Will Glenn Greenwald Run For Congress Against Peter King?

Terrorist supporter Peter King and civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald

Long Island as a geographical entity includes all of 4 counties: from east to west, Suffolk, Nassau, Queens and Kings (Brooklyn). Long Island as a state of mind is Nassau and Suffolk. When someone in NYC says they're going to "the Island," no one thinks they mean Brooklyn or Queens. There are 3 Long Island congressional districts, NY-01, NY-02 and NY-03 (although NY-03, represented by Steve Israel has a significant slice of Queens in it now). Although NY-01 and NY-03 are represented by Democrats, Obama did best last year in NY-02, the "Republican district" represented by Peter King. Here's how Obama performed in the 3 districts last November:

• NY-01- Obama- 49.6- 49.1%
• NY-02- Obama- 51.6- 47.2%
• NY-03- Obama- 50.8- 48.2%

[Update: I left out the new 4th CD, represented by Democrat Carolyn McCarthy, which now takes many of the Democratic-leaning South Shore Nassau County towns formerly represented by King. Her new district went for Obama with 56.3%, easily the most Democratic of the 4 (not 3) Long Island districts.]

Point: NY-02 is hardly a district the DCCC should be leaving uncontested as a red stronghold. But they do, especially under Steve Israel, a longtime crony of Peter King's. The district's PVI is R+1. Democrats represent 15 districts that are R+1 or worse. They are winnable seats, as Democrats like Carol Shea-Porter (NH), Raul Ruiz (CA) and Joe Garcia (FL) showed last year when they beat Republican incumbents in R+1 districts. The trick to it, though, is that the Democrats need a viable candidate and need to wage a real campaign. This is not something Peter King has had to face. When King first ran in 1992, it was an empty Democratic seat that Congressman Bob Mrazek had left so he could run for the Senate). King won 49.56 to 46.46%. But he never had a serious challenge after that. Blue America backed Dave Mejias in 2006 and he came close with 44% but the DCCC stabbed him in the back, Mejas spending only $908,135 to King's $2,075,502. And its been worse since then with the DCCC discouraging anyone from running and undercutting those who tried. Last cycle Vivianne Falcone took 41% of the vote after spending $11,115 (against King's $1,201,207), Needless to say, the DCCC spent exactly zero trying to help her, wasting millions of dollars are far redder districts where their conservative candidates had no chance at all.

King, probably best known for supporting violent foreign terrorists in Ireland, for his intense bigotry against Muslim-Americans and for picking fights with Michael Jackson, is back in the news this week.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) made waves yesterday on a Fox News interview in which he called for “legal action” to be taken against Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. The congressman’s comments were delivered in his usual stentorian style, with absolute certainty and conviction, even though they appear to lack any factual basis.

Abridging the whole situation, however, involves something of a brain-twister, but we’ll give it a try anyhow: Legal action should be taken against Greenwald, says King, not only because of the NSA intelligence leaks that he has already published but also because of information he has threatened to publish-- specifically the names of CIA agents. Even though he hasn’t threatened to publish any such thing.

Here’s how King articulated the matter to Fox News host Megyn Kelly:

Not only did he disclose this information, he has said that he has the names of CIA agents and assets around the world, and they’re threatening to disclose that. The last time that was done in this country, you saw a CIA station chief murdered in Greece. No right is absolute. And even the press has certain restrictions. I think it should be very targeted, very selective and certainly a very rare exception. But in this case, when you have someone who has disclosed secrets like this and threatens to release more, then to me, yes, there has to be-- legal action should be taken against him. This is a very unusual case with life-and-death implications for Americans.

That stuff about the CIA-- not true, wrote Greenwald on Twitter:

...Wherever he’s fetching his information, King’s comments reflect one of three disturbing possibilities:

1) He knows something about Greenwald that none of us does;

2) He’s spouting off to a large Fox News audience on topics with which he has little familiarity;

3) He’s willfully misquoting and misconstruing the many public comments made by both Greenwald and Snowden on this case.

...Peter King would make a poor journalist. May he never, ever complain about being quoted out of context.

His words yesterday don’t speak to his acumen as a public servant, either. As argued previously in this space, the recent explosion of leak news has highlighted the centrality of governmental self-restraint in preserving freedoms.

Blue America is trying to recruit Greenwald to run against King. A prominent constitutional lawyer and author, Glenn was born on Long Island and got his law degree from NYU. Although he'd love to see Peter King retired, he doesn't want to serve in Congress. I can't blame him-- but I'm still trying to persuade him... and I'm willing to pledge a maximum legal contribution personally and endeavor to raise as much money for his campaign as we have done for Alan Grayson and Donna Edwards, each over $100,000 from Blue America donors.

