Probably one of the more frustrating aspects of the NY-24 race is the fact that it’s hard to get solid information on the candidate’s position on different issues. Arcuri’s and Meier’s websites don’t give information on all their positions and it takes a lot of time to listen to every interview and debate. Fortunately, you can also call the campaign office to ask about a position. This is something I’ve done in a couple questions with both the Meier and Arcuri campaigns. The Meier campaign responded forthrightly; I have yet to hear back from the Arcuri campaign.

In this post I’m going to attempt to give a detailed rundown of Ray Meier’s position on a variety of issues that I’ve gleaned from his website, statements to the media and debates and interviews he’s taken part in. In a couple days I’ll do the same for Mike Arcuri.

The information below is what I could find at the moment, I’ll update this post as we collect more information. If I’ve made an error, missed an topic, or misrepresented Meier’s position please respond by commenting or emailing me at coyote.soundingthetrumpet [at] gmail.com. Also, just because there is no information under a topic, doesn’t mean that Meier has not addressed this topic. It just means that so far I haven’t been able to find information about it.

War on Terror
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David Brooks in the NY Times writes today about Rick Santorum’s work for the underprivileged. (Unfortunately, you need a subscription or access to Lexis Nexis to read it.) I’ll excerpt some of the poignant parts below:

For there has been at least one constant in Washington over the past 12 years: almost every time a serious piece of antipoverty legislation surfaces in Congress, Rick Santorum is there playing a leadership role.

In the mid-1990s, he was a floor manager for welfare reform, the most successful piece of domestic legislation of the past 10 years. He then helped found the Renewal Alliance to help charitable groups with funding and parents with flextime legislation

More recently, he has pushed through a stream of legislation to help the underprivileged, often with Democratic partners. With Dick Durbin and Joe Biden, Santorum has sponsored a series of laws to fight global AIDS and offer third world debt relief. With Chuck Schumer and Harold Ford, he’s pushed to offer savings accounts to children from low-income families. With John Kerry, he’s proposed homeownership tax credits. With Chris Dodd, he backed legislation authorizing $860 million for autism research. With Joe Lieberman he pushed legislation to reward savings by low-income families.

In addition, he’s issued a torrent of proposals, many of which have become law: efforts to fight tuberculosis; to provide assistance to orphans and vulnerable children in developing countries; to provide housing for people with AIDS; to increase funding for Social Services Block Grants and organizations like Healthy Start and the Children’s Aid Society; to finance community health centers; to combat genocide in Sudan.

I could fill this column, if not this entire page, with a list of ideas, proposals and laws Santorum has poured out over the past dozen years. It’s hard to think of another politician who has been so active and so productive on these issues.

Like many people who admire his output, I disagree with Santorum on key matters like immigration, abortion, gay marriage. I’m often put off by his unnecessarily slashing style and his culture war rhetoric.

But government is ultimately not about the theater or the light shows of public controversy, it’s about legislation and results. And the substance of Santorum’s work is impressive. Bono, who has worked closely with him over the years, got it right: ”I would suggest that Rick Santorum has a kind of Tourette’s disease; he will always say the most unpopular thing. But on our issues, he has been a defender of the most vulnerable.”

Santorum doesn’t have the jocular manner of most politicians. His colleagues’ eyes can glaze over as he lectures them on the need to, say, devote a week of Senate floor time to poverty. He’s not the most social member of the club. Many politicians praise family values and seem to spend as little time as possible with their own families, but Santorum is at home almost constantly. And there is sometimes a humorlessness to his missionary zeal.

Hat tip: K-Lo @ The Corner

We’ve blogged often about Charlotte Wyatt, the little girl who was born prematurely to Darren and Debbie Wyatt in Portsmouth, England. Charlotte is three now, and every year of her life has been a tremendous fight to stay alive. The National Health Service fought for a “do not resuscitate order”, and won from the courts over the strenuous objections of her parents. Now the courts have ruled that Charlotte can’t live with her family, but must go to a foster home. Darren is fighting to continue to take care of her, but so far it has been a loosing battle.

Then yesterday, blogger took down the Charlotte Wyatt site hosted at blogspot without notice, saying that a British court had issued an injunction against the site. The blog had been regularly updated with pictures and news of Charlotte.

