I received two e-mails that epitomize the difference between Russ Carnahan and Ed Martin.

The first was a press release from Carnahan’s office:

Yet another Social Security privatization group is lining up behind Ed Martin in thanks for his support to eliminate this critical safety net for Missouri seniors.  The 60 Plus Association, a national group known for promoting risky Social Security privatization schemes, has just begun spending significant campaign cash to elect a sure vote for their extreme agenda: Ed Martin.

You can bet your booty that Russ Carnahan won’t abandon Social Security. He’s the other kind of politician, the kind who will actually work to protect us–who will, for example, take time out from fending off Ed Martin’s lunacy to deal with an environmental issue that concerns the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of St. Louisans. He has jumped into the fray about West Lake Landfill.

The backstory on that landfill is that Kay Drey, who has been an activist about nuclear waste issues for decades, has, for two and a half years now, been kicking up a fuss over the decision by Region 7 of the EPA in Kansas City. The last director there ruled that it would be sufficient to cover up–oh, pardon me, I meant to say cover over a landfill site full of extremely hot radiation.

I don’t know strontium this from thorium that from polonium the other. But people who do, tell me that the nuclear waste that Mallinckrodt Chemical Works illegally dumped at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton in 1973 is the kind you don’t want to put on a floodplain. Eight miles upstream from the water treatment plant for all of North St. Louis County. With no liner or cap. And a levee that’s no higher than the one that the flood of ’93 breached in Chesterfield.

Rea Beck, working with Drey, tells me that:

Mayors of nearby cities and the St. Louis County Council have urged the original decision be overturned and a better solution be found. The Missouri Division of Natural Resources Director, Mark Templeton, weighed in with Region 7 (which has a new Director) and asked them to reconsider the original decision. So far, except for the reconsideration, no action has been accomplished. I recently talked with Rep. Russ Carnahan and he has graciously sent the following letter to the EPA in Washington DC.

The Honorable Lisa Jackson

Administrator

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Ariel Rios Building

1200 Pennsylvania Ave N.W.

Washington,D.C.2001

Oct.8th,2010

Dear Administrator,

I’m writing to discuss the radiologically contaminated West Lake Landfill Site,Operable Unit 1, located in Bridgeton,Mo.(CERCLIS ID Number: MODO79900932). As you know,this landfill became RADIOLOGICALLY CONTAMINATED IN 1973 WHEN SOILS MIXED WITH URANIUM ORE PROCESSING were USED AS DAILY cover in a Landfilling operation. While this Landfill is not in my District,it does sit on the Eastern edge of the Missouri River flood plain and could potentially affect my District and the drinking water of St.Louis area residents.

While I understand a Record of decision for Operable Unit 1 was signed in May 2008, I would like to ask for answers to the following questions,

1. The selected remedy calls for installation of an engendered landfill cover and implementation of a long term monitoring program. In light of the location being in the Missouri River floodplain, what effect would a levee failure have on this location?

2. The Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) has cleaned up a number of radiologically contaminated locations in the area. What reasons does EPA have for not transferring control of this site from the EPA to the Corps in order to remediate the contaminated waste?

3. Does EPA consider consider this location to be permanent or temporary storage for this radioactive waste?

4. Even if there is a cap to stop water from entering the fill, what is there to stop the radioactive particulate from seeping into groundwater, given that there is no protective layering below the fill?

Thank you for your attention to this important matter . Should you have any questions,please do not hesitate to contact me directly or Ken Reidy at (202)-225-2671 or Ken.reidy@mail.house.gov.

Sincerely

Russ Carnahan

Member of Congress

“Member of Congress” indeed. Someone who will ask those pertinent questions, that’s the kind of person we need as a member of Congress. Can you even imagine Ed Martin caring about something like safe drinking water? He’d find a way to turn such concern into a socialist plot.

