Jay Inslee’s Copenhagen Junket Turns Heads

Washington’s 1st District Congressman, Jay Inslee, is said to have his eye on the Governor’s mansion. However, his recent attendance at the U.N. Climate Summit turned a few heads.  And here’s the punch line: it’s CBS News that’s blowing the whistle.

Inslee isn’t the only junket junky from Washington’s Democratic Congressional delegation.  3rd District Congressman Brian Baird (D-Vancouver), faced an outpouring of criticism after taking lavish trips to the Galapagos Islands and the South Pole, ostensibly to “study the oceans” and learn about climate change.  Baird, of course, shocked many observers by announcing his retirement late last year.

For his part, Inslee does have a book on climate change and renewable energy.  But why attend the Copenhagen summit? Everyone else was doing it!  Except, they weren’t.  According to CBS, Nancy Pelosi handpicked attendees.  Sure, Inslee could have  easily attended via teleconference (he can see Microsoft from his front yard!), but hey, who needs such new-fangled technology. Rewind back to August when the town hall shout downs were looming, and Inslee was all about phoning it in.

Yeah, yeah, carbon footprints and all that jazz.  3 military jets. Hundreds of hotel nights booked. But the real kicker is this: the Copehagen summit was by all accounts an abject failure.  Will the luxurious junket put a kink in Inslee’s gubernatorial aspirations?  With the current political climate, Inslee might do better to focus on simply getting re-elected to Congress. Something tells us Inslee’s Congressional travel tab might be front and center this fall.

DNC Ad Boosting “Jay Inslee for Governor”?

That’s the speculation over at Red County.  Blogger Tom Forbes connects the dots on the Democratic National Committee buying up Puget Sound region ad time for Rep. Jay Inslee:

In fact, Josh Kraushaar of Politico is reporting that the Democratic National Committee is providing “political cover” for select House Dems, including Inslee, by running radio ads praising them for their support of Obama’s stimulus package.

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Leaked Email Reveals Dem Astro-Turf Operation

UPDATE: Welcome MichelleMalkin.com readers!

A leaked email originating from Congressman Jay Inslee’s office may reveal a widespread astroturfing effort on behalf of Washington Democrats and liberal interest groups to pack town halls with “grassroots supporters” of government-run health care.

In stark contrast to a spontaneous grassroots groundswell against President Obama and Congressional Democrats’s government-run health plan, it appears both overt and covert efforts are underway to orchestrate support for the President’s agenda from the highest-levels of the political Left.

In the email which follows below the jump, Inslee’s official Congressional scheduler forwarded to State Democratic Chairman Dwight Pelz a list of upcoming town halls the Congressman has scheduled.

Pelz then forwarded the email with a note saying “Let’s keep turning people out for these!” to high-ranking Democrat and union organizers including: “progressive” political group FUSE Executive Director Aaron Ostrom, Organizing for America State Director Dustin Lambro (the President’s on-going campaign arm housed at the DNC), and Washington State Labor Council Political Director Benjamin Lawver (one of the state’s most powerful union committees).

A Longview event focusing on Mt. St. Helens with Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, along with embattled Congressman Brian Baird, was cancelled in recent weeks after Lambro, the OFA organizer, mis-construed the purpose of the event in an email to supporters.

NWD Contributor Nansen blew the lid off that story in an earlier post titled, “Going Stealth in Longview.”

The email trail seems to suggest an on-going and coordinated campaign among Democratic Congressmen, Democratic Party leaders, as well as official campaign arms of liberal interest groups and unions, to issue marching orders for members and activists.  Similar efforts to disguise ObamaCare astroturfing as spontaneous grassroots efforts have occurred in other parts of the country as well.

The email follows…

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Town Hall War of Words Continues

The town hall battles of the past few weeks have indeed revealed one thing: some in Washington’s Democratic Congressional delegation are increasingly unafraid to get in the trenches and lob partisan bombs.

But given their often genteel manner of years past, you might say its No More Mr. Nice Guy for them.

Likely emboldened by having faced little opposition in recent election years, and thus feeling safe in their positions, more of the delegation is willing to ride the partisan hard edge. The hard party line was once left to be carried by other members of the delegation in safer liberal districts, like Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott (D-07).

For McDermott’s part, at a town hall meeting he held during a Democratic Party meeting in West Seattle last week, the state’s most liberal Congressman declared of the President’s embattled reform agenda, “This is War.”

But with a Democratic White House, and Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, some might interpret this new brashness as simply misplaced confidence. Two cases in point…

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Hardball Time? A Tale of Two Town Hall Approaches

If you’ve been following the Washington State Congressional delegation on recess, you might have noticed things got a little bizarre today.

Brian Baird suddenly took a sharp turn to the left, and adopted the same tack as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, going on the attack against critics of health care reform.  Baird compared critics’ tactics at town halls as similar to the “Brown Shirts.”

The response to his new plan of attack, as you might guess, has spanned from ridicule to indignation.

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