Washington

Four states will hold Democratic nominating contests this weekend. Overall, Barack Obama has the clear advantage in most of them, but Hillary Clinton’s campaign would dearly like to avoid a sweep—and has been working overtime to pull out a face-saving win in one state in particular.

Here’s what it looks like:

Saturday

Louisiana primary:

Even after Katrina, which may have reduced the overall influence of black voters in this state, Barack Obama is in a strong position here.  read more »

Here is former NJ Governor Jim McGreevey about to sign a copy of his book after speaking to the Stonewall Democrats at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in Manhattan yesterday.

Now that he's out of office with no plans to return, I asked him what he thought of the Democratic gains in Albany and Washington and what he thought the impact would be on the push to legalize gay marriage.

"I think it will happen in New York," he said. "And it will be on a priority list. I mean, there are a number of other challenges that are clearly eminent and pressing but I think it will happen."

On the federal level: "In Congress, I don't see it happening. I think there will be a number of employment anti-discrimination bills are passed that are very important."

He also said, "I think the employment discrimination and the federal anti-bullying legislation and also certain tax legislation I see as being critical."

When someone in the crowd of about 50 people asked about the legitimacy of outing closeted elected officials who actively work against gay rights -- as McGreevey did when he opposed same-sex marriage -- the former governor told the crowd it would be more effective to "go and talk to those officials who are closeted. Tell them that you are going to survive the other side of the divide."

There's more from McGreevey here [audio].

Dept. of Estimates: A reader who was at the event said that according to the group's sign-in sheet, there were 150 people in attendance. -- Azi Paybarah

First, reports surfaced that a domestic disturbance in upstate Republican congressman John Sweeney's home led his wife to call 911.

Then, a Republican congressional candidate in the neighboring upstate district endorsed Sweeney's Democratic opponent, calling it an "act of conscience."

That other Republican, Warren Redlich, went on to say Sweeney is 'what's wrong with Washington."

Ouch.

-- Azi Paybarah

Before Yvette Clarke won the Democratic primary for that congressional race in Brooklyn, she had the City Council seat her mother Una once held.

Now that Yvette is bound for Washington, might Una run for her old seat?

"ABSOLUTELY NOT!" emailed an aide close to Yvette.

-- Azi Paybarah

We just heard from Pete King, who said he's hoping that Michael Bloomberg's testimony tomorrow before his homeland security committee in Congress will help reverse some of the recent cuts in homeland security funding for New York.

"He's good, he's been very outspoken on this issue all along, and he can cross party lines," he said of Bloomberg, who also spoke briefly with President Bush about the cuts yesterday. "He has now hit the stage of Washington celebrity. People will come and listen to him."

King said he was realistic about what he expected to come out of the hearing.

"The ideal is Chertoff saying I'm wrong, here's the money, but I don't think that is going to happen," said King. "The realistic optimum in that they give a broad enough definition of terror money that we get some transportation and interoperability money."

- Jason Horowitz

The Post reports that the Yankees have hired two Washington lobbyists to get the approvals they need from the IRS and the National Park Service before building a new ball park. -Matthew Schuerman

A kind reader points out that Nation Magazine's Washington correspondent, John Nichols, has written a a bio of Dick Cheney. Dick: The Man Who Is President (Dick Cheney). New Press, 2004.

Listen, I despise George Bush as much as you do. I think he should be impeached for incompetence & his contempt for the consequences of his actions in Iraq is evil... And yet—I confess I always like him, in spite of myself. Here he is taking on a hostile questioner at a town hall event in North Carolina. Note how the guy just wilts under Bush's charm halfway through his assault on him.

The only question is, How did this guy end up being President? A congressman, I can understand. A talk show host. Something—anything, just get him away from the football.  read more »

No one ever lost an election by being too hard on sex offenders.  read more »

"Anything that preserves the integrity of the government is good for honest lobbyists.... There is a heightened concern because of abuses in Washington, but there's a clean system here."

-Edward Wallace, a former City Council member and current lobbyist at Greenberg Traurig, speaking to the AP in support of Mike and Chris's lobbying reform package.

Not to pick on Wallace -- but hey, wasn't there another guy at Greenberg Traurig with some connection to this whole thing?

