Well, Hellooo World! Finally I've finally got the power again, after losing it on Saturday night in the Treepocalypse that hit Greenwich. Here's a few pics from my neighborhood.
These poor folks lost the back of their house - the little white bit sticking out is a mattress - luckily no one was in the bed at the time.
On the same street:
This poor person got a tree through the roof. Similar scenes of devastation all around town. Schools will be closed again tomorrow, as many roads are still blocked and most schools continue without power. Governor Rell visited town today and declared a State of Emergency.
Meanwhile, the IDES OF MARCH have come:
and it's time to get out your popcorn, because so have the crazies.Oh Lord, where to start? How about JD Hayworth, the GOP challenger to John McCain in AZ, who made the leap from Gay Marriage to to Marrying Mr. Ed.
The mind boggles. Really.
Then there's good old Michelle Bachmann, who called President Obama the first "Post-American" president and told her followers:
"Passing the health care bill and moving it to the president's desk in the same manner used by the last administration to pass tax breaks "sounds more like a Chavez tactic in Venezuela"
Um, what? So it's for Republicans to use reconciliation to give tax cuts, but it's an UNAMERICAN EVIL SOCIALIST PLOT for the Democrats to use reconciliation to pass healthcare reform because the Republicans are being completely obstructionist. I feel like I'm reading Orwell's Animal Farm. Bush does: Gooood! Obama Does: Baaaad! I reread Orwell's essay Politics and the English language recently after I'd read a piece by Frank Lutz had written for GOP candidates on the language to use when speaking about healthcare reform. Lutz is the king of massacring the English language with Orwellian political speak. But the dude is scarily effective.
Oh, and just in case we didn't have enough to keep us amused in our CT SEN race, with Linda McMahon and her yacht the "Sexy Bitch" guess who is back and has just entered the race? Our good friend Lee Whitnum! I'm not sure if she's actually filed papers, but according to her website, she announced her candidacy on March 10th. Just in case you've forgotten about Lee, here's an old post with links that sum up our history.
"The Ides of March have come..." "Ay, but they are not gone"
Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy called Lee Whitnum "anti-Semitic" at a press conference yesterday afternoon in Stamford. Mayor Malloy was joined at the press conference by Rabbi Marc Disick of Temple Sinai in Stamford, Rabbi David Walk of Congregation Agudafdath Sholom in Stamford and Rabbi Eric Eisenkramer of Temple Shearith Israel in Ridgefield.
According to the Greenwich Post article written by Ken Borsuk, Mayor Malloy stated:
"I've observed this campaign and I've been bothered by this campaign and the things that have been said. I thought for a moment that ignoring this woman and some of the most outlandish thing she's said would be the best policy to not give it more credence but when I saw her statement in the Advocate I found it to be most offensive and taking a full swing at those of us in this country who support the state of Israel...To claim that Israel is somehow to blame for 9-11 is deeply disturbing and quite frankly belies a disturbed sense that Ms. Whitnum has. I also have come to the conclusion that her statements are unfortunately anti-Semitic in their nature...She has crossed the line and is clearly anti-Semitic."
Also disturbing is the silence from Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate, neither of which carried Mayor Malloy's remarks in their paper or electronic editions, nor even acknowledged that the press conference took place. Let's keep in mind that today's editions of both papers would have carried a column by progressive Democrat Sarah Littman, had she not been fired two weeks ago for calling out Lee Whitnum for her bizarre positions and her anti-Semitism in her column. As many know, GT/Advocate publisher John Dunster seized on a pretext to fire her right after that column appeared. Yet when Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy also forcefully denounces Whitnum for her anti-Semitism, Dunster's papers remain silent. Is there any doubt that GT/Advocate have been sanitizing their coverage of Whitnum, going as far as to pretend that a major statement by Stamford's mayor denouncing her never took place? Ignoring the presence of several prominent rabbis in this congressional district at that press conference?
To call GT/Advocate's sanitized coverage of Lee Whitnum disgusting and unethical somehow just doesn't come close to expressing the revulsion I feel for their commission of unethical journalism and convenient ommission of the facts from their reporting. Let's recall that GT/ADvocate had no problems insinuating that Ned Lamont was anti-Semitic, carrying a front-page article about anti-Semitic postings regarding Joe Lieberman on MoveOn.org's website in 2006, and suggesting that the Lamont camapign was somehow inmplicated. They even highlighted the article in dark gray.
With the acquisition of MediaNews Group's minority stake in a joint venture, George Irish, CEO of Hearst Newspapers, is now directly responsible for Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate. Let's hope that he is equally dismayed by the low state of journalism at those papers. He works in Manhattan, so let's hope that he takes a special interest in those two papers that are just a few minutes' drive from his office.
