Tonight's installment of the
Fighting Dems features
Eric Massa, running in the New York 29th Congressional District. The Fighting Dems series is meant to highlight men and women who worn the uniform and have chosen to run on the Democratic ticket. There's
tons more on our side than theirs.
(Massa is the guy in the middle)
The 29th got a great deal of attention in 2004 as Samara Barend made a valiant fight against Randy "shotgun" Kuhl (Kuhl endded with 51 percent of the vote, and the Conservative Party candidate getting another 6 percent). Kuhl's divorce papers were leaked to the press, and the contents weren't pretty. In addition to your run-of-the-mill divorce stuff, Kuhl had taken out a shotgun and threatened to shoot his wife in front of dinner guests. Lovely man, that one. And while that may be in the past, the present doesn't show a congressman too interested in his district. I mean, besides voting for CAFTA, supporting social security privatization, and eliminating bankruptcy protections, he must work on his golf game:
Perhaps John R. "Randy" Kuhl is just too busy improving his golf game to worry about such a mundane thing as the 2006 mid-term Congressional elections. The first term Republican Congressman who recently tied former House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX) and Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) as the 66th best golfer on Golf Digest's Washington's Top 200 list told the Corning Leader last week that he's not sure he's running for reelection next year.
"I haven't decided whether I'm going to run or not at this point, quite frankly," Kuhl told the Leader. "I'm enjoying this experience. It's a tremendous task. It's a lot of work." Kuhl represents the 29th District of New York, a largely rural, working class area in the western part of the state.
Interestingly enough, Massa was actually a top aide to Gen. Wesley Clark.
One deployment saw us for many months off the coast of Beirut in direct support of our Marines ashore. During another cruise to the Middle East we were on station during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and throughout the opening of Desert Storm. My capstone military assignment was Special Assistant to General Wes Clark, both in Panama and then when he became Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces. I served with Wes in Washington DC, Panama, and in the European Theater of Operations.
The segment will run at around 9:20 p.m. ET, though your local Air America affiliates may have it at different times. Here's Massa's official campaign site.
Previous Fighting Dems:
Dave Harris (TX-06)
Andrew Duck (MD-06)
Patrick Murphy (PA-08)
Paul Hackett (OH-Sen)
Bryan Lentz (PA-07)
David Ashe (VA-02)
You can get streams of these segments on Air America's Fighting Dems site.
Update: There's a Fighting Dem ActBlue page, so show your support if you can.