Hopefully democrats will pick up on the need for cooperation throughout all levels of the 2008 elections. It would be nice, but I won’t be holding my breath.
The national Democratic Party will suffer if it focuses too much on the state’s urban cores, while the GOP is coordinating in potential Democratic strongholds like Northeast PA.

The state and national Republican Party will open campaign offices throughout Pennsylvania in July, including one today in Luzerne County.

Pennsylvania Victory, a state organization operating on federal party funds, signed an agreement with congressional candidate Chris Hackett on Wednesday to sublease 936 square feet of the 1,183-square-foot office space.  read more »

The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history.

First, my own comments. Whatever one thinks of HRC, it’s to her credit that she, as her husband did last year, is able to walk into the lion’s den and begin to turn the opinion of a man who has done more to harrass the Clintons and all stripe of Democrat, liberal and progressive and who is the founder of rw think tanks and yappers which have blocked progressive policies for years.
Before bashing HRC, think about it. If we want more civility in politics, it’s imperative to co-opt people like Scaife. We will see if Barack Obama takes Scaife’s invitation to meet with the Trib editorial board and builds on what HRC started.  read more »

Attorney General Tom Corbett’s yearlong probe of legislative operations entered new turf this week when his investigators subpoenaed records from the state Senate’s majority Republican caucus.

The subpoena, confirmed Tuesday by the Senate Republicans’ general counsel, Stephen MacNett, is believed to be the first served in the Senate during the investigation.

Corbett’s office is investigating whether any of $3.6 million in once-secret bonus payments to legislative staffers by all four caucuses in 2005-06 were rewards for campaign work. Agents are also believed to be looking for evidence of campaigning on state time or using state resources.

After reading this, heads on both the left and the right of the political spectrum will be hard-pressed not to explode.

Billionaire newspaper publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, who spent millions investigating President Clinton, said the two had a long lunch over the summer and that he found the ex-president to be charismatic.

Mr. Scaife, a central figure in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Rodham Clinton once said was attacking her husband, also says philandering “is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common.”  read more »

Everyone knows you can’t have two winners in one election, so why are Luke Ravenstahl and Mark DeSantis both crowing about victories?  read more »

Nice to have a big campaign contributor own the newspaper that hires you to be columnist.

A press conference was held at 1:30 this afternoon at the Philadelphia Inquirer to announce that it has added former Sen. Rick Santorum to its stable of columnists.

Also hired is George Curry, the former editor of Emerge magazine. They will alternate the weekly Thursday spot. Santorium’s column will be called “The Elephant in the Room.” He said it would not focus all that much on politics.

The two attended the announcement with Brian P. Tierney, publisher, and Harold Jackson, editorial page editor.