PA9

Dear Friends in Pennsylvania's 9th District:

I'd like to know whether there are any other folks in the District who would be interested in forming a 9th District Committee on impeachment. The primary goal would be to get Congress off its butt and doing the job they should have started long since: impeaching George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Petitions are readily available on the After Downing Street site. I'd like to see if we could get enough of these together to give Representative Shuster a much needed shake-up. Anybody who's ever written to him knows he's Bush's man; I believe that needs to change. Anybody else up for it?

Peace,
Morgan

There are 725 days until Election Day 2008. Right now in Altoona, and Duncansville and Claysburg and bunch of other small Pennsylvania townships that most of you never heard of, a very weary group of stalwart volunteers is organizing a letter writing campaign. We will be writing to Rahm Emanuel, we will be writing to Howard Dean and you will see diary after diary on this page and more than a few others asking for your support of Democratic Congressional Candidate in the PA-09th Tony Barr.

For those you who missed it or ignored it. Tony Barr is the Special Education Teacher from Claysburg PA, who started a write-in campaign for the PA09th. We needed 1000 write ins, we got 1,900. From May to November, we raised only $45,000. Not much by political standards but for PA-09 Democrats it was unprecedented. At a cost of $.57 a vote, we got nearly 79,000 votes in November. While that is a paltry 40% of the total PA-9th vote it is a huge number by PA Dem Standards. We won 3 counties; winning one would have busted a 100 year old record. We won the City of Altoona; unprecedented. We nearly doubled Democratic turnout, also unprecedented, in Cambria county Dem turnout was 82%, yes that’s eighty-two percent. It’s a big first step, but only a first step.

I wanted to call this blog, ”lies and the lying liars who tell them” but Al Franken used that as a title of a book. This blog is about the fact that in a pathetic attempt to save his own political neck, Bill Shuster is going on radio trying to scare the voters with guns and taxes.

Here are the facts:
Tony Barr is a hunter and a gun owner. Do you need to know anymore about his positions on guns than that? If you do, check out the title page where, instead of ducking the questions of voters, we answer them, look for our NRA post cards page

Taxes:
Bill Shuster, who’s worth an estimated $3 million dollars, crying to middle class workers about taxes is the height of hypocrisy, since 2001 his taxes have gone down while the average worker’s taxes burden has increased. “oooh scary tax raising Democrat” is the only ghost story Bill Shuster can use to try to frighten disenfranchised republicans, most of whom hate his guts , back into line.

The following was written by volunteers for PA-09 Democratic Challenger, Tony Barr.

On Monday, October 23, 2006, The Public Opinion in Chambersburg, PA, published its endorsement of Tony Barr, Democrat, over Bill Shuster, Republican, in the race for U. S. Congress in Pennsylvania’s 9th District. This was a courageous endorsement, because the Opinion is published in an area of the state where party registration is heavily Republican. Rather than bowing to local partisanship, the Opinion based its endorsement on principles.

On Saturday, October 28, a half-page ad appeared on the pages of the Public Opinion, placed by Bill Shuster, which criticized the endorsement. The ad contained a number of statements that were unusual in that they repeatedly named the editor who wrote the October 23 endorsement in negative terms, and made controversial and inaccurate statements about the basis of their endorsement of Tony Barr.