A couple of days ago I wrote about how our Missouri Democrats need to emulate threatened Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, who has come out fighting in the face of GOP efforts to smear him by misrepresenting the Affordable Care Act. However, when I assumed that all our Missouri Democratic pols were taking a hands-off response to the ACA,  I spoke too quickly. As evidence I offer Russ Carnahan’s remarks at a recent St. Louis event concerned with business opportunities for veterans.

This video of the event (via the Turner Report) showing Carnahan standing up on his hind legs and acting like a member of species homo sapiens makes the case that he might have a healthy case of intestinal fortitude:

Not the slickest presentation, but doggedly honest – which makes it all the braver given the reams of misinformation and sound-bites that have seeped, via Fox News, into many Missourians’ consciousness. In the video Carnahan is doing just what a good leader is supposed to do  – educating his constituents by giving them the facts. We need more of this – slicker might probably be better, but honest and outspoken is okay by me.

This election Carnahan is up against Ed Martin, a right-wing, back-slapping, bully boy who seems delighted to prance around in front of an audience and try to score a few zingers at the expense of the truth. We can only hope that there are enough voters out there who prize substance – and who can recognize it when they see it.

GOP candidates have been running their mouths a lot about jobs, mostly in relation to lower taxes for their favored, well-off constituencies. Roy Blunt’s campaign for Senate, for instance, has produced a “Jobs Plan,” that is long on GOP boiler-plate (and equally long on “solutions” that seem designed to play well with the energy and telecom industries who support his political ambitions so generously). Rhetoric aside, what does the current GOP record actually look like when proposals that would really have an impact on employment are put on the table?

A rarely discussed structural problem that contributes to the current jobless recovery is that many of the good-paying, manufacturing jobs have been outsourced over the past decade – good for corporations that can exploit the poor in third world countries with impunity, bad for the U.S. employment picture. Roy Blunt doesn’t even mention this problem in his jobs plan. GOP Senate team-player, Kit Bond, voted just this week to keep a bill from coming up for a vote that would have imposed tax penalties on companies that outsource their production. Claire McCaskill, on the other hand, voted to end debate and permit a vote on the legislation.

Small business owners often cite tight credit that discourages expansion to explain their failure to hire new workers. However, Republicans, who talk endlessly about the importance of small businesses for recovery, have for months stonewalled legislation designed to address just that issue.

The long-stalled small business lending legislation was passed in the Senate only recently with the help of two Republican Senators who plan to retire at the end of their current terms, which means that they no longer need fear repercussions from the NO party’s leadership or its Tea Party-addled base. However, Missouri’s retiring Republican Senator, Kit Bond, good GOP soldier that he is, kept faith and continued to march in lockstep with the Party of NO (jobs).

On the House side, Roy Blunt was so busy out on the campaign trail running his mouth about jobs creation that he couldn’t manage to even vote on the Small Business Lending Fund Act of 2010. But Blaine Luetkemeyer, Jo Ann Emerson, Sam Graves, and Todd Akin made up for Roy’s indisposition, and handily voted against the interests of the small businesses they love to talk up as the real job creators. You want to know how Missouri Democratic Reps. Carnahan, Cleaver, Clay, and Skelton voted? If you even have to ask, just click on their names and learn who really stands with the middle class.

There are lots of clichés that reflect how strongly Americans feel abut personal integrity: walking the walk, talking out of both sides of your mouth, putting up or shutting up – you can probably supply many more. Today’s question is, when it comes to jobs for ordinary, middle class Americans, as opposed to more moolah for the GOP’s corporate sugar daddies, how many Republicans can you point to who walk the walk, talk straight, and put up when push comes to shove. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see too many in our Missouri GOP congressional delegation.

At the Sunday evening debate between Russ Carnahan and Ed Martin, Martin was in his element–or should I say among his element? 250-300 people crowded the Arnold Recreation Center in Jefferson County, and nine out of ten of them supported Martin. I couldn’t attend the Friday debate at Forest Park Community College, which is the northern tip of Carnahan’s district, so I can’t speak to the proportion of each man’s supporters that night. But Jefferson County, at the southern tip of the district, has a boatload of white conservatives.

