Author: Daniela Altimari

While three Republicans for U.S. Senate debate policy inside the Lincoln Theater tonight, a fourth, Vinny Forras of Ridgefield, will be standing outside with supporters.

Forras, a businessman, volunteer firefighter and father of seven, expressed frustration that he was excluded from the debate, which is sponsored by the Courant and Fox 61.

“We The People deserve much better than the status quo we have been getting, not only from our elected leaders in Washington, but also from the so called Main Stream Media, when it comes to presenting all points of view from those who are seeking to serve,” Forras said via email. “We ask you, in the name of our freedom, to send a message that can’t be ignored to the Hartford Courant, its sponsors and the public that this sort of arrogant and irresponsible behavior will not be tolerated.”

Only major party candidates were invited to participate in the two debates (one featuring Democrats Merrick Alpert and Richard Blumenthal was held Monday night.) Forras says he’s running as a Republican, but he was listed as an independent candidate on the Federal Election Commission website.

“The Hartford Courant and FOX CT believe strongly in the democratic process,” Courant spokeswoman Andrea Savastra said via email. “The U.S. Senate debates that we are hosting on March 1 and 2 are intended for major-party candidates vying for their respective party’s nomination through the primary process. Mr. Forras is listed on the Federal Election Commission website as running for the U.S. Senate as an independent.”

Forras campaign treasurer Joseph Manuele said Forras had always intended to run as a Republican but an error resulted in him being incorrectly listed as an unaffiliated candidate.
“I filed the appropriate forms with the Secretary of The Senate declaring him a republican candidate for US Senate representing the State of Connecticut and they were received on February 1, 2010. I have documented proof of this. ( Senate candidates do not file directly with the FEC when filing forms to declare candidacy and establishing committees),” Manuele wrote in a letter to Courant Editorial Page editor Carolyn Lumsden.

“Unfortunately since I had confirmation the forms were received I assumed the web site would be updated correctly. I had been on away for a personal matter and did not check the web site until last Monday and discovered the error. I called and spoke to Ken at the FEC and he acknowledged it was their error and assured me it would be corrected no later than Thursday.”

A check of the FEC website this afternoon shows that Forras is listed as a Republican.

Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon’s glossy mailers attacking one of her GOP rivals has caught the attention of FactCheck.org, a widely respected non-partisan group that researches the claims made by political candidates and debunks those found to be untrue.

The McMahon campaign has sent out a number of brochures critical of Rob Simmons, including allegations that the former congressman cosponsored a cap and trade bill that will “cost the average American family more than $1,7000 a year.”

Team McMahon also tried to tie Simmons to the controversial group ACORN. The McMahon mailer alleges that Simmons was one of ACORN’s congressional chums when he served in the U.S. House: “Congressman Simmons voted with ACORN 56 percent of the time,” the mailer asserts. In fact, McMahon claimed Simmons is a better friend to ACORN than Democrat Chris Dodd.

The Simmons campaign has been complaining about the veracity of these statements and FactCheck agrees. In an article titled “You’ve Got False Mail,” published today on the group’s website, FactCheck sifts through the McMahon statements and finds them riddled with falsehoods.

“ACORN’s legislative scorecard for the 109th Congress in 2006, based on House and Senate members’ votes on ACORN’s key legislative issues, shows, as the mailer notes, that Simmons earned a 56 percent “pro-ACORN” rating. Dodd, however, received a perfect 100 percent “pro-ACORN” rating,” FactCheck found.

The group brought the matter to the attention of McMahon spokesman Ed Patru, who issued a correction on the campaign’s website.

Will the issue come up in tonight’s debte between the Republican candidates? We’ll see.

In his closing statement during Monday’s debate, Merrick Alpert offered the rousing proclamation that he “represents the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.”

The line didn’t originate with Alpert. It was made famous by Howard Dean, but it apparently originated with the late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota.

Not really. Chris Healy, the state GOP chairman, calls Mystic businessman Merrick Alpert  “a crazed liberal.”

But, Healy adds, “at least he was cogent and coherent” during Monday night’s debate with his Democratic opponent, state Attorney General (and presumptive Democratic nominee) Richard Blumenthal.

Alpert’s public approval rating among Democrats is mired at 4 percent according to the latest Q poll, But he seems to have some fans among Republicans, who will cheer anyone trying to pierce Blumenthal’s sky-high public approval ratings.

