Mike Fisher, or why I turned my radio and TV off
 

Every Mike Fisher advertisement I've seen and heard so far has a very simple message:

taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes taxes taxes Rendell will raise your taxes taxes

Just for factual reference, are there any _other_ Mike Fisher commercials, and will it be safe to turn on my TV for purposes other than for PlayStation 2 games any time before mid-November?

Re: Mike Fisher, or why I turned my radio and TV off
 

Surprisingly there are...one involves education...another involves his running mate, Jane Earll.

Fisher has made some gains, but Rendell still has a commanding lead. This campaign was basically over the day Rendell won the Dem primary anyway.

It speaks to me. Of course, I'm voting for the pot candidate.

this is why i listen only to npr and turn on the tv only for dvds or video games. but those fuckers always find a way. my wife, whom i believe is a registered democrat, keeps getting these tacky-ass invitations to republican fundraiser dinners. one even threatened that the vp would be attending.

~james

People not in Pennsylvania are confused at this point. This is the Gubernatorial race we're talking about. It will be won by Ed Rendell, the Democrat. Mike Fisher is the current Attorney General running the attack campaign. Griff is voting for my buddy Kenny.

Kenny and I actually sat down last night and chatted about how stuff is going for him. He has the greatest campaign going for a third-party candidate since Jesse Ventura. If he had Jesse's name recognition, he would win. Since he doesn't, he has a shot at about 2%.

The Green Party candidate is a marvel of incompetence. They came up with a strategy of not attending any event where Rendell or Fisher are not in attendance. Their boy has turned down about 10 media events with the dismissal that it's "ghetto coverage". Those were the exact words he used to turn down WHYY-FM (thus foregoing a half-hour of talk coverage on the local public radio outlet with enormous coverage in the fourth largest media market in the country). Those were the words used to turn down the Urban League. Those will likely be the words used to turn down the NAACP. Wow.

Your buddy got some interesting press coverage a few weeks back. They seemed to pass him off as a novelty in this campaign. (I believe it was during a debate where all the candidates were present.) As a whole though, it does seem like he has a pretty good campaign going.

The problem with the whole Ventura election and subsequent downfall is this: In the minds of many, this will only solidify the notion that politics are best left to the 2 main parties. It'll come across to many as arrogance and defiance of a "good system"...self-fulfilling prophecy to some.

I have no problem with voting for a third-party candidate, if I see one that appeals to me. I haven't seen one yet, but I'm sure one will come sooner or later.

Mike Fisher got early 'good' press by establishing a database that keeps phone marketeers from calling your phone. But there appears to be no consequences to violating that data base. Slowly phone bank spammers are returning to PA - to use people's personal property to sell scams.

This 'lack of consequences' - will it become public knowledge before or after the Nov elections? Or will Mike Fisher do something about those violations of PA law?

Hey, cool... is there a candidate in favor of privatizing the Liquor Control Board? I'll vote for 'em.

I hate the ads too. I'm spending more and more time with my CD/MP3 player in the car, and not ust because of those ads in particular. (Did you ever listen to Howard Stern? Or Opie and Anthony (RIP for now at least)? I'm not a regular listener, but I've turned them on sometimes. Regardless of whether you like their shtick, it's very hard not to notice that about 50% of the airtime is commercials. I once turned on Stern on the way to work and listened to nothing but commericals from 8:40 to 9:00.) I even have to pick on WRTI... I always seem to be turning them on just in time to get their news updates... sorry, RTI, but if I want to hear news I'll listen to WHYY or KYW. I'd appreciate being able to turn on a music station and listen to music.

And satellite radio is looking better... if the receivers get closer to $100, I may take a flyer on one. (Though even there, one of the services has some channels that carry commercials.)

Kenny would be vehemently anti-LCB, and I'm not just saying that.

My listening habits put me in closer touch with the NY Pataki-McCall-Galisano debacle. I hope Kens commercials are more professional than Galisanos (not a lib just an ego-maniac). He's playing the upstate vs downstate card but not even very well. His commercial has Binghamton dubbed into it and lists a bunch of Rochester companies that have gone toes up during Patakis term while ignoring the list from the Bing area.

I've been watching Kens progress via libernet and have been impressed by his willingness to meet and greet all comers and his straight forward answers to questions. Its a damn shame he won't poll major numbers but he could do well, since so many Republicans have already written off Fisher.

Ken will be coming to the next Delaware Valley Pink Pistols get-togther on the 19th. Should be interesting; we're expecting a crew from the local Fox affiliate, too...they're not coming to see Ken, they just happened to ask to come talk to us on the same day. Last month it was a reporter from the Courier-Times.

Re: Mike Fisher, or why I turned my radio and TV off
 

Rendell *will* raise our taxes. Do you really think he'll do anything good with our money? He's also in bed with the gun prohibitionists, but is too slick to talk openly about that during the campaign, knowing it will hurt him outside Philadelphia and Pittsburgh..

http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/...on/3410712.htm

Yep, Infinity stations are notorious for loading their talk-format shows with commercials. I was a regular O&A listener, and they'd have ten-minute blocks filled with ads for all sorts of oddball products, and joke about it when they got back on the air.

(O&A _will_ be back, sooner or later. They still have a huge fan base, and since that fan base wasn't the group offended by the Sex-for-Sam 3 stunt, someone will put them back on the air eventually to exploit that fan base. I call it the Marion Barry Reelection Principle.)

