Elizabeth Crum

Since there is both state-level and national interest in Harry Reid’s falling poll numbers and much talked about 2010 election campaign, I think I’ll start doing occasional “round ups” of Reid related news and info here on E!! I’ll scan the news wires and blogs; if you see anything news and/or noteworthy, please send it to me at elizcrum at gmail dot com – or just drop a Comment with any pertinent links.

Here we go:

– Both Reid and Pelosi said last week that they would not commit to giving the public even a week to review the final text of the health-care bill, nor would they commit to waiting for the Central Budget Office (CBO) to review the bill and report the costs to the public.  I find their audacity – in the form of their continued lack of transparency and accountability to the American public – just appalling.  This by itself should be reason enough not to vote for Reid in 2010.

– Steve Benen at Washington Monthly provides some very self-revealing Reid quotes.  In a nutshell, Reid admits he is more bark than bite and doesn’t have much power over Senate votes.  Remind me again why Nevada “needs” Reid on the Hill?

– The LVRJ reports that membership in the controversial group “Republicans for Reid” is growing.  Though, apparently, some formerly named members are back-peddling and/or denying their support for Reid.

– The LAT reports that Department of the Interior – which in yet another irony of government nomenclature is in charge of everything Outdoors – secretary Ken Salazar has just designated 1,000 square miles of land in the Southwest U.S. “for two years of study and environmental reviews to determine where solar power stations should be built.” Says the LAT:

Salazar vowed to have 13 “commercial-scale” solar projects under construction by the end of 2010. He set a goal of producing a total of 100,000 megawatts of solar electricity.  Salazar said the federal Bureau of Land Management plans to spend $22 million conducting studies of 24 tracts in the 670,000 acres of property he set aside in Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

Expect Reid, aka Mr. Green Jeans, to take credit for all this in his 2010 run.  Expect his opponents to say that some lines on a BLM map and a $22M two year study is not the same as action.

– On Thursday, July 2, 2009, Harry Reid, along with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, held a press conference about a proposed high-speed train that would go from Las Vegas to Southern California.  Though there was no mention of the DesertXpress by name, Reid’s portion of the announcement featured a large map showing the DesertXpress route to Victorville.  The Las Vegas Sun story described Victorville as “the high-desert outpost 85 miles north of Los Angeles” and explained that DesertXpress has a “planned spur to Palmdale to connect with California’s planned north-south line connecting San Francisco, Los Angeles and Orange County.”  Public opinion varies re: Reid’s recent abandonment of the maglev train and sudden enthusiastic support of (prominent Republican) Sig Rogich’s DesertXpress.  Either way, I think most people who travel back and forth agree with Rick Moore’s recent post:  “I personally don’t care if the thing’s magnetic or runs on Froot Loops. I just want to see a train on that route.”

Update: If you want more background on how/why Reid left long-time Mistress Maglev in the lurch and took up with DesertX, read Victor Joeck’s post over at the Nevada Policy Research Institute blog.

– Everyone’s known for months that Rory Reid plans to run for governor of NV.  Though he has not officially announced, CQ reports that he has hired David Chase Cohen as his campaign manager.  Cohen worked on Obama’s presidential campaign as deputy national director of voter contact and then as manager of general election direct mail in 16 battleground states.  The race should be interesting.  Word on the street is that state Assembly speaker Barbara Buckley (D) will also make a run – and though (so far) only Joe Heck and Mike Montandon have announced for the R’s, there is another possible candidate who could break the whole thing wide open.  Especially because he says he would run as an Independent…

So reports S.A. Miller, in the WaTi.

(It’s official:  I will now start using the “2010 Elections” category I created the day after the election.)

Also said (as much as it disgusts me to repeat it here):

Mr. Reid now has more than $5 million on hand after starting the year with $3.3 million, said a Democratic official familiar with the Reid campaign’s first-quarter contribution reports, which are due Monday.

The official did not want to be identified discussing campaign-finance figures not yet made public.

The cash infusion will push his total contributions to $7.6 million for the 2010 re-election race, compared with the $9 million total he raised for the 2004 campaign. Since his 2004 election victory, the Reid campaign committee has given about $1 million to other Democratic candidates and party entities.

Mr. Reid scheduled a meeting with supporters and volunteers in Las Vegas this week to discuss the campaign, which is “already in full swing,” according to the Nevada state Democratic Party.

He plans to rally volunteers Tuesday at the Democratic Party Organizing Convention, in Clark County, Nevada. There, party officials say, Mr. Reid intends to retool the Obama grass-roots organization in the state to boost his re-election campaign.

“I think starting early is just being smart, not being cautious,” said Sam Lieberman, chairman of the Nevada state Democratic Party. “As much as Republicans would like to target the race, I don’t see a credible candidate emerging…”

(I told someone the other day that at least $20 million would be spent on the race between Reid and his challenger.  The person looked at me in disbelief.  Well, do ya’ believe me now…?)

From the other side:

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), says the party is courting a strong challenger, but he’s not saying who that is.

We wait.  Oh My Stars !! do we wait, and hope, and pray, for Someone who can beat Harry Reid, who so deserves to lose his seat on The Hill.  Which is why:

Republicans say Mr. Reid will need an early start and deep pockets this time around.

“On a range of issues, he is to the left of the state,” NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh said. Nevada voters “know Harry Reid. They are just saying they don’t support him.”

The four-term incumbent consistently scores less than a 50 percent job-approval rating in Nevada, which, though then-Sen. Barack Obama carried it in the 2008 presidential elections, is generally more conservative than the Democratic Party national agenda Mr. Reid champions on Capitol Hill.

