaign. I started out with a lot of friends, and the number has grown dramatically. I truly feel, and said on Election Night, that in the immortal words of Sister Sledge (subsequently adopted as the theme song of the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates): "We are Fam-i-lee!"
I'm in Oregon now, but I grew up in Montana. And Butte's Evel Knievel was a local hero. Evel died last year on Nov. 30. This past Saturday, May 24, his son Robbie was back on the bike.
Good job, Robbie! That's a tough way to make a living. Let's just say Cap'n Robbie's lucky that he's not riding one of those rigid old Harley street bikes his dad used to ride.
Evel sold out Portland's Memorial Coliseum on March 31, 1973.
Even if you set aside Clinton's RFK remarks, her historical analogies were absurd. Bill Clinton had the nomination wrapped up long before June of 1992, and it wasn't a secret. Here's Tim Russert on April 8, 1992:
Even Bill Clinton seems to disagree with his wife's analysis, in which she claims her husband fought through June for the '92 nomination:
"On April 7, we also won in Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. On April 9, Paul Tsongas announced that he would not reenter the race. The fight for the nomination was effectively over." --Bill Clinton from his memoir My Life.
Seems reality is, at last, closing in on the Clinton campaign.
Dick Martin, a veteran nightclub comic who with his partner, Dan Rowan, turned a midseason replacement slot at NBC in 1968 into a hit that redefined what could be done on television, died Saturday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 86 and lived in Malibu, Calif.
... The show, partly the brainchild of the producer George Schlatter (who would later get into a court battle with Mr. Rowan and Mr. Martin over the rights to it), pushed the envelope of topical humor, something "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" had begun doing the year before. "Laugh-In," though, was more interested in creating a frenetic pace than in creating controversy. To do so it relied on a cast of young, largely unknown comics like Judy Carne, Henry Gibson and Jo Anne Worley — a risky approach that one writer who logged time on the series, Lorne Michaels, would use when he shook up television anew in 1975 with "Saturday Night Live." And, just as with the "S.N.L." cast, a few "Laugh-In" alumni went on to impressive careers, most notably Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin.
"Laugh-In" stayed No. 1 through its first two seasons, garnering 11 Emmy nominations in 1969 for Season 2. The novelty, though, began to wear off, and by 1973 it was no longer on the air.
Oregon's got a notoriously active political blogosphere, but Minnesota's got a "mob," and some of it's Republican goons have Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken in their sights.
On a laptop at a kitchen table in this cheery Twin Cities suburb, headlines ripping into Al Franken, the satirist whose campaign for the United States Senate is seen as one of the most competitive in the nation, are written up day after day for “Minnesota Democrats Exposed,” a political blog created by a former Republican Party researcher.
...What Mr. Franken’s circumstance has proven, though, is that no Minnesota candidate this fall can afford to ignore Mr. Brodkorb, or the rest of the state’s vast universe of Web sites devoted to local politics. Experts here say the abundance of these blogs is a mirror onto this state, its partisan split in recent years and its long tradition of intense political activism (by some measures, voter turnout here was the highest in the nation in 2006). That said, they are anything but Minnesota Nice.
Eric Pusey’s liberal-leaning "mnblue," for instance, tracks Mr. Coleman’s moves on a "Weasel Meter." Some blog live from the smallest of political meetings and the forgotten campaign stops. Enough of these writers have cropped up here now to make a Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, better known here as the Mob. "We’ve kind of got a center of gravity going on up here," said Mitch Berg, one in a group that started a "True North" Web site in 2007.
UPDATED: As noted in the comments below, the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is a group that includes all sorts of bloggers, not just political bloggers or Republicans.
Looks like I'm gonna be able to get some mileage out of this cartoon -- about Rep. David Wu from Oregon's 1st Congressional District -- every two years or so.
Mr. McCain repudiated the Rev. John C. Hagee, a televangelist, after a watchdog group released a recording of a sermon in which Mr. Hagee said Hitler and the Holocaust had been part of God’s plan to chase the Jews from Europe and drive them to Palestine.
Later in the day, he also rejected the endorsement of the Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio, whose anti-Muslim sermons were broadcast on ABC’s "Good Morning America" on Thursday.
Controversy has dogged the Hagee endorsement since Mr. McCain announced it at a February news conference, and just last week Mr. Hagee issued a letter expressing regret for "any comments that Catholics have found hurtful."
So McCain decides to cut ties only when Hagee is caught saying God wanted six million Jews efficiently murdered, but this influential conservative preacher has a long history of revealing kooky end-of-times yearnings most Americans would find abhorrent. For example, check out this short video featuring some of Hagee's follower/donors:
Yet McCain appeared on stage to accept the TV evangelist's endorsement, knowing full well of the, eh hmmm, pastor's extreme beliefs.
McCain's delay in doing the right thing seems similar to an episode in 2000 when he adamantly refused for three days to apologize for saying "I hate gooks."
McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent five years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, was questioned about the language because of a story last month in the Nation magazine reporting his continued use of the slur.
Since then, reports of McCain's language have been circulating on Internet chat sites and e-mails among Asian Americans, many of whom find the the term offensive and inappropriate for an elected official.
...McCain made no apologies yesterday.
"I was referring to my prison guards," McCain said, "and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends."
...The horrors of the past cannot be an excuse for hurting people in the present, said Guy Aoki, president of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, an anti-defamation group.
"If Sen. McCain had been captured by Nigerians, could he call those people `niggers' and think he wasn't going to offend everyone who is black?" Akoi asked. "We can all feel for what he went through, but if that's his level of sensitivity, I'm very disappointed."
So it's not the first time Grandpa Straight Talk has steered his Express off the tracks and into the ditch. We've seen that kind of leadership in the White House long enough.