Fortunately, most of the blog was available in the google cache and moved very soon afterwards to a new site SaveCharlotte.com. Hannah, one of the bloggers at Save Charlotte writes:

Past experience has taught us that trust in the “system” and their views about what is best for disabled children is, at best, badly misplaced, and we feel that it is important that information about Charlotte’s case is available to the public. Therefore this blog will continue to be maintained.

The shutdown of Charlotte Wyatt’s blogspot site raises important questions. I’m not a lawer, but I thought Blogger was an American company based in California. Why did it listen automatically to a court order from a foreign country? Is Blogger also registered in the UK? Are there courts in other countries that can give similar injunctions to take down Blogger sites?

Lord Matt is hosting the google cache. Perhaps SaveCharlotte.com should be mirrored elsewhere as well, so that whatever happens information about her will not be wiped out.

Ray Meier is out with a new ad this evening:

From Human Events:

The complaint in Washington is that state Sen. Ray Meier (R) in open District 24 won’t go negative enough against Oneida County District Attorney Mike Arcuri (D). But Meier’s campaign offices have become tense as publicization of Arcuri’s personal scandals actually appear to be backfiring against Meier, even though he has avoided bringing them up himself. Meier feels enough pressure that he has convinced the retiring incumbent, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R), to come out of hiding and help him. Leaning Democratic Takeover.

Blogger took http://charlottewyatt.blogspot.com off because of a court injunction from the Portsmouth City Council. There’s only a short notice on the site right now:

Charlotte’s website has been removed from this domain due to an injunction filed by the Portsmouth City Council against disseminating information about her. We’re currently negotiating this issue and considering our options; and will have more information here shortly. In the meantime, you can contact us at charlotte.paige.wyatt @ gmail.com

Fortunately, most of the website is still in the Google cache, including many of the pictures that were posted in recent days from Charlotte’s third birthday. I’ve include a couple of them below:


I’ll keep you updated as I learn more.

WSYR has a debate online between Ray Meier and Mike Arcuri.

From the majority ruling in Lewis vs. Harris:

Only rights that are deeply rooted in the traditions, history, and conscience of the people are deemed to be fundamental. Although we cannot find that a fundamental right to same-sex marriage exists in this State, the unequal dispensation of rights and benefits to committed same-sex partners can no longer be tolerated under our State Constitution. With this State’s legislative and judicial commitment to eradicating sexual orientation discrimination as our backdrop, we now hold that denying rights and benefits to committed same-sex couples that are statutorily given to their heterosexual counterparts violates the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1. To comply with this constitutional mandate, the Legislature must either amend the marriage statutes to include same-sex couples or create a parallel statutory structure, which will provide for, on equal terms, the rights and benefits enjoyed and burdens and obligations borne by married couples. We will not presume that a separate statutory scheme, which uses a title other than marriage, contravenes equal protection principles, so long as the rights and benefits of civil marriage are made equally available to same-sex couples. The name to be given to the statutory scheme that provides full rights and benefits to same-sex couples, whether marriage or some other term, is a matter left to the democratic process.

New Jersey’s Supreme Court just ruled that all the benefits and privileges of marriage should be available to same-sex couples by the state constitution. This is the third state (after Massachusetts and Vermont) to grant gays special rights different from the rest of the population.

According to the 90 page ruling “[t]he Legislature must either amend the marriage statutes to include same-sex couples or create a parallel statutory structure, which will provide for, on equal terms, the rights and benefits enjoyed and burdens and obligations borne by married couples.”

The entire ruling can be found here.

Hat tip: How Appealing.

Update: Katheryn Lopez writes , “My quick understanding of: Same-sex couples have to be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits that married couples have. The name to be given to the same-sex arrangement is left to the democratic processes. ”

Mike Arcuri’s past is certainly haunting him right now. Yesterday the NRCC continued their barrage of attacks by releasing their latest ad accusing Arcuri of failing to build a safer community. The ad focus on Thomas Griffiths, an unrepentent sex offender who Arcuri recommended for parole.

The NRCC’s attacks all seem to be following the same line of accusations taken by the original rape ad and the bad call ad last week.The ad is below.

Hat Tip: Robert Bluey @ Right Angle

Is this insightful prose, art, or just the output of a lazy columnist? Claire Readhead’s recent column in The Cornell Sun’s The Tarnishing Tiara consists a bunch of rambling and rather silly dialogues.

The Cornell Daily Sun is one of the best college newspapers here in America. After all, we produced E.B. White, and a lot of their columns are quite engaging. Why does the Sun let their columnists produce such inferior work? Can’t they replace a regular column with a guest column when their writers run out of something to say?

