Musings From Mikey’s Press Service

The Bucks County Courier Times weighed in on the U.S. House 8th district race between Patrick Murphy and Michael Fitzpatrick today on a couple of different fronts. The first was in this news article by reporter Brian Scheid, who covered the news conference with Murphy and Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who is supporting Democratic candidates for Congress; it took place in Philadelphia yesterday.

I want to highlight this excerpt from Scheid’s story.

In his first term on Capitol Hill, Fitzpatrick has voted against billions of dollars in funding for Homeland Security efforts while voting for “pork barrel” projects, Murphy charged. Those projects included: $231 million for the “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska; $550,000 for a glass museum in Tacoma, Wash.; $1 million for the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut; and $500,000 for a teapot museum in North Carolina.

I had that number at about $320 million below in the Inhofe post – either way, it’s too damn much money.

“I have nothing against teapots,” Murphy said. “What I do have a problem with is the irresponsible and reckless spending of my opponent.”

Fitzpatrick never specifically voted for any of those “pork barrel” projects. They were included as part of multi-billion dollar federal bills that few in Congress voted against.

What does “never specifically voted for” mean (and isn’t that an editorial comment anyway)? If you voted for the bill, then you voted for everything in it, right? I will admit, though, that the trick of “omnibus bills” that cover everything in the world, including a bunch of stuff that is not relevant but stuck into the bill for partisan purposes, is practiced on both sides and should be stopped.

I also want to highlight this (a paragraph missing from the online version of the story).

The Bridge To Nowhere is a $223 million federal appropriation approved by Congress last year to build a bridge connecting a town in Alaska with a sparsely populated island. That funding was part of a $300 billion transportation bill approved in the house by a vote of 412 to 8. Not one Democrat voted against the bill.

Why is it necessary for Scheid to point out how the Democrats voted on this? I, for one, don’t care. I only care about how Fitzpatrick voted. That’s the issue here.

And the newspaper’s editorial page chimed in with their take on the first Murphy/Fitzpatrick debate, and they basically slapped both of them on the wrist, calling it “an uninformative verbal slugfest” (see, if Fitzpatrick had been taking all of the shots, then that would have been OK, but the Dems are never supposed to stand up for themselves, or else that’s reeeaaally bad). This was one of their complaints.

…Murphy should knock off the murky and unfair stereotypes. Campaign-speak such as “We need leaders in Washington, not career politicians,” lacks substance.

Apparently this is news for the Courier Times, but according to Fitzpatrick’s campaign web site, he served as a Bucks County Commissioner for 10 years before he was elected to Congress in 2004. So there’s a reason why Patrick refers to Fitzpatrick as a career politician; it’s because he is a career politician.

(Fitzpatrick’s web site doesn’t mention that he served on the Delaware River Basin Commission, though - it's not in his bio anyway...curious.)

There have been other moments when the newspaper has fawned over every little thing Mikey has ever said or done more egregiously than this, I should point out, such as their applause for Mikey intervening in the matter of the Boy Scouts and the city of Philadelphia, which shows the truly puritanical side of this paper for what it is.