“If you happen to catch the debate, it is easy to see why Dick Blumenthal didn’t want to debate Merrick Alpert,” Healy said in an email sent to reporters before the candidates had even cleared the stage at the University of Hartford’s Lincoln Theater.

“Blumenthal’s responses were pedestrian,” Healy continued. “His grasp of issues weak and some of his assertions simply wild exaggerations. He claimed his had “law enforcement” duties when he doesn’t; made an incoherent proposal on cutting payroll taxes without saying for how long or at what level of income, took credit for saving lives and said he had witnessed the direct effects of military action. On that last one, I would like to know what battlefield Blumenthal inspected.”

Yesterday’s must-read for denizens of Fairfield County is now available to the rest of the world. The excellent, in-depth analysis by Brian Lockhart of Hearst Connecticut Newspapers details how the White House and Congress each never followed through on an investigation into steroid use in the WWE — a huge break for Linda McMahon’s political career. Read it here.

Here’s a little bedside reading as we wait for Hearst newspapers’ WWE steroid story.

Enjoy!

Linda McMahon’s congressional testimony.pdf

Fox 61 and the Courant are sponsoring the first official debates between the candidates for U.S. Senate. Democrats Merrick Alpert and Richard Blumenthal will square off at the University of Hartford Lincoln Theater Monday night; Republicans Peter Schiff, Rob Simmons and Linda McMahon will take the stage Tuesday.

Things should be even more interesting on Tuesday, when the GOP candidates take their turn in the spotlight.

State Rep. Fred Camillo, a Republican from Greenwich, has proposed keeping secret the names of those arrested on domestic violence charges.

Mosler, a Manchester native who holds an economics degree from UConn, is currently living in the U.S. Virgin Islands. But he intends to return to Connecticut tomorrow, to start a “listening tour” as he weighs a run for the seat currently held by Chris Dodd, who is retiring.

Mosler says he was planning to run for president in 2012 but has been prodded by people in Connecticut to enter the senate race. If he runs, he’ll do it as a Democrat — joining a field that already includes Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and Mystic businessman Merrick Alpert.

“It looks more than intriguing,” Mosler said. “If it makes sense, I’ll announce…I have a specific agenda for economic development I’m pushing.”

He says he’s motivated by his conscience, adding “I know I can turn the U.S. economy around in 90 days.”

Mosler’s agenda includes three main proposals: a full payroll tax holiday, a $500 per-capita distribution from the federal government to each state and a federal jobs program that would provide an $8-an-hour position to any unemployed person willing to work. (That’s the thumbnail version of his platform. More details can be found on his website.)

Mosler, 60, grew up in Manchester in the 1950s and ’60s and worked in Hartford before leaving for a job on Wall Street. He started his own hedge fund in 1982 and turned most of it over to partners in the late 1990s. He is currently on a government-sponsored project to promote economic development in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

According to his website, Mosler recently spoke to tea party activists in Dallas. That’s not normally a place you’d expect to find a Democratic office-seeker, but he says many of his views are in line with tea party values.

“I look at the tea party and I see a lot of concerned citizens who are unhappy, who believe the government has supported the elites,” he said. “They see their tax money going to AIG and the banks while they’re getting squeezed.”

If he runs, Mosler will pour some of his own money into his campaign but he won’t exclusively self-fund. He said he views campaign contributions as a measure of support. “Broad-based support is important,” he said. “I’m not talking to hear myself talk.”

That’s the implication in this scoop by Muchnick.

But Justine Sacco, a publicist for World Wrestling Entertainment, said ratings for the company’s programs haven’t changed. So why was WWE’s new NXT program listed on televised programming guides as TV-14, “unsuitable for children under 14 years of age?”

“There was a miscommunication between SyFy [the cable channel airing the show] and the programming guides,” Sacco said. It was just the satellite and cable television guides that contained the incorrect information, the show itself carried the correct rating.

“All of our programming is PG,” she added. 

On the campaign trail, Republican Linda McMahon has been touting WWE’s family-friendly side, the company she once ran and still owns a sizeable chunk of with her husband Vince.

If approved, the amendment would essentially nullify last month’s controversial, 5-4 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down restrictions on political spending by corporations.