(Bumped this up ... Polls close in less than four hours... be sure to vote ... and let us know what's going on in your district. - promoted by CaptCT)
(Jim, Mary, Emma, and Linley Himes voting this morning.)
It's finally here - primary day.
Polls have been open for just about two hours now. Here's Emma and Linley helping Jim fill out his ballot early this morning (according to the workers at their polling place, at about 6:20am Mary and Jim were the 7th and 8th people to vote):
And here's an iPhone pic of the ballot that a supporter sent in about 20 minutes ago - filling out a bubble may not be as satisfying as pulling the old levers, but today, it seems pretty satisfying:
More photos at Flickr. The Greenwich Time reports this morning that "light turnout" is expected throughout the district - which mean every single vote will count! Polls are open until 8PM tonight. To find your polling place and remind your friends to vote, check out our primary info center page at: www.himesforcongress.com/primary
Is Lee Whitnum running for Congress to shill her book Hedge Fund Mistress? In 2004 she exploited a relationship with John Kerry for her own personal gain and until recently had references to Kerry in the meta tags on her campaign web site. Those have now been replaced on the Hedge Fund Mistress site with Jim Himes and Chris Shays.
Greenwich Post (the only non-MediaNews Group publication in the town of Greenwich and Stamford) came out with an article whacking Greenwich Time for their firing of popular progressive columnist Sarah Littman last week.
The article states:
Greenwich progressives are demanding Sarah Littman get her job back after she was abruptly terminated last week as a Greenwich Time columnist.
Ms. Littman, a children's book author who had been contributing to the paper since 2001, had been a regular columnist since 2003. Readers of her column said her departure came as a shock. She said she was fired after she wrote a column sharply criticizing congressional candidate and Greenwich resident Lee Whitnum.
Rather than the bogus reason of comprising the newspaper's integrity, Littman said:
...she feels the reason for her dismissal goes beyond this particular column. She said people at the paper knew long before she wrote the column that she had held the event for Mr. Himes and that it reflected her desire to remove her point of view from the paper.
Sounds like a set-up to me. And according to Sarah:
From the recent News 12 debate held in Norwalk between Jim Himes and the always provocative Lee Whitnum. Mort Sahl's famous quip "Is there anyone here I haven't offended yet?" comes to mind.
"Give The Taliban Back Their Country" / "We Know The Reason Why We Had 9/11"
"I think it was a long time coming," says Littman, an author of books for teens. "The atmosphere of the paper has changed since it was taken over by MediaNews. It's more conservative." The 40-paper chain operates Greenwich Time and its sister paper the Stamford Advocate. (More disclosure: When Littman started writing for Greenwich Time in 2002, it was owned by the Tribune Company, which owns the Weekly.) Though she didn't exclusively write about politics in her bi-weekly bit of space, Littman was the only dyed-in-the-wool liberal on the op-ed page.
Littman says she doesn't see how editors "could have not known" that last September she hosted a "friend-raiser," where Himes introduced himself to potential supporters. She says she's given about $700 to Himes in donations and the cost of the event. "It's something that Lee Whitnum brought up to them," she says. It was mentioned in an email exchange between Littman and political reporter Neil Vigdor. And bad blood between Whitnum and bloggers is no secret; she's mentioned Littman, the event and her position at Greenwich Time on her campaign website. Littman believes the paper may have been giving her enough rope to hang herself when they published the column without inserting or asking for a disclosure note.
"It may have been naive of me not to put something in [the column] that I gave to the Himes campaign," she contends. "But the point was not 'vote for Jim Himes,' it was to point out the dangerous ideas [Whitnum] was spreading."
News 12 moderator Tom Appleby, center, prepares for a debate between 4th District congressional rivals Jim Himes, left, and Lee Whitnum, at the News 12 studio in Norwalk yesterday. (Bob Luckey Jr./Greenwich Time photo)
Channel 12 hosted a debate yesterday between Jim Himes and Lee Whitnum, and this quote from Whitnum pretty much sums up the event:
"I say we give the Taliban back their country."
- Lee Whitnum
While in power, the Taliban implemented the "strictest interpretation of Sharia law ever seen in the Muslim world,"[6] and became notorious internationally for their treatment of women. ... Women seeking an education were forced to attend underground schools, where they and their teachers risked execution if caught.[7] They were not allowed to be treated by male doctors unless accompanied by a male family member or husband chaperone, which led to illnesses remaining untreated. They faced public flogging in the street,[9] and both men and women faced public execution for violations of the Taliban's laws.