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New York GOP: Cruzin' For A Bruisin'

I know that the New York State Republican Party had a golden age... but it wasn't during the 20 years I lived in New York-- nor in the decades since. Currently there isn't one statewide Republican elected official-- nor has there been one since George Pataki. Last month, NY blogger Morgan Pehme summed up the party's dilemma pretty well.

Election Day in 2012 was one of the bleakest in the history of the New York State Republican Party.

Propelled by an Obama landslide in New York—the president’s best showing in any state except Vermont and Hawaii-- the Democrats trounced their opposition all the way down the ballot.

Kirsten Gillibrand, once considered one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the U.S. Senate, amassed a startling 72 percent of the vote, the highest percent total of any statewide candidate in New York history. At the same time, Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, a Tea Party darling, was drummed out of office, Rep. Nan Hayworth was defeated in a stunner, and Rep. Tom Reed, who was expected to cruise to re-election, only narrowly staved off a strong challenge from his previously unknown opponent.

In the state Legislature, the story was just as dreary. Despite the Vito Lopez scandal that had wounded Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the Democrats rolled to victory in the lower chamber, regaining the “veto-proof” supermajority they had lost in 2010. And in the Senate, long the lone bright spot statewide for the GOP, the Republicans lost their pure majority, watching much ballyhooed candidates like Sean Hanna and Bob Cohen go down in flames, and even, after a razor-thin recount, George Amedore, for whom the party had gerrymandered the newly created 63rd Senate seat specifically for him to win.

In the devastating aftermath, a host of political observers declared the state Republican Party dead-- or at least on life support.

As Baruch College professor Doug Muzzio put it to the Daily News, “It is not extinct, but it is comatose.”

Beyond the results of Election Day, there was-- and continues to be-- ample reason to draw this conclusion. With the party suffering from a registration deficit statewide that has grown to a gaping 2.5-to-1 in favor of the Democrats, the last time the Republican nominee for president prevailed in New York was 1984, when Ronald Reagan swept every state in the union save for Walter Mondale’s home turf of Minnesota.

...In many ways, things have never looked worse for the state Republican Party-- once a breeding ground for giants like Teddy Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits.

“We have hit rock bottom,” laments New York City Councilman Eric Ulrich, one of the Republican Party’s promising state Senate candidates who went down to defeat in 2012. “The only place we can go is up.”

Actually not. The state party, according to the conservative NY Daily News could sink New York's Republican Party. Short version: their guest of honor to the annual party dinner is Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Two choices are offered to New York Republican Chairman Ed Cox: Cancel plans to have Texas Sen. Ted Cruz headline the party’s annual dinner or speed the GOP’s long demise in the state. In featuring Cruz as the prime speaker at the May 29 affair, Cox has entered a death embrace with New York’s political Public Enemy No. 1 of the moment.

Cruz represents the unthinking, doctrinaire strain of conservatism that doomed Mitt Romney’s electoral chances, such as they were, and threatened to alienate Republicans from key voting blocs, including Cruz’s fellow Hispanics.

He will be toxic to any hope that New York’s GOP might regain even slight relevance.

In the wake of the Newtown massacre, Cruz threatened to filibuster any and all reasonable gun control measures, up to and including background checks for purchases at gun shows.

With breathtaking callousness, he called the families of Newtown victims-- those mothers and fathers wrenched with pain-- “political props” for the Obama administration because many of them had stepped up to petition Congress for legislation aimed at stemming gun violence.

After superstorm Sandy devastated New York and New Jersey, Cruz voted against federal recovery funding, calling the urgently needed aid package “wasteful.”

This was typical of the GOP response, which prompted Long Island Republican Rep. Pete King to scream that his fellow legislators were “more and more taking on this anti-Northeast attitude.”

King followed up Tuesday, saying of Cruz: “He went out of his way to attack New York on the bill. It’s a little early to forgive and forget.”

King continued: “There were really false and phony charges made against the Sandy aid, and if Ted Cruz had prevailed, my constituents would be homeless.”

Extra bonus for hypocrisy-- after that fertilizer plant explosion leveled much of West, Tex., Cruz had the gall to demand that the federal government devote “all available resources” to help the stricken area.

Now, he is fighting to sink the bipartisan immigration reform plan that’s searching for support in Congress; he wants a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants to be “taken off the table.”

Let’s review the vital stats of the state party as led by Cox.

Having hemorrhaged clout for years, the GOP holds not a single statewide office.

