Actually it was Friday — At the Bethel candidates’ forum, she got off what may be remembered as line of the campaign:

Schmidt said McEwen’s “true home is in Virginia.”

“I know, because I have been sending him Christmas cards there for the past 15 years,” Schmidt said.

And they haven’t been addressed c/o the Fairfax Station, Virginia Homeless Shelter?

(Let me guess: COAST will file an election complaint claiming
she’s only been sent cards the past 14 years; or that
the cards have been from both her and her husband,
not just her; or that the cards said “Happy Holidays”
and didn’t mention Christmas; or…..)

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UPDATE, April 30: An e-mailer tells me that John Boehner got in on the act yesterday:

(Boehner said that) McEwen wanted him to endorse him again but
Boehner told him he was in Jean’s corner.

His rationale?

She’s the incumbent, she won it fair and square, and
“she lives in the district.” Then he made a comment
about the whole residency flap and said, “All of us in
DC know where Bob lives because we see him.”

It was great.

The Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes (COAST) is an anti-tax organization with ostensibly noble goals:

COAST exists to limit the rate of taxes and spending at the Federal, State, and local level to within the rate of inflation and to stop the abuse of power by government officials.

COAST advances this cause by consistent and principled adherence to limited government and lower taxes in fighting legislation and ballot initiatives that increase taxes and spending beyond the rate of inflation, and by supporting candidates for public office who advance these principles.

Despite the stated mission, COAST spends the bulk of its energy not by “supporting candidates for public office” but by opposing people they don’t believe have hewn sufficiently to their low-tax outlook, and does so by using some of the most outrageous tactics imaginable.

I have been told by three different antitax people in three different school districts that the surest way to make sure that school levy repeal or reduction efforts fail is to bring the COAST folks in to “help you out.” The next thing you know, everyone is so mad at you that they won’t listen. That’s because the COAST folks are so bent on insulting people who don’t agree with every line item of their agenda and in scoring their debating points, no matter how bizarre, that they make those who might otherwise have been persuadable tune them out. The people who are trying to keep taxes under control don’t need that.

Now to the current Second District campaign: In February, COAST gave incumbent Congresswoman Jean Schmidt their “Marie Antoinette Award” for 2005 for voting for tax increases. There’s only one problem: Jean Schmidt had a pretty good 2005. In fact, though it was only for a partial year, it was just as good as John Boehner’s, five points shy of Steve Chabot’s and better than every other member of the Ohio congressional delegation.

So the award was bogus. If COAST was really interested in giving out a “Marie” award to Jean Schmidt and they really thought her record in the Ohio General Assembly was that horrid, it should have been one for Lifetime Achievement.

Bob McEwen was there not only when the “Marie” award was given out, but he yukked it up with everyone there when Jean Schmidt’s head was figuratively cut off on a cake (”let them eat cake — get it?), an act of meanness that will be discussed in a later post.

People should know that Bob McEwen is joined at the hip with COAST; he attended the infamous “Marie” meeting, and they have given him $1,000.

This is the same organization that took money from and worked with a liberal proabortion PAC last summer in an attempt to convince GOP voters to stay home and let Democrat Paul Hackett win by default.

How working with an antitax organization that has no problem working with a group that supports the antilife agenda is consistent with Bob McEwen’s stated fundamentalist Christian beliefs is an unsolved mystery that perhaps he’d like to explain — right after he explains how someone who once stood with Ronald Reagan as Eastern European communism fell can take $15,000 a month from what Evans and Novak in their latest e-mail call the “quasi-Marxist government” of Eritrea.
______________________

UPDATE: Mr. Jenkins’ comment #1 below inspires me to make sure this quote from this week’s Evans-Novak Report is in the record (link will only work for a few more days):

Still, (Jean Schmidt’s) primary election opponent, former Rep. Bob McEwen (R), is weighed down by his own ethics problems, which go beyond his involvement in the House Banking Scandal in the early 1990s. Now he is facing problems related to his voter registration: He has voted in Ohio for years since leaving Congress, despite living in Virginia. This issue has legs, and it blindsided McEwen, who has handled it very badly. Perhaps less damaging, but still problematic, is the new revelation that he lobbied for the quasi-Marxist government of Eritrea.

Pierce-ing Posts, daily until the election, is sampling current blog posts both in and out of the S.O.B. Alliance, going to Old Media coverage, and bringing important prior posts to the attention of late-comers to Ohio’s US Senate contest.

Don’t forget to visit Bill’s site, his blog, and his Contribute page.

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FROM THE CURRENT BLOG CROP

Right Angle Blog Picks up a 16-vote Swing (Bill Pierce +8 Mike DeWine -8)

From Cleveland Townhall (no link provided; indicated link does not go to forum post) — “At our last monthly meeting, one of our special guests was Bill Pierce, who’s running in the Republican primary against Mike DeWine. Most everyone there was very impressed with Pierce, and based on the conversation I heard afterwards, the DeWine camp should be concerned because I think they lost at least 8 votes that they were able to count on last election.”