Whitnum, a substitute teacher, fails to see the need for educating Afghan women, something that international groups believe is crucial to improving Afghan society.
Whitnum was 20 minutes late for the taping, which she later blamed on Interstate 95 traffic.
The Greenwich Time's Neil Vigdor called Whitnum a "grass-roots" candidate. Shouldn't it be "grass-root," singular? "Grass-roots" implies the candidate has a base of Democratic supporters -- a stretch considering she didn't receive a single vote at the state convention.
Also, Vigdor couldn't find much else to write about besides Afghanistan and Israel.
(Outrageous nonsense from a crappiest newspaper in the state. - promoted by ctblogger)
Progresssive columnist Sarah Littman, whose essays are carried in Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate, was fired by publisher John Dunster on Thursday for having written a column critical of Loony Lee Whitnum while having held a "meet-and-greet" for Jim Himes last year. According to Sarah, Dunster said that having criticized Loony Lee while having supported Jim Himes campaign "compromised the integrity of the paper".
What's the truth? This is a right-wing rag that has been shilling for Whitnum for months. In virtually every article about Jim Himes, Greenwich Time's political reporter Neil Vigdor has been boosting Whitnum's candidacy, covering up her whacky utterances and essentially portraying Whitnum as a courageous fighter against the Democratic machine.
But this appears to have been nothing but a pretext. In an appearance before the Greenwich Retired Men's Association about a month ago broadcast on Greenwich Community Television channel 79, Dunster, responding to a complaint about "liberal" Sarah Littman, admitted that he personally "on the conservative side of the spectrum", and said that he was going to make changes in the editorial page.
It is absurd for Dunster to have fired Littman, because she's not a reporter who is required to be objective, but in fact is paid to give her subjective take on political and social issues. Does anyone believe that David Brooks, George F. Will, or the editors of the Wall Street Journal don't contribute to political candidates? Of course they do. And George F. Will has actually served as an advisor to Republican candidates in the past.
Lee Whitnum didn't file her 2Q financial report with the FEC, and the FEC isn't happy about it. The agency issued her a "Notice of Failure to File."
Violations like this give the FEC the right to fine Whitnum's campaign:
Federal law gives the FEC broad authority to initiate enforcement actions, and the FEC has implemented an administrative fine program with provisions for assessing monetary penalties.
When Republican Congressional candidate Sean Sullivan failed to file, it made headlines, and included this comment from the DCCC:
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called Sullivan's lapse a flagrant violation of federal election law.
UPDATE Both CTBob and Sue add to the scoopfest -- highlighting Lee's wacky foreign policy statements about Afghanistan -- which the CT Post seemed to just gloss over, the same way it ignores her lack of qualifications:
The Editorial Board at the CT Post had a sit-down with Lee Whitnum on Monday. Oddly, the article made no mention of Whitnum's experience or qualifications -- or lack thereof -- but just printed a bunch of Whitnum's comments (no matter how little sense some of them made). The most revealing bit of information about her candidacy came in the last paragraph:
Whitnum said she hasn't raised any money for her run against outsiders[?] and has put in about $9,500 of her own, which she hopes to eventually recoup somehow. She said she knows she is waging an uphill fight. "I'm doing the best I can with what I have," she said.
Emphasis and question mark added.
Not sure who Whitnum meant by these "outsiders" or from whom she expects to be reimbursed for campaign expenditures.
Fortunately, there's Google News, where I saw a link to Bob Gardener's diary at Weston Policy, which gives a much better look at Whitnum's candidacy:
Her qualifications seem to be that she ... hates immigrants - both legal and illegal, wrote two novels and published them herself (with sales allegedly hovering around zero), had a defense software engineering career but is now a substitute teacher in Stamford, has no discernible town, county or district political experience, has appeared at only two Democratic Town Committees meetings in Fairfield county, had a self-publicized romance with John Kerry (before he married Teresa), and somehow got the required number of signatures on petitions to earn a line on the ballot for the Democratic primary on August 12th.
Democratic Congressional candidate Lee Whitnum called Monday for extensive crackdowns on job-specific and illegal immigration to open up jobs for more Americans.
Whitnum, who gathered enough signatures in the 4th Congressional District to force a primary against fellow Greenwich resident Jim Himes Aug. 12, called for two dedicated police officers in every community to enforce immigration regulations, such as overstayed visas and illegal entrants.
"I went to bed a congressional candidate and I woke up to find myself in Jim Himes' version of Nazi, Germany; the powerful Himes"
Was the tasteless Congressional candidate demonstrating her "command of geography" (the city of "Nazi" in Germany)? Or is this just another example of bad punctuation for the congressional candidate?