Fortunately, they were–by Tea Party standards anyway–calm and civil. But that’s only Tea Party standards. I know what the far right is like at its toxic worst. In August of 2009, I attended McCaskill’s town hall in Hillsboro, and the hate and anger pressed down on me like a huge, sooty fist that day. I’ll never forget it. By contrast, Sunday night’s crowd was merry, though always at Carnahan’s expense. Give Ed Martin this much: he has a knack for belittling another person. No matter how logically Carnahan presented his viewpoint, Martin mocked him. He played to the crowd, and they ate it up.

Carnahan can speak clearly, but he’s not inspirational. In the following clip, he answers two separate questions about health care reform, and each time, Martin begins his response by flattening Carnahan.

When the candidates explained whether they support repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Carnahan said that the military needs talented people, whether they’re gay or straight, so he supports repeal. Martin translated that for the crowd as “Congressman Carnahan supports gay marriage. He doesn’t care what Missourians think….” That response was far enough away from any attempt to answer the question that Martin drew a mild rebuke from the moderator. But he was too high on the crowd’s adulation to show any compunction.

The audience laughed and hooted as Martin put words in Carnahan’s mouth. For instance, Carnahan said, speaking about abortion, that women should be allowed to choose for themselves. Martin “translated” again: “He’s for abortion.” The audience occasionally booed, like when Carnahan called Martin out for the Eckersley scandal or when he said we should wean ourselves off of oil dependence. But on the whole, they had a great time watching their man of the hour walk all over that mean, nasty liberal elite, that “member of the ruling class.”

You know. The one who wants them to have affordable health care. What an ogre.

Missouri will likely lose a House seat according to a new estimate based on 2010 Census data. The loss will significantly affect Missouri’s overall impact on national issues; the state would will lose an electoral college vote, for instance, and each district would will be somewhat larger, permitting less representative granularity. The most immediate impact, however, would will be the shape of Missouri’s House delegation. The process of reapportionment should be especially interesting given that Missouri has a Democratic governor and a Republican controlled legislature, a situation that is likely to persist for awhile at least.

In April, Nathaniel90 at the Swing State Project offered a speculative map showing how Missouri’s political environment, coupled with the loss of a House seat,  might affect reapportionment. I found myself, as a current resident in Rep. Akin’s 2nd district, very interested the first point he made:

The real question for me was which districts to combine. With power balanced between the parties, it was obvious that one Republican and one Democrat had to face off in a “fair fight” district, leading to an obvious solution: a suburban St. Louis seat forcing Todd Akin (R) and Russ Carnahan (D) together. […] the legislature won’t draw anything too friendly for Carnahan’s south-of-the-city base, and that Gov. Nixon would balk at a map too heavy in Akin’s northern suburbs.

Were this to happen, it could give us at least some chance of finally getting rid of the egregious embarrassment that is Todd Akin. It also puts Carnahan’s Democratic seat at risk (assuming that Carnahan holds it this November), but it might be worth it. I am one of the few who believes that if the Missouri Democratic party had been willing to put more energy into Akin’s district over the past few years, he would be a lot more vulnerable right now, even without redistricting. A new competitive district might be just the ticket.

The second biggie that Nathaniel90 struggled with is the outlook for Ike Skelton’s rather strange 4th district:

The other problem in Missouri was what to do with Ike Skelton’s (D) heavily Republican district spanning the rural areas between Kansas City and Columbia. I figured that a bipartisan plan means incumbent protection, and the Democrats know Skelton will be 81 when the 113th Congress convenes and is not far from retirement. I thus drew a swing district stretching from the close-in Kansas City suburbs to college town Columbia that would not only easily reelect Skelton, but provide a future Dem with a decent shot at holding the 4th District.

Nathaniel90’s final conclusion about the best of all possible outcomes (note the emphasis on “possible”):

So there would be four safe Republican seats, two safe Democratic seats, and two swing seats (one of them safe for an incumbent Democrat as long as he chooses to run). Believe it or not, this is probably the closest thing to a Dem-friendly map one could get from today’s Missouri legislature.