“There are a lot of folks who are upset with all the spending and what’s going on in the federal government,” said John Ellison, a longtime member of the Elko County Board of Commissioners in northern Nevada.

If and when a viable conservative candidate is announced, I pledge my blood, sweat, and tears to his/her campaign.

Obama visits the White House while the echoes of McCain’s can’t-say-that (or That either) (and definitely not THAT!) protestulations and admonishments still ring in our heads. 

This makes it hard to understand why The Maverick has been so quiet on the snarkfest re: Palin.

Says a new blog pal:  Your silence, sir, is deafening!

Lisa Schiffren has a great post on The Corner.  She posits that McCain deliberately held back in the campaign.  Here’s part of it:

…some McCain aides had felt for a while that their candidate had had a deep reluctance to impede the election of the nation’s first African American president. That he had, perhaps, pulled punches and failed to strike as hard as necessary to win this thing, for that greater good. [This] was infuriating, since more depended on the election than changing the race dynamic — which, it must be said, has been changed for some time, and did not require this particular symbol to validate it. To be sure, McCain must have known that his campaign was losing — and did not want to swing blindly. And maybe he didn’t like being called “erratic,” “desperate”, and a “racist” every time the inconvenient facts of Barack Obama’s short past came up for discussion.

But all Republicans who watched their candidate these past few months, must have been struck, as I have been, by the sense that he was holding back. I wondered, too often, how it could be that no one at the campaign could frame and muster the arguments that were clear to all conservative writers here and at the other publications and blogs that share our view. When the arguments were made, they were too little, too late, and garbled enough to drain their force. The campaign had it’s (very serious) flaws, but it seems that the reluctance to aim and shoot cleanly, was due to the candidate’s internal conflict here.

I’m not sure what I think about this.  But I also often wondered why, with so many brilliant minds and writers at his disposal, McCain did not do a better job of articulating his message in speeches, interviews, debates and ads. 

How is it possible that McCain’s campaign could not manage to patch together a persuasive narrative?  Lisa’s post may explain at least some part of it.

I just love Mark Steyn.  Here he is on a reference to Charlie Gibson’s query re: Obama’s questionable online donations:

Re: Charlie Gibson Hits Obama On His Donors   [Mark Steyn]

Oh, please, Greg. That’s not a “hit”, that’s a Swedish massage by Princess Fluffy Bunny. That’s Charlie Gibson appearing to cover himself while letting Obama get away with mush. A (Palin-style?) hit would have taken the conversation on a quite different tack:

OBAMA: What I would simply point to is that the way we have raised this money has been by expanding the pool of small donors in this country in an unprecedented way.

INFORMED GIBSON QUESTION: What’s unprecedented is that, unlike John McCain, your website disabled the standard credit-card security system used by almost all reputable online retailers. Why did you do that? And, given that of the record $150 million you raised in September two-thirds was raised under this systemically corrupted Internet operation, isn’t it likely that a significant proportion of your half-hour infomercial was paid for by fraudulent donors? And, as to “expanding the pool of small donors in this country”, what about the way you’ve expanded the pool of donors in other countries who’ve been able to make illegal contributions to your campaign because you switched off the AVS security checks?

OBAMA: I mean, you’re looking the people who are giving $5, 10, 25. Ordinary folks who have gotten impassioned about this campaign in a way that is unprecedented. And that, really, is…

INFORMED GIBSON QUESTION: Also a lot of extraordinary folks have gotten impassioned about your campaign. You’ve received contributions from, among others, a Mr Saddam Hussein, Mr A Hitler and Mr K Marx? How do you propose to return those contributions given that all three “donors” are deceased?

OBAMA: Look, you know, 3.1 million donors would be a pretty hard thing for us to be able to process…

INFORMED GIBSON QUESTION:  Why? I mean, you’ve had no problem “processing” the money, have you? And, if you hadn’t monkeyed with the standard online retail data system, all you have to do is press a button and 3.1 million names and addresses pop right up. Ask Amazon. So why did you switch it off? And, if you yourself did not make that decision, who did?

The Senator terminates the interview to instruct an aide to have state and local officials look into this guy Gibson’s child-support payments, tax liens, etc. Later, it emerges that Charlie the Anchor is not even a state-licensed interviewer.

This morning I heard someone - I think it may be have been Megyn Kelly on Fox News – talking about people buying prepaid credit or debit cards (which have no name or address associated with them) and using those to donate as much as they wish, since Obama’s campaign turned off the credit card security measures on their website.

Who knows how many millions have been collected illegally and/or improperly?  The whole thing stinks, and even though Obama will not agree to release a list of his donors, or turn the online security stop gaps back on, not one mainstream/network media outlet (other than Fox) seems to give a damn. 

From Ken Timmerman at Newsmax:

As Barack Obama reaped a stunning $150 million in campaign donations in September, bringing his total to more than $600 million, new questions have arisen about the source of his amazing funding.

By Obama’s own admission, more than half of his contributions have come from small donors giving $200 or less. But unlike John McCain’s campaign, Obama won’t release the names of these donors.

A Newsmax canvass of disclosed Obama campaign donors shows worrisome anomalies, including outright violations of federal election laws. For example, Obama has numerous donors who have contributed well over the $4,600 federal election limit. Many of these donors have never been contacted by the Obama campaign to refund the excess amounts to them.

And more than 37,000 Obama donations appear to be conversions of foreign currency.

According to a Newsmax analysis of the Obama campaign data before the latest figures were released, potential foreign currency donations could range anywhere from $12.8 million to a stunning $63 million in all. With the addition of $150 million raised in September, this amount could be much more….

Hat Tip:  Andy McCarthy @ The Corner