There are few things more humiliating than crying in Chicago.  read more »

From Romenesko letters, emphasis ours:

From MIKE PETERSON, The Post-Star, Glens Falls, NY: I don't see a problem with the Washington Post and other companies being part of a rally to support our troops. As the spokesman for the Post said, it's a corporate decision and has nothing to do with the fact that they happen to be a news medium. Hey, he WORKS at the Washington Post, I don't. If he says journalism is totally irrelevant to the decisions made in the boardrooms there, I'm gonna take his word for it. I'm also going to assume that if a group called "Americans for Peace" or "The Bring'em Home Now Club" wants to be part of this great rally to support our troops, they'll be welcome to march along with everyone else. After all, if the senior VP of Allbritton Communications says there is no connection between support for the troops and support for the war, then who am I to call the man a liar? He didn't get to be a senior vice-president at a communications company by mouthing empty platitudes. Looks like a good party to me. I wonder if any of the Washington media will make the independent decision to cover it?

 read more »

The folks opposed to regulating campaign finance are having some fun out in Washington State today, where a judge ruled that talk-show hosts backing an anti-gas-tax should be considered contributors to the campaign. As Ryan Sager details on his libertarian blog, the campaigners responded by filing a report that lists as contributors every newspaper that ever ran an article about them. Which I figured the lawyers who spent last week poring over the minutae of this stuff would enjoy; the staff of the Campaign Finance Board, less so.  read more »

We've noted before that if the tiny, under-funded right wing groups promising to bring down Hillary didn't exist, she might have to invent them.

And now she has!

Here's from a fundraising email today:

"While we are fighting back in Washington, Republicans are raising tens of millions of dollars to defeat me in 2006. 'Whatever it takes,' says the New York state Republican chairman. 'STOP HER NOW' urges a new 'independent' 527 committee."

Tens of millions?

Last we heard, they were struggling to keep the lights on up at State Republican Party headquarters. And as we've reported, the half-dozen shadowy anti-Hillary groups created over the last five years have raised a sum which you can round down to zero.

Now, Arthur Finkelstein's certainly doing his best at raising the millions, with no signs of success so far. And we suspect that once the GOP settles on a candidate, he or she will raise a lot from the very real anti-Hillary market.

But nobody has yet. So Hillary's continued reliance on this kind of pre-emptive victimology is a classic instance of Nelson Warfield's recent observation:  read more »

"Both Clintons have benefited from the fact that they drive Republican political consultants insane and we start to do things that, to the undecided voters, seem to be nutty," the Republican consultant told us earlier this year. "It makes her a victim; it makes us seem like we're off-balance."

The New Republic takes obvious, patronizing relish in demolishing Freddy this week, in a piece that is available online only to subscribers.

The view from Washington, apparently, is that Freddy is an almost 19th-century creature of an exotic, nearly extinct breed: the local Democratic Party machine hack. There's something to that view, though we're unsure how a magazine whose central political identity is a fond glance back to the great old Clinton years can be quite so snide about politicians playing politics.

Anyway, here are some choice excerpts:

"All his adult life, Ferrer has been playing by the same set of rules -- that the way to succeed in politics is to behave like an unapologetic hack. Now that he's on the verge of his greatest success, voters and the press have decided unapologetic hackery isn't good enough. Suddenly they want 'consistency.' And 'principle.' And 'character.' Well, I say it's not fair. You don't cut Social Security benefits for people who are about to retire. You don't change frequent-flier incentives for people who've already earned their free trip to Hawaii. And you don't go revising the criteria for political leadership when a longtime pol like Ferrer is about to grab the brass ring....  read more »

"To suddenly deny Ferrer his due would be a crime against ambitious ward heelers everywhere, a crime against mixed metaphors, a crime against a lovable sitcom type. Then again, who am I to over-indict?"

All the attention in the 2006 race for State Attorney General has focused on the Democratic side: Cuomo, Green. (The Inner Circle called them "the unlikeables," but the Politicker likes everybody.)

Now we're starting to hear some buzz on the Republican side as well. Not everyone in the party establishment is on board with Westchester D.A. Jeanine Pirro as a candidate, concerned about her husband's legal problems and a potential tough reelection fight this year.  read more »

Meanwhile the Staten Island D.A., Dan Donovan, has been quietly testing the waters. He was in Albany recently meeting GOP State Senators, and went down to Washington yesterday to talk to members of the New York delegation.

"Dan has a good case to make," said a source in Donovan's camp. "He's the only Republican district attorney in the five boroughs, and probably the only one elected since Thomas E. Dewey."

Don't miss Ryan Sager's damaging attack on the Campaign Finance Reform movement in the New York Post today.

Sager has unearthed a video of one "reformer" bragging about how, to put it generously, his movement uses the tools of its enemies: massive spending campaigns, "astroturf" popular movements, and general deception.

Here's Sager's description of a speech by a former Pew Charitable Trusts staffer, Sean Treglia:

"Charged with promoting campaign-finance reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of 'experts' all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.

"'The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington,' Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. 'The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.'"

Now we're not entirely on board with Sager's thesis. When you spend a lot of time watching how money sloshes around City and State politics, it's hard to view it as "speech," or to share Sager's libertarian hostility to the notion of regulating it.  read more »

But hypocrisy is always damning, and the slimy tactics of holier-than-thou reformers are fair game.

Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist stationed in New York, has been booted upstairs from the  read more »