I don’t have the experience or background with Missouri’s political map that would allow me to comment knowledgeably about the overall state picture. Does anyone think the situation will roll out differently?

Last week I noted that no members of the Missouri Democratic House delegation had signed onto a letter to Speaker Pelosi from Blue-Dog Democrats in the House who are in favor of extending all of BuschCo’s upper bracket tax cuts. As far as I know, this is still the truth – a list maintained on Politico has not been updated to show any of their names. Nor, as of Sept. 18th, had Claire McCaskill’s name been added to the list of six Democratic Senators known to be in favor of extending the Bush goodies for the upper crust.

While this is good news, it could be even better. Today, via DailyKos, we learn that 36 House Democrats have signed onto a letter written by House Progressive Caucus members Mary Jo Kilroy, Alan Grayson, and Raul Grijalva, which calls calls for a vote, “before Congress adjourns in October on repealing the tax cuts for the top two percent, and making the middle class tax cuts permanent.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of our Missouri reps signed on?

Can we convince our Missouri Democrats to stand up and act like leaders? Leaders don’t resort to protective camouflage – or at least smart ones don’t when there’s no reason for them to hide. Letting tax cuts for those with incomes in the top 2% expire is not only the right thing to do, it’s a politically smart strategy.

The text of the letter and the signatories over the fold:

Dear Madam Speaker:

Last decade, President Bush rammed through Congress a multi-billion dollar give-away for the wealthiest Americans on the backs of our nation’s middle-class. In the process, the aforementioned Bush tax cuts eviscerated an unprecedented budget surplus and weakened our nation’s fiscal health. As the Bush tax cuts are set to expire, we respectfully urge you to bring to the floor, before Congress adjourns in October, a vote on President Obama’s recently proposed tax plan: permanent tax cuts for the middle-class while allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans to expire, using any additional revenue to close our budget deficit.

We must show the American people that our Democratic Majority stands for them — people who have worked hard, played by the rules and depend on these tax breaks to make ends meet. We also need to get serious about cutting our budget deficit by allowing the Bush tax cuts for the rich to expire.

Some have argued that the Bush tax cuts help to stimulate the economy, or that allowing these cuts to expire would hurt our nation’s small businesses. This is flat out wrong. According to a recent report by the Center for American Progress, the economy boasted 132 million jobs in June 2001, the month that the first of the Bush tax cuts was signed into law. By June 2004, there were just 131.4 million jobs — a decrease of 600,000 jobs. Furthermore, a recent report from the Tax Policy Center states that, “Roughly 97 percent of small businesses would not be affected at all by increases in the top two tax rates.”

Rather, extending the Bush tax cuts will result in an $830 billion give-away for the nation’s wealthiest Americans, significantly increasing government debt, the interest on which will be paid by our nation’s middle-class for years to come. This astronomical sum could instead be used to close our budget deficit.

It is critical that we pass the Obama middle-class tax cuts — not providing an even greater lift for the wealthiest Americans who don’t need it.

Tammy Baldwin

Robert Brady

Michael Capuano

Andre Carson

Steve Cohen

John Conyers

Donna Edwards

Elliot Engel

Keith Ellison

Bob Filner

Marcia Fudge

Raul Grijalva

AlanGrayson

Phil Hare

Alcee L. Hastings

Maurice Hinchey

Mazie Hirono

Mike Honda

Mary Jo Kilroy

Barbara Lee

Sheila Jackson Lee

Jim McDermott

Jim McGovern

Kendrick Meek

Gwen Moore

Tim Ryan

Jan Schakowsky

Carol Shea-Porter

Jackie Speier

Betty Sutton

Peter Welch

Lynn Woolsey

David Wu

Today I have bad and good news. TPM made public a list of 31 Democrats in the House of Representative who are breaking with the president’s plan to cut taxes for the middle class while allowing tax giveaways for the wealthy to expire. These so-called Democrats are signatories to a letter to Nancy Pelosi that repeats debunked Republican arguments about how allowing the tax bracket of the 2% of the richest Americans to rise less than 4% points will crash the economy. (Even Republicans don’t really believe that stuff!)  