OLD MEDIA MORSELS

Thanks to DeWine, the Left Is Close to Winning Many Judicial Nomination Battles by Default

A subscription-only editorial in The Wall Street Journal makes that very clear:

There are 17 vacancies on the appeals bench, including nine pending nominations. They deserve to be filled as soon as possible before the summer recess.

An excellent place to start would be to finally vote on Terrence Boyle, whom Mr. Bush has named to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Boyle was in Mr. Bush’s original group of appeals-court nominees on May 9, 2001, after having failed to get a vote when he was nominated a decade earlier by the President’s father. Judge Boyle, who has served on the federal bench for 22 years, had a hearing more than a year ago and was voted out of the Judiciary Committee in June. His plight is similar to that of William Myers, whose confirmation hearing for the Ninth Circuit also took place more than a year ago.

….. We guess we should be happy that no one is talking about filibusters these days. This time last year, the fight over the Democrats’ unprecedented use of the judicial filibuster was coming to a head and Republicans were threatening to change Senate rules to prohibit its use. The single biggest accomplishment of the Senate last year was breaking the filibusters to confirm a string of highly qualified candidates for the appeals courts and then going on to confirm two Supreme Court nominees.

The advice-and-consent clause of the Constitution gives the Senate the duty to vet all federal judicial nominees. Now it’s time for the remaining nominees to have the up-or-down floor votes they deserve.

The editorial was written a month ago. Note how nothing has happened. Note that Mike DeWine is on the Judiciary Committee. Note that Mike DeWine has uttered not a word of complaint about the lack of action.

BLOG BLASTS FROM THE PAST

Bill Pierce visited the lion’s den, so to speak, when he was interviewed by the left-leaning Meet the Bloggers group in March. Though there were obvious disagreements on issues, Bill nevertheless left favorable impressions with the interviewers — an outcome that bodes well for getting independent and crossover votes in the general election. Here is Writes Like She Talks’ summations of Part 1 and Part 2. Audio files are here.

Back in December, some S.O.B. Alliance members, and members to be, used Mike DeWine’s vote against ANWR drilling as an opportunity to endorse. Porkopolis used it as an opportunity to unload, and did he ever.

Porkopolis did the dirty work and asked our incumbent senator six as-yet unanswered questions. I’m doing what I can to call attention to them before balloting takes place next Tuesday.

So here’s the Porkopolis Pre-Election Question of the Day:

Why are you supporting the give-away of government land to lobbying groups?

Mike DeWine has not been a good steward of our tax dollars. As indicated earlier this week, the National Taxpayers union gave him a 2005 grade of C- with a raw score of 48 — the fourth-worst rating of any Republican senator.

Don’t wait for answers that aren’t going to come. Instead, vote for fiscal conservative Bill Pierce on May 2, and you won’t be asking your senator questions like this six years from now.

Don’t forget to visit Bill’s site, his blog, and his Contribute page.

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NOTE: I have endorsed Bill Pierce for Senate, and have provided nominal financial support for his campaign. BizzyBlog is a member of Blogs for Pierce.

The Free Market Project notes the typical characterization of shareholder-owned oil companies as sinister, while totally overlooking what near-dictator Hugo Chavez does with his country’s oil profits:

While ABC’s April 26 “World News Tonight” opened with an attack on the success of petroleum companies – anchor Elizabeth Vargas noted “overflowing profits for the oil industry as Americans struggle to pay rising prices at the pump” – it also featured a story that just briefly discussed how Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is pumping some of his billions in oil money into undermining American interests.

The same night on the “CBS Evening News,” correspondent Byron Pitts slammed American petroleum companies as harming consumers and even their own gas station owners, though the Citgo station owner he featured worked for a company owned by Venezuela.

Over on ABC, correspondent Dan Harris was more realistic. “Before you get too steamed at the oil companies, take a hard look at oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Venezuela,” Harris said.

“It’s the producers,” of oil, countries like Chavez’s Venezuela, “that make the lion’s share of the profit,” Thompson Financial research director Michael Thompson told ABC News.

Harris informed viewers that Chavez’s regime stood to gain $34 billion from oil sales this year, money which helps the country’s dictator “to support anti-U.S. politicians across Latin America.”

….. Pitts didn’t explain that it’s the anti-American Chavez who is getting “big and fat” from Citgo sales. Citgo, unlike publicly-traded corporations like ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) or BP (NYSE: BP), is “a wholly-owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A.,” and therefore has “no publicly-traded equity securities,” according to the company Web page.

In other words, all of Citgo’s profits are Hugo Chavez’s to essentially do with as he pleases, while shareholder-owned oil companies pay out dividends and are expected by their owner to invest their profits wisely to produce more wealth.

Tell me which set-up is more greedy again?

A nice touch — A “graduation“:

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