Fisher has a proposal to sell off the State Stores, with the proceeds going for special ed. I don't think you'd ever see Rendell pee in the union's Wheaties like that.

I'm sure KenK would do something similar were he ever to be elected. He's the candidate whose philosophy really matches up with mine on a bunch of major issues at once....gay rights *and* the right to self-defense, for example.

Mixing just those two issues makes me demographically marginalized, I can't really vote for *any* of the candidates without feeling, as Tom Leher so eloquently put it, "like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis". Rendell's a tax-and-spend gun-grabber with no cred on state-level issues, Fisher seems RKBA-friendly but his constituency hates queers. KenK is a true believer but would be ecstatic to break into double digits at the polls.

I've noticed a <b>massive</b> reducton in telemarketing calls since the list was started. But if I recall, the list is on a quarterly update cycle, if you didn't enroll the minute the website went up you may not have made it out to the list yet.

The consequences for each violation are a $1000 fine. Have you filed a complaint?

I'm not really worried about the guv's race anymore. Rendell's pretty much got it...and he has my vote in November.

The race I am more concerned about at this point is in the 13th Congressional District (which for at least 2 years includes most of NE Phila): Joe Hoeffel vs. Melissa Brown. Brown using Section 8 as a scare tactic to get votes in the NE is incredibly sad...and dangerous, IMO.

Re: Re: Mike Fisher, or why I turned my radio and TV off
 

The way things are going in the Commonwealth right now, I see taxes being raised, regardless of which candidate wins.

Oh yeah, no question.

I really miss Kent Voss. His show was light, without being just plain stupid. (After a long day at work, I don't feel like listening to political blather, of any stripe.)

Re: Re: Re: Mike Fisher, or why I turned my radio and TV off
 

Of course, some variables in that are which taxes are raised (and which reduced) and what other related changes happen. Like the balance between municipal and state taxation, and amount of and formula for state aid to school districts. So it's not as if "they all will raise taxes so it doesn't matter".

I think the core Fisher message is "Rendell will raise your taxes more, and spend it less effectively." I also don't think it's a given that KenK would raise taxes if elected.

I also noted a complete elimination of telemarketing calls. However in the past two weeks, those calls are starting to return. Many calls to the answering machine from numbers 'that are not known'.

Of course with the new law, telemarketeers were going to stop - to reassess the law. But I think they now see no adverse consequences. After all, can PA sue a telemarketeer in Canada? IOW, the question is really about whether Mike Fisher's new law really had any teeth. It was an excellent platform to promote his name and candidacy. But was the law really enforceable?

It would appear to have been effective, by your own account. I don't think we're going to see a sudden spate of international boilerroom traffic.

It'd be nice if character was an issue in this race too...
<blockquote>
Rendell vehemently denied these charges: "The NRA ads are like the Casey ads. <b><i>They don't tell the truth. There is nothing that I want to do to take a gun away from a hunter or a law-abiding citizen."</i>,</b> Gun-control organizations campaigning for Rendell insisted he only wanted "sensible" gun laws. Just recently, Rendell again denied that he was a liberal on gun control.

Yet, because I have talked with Rendell during less guarded moments, when he was not focused on winning votes for governor, I know that Casey and DeWeese were telling the truth about Rendell's views on guns.

During 1999, when I was at the University of Chicago law school, lawyers for the city of Philadelphia asked me to participate in a panel on cities suing gun-makers. Rendell had been the first mayor to talk seriously about doing that, and he wanted a session to educate city lawyers about the issue.

Three-quarters of the panelists (including Rendell) supported Rendell's desire to sue the gun-makers. During the presentations, Rendell said again that he didn't want to take guns away from hunters or law-abiding citizens and that he wanted to use the suits to make gun-makers responsible for the costs that guns impose on cities.

At the debate, there were several representatives from the Violence Policy Center, a group that has long advocated banning guns and even sponsors the website banhandgunsnow.org. Rendell warmly greeted the Violence Policy Center people when he arrived and included one of their representatives on the panel, but they noticeably groaned and rolled their eyes when Rendell claimed he didn't want to take away people's guns.

After the debate, Rendell immediately headed over to the Violence Policy Center people. I wanted to follow up on the discussion, so I tried to catch up with him as he crossed the room. The Violence Policy people were still visibly disturbed by his comments, and Rendell put his arm around one of them, saying,<b><i> "I just can't say publicly what we want to do — we have to take these things slowly."</i></b> I was standing right behind Rendell when he said it.

When Rendell saw me, he angrily turned toward me, asking what I wanted. I said I had hoped we could talk more about the issues raised by the panel. I added that I understood the costs to cities of the bad things that happen with guns, but that I wanted to know why he didn't consider the benefits of defensive gun use and of victims defending themselves. Still quite angry, Rendell said that, as a city prosecutor, he had never seen a defensive gun use, and that as far as he was concerned, he had never heard of a defensive gun use. He said that he didn't believe they occurred.

I started to offer to provide him with examples, but he told me he didn't need any evidence, and walked away...
</blockquote>
http://nationalreview.com/comment/co...lott101102.asp
[emphasis added]

Okay, Maggie ... I gotta ask ... What are the DelVal Pink Pistols??

The Delaware Valley chapter of the Pink Pistols. Lots of background and other info at the websites. We get together once a month (third Saturdays) to have lunch and then visit a local range for practice.