“I am a firm believer in the sanctity of the First Amendment, and I believe we must continue to do all we can to protect the free speech rights of the American people. But I strongly disagree with the Supreme Court’s conclusion that money is speech, and that corporations should be treated the same as individual Americans when it comes to protected, fundamental speech rights,” Dodd said in a statement.

Sen. Tom Udall, a Democrat from New Mexico and a co-sponsor of the amendment, said the court ruling upends the notion that political campaigns “should be about the best ideas and not the biggest bank accounts.”

Democrats in Congress have been scrambling for ways to diminish the impact of the court’s ruling in the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted earlier this month found that 80 percent of those surveyed oppose the decision.

A constititutional amendment would certainly accomplish that goal. However it isn’t easy: The U.S. Constitution hasn’t been amended since 1992. It requires a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate and the ratification of three-fourths of the states.   

“The odds are going to be stacked against it,” said Trinity College Professor Ned Cabot, the former national chairman of the citizens organization Common Cause. But, he added, Dodd’s proposal could be a catalyst for opposition to the ruling.

“It’s a useful way of engaging citizens in the discussion,” Cabot said. He also predicted ithe debate over the amendment could shed light on what he views as the corrosive influence of corporate spending on the American political stystem. 

We won’t be co-opted.

That’s the bottom line message from t
ea party activists across the nation, including several in Connecticut, who have drafted what they call a “Declaration of Independence.”

As one would expect, the document reiterates the tea party’s rejection of big government and “arrogant left-wing politicians who furtively hide from public scrutiny as they cut corrupt deals loaded with earmarks and pork.”

But there’s also a strong message here for Republicans, who may be looking to capitalize on the tea party movement’s wave of populist discontent.

“We Declare ourselves INDEPENDENT of the Republican Party, which has in the
past manipulated its Conservative Base to win election after election and which then
betrays everything that Base fought for and believed,” the declaration states.

“We reject the idea that the electoral goals of the Republican Party are identical to the
goals of the Tea Party Movement or that this Movement is an adjunct to the Republican
Party. We reject the Republican Party professionals who now seek to use the Tea Party
Movement for their corrupt and narrow political purposes.”

Dec of Tea Party Independencev8.pdf

The document emphatically denounces compromise. Tea party activists say they won’t settle for the “lesser of two evils” when faced a choice between a liberal Democrat and a moderate Republican (paging Rob Simmons and Linda McMahon.)

“We reject RINO money; we reject RINO ‘advice’; we reject RINO ‘professional experience’;
we reject RINO ‘progressivism’,” the group declares. “We reject RINO support of Big Government; we reject RINO back room deal making; we reject RINO pork spending; we reject false RINO professions of Conservative views and we reject the RINO’s statist subversion of the principles of small government for which the Republican Party is supposed to stand.”

The group revels in its grassroots — declaring that it has no use for “self-styled ‘leaders’ who claim to speak for the tea party movement.”

“This movement is not a brand name to be used to sell product; nor is it a logo to be used to justify profiting off its name. We reject those who seek to personally capitalize on our popularity and momentum by trying to associate with our cause,” the declaration states.

“We reject the idea that the Tea Party Movement is ‘led’ by anyone other than the
millions of average citizens who make it up. The Tea Party Movement understands that
as a Free People, we need to SAVE OURSELVES, BY OURSELVES, FOR
OURSELVES. The Tea Party Movement is not ‘led.’ The Tea Party Movement LEADS.”

Oh, and the movement has little use for the media, which it says is more focused on “entertainment, fear-mongering and shock-value” than unbiased reporting.

Torres, who fled Cuba in the 1960s and settled in Bridgeport, is running for the seat currently held by Democrat Jim Himes.

“Mr. Torres is a proven conservative leader who pledges to shrink the size of Government, reduce spending, and provide tax relief for all Americans,” Jesse Haskell, chair of the Conservative Party, said in a statement announcing the endorsement. “Mr. Torres brings a wealth of experience, Constitutional knowledge, and common sense solutions to the United States House of Representatives.”

Capitol police are investigating a small fire this morning at U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy’s Washington office.

There were no reports of injuries, said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider of the Capitol Police department.

“I believe it was the only office affected but I don’t have any other details,” Schneider said. 

Murphy, a Democrat from the state’s 5th District, is currently serving his second term.

POLITICO, which broke the story earlier today, reported that Murphy’s office in the Cannon Office Building was marked by yellow police tape and a police officer stood in the hall.

