Thursday, February 22, 2007

Stumbo threatens unions

Greg Stumbo has threatened two unions that refuse to consider endorsing the Lunsford-Stumbo ticket. Perhaps Stumbo should have thought about this before he decided to end his political career by joining a ticket with Bruce Lunsford.
He said he was upset with the unions and thought it was unfair of them to exclude his ticket from the endorsement process.

The allegations were made by Steve Earle, a lobbyist for the United Mine Workers union, and Charles Wells, executive director of the Kentucky Association of State Employees.

The UMW and the state employees’ association both announced in the past week that they would not consider endorsing Lunsford for governor.

Another group of labor unions announced Monday that they would “aggressively educate” their members about the “sins” of Bruce Lunsford, who dropped out of the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2003 and later endorsed Republican Ernie Fletcher, the eventual winner, in the general election.

Earle said Stumbo called him Monday after the UMW sent out a press release announcing its decision not to consider endorsing the Lunsford-Stumbo ticket.

Earle said Stumbo told him, “You stabbed me in the back, and now I’m going to stick a knife in yours.”
It seems a bit too early to be making presidential endorsements but it appears that former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle has decided to endorse Barack Obama for president.

California has moved their primary to February 2008.

The state house has passed an increase in minimum wage. This is, by far, a good move.

Back to Obama, it appears that there is a feud between his campaign and that of Senator Hillary Clinton. I'll sit back and watch how that plays out.
The back-and-forth between the two campaigns has largely been fodder for political insiders. Yesterday, however, David Geffen, the music and film producer who is one of the party's most prominent donors, made the fight more public. In an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Geffen said that Clinton is "the easiest to beat" of the Democratic field and skewered her unwillingness to apologize for her 2002 vote to use force in Iraq. "It's not a very big thing to say 'I made a mistake' on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can't," Geffen said.

Geffen, who was a co-host of an Obama fundraiser Tuesday night in Los Angeles, saved even sharper criticism for former president Bill Clinton, to whom he was close before a falling-out over the pardoning of financier Marc Rich at the end of Clinton's second term. "I don't think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person," Geffen said in an oblique reference to questions surrounding the former president's private life.

After seeing the comments yesterday morning, the Clinton campaign immediately issued a call for Obama to disavow Geffen's remarks and return his $2,300 donation, arguing that they were contrary to Obama's pledge to run a positive campaign.

"A day after Barack Obama goes out and eschews the politics of slash-and-burn, his campaign embraces the politics of trash," said Phil Singer, Clinton's deputy communications director, referring to a speech Obama made Tuesday in Las Vegas.

Obama communications director Robert Gibbs took a markedly different course. After refusing to get in the "middle of a disagreement between the Clintons and someone who was once one of their biggest supporters," Gibbs pointed out that Hillary Clinton had recently praised Robert Ford, another South Carolina state senator who endorsed her and said the Democratic ticket would be in serious trouble if Obama was the nominee because of the color of his skin. Clinton distanced herself from that remark, and Ford later apologized for it.

Obama weighed in later. "It's not clear to me why I would be apologizing for someone else's remarks," he said in Iowa, where he had gone instead of the candidates forum because of a prior commitment. "My sense is that Mr. Geffen may have differences with the Clintons, but that doesn't really have anything to do with our campaign."
Why should Obama apoloogize for remarks made from someone else? Seriously, why? It makes no sense to me.

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