Patrick Kennedy on Why He Has Better Things to do With His Time than Explain His Positions to the Public

Patrick Kennedy just explained to WPRO radio why he refuses to debate his opponent…

Debates at this stage are usually theatre and gotcha games.

Unbelievably, Congressman Kennedy made this statement while spending the day with actor Martin Sheen!

So Congressman Kennedy considers discussing issues with his opponent in front of the public to be theatre.

Yet he considers traveling around his district in the company of an actor to be a substantive use of his time -- or maybe he just doesn’t care about keeping the public informed.

The Congressman, you may recall, just voted to spend $700 billion on a financial bailout for private businesses. His opponent, Jon Scott, has some ideas about how that money could have been better spent. Various members of the public may also have some ideas about how the $700 billion could have been spent, or if it should have been spent at all.

Doesn't Congressman Kennedy, at the very least, owe the public an explanation before the election of how he intends to see that the bailout money is well spent? Or does he consider the ideas of fiscal oversight and government accountability to be mere theatre as well?

Here's the series of debates that Jon Scott has proposed, where Congressman Kennedy could explain to the public how he thinks Congress should approach oversight of the bailout money, along with other issues...

Scott has challenged Kennedy to a series of four debates; one on Radio’s Buddy Cianci Show, one on Channel 10’s Sunday morning show hosted by Jim Taricani and Bill Rappleye, one hosted by the League of Women Voters (which will not happen) and a 90 minute debate with only a timekeeper, no moderator, to be hosted at Brown University. Kennedy’s spokeswoman has repeatedly denied that there has been a formal request for those debates yet the text of the formal request has been widely circulated and was sent to Kennedy at his campaign email at KennedyforRI.com

There's still time to get most of these scheduled, if the Congressman Kennedy is interested in keeping the public substantively informed on what's going on in government.

Reactions to the Bailout Bill

Reaction from Second District Congressional candidate Mark Zaccaria on the bailout bill that passed Congress on Friday…

This week Rhode Island's entire congressional delegation voted in favor of an open ended plan to nationalize private property on a scale that boggles the mind. If this had been done using the government's authority under Eminent Domain the legal term for it would be 'A Taking.' Since this bill has been characterized as the cavalry charging to the rescue from over the hill there has been no outcry against it in the press. Too bad. Life is full of compromises, of course, but I wish we had thought more about the pain we were trying to avoid vs the pain we will now induce as the federal government takes ownership of a giant piece of the country.

Think about it. With plenty of blame to go around in Congress you could make a case that those who induced this crisis, through misguided incentives to Fannie Mae and out-and-out quotas for sub-prime mortgages to private banks, have now taken management control of ⅓ of all residential properties. In the military the term for that is Screw Up & Move Up. What kind of financial horsepower have we just given to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee? What will that kind of authority do to the men and women who now hold its keys?

…and from First District Congressional candidate Jon Scott, on the same subject…

This bailout bill, which supposedly benefits "Main Street America" contains tons or Pork Barrel projects that have nothing to do with the financial crisis. Mr. Kennedy's actions suggest that he is fighting to empower the power brokers on K Street at the expense of those who live on Main Street. Does he even know where Main Street is? It is time we asked him.

Jon Scott on the Bailout & on Alternatives

For the first time I can remember, the government is actually moving as fast as the blogosphere can keep up. I had scheduled up a follow-up interview with Republican First District Congressional candidate Jon Scott for Monday, to give him a chance to go on the record about the big bailout deal as it details were becoming clearer. They say that timing in life is everything. I sat down with Mr. Scott at about 1:00, so what follows in the Q&A section below are opinions expressed by Jon Scott BEFORE the bailout was voted down in the House…

Anchor Rising: Federalist 52 says that the House of Representatives, the office that you are running for, is supposed to be the branch of government having the most intimate sympathy with the needs of the people. Do you think that the House right now is doing a good job of fulfilling that function, with its work on the current bailout bill?