That’s the bad news. The good news? To date, none of Missouri’s Democratic House delegation are on that list! Sing Hallelujah!

Given that Senator McCaskill has been dancing around the issue, telegraphing her willingness to give the goods away if anyone asks, and the fact that Robin Carnahan managed to do just that before anyone even knocked on her door to ask, this comes as a pleasant surprise. I had begun to think that Missouri’s Democrats were a pretty worthless bunch. Representatives Emanuel Cleaver, Russ Carnahan, Lacy Clay and Ike Skelton are to be congratulated for standing up for the people that they represent on this issue.

There is no way that extending the Bush tax giveaways for the wealthy does anyone any good. The tax cuts do not, contrary to GOP claims, affect most small businesses; economists argue convincingly that they will play little or no stimulative role; and, to cap it all off, they will cost 1.1 trillion dollars over ten years – which is to say that they will really bolster up the big, bad, deficit boogeyman that the right wing has been using to herd weak Democrats rightwards. To top it all off, for once, Americans seem to recognize that extending the tax cuts is a stupid idea – with maybe the exception of the Tea Party where stupid seems to be king.

Just to encourage these gentlemen to keep on keeping on, I suggest that those of you who live in their districts, if  you are so inclined, drop them an email or give them a phone call and let them know that you are gratified by the respect they are showing their constituents and to good policy:

Russ Carnahan: (Email Contact page; phone nos.)

Lacy Clay (Email contact page*; phone nos.)

Emanuel Cleaver (Email contact page; phone nos.)

Ike Skelton (Email contact page; phone nos.)

Just remember, if progressives can’t win on this issue, we might as well just give up and get minimum wage jobs helping McCaskill parcel out the goods to the waiting Tea Party. We need to let our guys know that if they want us to stick with them, we need a win.

* Perhaps it’s just my browser, but but the email contact page on Lacy Clay’s website appears to be broken.

Perhaps you read the recent story about a Missouri farmer who put a sign up in a field with the message:

Are you a Producer or Parasite Democrats – Party of the Parasites

Of course the punch line is that this gentleman, who is so indignant about “parasites,” has taken over $1,000,000 dollars in federal farm subsidies over the past thirteen years. This story, among others, serves to underline the fact that there are far too many small minds on the far right who aren’t at all bothered by the hobgoblin of consistency. Or to put it another way, the GOP winger base may not be made up of the best and brightest.

Since nature abhors a vacuum, for every right-wing simpleton, there is almost surely a cynical, bought-and-paid for huckster with the corporate line du jour on standby standing by ready to take up the slack. The proof? Look no further than Ed Martin, Russ Carnahan’s Republican challenger for Missouri’s third congressional seat.

Martin, who left his job as little Matty Blunt’s capo in disgrace, became a free-lance political jack of all trades, keeping himself viable with the right-wing through organizations like the Missouri Club for Growth and the Missouri Roundtable for Life. In his latest role, he has cast himself as a “leader” in the Tea Party crusade to takeover Washington.

True to the Tea Party ethos, Martin has been outspoken about the evils of government regulation. Most recently, he has come out swinging to protect poor little BP, shamelessly trying to pretend that the Gulf oil spill can be  blamed on excessive government regulation, a talking point that is gaining traction as the right-wing attempts to justify its inflexible ideology in the face of one more example of its failure.

Well, guess what? Just like our Missouri farmer’s disgust with parasitic Democrats, the story about Ed Martin as a valiant defender of beleaguered BP against the big, bad government has a pretty good punch line too.  After local bloggers, including SMP’s Clark, went to town with the fact that Martin seemed somewhat hesitant to file his federal income disclosure forms, he made a few feeble excuses – mostly to the effect that he was just too busy and it’s soooo hard to file those intrusive government forms. (Bear in mind that this guy expects us to trust him to have the energy and sufficient organizational skills to navigate the demands of a complex and demanding elective office.)