On second thoughts, if a writer never has something to say, why are they there in the first place? Claire of the Tiara only has to write every other week, and her previous articles this semester don’t seem that promising. Her first column had no paragraph breaks. Her second column (which was more of a rant in list form) was called Top Five Men at Cornell Not to Date. Her article two weeks after was aptly named Top Five Men at Cornell Not to Date Part II.

Not exactly the kind of writing I’m looking for when I open the Sun.

Zucker is at it again with The Taxman, a hilarious ad that pokes fun at the Democrat’s penchant for raising taxes.

Check out the ad below:

Is this just election humor? Well, there actually may be more truth than fiction in the ad, at least according to the Charlie Rangel, the man who will head up the tax writing House Ways and Means Committee if the Democrats win Congress:.

Congress Daily reported today that the Democratic Party’s ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Rangel (D) of New York, all but guaranteed tax increases in the Democratic agenda if they take back the house in November. When approached about whether tax increases across the income spectrum would be considered, Rep. Rangel responded, “No question about it.”

The NRCC has hit the 24th district with another flier, accusing Arcuri of incompetence at his job as a district attorney. In an ominously colored ad Arcur is accused of wrongfully convicting a bunch of people, and letting a rapist go free.(Click for the larger picture)

Ben Smith over at The Daily Politics says that the Republican’s accusations may be working:

. . . an operative for an independent group active in the district tells me that the campaign seems to be working with the voters the group is contacting:

“More and more people are citing this specific commercial in why they’re not voting at all, or have possibly changed their minds in voting for Meier, but more common is the first.”

(Courtesy of Biggus Dickus @ CNY Underground)

It turns out we weren’t the only ones to raise questions about the poll released a week ago showing Arcuri 11 points ahead. The Ithaca Journal reports that there are questions about the accuracy of these experimental polls:

But questions have been raised about the reliability of an untraditional polling technique being used for the first time to evaluate 55 hotly contested House races, including the 24th District clash to replace retiring Republican Sherwood Boehlert.

Instead of doing live interviews with voters, Majority Watch uses automated calls that ask voters to answer either by pressing certain buttons on their phone or by answering orally. That “Interactive Voice Recognition” methodology, called IVR, say advocates of traditional polling based on random sampling, could be unreliable because there is no certainty that the person taking the call is the targeted voter.

“I would have those worries about it,” said Nancy Belden, a Washington, D.C. pollster. “There is no way to know if a respondent or a 3-year-old is pushing buttons.”

Critics of IVR surveys also note that such polls can have low response rates — sometimes in the single digits — and unusually low numbers of undecided respondents. That could mean a “false high number for one or both candidates,” according to The Hotline, an online political tip sheet that has so far declined to report on IVR polls.

“That can skew the thinking on a race that’s detrimental to those trying to figure out if a race is over or not,” Hotline reported.

Riehle thinks he has gotten around such problems. He says the Majority Watch poll verifies a voter’s identity by asking questions about age and gender. Answers are then matched against data in Riehle’s computer file of the likely voting population in a congressional district. He says Majority Watch polls also are topping the 20 percent response rate — the industry standard on live call surveys — because voters are assured that the poll will take only two to three minutes.

You can read the whole article here.

Hat tip: Spotlight on the 24th

It looks like the NY-24 district is a high priority of the NRCC. They’ve spent $1.40 million since September 1.

I’m sure everyone knows of the horrible things Kim Jong II has done in his own country, such as the rampant famine he has done nothing to stop. For me, this article in the Times Online was new information. I guess it is not really surprising; but it is nonetheless really horrible:

THE North Korean regime’s obsession with racial purity has led to the killing of disabled infants and forced abortions for women suspected of conceiving their babies by Chinese fathers, according to a growing body of testimony from defectors.

The latest description of Kim Jong-il’s policy of state eugenics came from a North Korean doctor, Ri Kwang-chol, who escaped last year and told a forum in Seoul that babies with deformities were killed soon after birth.

“There are no people with physical defects in North Korea,” Ri said. Such babies were put to death by medical staff and buried quickly, he claimed. He denied ever committing the act himself.

Exiles in Seoul said Ri was now keeping a low profile, fearing retaliation by North Korean agents, who have assassinated foes in the South Korean capital before. But his account added to the evidence that the Kim family dictatorship is founded on mystical notions of Korean racial superiority rather than Marxism — a reality that explains its deepening estrangement from China.

