blogger interrupted

This evening, Progress Ohio’s Dave Harding sent out a post to Ohio bloggers which jumped out for the sole reason of its headline.

Secretary of State Brunner It’s Profile In Courage Time

The post basically calls Jennifer Brunner a coward if she doesn’t do what Progress Ohio wants her to do in its months long campaign to play a partisan game against John Husted over his residency.  Not just boring, pathetic, petty and parroting of Republican stupidity already shot down by Democrats, but in fact, wrong on the law, as Modern points out quite thoroughly.

I don’t get the gaunltet that Harding is throwing down.  He’s pretending that the only reason Brunner might rule against ProgressOhio’s complaint is not because they’ve failed to prove the legal standard, but because she’s somehow a “coward” to stand up to an influential Republican politician?  Even though that was the some politician she routinely was standing up to when it came to the “Golden Week” of early voting and countless other election issues just… last…. year?

Dave, I’ll give ProgressOhio credit for revealing just how embarrassingly little Husted is ever even near his house.  However, that’s not the legal standard for disqualifying a person’s voting residence as we all should have learn from the Strickland challenge farce.

If Brunner decides against you, it’s not because she’s suddenly a “coward.”  It’s because as the law is presently stated, Husted has several defenses against your organization’s partisan complaint that have merit.

Not one headline from any blog post at Progress Ohio on this matter ever tried to call Jennifer Brunner a coward.  Until tonight.  Now, why might that be?

You will recall that last year, Progress Ohio’s Brian Rothenberg, former ODP communications director under Chris Redfern, spun ohio bloggers in defense of Marc Dann for weeks, until right before Ohio bloggers finally got fed up and threw Dann under the bus.  Then, Rothenberg hired Leo Jennings straight out of Dann’s office, which got me looking at Progress Ohio’s board, where I learned that Progress Ohio’s board included known Marc Dann crony Jeff Rusnak.  

I have since learned that Progress Ohio’s board also includes Columbus political consultant, and long time Lee Fisher hack Marc Gaunce.  Rusnak and Gaunce together have built their careers in large part on the endless streams of losing Lee Fisher campaigns.  Rusnak consults, Gaunce is usually a paid staffer – I believe he was Lee’s field director and/or campaign manager at various points.   Gaunce and Lee Fisher are tied at the hip.  I’d be shocked if Gaunce didn’t end up on Lee’s 2010 Senate campaign, and unsurprised if he’s already there.  

Combine this with Rothenberg, who came from ODP under Redfern, where he perfected and to this day still deploys his buffoonish bullying toward blogs, and you have at the very least a perception problem when it comes to this 2010 US Senate primary.  Why the hell would you write, out of the blue, such a patently absurd blog post, in the midst of the hot first days of this primary, and email it to a blog list already primed to not believe a single thing you say?  Are you trying to get people to think you’re in the tank for Fisher?  

Or are you just a link whore, who knows that if you take a shot at Brunner, right now, you’ll brew up a storm?  If so, congrats, you’ve done it, I’m sure this is the most linking anyone has ever done to Progress Ohio since the day it got launched.  Woo fucking hoo.  You got your link, to a campaign that is without merit under the law, and by doing so, you’ve gotten Marc Gaunce in a few cross hairs, another blog post with Jeff Rusnak’s name tied to Marc Dann, another blog post with Rothenberg’s name tied to Leo Jennings, and another opportunity for Rothenberg to obsessively hit refresh on his browser every 20 minutes.  I’m sure they’ll be happy about that.

Progress Ohio has no history of accomplishing a single thing in this state other than to embed cronyism and incompetence into Democratic Party politics.  I’m not sure which is worse.   Whether or not Gaunce or Rusnak influenced Dave Harding’s post tonight is irrelevant.  It is in Harding’s interest to please his bosses, some of whom might soon be under Lee Fisher’s direct employ, and this post most certainly will do that – briefly.