I’ll bet you’re not really that surprised, though, when I tell you that we are now learning that maybe Martin didn’t file these publicly accessible forms because he just might have had something to hide – like the fact that he has been kept afloat on a tide of big oil money. It seems his wife has oil holdings worth something in the area of $100,001 to $250,000.

Kind of puts a different light on our crusader. As the Carnahan campaign put it:

Letting Big Oil drill without oversight in the wake of this disaster is a position that defies logic – unless you realize that bigger profits for Big Oil would directly benefit Ed Martin’s bank account

It’s probably a good thing for Martin that the Tea Party types don’t seem to be too disturbed by good ol’ boys who conceal their conflicted interests – even when they’re playing the Tea Party faithful for fools.

The Wonk Room reports that just as it looked like Senator Blanche Lincoln’s (D-AR) pre-primary Hail Mary pass, a proposal that might actually put some real teeth in derivatives reform, was gaining traction, the New Democratic Coalition has stepped in to put the kibosh on it.  The Coalition, which counts our Russ Carnahan (D-03) as a member, has prepared a letter asking that the Lincoln proposal, known as Section 716, be removed and replaced by the much weaker derivatives proposals in the House legislation.

According to Gary Gensler, Chairman of the Futures Trading Commission, a kind of de facto derivatives overseer, the House bill :

… may be read to provide for a more liberal exemption for entities using derivatives to hedge commercial, balance sheet or operational risk, … . Every exemption for financial companies creates a link in the chain between a dealer’s failure and a taxpayer bailout. Every slice of the financial system that we cut out through an exemption could allow one bank’s failure to spread like fire throughout the economy. It is essential that financial reform does not allow loopholes that leave interconnectedness in the system. Such exemptions will only come back to haunt us in the future.

Forbes.com‘s Lee Sheppard is even more emphatic:

Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s derivatives proposal, usually referred to as the divestiture or “push down” requirement, is the only worthwhile proposal in the Senate financial regulation bill. The rest of the derivatives regulation component of both the House and Senate bills is meaningless filler.

You get the idea: Lincoln’s Section 716 is the real thing; the House bill is window dressing. Even Barney Frank (D-MA), Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, admits that the Lincoln proposal would do a better job of regulating derivatives.

Politico asserts that the force behind the New Democratic Coalition letter is Rep. Michael McMahon (D-NY), known for having, as the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo puts it:

…argued for the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy on the grounds that people making $250,000 per year are “barely making ends meet.

So does Russ Carnahan really support McMahon’s position on derivatives? And if he does, why?

An even bigger question is why do I have to keep writing about actual Democrats, and my Democrats from Missouri at that, engaging in maneuvers that we expect from Republicans?  Why do the guys who promise to support the middle and working classes put themselves out so readily to defend the interests of the big guys, in this case the big banks that, thanks to the era of lax regulation ushered in by the GOP, have dumped us into the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression?

St. Louis Activist Hub does the best work bar none, in Missouri, of calling out teabaggers on their lies:

The St. Louis Tea Party, after a weekend of chest-thumping and saber rattling, is now trying to portray themselves as victims of a Lefty and Media conspiracy to make them look like extremists. I think there is overwhelming evidence that their actions over the past week were specifically intended to intimidate members of congress and/or rile up their followers, potentially into violence. I present it here.

At a rally at Carnahan’s office last Saturday, they threw boots at Carnahan’s picture. That was a warm up exercise. Then they:

finally ended by setting the picture of Carnahan on fire while Dana Loesch said things like, “This is how a fire smells when it’s burning Tyranny”.

They used a photo of Carnahan with blood dripping from his mouth: [visit St. Louis Activist Hub to see the photo]

Jim Hoft titled  his post “Russ Carnahan Gets Booted and Torched,” and said:

The protesters torched Russ’s photo while they chanted “Death to Dictator.”

And that’s not all that these “victimized” bullies have been up to. But you have to visit the St. Louis Activist Hub to get the rest of the story. Don’t miss the concluding paragraph.