Why Is So Much Special Interest Money Flooding Into New Hampshire?

These fellas think they should have their own New Hampshire congressman

New Hampshire voters tossed shameless Wall Street shill Charlie Bass out of Congress in 2006, when they elected Paul Hodes, 108,525 (53%) to 93,905 (45%). Now Hodes is running for the open U.S. Senate seat and Bass wants "his" old seat back. And the special interests are pouring huge sums of money into the second congressional district to help him beat progressive activist Ann McLane Kuster. This week the NRCC and four Republican Party front groups put another half million dollars into the race, all working in lockstep with his campaign to hide and distort a 12-year record of working hand-in-hand with the ideological reactionaries who ushered in the economic mess that Bush and the GOP Congress left us when the voters finally said, "No More!" [If you'd like to contribute to Ann Kuster's campaign, you can do it at the Blue America ActBlue page.]

“In Washington, Congressman Bass supported subsidies for oil companies and bailouts for big Wall Street executives-- now those same interests are subsidizing his campaign and bailing-out his faltering effort,” said Kuster Communications Director Neil Sroka. One of the worst, and best known, is Americans for Prosperity, a shady outfit funded by nefarious billionaire oil executive David Koch, whose company won the "Outsourcing Excellence Award" for its work shipping American jobs to China. Koch wants Charlie Bass back in DC and fork out whatever it takes. "It's no wonder Congressman Bass' out-of-state friends are rushing to his defense. His support for tax breaks for big oil and tax loopholes for companies that outsource jobs matches the agenda of these shady, outside groups," said Sroka. "Charlie's outsourcing friends are understandably concerned about Annie Kuster's plan to close the tax loopholes he supported during his twelve years in Washington."

A couple weeks ago Dean Barker at Blue Hampshire thoroughly laid out all the facts on Bass' disgraceful relationship with Big Oil who has received, over the course of his slimy career, more thinly veiled bribes from the oil & gas industry than all of the other 22 members of U.S. House of Representatives from New England combined. In return for which Bass has consistently voted against cracking down on price gouging by Big Oil and against removing Billions in tax breaks to Big Oil from legislation. In fact when he was in Congress, and part of the reason New Hampshire voters tossed him, he voted for Cheney's 2005 Energy Bill which featured a $1.6 billion tax breaks for Big Oil and Gas.

OK, so that-- plus Kuster's promise to shut down the tax loopholes that reward companies for sending good American jobs overseas and to cut subsidies for big oil companies and end the Wall Street bailouts-- explains much of the GOP gusher of special interest money flooding into the NH-02 race. But what about the Safari Club? Yeah, another international special interest outfit, the Safari Club, threw a few grand into the race as well. I don't know a lot about them but I do know that their biggest legislative effort has been to get the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to allow for the importation of trophies made of dead gorillas, cheetahs, tigers, orangutans, snow leopards and lobbying for shady tax write-offs taken by big game hunters. And then there's this...

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