Its last foothold in Albany-- control of the state Senate-- hangs by the slender thread of alliances with renegade Democrats.

More embarrassing still, two ranking Republican officials in the city have been indicted on charges of trying to rig the mayoral primary-- diminishing the party’s shot at winning City Hall.

Whether this Tea Partyer-in-chief will sell many tickets to Cox’s $1,000-a-plate dinner ($5,000 for a photo opportunity) at the Grand Hyatt remains to be seen. But scrounging to fill the organization’s depleted coffers will come at the price of branding the party and its candidates as pariahs.

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GOP In Tumult? Scott Brown And Peter King

So he's an unrepentant Islamophobe... the Dems will take him anyway

Defeated Republican Senator Scott Brown wants to get back into the Senate but polls showed him that Massachusetts voters had had enough of him and he passed on the prospect of running against Ed Markey. But he hasn't passed on running altogether. Maybe he finds lobbying demeaning after being the #1 target of lobbyists affection for so long. So he's been hinting he could run in New Hampshire against Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, the most popular political leader in the state, with a career-high approval rating. "In the most recent Granite State Poll, 59% of New Hampshire adults say they have a favorable opinion of Shaheen, 22% have an unfavorable opinion of her, 9% are neutral and 11% don’t know enough about her to say. Shaheen’s net favorability rating is +37, up from +27% in October. Shaheen’s favorability ratings have improved in a bipartisan fashion since October, she is viewed very favorably among Democrats (net favorability rating of +80%), favorably among Independents (+34%), but unfavorably among Republicans (-9%)." Still, Beltway insider Stu Rothenberg claims Brown is serious about running there, regardless of how boneheaded the idea is.

Former senators who were defeated for re-election can’t simply go to another state-- even if they have property there and have paid taxes there-- and get elected to the Senate, especially if the state is politically competitive.

Former New Hampshire Sen. Robert C. Smith, for example, briefly tried running for Senate in Florida in 2004, two years after he was defeated in the Granite State GOP primary by John E. Sununu. He dropped out after finding that nobody in Florida knew who he was or cared.

For many voters, Brown would appear to be nothing more than “seat shopping” if he were to run in New Hampshire. He’d look like a perfect example of a personally ambitious politician who didn’t care who he represented as long as he had an office on Capitol Hill and the title of U.S. senator.

And coming after Republicans mocked Ashley Judd, who lives in Tennessee but grew up in Kentucky, for publicly mulling a run for the Senate from her home state, those same Republicans would look hypocritical if they backed Brown.

The Brown argument that this would be different because he has had property in the state and paid taxes there is a loser. He represented the people of Massachusetts in the Senate and he’d look like someone without principles-- a carpetbagger who was more interested in his own career than in the country’s future-- if he tried to move on to New Hampshire. After all, if he wants to be in the Senate, why didn’t he run in this year’s special election in Massachusetts?

Never gonna happen. Well, let's put it like this... it's probably less likely than Peter King switching parties and becoming a Democrat-- something we've speculated on before. And there's not much new in the month that's elapsed since that speculation... except this interview he did on Morning Joe a couple days ago. Watch:



He's pretty pissed off at "Republicans in Congress" and singles out Marco Rubio for particular vituperation. "My relationship with Congress," he told Joe Scarborough, "will never be the same again. They made us wait 90 to 100 days to give the most basic human aid that is required. It's absolutely disgraceful. And when I see these Republicans, we slap each other on the back, all the camaraderie, 'hey, we're great friends.' All I know is there were people who were close to dying in my district and no one gave a damn." So how is all that anger manifesting? Peter King is no right-wing whack-job like Steve King, but he's far from a liberal. His career-long ProgressivePunch crucial vote score is 8.34, pretty miserable even for a Republican. This year the score tells a very different story. For the first time in his career, King is voting against the Republican leadership more frequently than any other Republican in the House. His score is 38.89, basically the exact same score Steve Israel and Ron Kind have been steering freshmen into. The 38.89 brigade includes worthless losers like Ann Kuster (D-NH), Dan Mafei (New Dem-NY), Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY), Scott Peters (New Dem-CA), Raul Ruiz (New Dem-CA) and Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ). Peter King actually has a more progressive voting record this session than DCCC faves Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog/New Dem-NC- 35.29), Ron Barber (New Dem-AZ-33.33), Bill Owens (New Dem-NY-33.33), the House's worst Democratic freshman, Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ-23.53) and, of course, the House's worst over-all fake Democrat, Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT-16.67).

So maybe if Boehner or Cantor do one more thing to alienate him, he'll knock on his buddy Steve Israel's door and work on a jazzy press release.

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