Why do we learn history? So we can learn from our past mistakes, or so we can repeat them? Ought a man like this be left to slaughter his own people, and stockpile weapons for use against us in the future? Is not this what Hitler did, and was allowed to do — because the world was afraid of war? And was it not so much worse because of there tardiness?

Chuck Todd gives five reasons why this election might parallel ‘94, and five reasons why it might not.

His five reasons in favor of the analogy:

1. One party control
2. Unpopular president
3. Ethical problems
4. An unpopular issue
5. A disbelief in loosing

On the other hand, there are five aspects that are different from ‘94:

1. Prepared Incumbents (I guess this would include our GOTV)
2. Relatively Few Retirements/Freshmen
3. Nervous And Cynical Electorate
4. An Engaged White House
5. 2000-01 Census/Redistricting

There’s no denying that we’re in a bad state. Can we still turn this thing around, and pull a victory? I think so. . .so lets get to work.

Our university’s new president, David Skorton, seems serious about a commitment to intellectual diversity– something Cornell has been in need of through the past few administrations. His column in today’s Sun is worth reading. Quoting from there:

To stimulate further discussion of this issue at this time on our campus, I propose to the reader four operating principles regarding diversity of perspective at Cornell.

First, we must adhere to the principle that all perspectives and their proponents are welcome on our great university campuses. As I told first-year students during my convocation address in August, nothing will broaden your horizons more than going to hear a speaker whose political view you despise. No speaker should be kept from our auditoria and lecterns unless the immediate consequence of a speech would be a violent act or other lawless behavior. Short of such immediate provocation, no easy line can be drawn to isolate any individual opinions from the greater campus community.

A second principle that must be followed is that no internal perspectives, including those of the faculty, should be suppressed. Whether viewed as liberal, conservative or by any other label, faculty members must not face artificial interference with their presentation of facts, observations, conclusions or implications of any aspect of their disciplines based on perceived balance or imbalance along the political spectrum.

A third principle is that discourse should be civil and non-threatening. Being allowed to make a presentation in a classroom or other forum on a university campus must include the right to complete the discourse. As Columbia University President Lee Bollinger pointed out in response to the disruption of an event on that campus earlier this month, “ … we must speak out to deplore a disruption that threatens the central principle to which we are institutionally dedicated, namely to respect the rights of others to express their views.” Of course, arguments, protests and demonstrations have long been vital features of campus life at Cornell, as well as at universities throughout the United States and in many other countries. But a threatening environment, a campus that does not allow expression of a perspective, no matter how odious to a particular group, is not consistent with the university’s basic purpose of exploration and debate.

Find the rest at the Daily Sun’s website.

A new humorous ad by Ray Meier.

And you still think Arcuri looks better?

This Saturday is Charlotte Wyatt’s third birthday. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is planning on putting Charlotte Wyatt in foster care even though her father desperately wants to take care of her.

Slobokan has done a excellent podcast on this situation, that I would recommend for all our readers to listen to. (You have to scroll to the end of the post to see the podcast.)

HT: Save Charlotte

Ray Meier just got endorsed by the AFGE Local 201. News 10 Now has the story:

In his latest endorsement, Ray Meier is getting backed by the AFGE Local 201 in his congressional bid. That’s the union representing workers at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Rome, workers Meier advocated for as state senator a year ago during the Base Realigment and Closure process.

“I was honored to present that case for them because it’s really their work, the quality of their work that won the day and now we’re adding jobs,” said Meier.

About 600 new jobs by 2008. No surprise Meier has gained the union’s support.

A poll on the New York 24th District came out last week. It was done my Majority Watch, as a project of RT Strategies and Constitutent Dynamics. Of likely voters, Arcuri to Meier was 52% to 43%. Ray Meier has the support 73% of Republicans, versus the 84% of Democrats that support Michael Arcuri.

I have a hard time believing that Arcuri has a nine point lead in a district where Republicans outnumber Democrats by forty thousand voters. Two years ago Boehlart defeated his Democrat opponent 57% - 34%. Walrath, the candidate running for the conservative party got 9% of the vote.

Constituent Dynamics used automated polling, but I’m not sure if that is any more or less accurate than traditional polling.

The Utica Observer Dispatch has a bunch of stuff on the rape ad from the NRCC as part of their ad watch. The information is here. They include a bunch of very useful source documents, including the original article the quotes in the ad were taken from.

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