Murphy’s spokeswoman Kristen Bossi said the office is open and it’s business as usual.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Peter Schiff might win. The financial pundit, author and broker from Weston has a whopping 21,518 fans. (And that’s not even counting the 7,122 fans on his official “Peter Schiff for Senate” page.)

Democrat Richard Blumenthal has a respectable 9,582 Facebook fans and Republican Linda McMahon has 7,676. Her arch enemy, fellow Republican Rob Simmons, brings up the rear with 2,772 fans.

On Twitter, Schiff also leads the pack with 3,486 followers (even though his last tweet was on Jan. 17.) McMahon has 3,326 Twitter followers (last tweet — about 1:10 this afternoon) and Simmons has 1,850 (last tweet — yesterday.)

Blumenthal, by the way, has 192 followers on Twitter and has only one tweet, which came on Jan. 8, two days after he announced that he was entering the race.

Many candidates like to tout their fluency in social media but does it translate into votes?

Most of the posts and tweets are bland statements similar to the pronouncements found on the campaign websites. Blumenthal’s Facebook wall is an exception: tucked among the numerous posts from fans lauding his work as attorney general — “You are a great man and have done so much for the weak, timid and underprivileged…” — are several personal pleas for help.

And then there’s Merrick Alpert. Earlier this week, Ted Mann of The Day took note of the slightly dreamy, stream-of-consciousness tweets from the longshot Democrat.  

McMahon campaign spokesman Ed Patru thought his boss did well on MSNBC this morning.

“I thought Linda did well,” Patru said. “I thought she displayed a lot of the attributes that are responsible for her growing momentum in this race. She held her own in the face of a very aggressive and perhaps over the top line of questioning, the tone at least.”

Watch the segement and judge for yourself

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

He’s placed a deposit on a condo in Bridgeport. What does it mean for the former Congressman’s political aspirations? Lennie Grimaldi has the scoop at Only In Bridgeport.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Peter Schiff is running as an outsider whose real-world experience and understanding of economics can help fix Washington. Yet he has unveiled a campaign team with deep ties to the local and national Republican establishment.

Schiff says he searched the nation to find “the best and the brightest” to steer his campaign.

Schiff’s campaign manager is JR Romano is a familiar face in state GOP circles. He served as political director to the Connecticut Republican Party and worked on former Gov. John Rowland’s campaigns.

The Schiff campaign tapped another veteran as its political director. Len Greene directed field operations for the state Republican party and the House Republican campaign commitee.

Jon Seaton, Schiff”s general consultant, wore a number of hats for John McCain’s presidential campaign, including national field director, Iowa caucus director and regional campaign manager in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. He also served in the Bush administration as White House liason to the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2004, he led Bush’s re-election efforts in Washington state.

And the campaign has also enlisted the services of Carl Forti, founder of the Black Rock Group. Forti was a chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s presidential bid and also has connections to the conservative group Freedom Watch, which could help Schiff’s cause as he courts Tea Party activists.

Schiff’s media adviser, Evan Kozlow, should be familiar with the dynamics of Connecticut’s U.S. Senate race: he advised Sam Caligiuri before Caligiuri abandoned his run for Senate to campaign for a House seat instead.

Adam D. Probolsky, an Orange County-Calif. based pollster, is also working for the Schiff camp.

“Campaigning for the United States Senate is not going to be easy, nor do I think that this is an undertaking that can be done alone,” Schiff said in a statement accompanying a press release announcing his new team. “Which is why I have scoured the country to find best and brightest to be a part of our campaign leadership team.
 
“In addition, to the many volunteers that have and will be giving their time, energy and talents to this massive effort these are the people that will be working with me day-in and day-out so that my vision of creating jobs by removing government road blocks and allowing the private sector and small business do what they do best – create wealth and create jobs – can be fulfilled.”  
 

Former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon likes to trumpet the company’s multi-national connections. For instance, under her direction, the WWE opened an office in Shanghai, a fact she proudly pointed out at a Republican party event in Vernon last weekend.

Rob Simmons, McMahon’s GOP rival, immediately saw an opportunity to one-up her. He didn’t just open an office in China, he said, he spent the time there as a CIA agent. And, as if to to prove his superiority on all things Chinese, he quickly tossed off a few sentences in Mandarin.

He’ll discuss his efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution to regulate campaign finance. Tune in tonight at 11:30 on Comedy Central.