"As I read the book, I noticed many typos, missing words, grammatical errors, etc" -Review of Hedge Fund Mistress authored by Lee Whitnum (Roystone)as posted on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Hedge-Fu...
"You came here, you made some money, now please go home" Lee Whitnum Congressional Candidate June 29, 2008 Stamford Times.
Whitnum's mantra in parody of Julius Caesar is more like "Caesar Salad".
Whitnum stated to The Stamford Times that her "career in the software application field dried up in 1999 because of more foreign workers coming to the United States under special visas. That was 1999. One would think that a person with the "intellectual resources" to graduate Harvard would be able to be retrained in some other occupation, if she was ambitious. What has Whitnum been doing to change her situation in the past 9 years? For example Ms. Whitnum could have gone back to school to get an MBA, or gone to law school. She had the opportunity but did not take it. What vision has Whitnum had and what has Whitnum done to make the vision a reality by action on a consistent basis? While not knocking the honorable profession of teaching, she's doing so part time and with a little effort could very easily have transferred her 1999 skills into something more financially productive as a United States taxpayer.
Ms. Whitnum doesn't seem to get the global world reality. Is it passing her by? We are now living in a world of interdependent communities. In 1982, a little more than a quarter of a century ago, at or about the time Ms. Whitnum graduated college one of the top bestsellers was a book by John Naisbitt called Megatrends: 10 New Directions Changing Our Lives. Did Whitnum read it?
Are better or worse being challenged intellectually by immigrant hires? I submit that we ARE better in many ways because of the challenge. Let's learn from them.Think shutting down Visas is going to help? Think again!
These immigrants pay taxes and contribute to our economy. Sure they send money home, but didn't our forefathers from Europe do the same?
As a business person I use Indians in India for software development who have been hired by an American company. My costs are $120 per hour less than they were in 2002 and the work quality is great. Prior to then I was using an American company run by Indians based in the US. $120 per hour is a savings that goes directly to my bottom line for reinvestment in my business and saving for retirement both of which help the United States economy. Hiring India based employees of an American company who are educated, speak fluent English, and whose work day is 10 ahead of ours means that software and server issues can be handled while I sleep with minimal business disruption. I can call a legal transcription company with a US office at 730pm EDT to create a working MS Word version of a 50 page .pdf document that I need by 8:00am EDT the next day and have it done with accuracy using its team of legally trained employees in Bangalore.
What I do for my business is just a thumbnail for what businesses are doing all over the country. Why should a business have to hire someone at high wages and benefits to do mundane tasks when they can hire someone to build a computer program to handle it?
What we do need is to be sure that our children are educated and properly guided in the new world reality as early and repetitively as possible in preparation to enter the work force.
Whitnum's own apparent inability to adapt is a characteristic of poor leadership skills. We need a leader not a shrew.
(This type of insanity deserves Front Page status.
If anyone wants to know about the wackiness of the person challenging Jim Himes, this should just about do it. Be sure to read MikeCT's reply to Ms. Multiple Personality...it's a classic.
Enjoy! - promoted by ctblogger)
Mike you may not be on Jim Himes' payroll now, but you were, or you are, on someone's payroll. You are a hired gun - a hatchet man. You will recall that I met you in front of the Civic Center. You were flashily dressed for a picnic and I knew as soon as I looked into your cold eyes that you were hired gun. The next day an article appeared on the DailyKos and I knew instantly that it was posted by you. Only a hired gun would make up such ugliness (see 10 below) and post it on a national website. No one else, none of us local folk, would have done that. So now you are moving on to some other congressional district, in Wisconsin or somewhere, and recapping to justify your time here. Hey Mike, guess what - you have no soul. To set the record straight:
1. What motivates me? Outrage. Deterioration of the American dream to line the pockets of special interest groups. Special interests groups who send us into unnecessary war. And most specifically: Out-of-touch, weak, follow-the-leader politicians, like Himes, who allow it. The people deserve better.
2. Like Danbury did, enabling local police to enforce immigration through ICE is the wave of the future and should be initiated all over Fairfield County. Deal with it. I'm very clear: Save the American job and you save the American economy.
3. Prejudice? Nope, that's not it - it's preservation of the American job. We are expected to lose 14 million white collar jobs in ten years. Many of the legal immigrants: H1b, L1 and the E series are from the UK (my heritage). The US needs to finally enforce the 6 year return policy. Sorry guys, it's time to return. There is no shortage of educated labor here. What is coming pike is going to be ugly we will need all of our jobs for Americans.