Jon Scott: There's a compromise being debated, but it's a compromise that's been brokered by the leadership solely. It doesn't have the opinions of all the Congressmen and Congresswomen -- that input hasn't been there, so I'm not so sure that it does represent the will of the people.

I will give credit where credit is due, and say that Congressman Kennedy is so far sitting this one out.

I said it the other night to the crowd over at the debate watch: this problem wasn't created over 72 hours. It was created over decades and to try and come up with a 72-hour fix is a mistake. I think you get those kinds of fixes that put the spotlight on the businesses and the executives and the class warfare when you don't have broad enough representation in Congress. Some of the people negotiating this bailout are so heavily invested in the market and in the oil companies and in the mortgage companies that it taints their view of how a bailout or a buy-in should go.

Anchor Rising: From what you've learned so far, what parts of the plan do you like or not like?

Jon Scott: I'm not so sure I like any of the plan. I think the wrangling has improved the plan and made it less of a socialist plan. I'm not so sure that any plan that breaks new ground in creating new relationships between government and business should ever be seen as a good plan.

At this point, Mr. Scott went into the details of an alternative plan that he favors. Since the interview, he's placed an outline of the plan into written form, which I will reprint below…

Make no mistake about it: Congress must fix the problems that they have created. They must act and they must shore up our economy but they need to do so without expanding their own power and scope.

I call on Congress to stay in session and pass a plan that mimics one devised by economist James Galbraith and laid out in the Washington Post. The Galbraith plan would have the government shore up the markets by using an existing vehicle: the FDIC. Five hundred billion dollars would get put into the FDIC’s coffers with a portion of that money allocated to the hiring of an expanded work force of forensic accounting experts and investigators who could probe the causes of the failures.

At the same time, the $100,000 FDIC limit would be lifted and another $200 billion put into reserves with the expressed purpose of re-capitalizing failing banks through the purchase of preferred shares – in the same way that investor Warren Buffet sparked the market last week with Goldman Sachs.

This approach does not saddle the American people with the purchase of bad debt. It does not create any wider partnership between government and business than that which already exists. It does not attempt to put a random value on illiquid assets which are not easily valued. It simply shores up the economy and helps spark the markets again.

It is not a fix that will turn the situation around overnight but there is no such fix that preserves the Republic as it was intended to be. There is no solution that will right, in 72 hours, that which has been created over decades.

Mark Zaccaria on the Big Bailout

On Saturday, I had the chance to interview Second District Congressional candidate Mark Zaccaria on the big bailout plan that was taking shape. Details were still emerging and not yet final, so I still wanted to keep the questions general.

I opened with a reference to Federalist 52. Mr. Zaccaria responded with the best explanation that I've heard so far of how the financial crisis has spread from the housing market to the wider economy…

I think that one of the reasons that you are seeing such a quick and deep response on the part of the Executive Branch is that the people like secretary Paulson stopped breathing a week ago Wednesday, when basically credit came to a halt in this country. We think of this in terms of the sub-prime mortgages and people buying houses they couldn't afford, and so forth and so on, but there is also this huge credit market in the United States.

When McDonald's needs hamburger, they use short-term paper and overnight loans. They call Merrill Lynch and say I need a billion dollars until noontime…

When UPS buys diesel fuel, they do it that way. Their cash flows on a cyclical basis, and their expenses are on a cyclical basis, and if the waves are out-of-synch, they use very short term borrowing.

That all stopped a week ago Wednesday. They just couldn't get it. That would have brought the entire economy to its knees very, very rapidly, and that's what made Secretary Paulson leap out of his chair and do something.

