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A Mid-Missouri tipster tells Fired Up! that the McCain campaign is up with a round of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) polling calls to voters in the state.  IVR uses automated voice prompts and asks respondents to reply to questions with a press of the telephone keys.

Yesterday's McCain IVR calls asked a battery of five questions (as remembered and relayed):

1. Do you consider yourself a Republican, Democrat or Independent?

2. If the Presidential election were held today, would you vote for John McCain, Barack Obama or other?

3. Have things that you have recent seen, heard or read made you more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain?

4. Have things that you have recent seen, heard or read made you more likely or less likely to vote for Barack Obama?

5. Which candidate has stood up to President Bush on the issue of global climate change by promoting new policies to deal with that issue: John McCain or Barack Obama?

Hank Waters today makes the increasingly common mistake of suggesting "accurate" ballot summary language is synonymous with "ballot summary language that portrays the initiative in the way I'd portray it."

Difficult as this may be to believe, nowhere do the statutes require that ballot summary language be crafted to reflect Hank Waters' eccentric worldview.

Over the last four years, there is a list longer than your arm of ethical improprieties in Jefferson City and across Missouri which Peter Kinder saw fit to ignore completely.  Kinder never, not once, piped up to talk about ethics in government during any of the following ethical lapses and scandals...

The fee office scandal

The Jewell Patek-Andy Blunt favored lobbyist strongarm

The Fred Ferrell sexual harassment scandal

The Blunt brothers' Show Me Ethanol escapade

The Nathan Cooper illegal immigration saga

The Carl Bearden lobbyist-and-legislator-at-the-same-time trick  

Catherine Hanaway's Sweetheart Deal for Nathan Cooper

The Scott Eckersley firing

The Governor's Sunshine Law violation and cover-up

The Randa Hayes fiasco

Rudy Farber's $50K Purchase of a Transportation Commission seat 

Mike Kehoe's illegal in-kind bus donation to the Matt Blunt campaign

Yet now, all of the sudden, Kinder is drawing a bead on Rod Jetton, rolling out an ethics package clearly aimed at the Speaker.  I wonder if Kinder knows something the rest of us don't that he's trying to get out in front of by throwing Jetton under the bus?

This evening, bestselling author and nationally syndicated columnist David Sirota will visit St. Louis to discuss his newest book, THE UPRISING: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street & Washington.   The event will be held at 7pm at Left Bank Books (399 N. Euclid, St. Louis, MO.) at Euclid and McPherson in the Central West End.

Sirota, a longtime Congressional committee advisor to Wisconsin Democrat Dave Obey and consultant to Dem Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, has a new book that looks at populism on both the Right and Left and how it is shaping American politics. 

David Sirota will join State Senator Jeff Smith at a reading, Q&A and book signing sponsored by Fired Up Missouri, the Young Democrats, the Midwest Coalition for Responsible Investment and the Missouri Progressive Vote Coalition.  

Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder recently addressed the meeting of a Missouri lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police.  When Kinder finished his remarks and opened the floor to questions from those assembled, one officer asked Kinder about the series of events in his office regarding the charging of his chief of staff, Eric Feltner, for furnishing pornography to a minor.

The question set off a rambling seven-plus minute response --the length of which exceeded his initial remarks.  Though audio of the entire event is available here, below is a transcript of a particularly compelling portion.  In the excerpt, Kinder seeks to enlighten his audience about the "nature" of the behaviors undertaken by people like his former chief of staff:

It is in the nature of these charges and these people who engage in that kind of behavior, I will further add, that it is located in a very dark and compartmentalized part of their life.  I consulted with a prosecuting attorney who's known to many of you with a statewide reputation who has prosecuted some of these cases and he said "Governor, we have priests, we have captains of industry, we have respected professionals --lawyers, doctors and CPAs-- we have ex-cops who we have charged and in most cases you will find that they have displayed wonderful judgment, excellent judgment, were reliable employees in every other facet of their work life and their daily lives."  And they've got this little dark thing going over here that no one else knows about, including in this case his wife.  And it's in the nature of these things that they are unknown to the rest of us.  So that's what I'm dealing with there, and it's in the courts and I await resolution to the case. 