4. I am not a supremacist of any kind. I don't know any of those groups.
5. Demographics are fact, they are not racist. I am not racist.
Now that Lee Whitnum has gathered enough petition signatures to force a Fourth Congressional District primary against endorsed Democrat Jim Himes, voters are faced with a weighty choice about which candidate to support. To introduce her to uninitiated readers who have not been haunting the sidebar at MLN, here's an introduction to Ms. Whitnum that gathers together some of the numerous fascinating and peculiar details of her life and viewpoints that have thus far been flung widely across the internets.
This overview covers multiple aspect of her life and personalities:
John Kerry and Hedge Fund Mistress. Her first claim to fame - the use of a personal relationship with John Kerry to sell books.
The anti-blogger. Her antagonistic encounters and misadventures with bloggers.
Her campaigning skills. And the lack thereof.
Her issues and Nazi conspiracies. Calling her opponent a Nazi, and her other issues.
Racism and immigration. Her views on immigration, her racial rhetoric, and her reliance on information from racist hate groups.
Her fundraising. And the lack thereof.
The many faces of Lee Whitnum. Her multiple incarnations.
See below for the full story and add your own Whitnum stories in the comments.
Lee Whitnum and her intrepid tin foil hat team of five volunteers have been scouring the fourth district in recent days, scrambling to gather signatures to petition her way onto a Congressional primary ballot. But she hasn't exactly been endearing herself to Democrats, telling a reporter that other than the little war thing, "I don't have a problem with Chris Shays" and "I kind of like Chris Shays."
Now, coming down to the June 10th deadline for petition signatures, she's getting anxious, sending e-mails to Democratic Town Committee chairs. (And how could they refuse?)
Democratic Chairs: Please forward the following message to all the Democrats on your town committee and any other Democrats that you know.
Being a small d democrat, I'm glad to help spread the word. Lee has not always been clear on her own identity, but she knows who public enemy #1 is - Jim "Nazi" Himes. That much she has in common with Chris Shays, and perhaps that's why they're so chummy on the campaign trail.
Speaking of Chris Shays, I saw him in Trumbull and he asked, "Lee, how is your petition drive going?" He was well-aware of who I was and what I was doing. I told him "okay" and he actually wished me luck.
Now sharing fuzzy stories about Shays might not be the most effective way to motivate Democratic activists. But Lee is not about partisan expediency, sucking up to Democratic activists or talking to delegates (though an occasional answering machine is a good place for her to vent). While she claims she's tantalizingly close to her signature requirements, she's run into a snag and is pulling out all the stops to recover lost ground.
Unfortunately, our campaign had a major blow yesterday. We learned that the petitions collected from one man could not be used because, although he is a registered Democrat, he had converted from Republican within the last three months. We didn't know. We lost a huge chunk and I am heartbroken. We had our initial 2459 and we were working on margin of error but now we are set back. We are so close but there is only five days remaining. We need your help.
Lee Whitnum continues to claim that she will gather signatures to petition her way onto the primary ballot to challenge Jim Himes for the Congressional nomination.
However, given her unrelenting hostitility against all sentient bipeds, she and her purported team of five.... count 'em... five volunteers will have a tough time gathering the 2,459 required signatures by June 10.
Whitnum has done little to earn the good graces of Connecticut's Democratic leaders; no delegates voted for her at the district's May 12 nominating convention.
Whitnum thinks little of earning the support of these politicos. In the nine months since she first considered a run for office, she didn't seek any endorsements and, as of this week, could not point to any elected officials who champion her.
She's delighted to find an opportunity to vent her rage at the enemy of the people.
When asked about her key issues, Whitnum instead insulted Himes several times during an interview with The Hour. She said he offers no solutions in his campaign platform.
"I've never seen somebody who says absolutely nothing so beautifully," Whitnum said.
Though she and Himes both oppose the war in Iraq, Whitnum said Himes lacks the conviction to vote his conscience - a reference to how Democrats overwhelmingly approved the war in 2003.
But she's ready to praise the political mentor she hopes to elect defeat in November.
Compared to her remarks on Himes, Whitnum has far less negative things to say about Shays.
"I don't have a problem with Chris Shays, except that he voted for the war in Iraq and he voted for Kyl-Lieberman," - an amendment interpreted by some Democrats as setting the stage for a war with Iran - Whitnum said. "... Other than that, I kind of like Chris Shays."
Now that Lee Whitnum has gathered enough petition signatures to force a Fourth Congressional District primary against endorsed Democrat Jim Himes, voters are faced with a weighty choice about which candidate to support. To introduce her to uninitiated readers who have not been haunting the sidebar at MLN, here's an introduction to Ms. Whitnum that gathers together some of the numerous fascinating and peculiar details of her life and viewpoints that have thus far been flung widely across the internets.
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