Perhaps I don’t listen to the correct radio stations since I haven’t heard the spot in question, but Martin O’Malley got the ball rolling on nasty campaigning by producing a radio commercial tying Bob Ehrlich to Big Oil. (Maybe that ball O’Malley started rolling is a tar ball.)
Obviously O’Malley is playing to both his radical environmental base and upon the fears of a Deepwater Horizon-style catastrophe fouling the waters of Chesapeake Bay.
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A controversy over a statement Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Wargotz made to the Baltimore Jewish Times last October has grabbed some notice in a summer where voters are focused on the race for governor.
The Jewish Times remarks got the attention of fellow Examiner Scott Strzelczyk, who hammered Wargotz’s announced stance on immigration as “misleading” Republican voters. In his post Strzelczyk quoted Wargotz as telling the BJT reporter, “I was very disappointed that President Obama stated that he wouldn’t pay health care for illegal immigrants.”
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With a spirited battle brewing between Republican contenders Charles Lollar and 2008 candidate Collins Bailey for their party’s nomination, little notice has come to a challenger on Hoyer’s Democratic side.
Andrew Gall, should he be victorious over Hoyer in the primary and dispatch the survivor of the Lollar-Collins election, would become the youngest member of Congress. At 27, Gall’s entire life has been spent with Hoyer being in Congress representing Maryland’s Fifth Congressional District.
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Late yesterday afternoon Rasmussen released its latest polling of the Maryland governor’s race and the results should be encouraging to Bob Ehrlich.
After trailing in two previous polls Ehrlich has closed the gap and now sits in a virtual tie with incumbent Martin O’Malley 45 percent to 45 percent.
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Earlier this afternoon I stopped by the downtown Salisbury campaign office of First District Republican hopeful Rob Fisher and asked him a few questions. While I had some items on my agenda to ask, the 45 minute conversation with Fisher and his campaign manager Demetrios Karoutsos ranged over a broad palette of topics.
The modest facade of the building fit the low-key style of the candidate, who spoke about being a sixth-generation resident of the Eastern Shore and his family’s working class and agricultural background. Rather than being a stiffly formal q-and-a format, we worked in the information amongst a discussion of all the issues of making a run for Congress.
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Also, Fisher debuted his first television commercial today on various cable outlets. In speaking to them today, though, I noted that whoever does his website really needs to allow embed codes for videos!
While it’s not quite “one for you, nineteen for me” yet here in Maryland, one perception among business owners who remain in the state after the last four years of being battered by a sluggish economy and government less than friendly to their interests is that taxes are simply too high.
GOP frontrunner Bob Ehrlich already promised his effort to repeal the one penny per dollar increase in the state sales tax adopted in 2007 while Libertarian Susan Gaztanaga pledges to phase the sales tax out entirely over 8 years, but fellow Republican contestant Brian Murphy is going farther down the anti-tax road.
In a series of press releases this month, Murphy has challenged his two main opponents to refrain from raising taxes, vowed to cap property tax rate increases, and revealed a plan to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely. Taken at face value, one would be led to assume that Murphy would also have to make deep cuts in Maryland’s budget.
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In nearly four years as Governor, Martin O’Malley has presided over a near-doubling of Maryland’s unemployment rate. Certainly all the blame can’t be placed on his shoulders, but it is worth pondering why the state’s unemployment rate is higher than neighboring Virginia’s or 14 other states which don’t have the advantage of location near the seat of a burgeoning federal government.
As part of his response to both the issue and the attention paid to it by his three main opponents, Governor O’Malley signed an Executive Order last week to create a 26 member commission to study the issue and report back to the governor annually beginning in June 2011 – safely after both this year’s election and the 2011 General Assembly session.
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First of all I’d like to congratulate Julie Bykowicz and the Sun for writing an article on the Maryland GOP which omits most of the backhanded complements and snide remarks. But, as always, the party’s newfound success begs the question: does it have too many eggs in Bob Ehrlich’s basket?
There’s little doubt that, for better or worse, Bob Ehrlich has been cast as the party’s savior in 2010. Yes, there are some conservatives who don’t care for some of Ehrlich’s actions while he was governor and Bob has a game but underfunded challenger in political newcomer Brian Murphy – as Julie points out, former GOP chair Jim Pelura is in his corner.
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While it wasn’t a strictly party-line vote outside of the Maryland delegation, Frank Kratovil joined his other six Democratic colleagues from the Free State in voting for an amendment to the defense appropriations bill to overturn the Clinton-era ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy for gays in the military, with certain conditions.
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Playing on the emotion of the Gulf oil spill, the Maryland Republican Party blasted Governor O’Malley for raiding money from the state’s Oil Disaster Clean Up Fund. Out of $4.8 million in the ODCU fund, O’Malley sought to move $2.2 million before the General Assembly cut the transfer to an even $1 million.
In reading the release, one may think of a primordial black ooze seeping onto the beaches of Assateague and Ocean City when in reality we may see a few stray tar balls, according to a University of Maryland researcher.
Certainly it’s acceptable for the state to have money on hand for such a cleanup, particularly when nasty spills have occurred in the fairly recent past.
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The colorful Pat McDonough, who considered a run for Governor but instead will bid to retain his seat in the House of Delegates, is using his bully pulpit to blast a resolution to be introduced by Baltimore City Councilwoman Sharon Green Middleton.
McDonough’s staunch opposition to illegal immigration extends to a pledge to introduce a bill similar to Arizona’s SB1070 if re-elected to the General Assembly next year. In contrast, Middleton’s proposal codifies the City of Baltimore’s opposition to the law.
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As I detailed yesterday, Brian Murphy wasn’t pleased with the Maryland GOP taking sides in the race for Governor. Last week it was revealed that the leadership of the Maryland Republican Party that represents the party at the national level allowed the waiver of the Republican National Committee’s Rule 11, giving consent to the Republican National Commitee for providing assistance to Murphy’s opponent Bob Ehrlich as well as First District Congressional candidate Andy Harris prior to the September 14 primary.
Today I got a copy of Murphy’s letter to Audrey Scott, Chair of the MDGOP, and one of the more scathing paragraphs is worth passing along.
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