Yesterday Matt Blunt signed into law a bill intended to toughen some sex offender laws.  Among the changes to statute was one that would change a certain offense from a Class C misdemeanor to a Class A misdemeanor.  As summarized by Senate research, the bill changes RSMo. 573.040 thusly:

Under this act, attempting to furnish pornographic materials to a minor is a Class A misdemeanor in the same manner as actually furnishing the materials to a minor. It is not an affirmative defense to prosecution that the person being furnished the pornographic material is a peace officer masquerading as a minor.

This is interesting, since furnishing pornographic materials to a minor is precisely the charge faced by former Peter Kinder and Kenny Hulshof aide Eric Feltner.   Story Continued »

Former Missouri House Speaker and PSC Commissioner Steve Gaw is up with the first ad on the Democratic side of the 9th district primary.

Check it out.

 

Rarely do we respond to a comment on the site, but one recent comment deserves a front page reply.  Specifically, a commenter with the handle 'blessedcurse' fired off a comment in response to a recent post about MOHELA's recent failure to make another scheduled Lewis & Clark payment.  'blessedcurse' wrote:

MOHELA's woes have very little to do with Lewis & Clark and are mostly due to the colapse [sic] of the auction rate bond market and changes in federal regulations governing student loan lenders...

In other words, 'blessedcurse' makes the case that Matt Blunt's sale of MOHELA can't be blamed for any the loan agency's current woes because those difficulties are attributable to fluctuations in the market and interceding federal action.  Implicit in the argument is the idea that the events 'blessedcurse' cites were either unforeseen or unforeseeable, leaving the proponents of the sale of MOHELA's assets free from any responsibility.

Of course, the trouble with this line of reasoning is that all of the "unforeseeable" occurrences cited by 'blessedcurse' were the very same reasons pointed to by opponents of the MOHELA sale while it was being discussed in the legislature as reasons why the asset sale was a terrible idea.

LOCAL VOTER PROTECTION ADVOCATE - KANSAS CITY, MO

Advancement Project (DC), a non-partisan national civil rights and racial justice action
organization with a Voter Protection Program in Missouri, seeks a temporary, part-time
Local Voter Protection Advocate for Kansas City, Missouri. The Local Voter Protection
Advocate will join our 2008 Voter Protection Program, which is part of our Power and
Democracy Initiative. Through non-partisan voter protection work we will focus on
sustained pre-election activities in order to permanently break down barriers to voting in
the 2008 election cycle and beyond. The Kansas City Local Voter Protection Advocate
("LVPA") will be Advancement Project's on-the-ground eyes and ears in the Kansas City
area, including Kansas City and Jackson County, Missouri.  Story Continued »

You probably knew things were bad for the Republican Party as an organization and as a brand, but you probably don't know how bad until you read about the party's future from some GOP blogger called Middlebury Republican.  Middlebury Republican sees some GOP heroes out there on the scene:

One thing that reading Grand New Party did make me think about is the future of both American political parties. Despite the conventional wisdom that the Republican Party is in trouble, one thing that we do that I believe the Democrats are lacking right now is a leadership foundation upon which we can build for the future. It is this foundation, I believe, that is going to lead to a Republican resurgence with the next decade. ...

But it is in gubernatorial politics that Republicans future may lay....  Governor Matt Blunt of Missouri is a decorated Navy veteran and highly successful governor who has earned the nation's highest rating from the libertarian Cato Institute, and is well regarded for his successful work to reduce the size of the state's government...

To have these...young leaders, each moving forward with a clear united conservative vision for the country, is something that happens once in a generation. And for all the stories that are written about the Democratic Party's young power, they don't have this. In today's closely divided political environment, that may be all the difference.

This guy must've gleaned everything he knows about our illustrious governor from the eight-minute infomerical on Matty's repurposed campaign website.

Apparently, the inability to "string a sentence together" makes one "a maverick."

Who knew?