…and what was the principled objection to the original version of the plan…

The real problem that they really don't talk about in the media quite a lot, was that [the bailout plan] was an opportunity for members of the majority party in both the House and Senate to say let's hang a couple of ornaments on this Christmas tree. So, there were provisions inserted into the plan to use a certain amount of the money to fund future proposed low-cost housing authorities, and to do a variety of other things that were not directly related to resolving the crisis. Now, Paulson agreed to these things -- I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he grudgingly agreed – because of how important it was to restore confidence in the marketplace, by starting to buy up some of those bad loans, so that banks didn't just sit on their cash and started it moving around the track again.

Rep. Hensarling and the House Republicans didn't want to take 15 or 20% of 700 billion dollars and divert it to pork. For that, my hat is off to them.

This kind of exchange is why it's great to be a part of the blogosphere in a democracy. The entire interview is below the fold.

(p.s. McCainiacs will want to click here).

Anchor Rising: Federalist 52 says that the House of Representatives is supposed to be the branch of government with the most intimate sympathy with the interests of the regular American people. Based on what you know of the big bailout plan, do you think that the House is performing that function well, and that the House Republican Caucus is performing that function well?

Mark Zaccaria: I would say that, as a body in general, the House appears to have been caught pretty flat-footed by this, the way just about every other branch of government was.

I think that one of the reasons that you are seeing such a quick and deep response on the part of the Executive Branch is that the people like secretary Paulson stopped breathing a week ago Wednesday, when basically credit came to a halt in this country. We think of this in terms of the sub-prime mortgages and people buying houses they couldn't afford, and so forth and so on, but there is also this huge credit market in the United States.

When McDonald's needs hamburger, they use short-term paper and overnight loans. They call Merrill Lynch and say I need a billion dollars until noontime, how much is that going to cost? They have cash flow issues that are multiplied.

When UPS buys diesel fuel, they do it that way. Their cash flows on a cyclical basis, and their expenses are on a cyclical basis, and if those waves are out-of-synch, they use very short term borrowing. That all stopped a week ago Wednesday. They just couldn't get it. That would have brought the entire economy to its knees very, very rapidly, and that's what made Secretary Paulson leap out of his chair and do something. I'd venture to say that nobody in the House of Representatives knew about this until well after the fact, when the financial insiders sat them down and made them listen to a briefing on this.

In retrospect, there were plenty of signals that this was going to happen, but we humans like to ignore things like that, because we think it's going to happen some other time.

A week ago Wednesday was that some other time.

We've been hearing about the San Andreas Fault through Los Angeles for 40 years that I can remember, and the big one being right around the corner. Guess what, if you want to go start a real estate development in the San Fernando valley tomorrow, you'd find plenty of support. Someday there will be a big one along the fault line, and everyone will say Oh my God, what's the government going to do about this. It's sort of a natural human trait to bet that things are going to be as they are now.

In retrospect, I think that a body like the House of Representatives should exert a little bit of leadership in a case like this – that's why people hire representatives, to take care of things like this in advance. I think that there were so many different facets that went into making a short term crisis. It was like having the ocean open up and be about to engulf the entire country, then burp once, close, and say not now.

I was that kind of a shock to the people who really know inside finance. It's a situation where any of a number of things need to be done to correct it. I don't believe that clamping down harsh regulations on 50 different facets of our society is the right way to go. I have sympathy with representative Hensarling from Texas and his colleagues in the Republican House Caucus who basically said wait a minute, wait a minute, government's going to own all this stuff? You are supposed to have private ownership. This is America.

The kind of thing that regulation is not going to help quite so much is leadership. Rep. Hensarling is one of my favorite guys down there, and I hope I get to meet him and work with him starting in the next session. But the fact is that we need to exert leadership. This is a perfect example of how we don't necessarily have a cohesive society that agrees on a number of subjects broadly or deeply, finance being one that's key to all of us.

In the past, we used to have bankers who were little bit like physicians. If you came in and said can I please have a loan for 10 times more than I'm worth, they had a fiduciary responsibility to their bank to say, "I'm sorry, you can't afford that". That's exactly what I was told, when I tried buying my first house. My first house was a typical starter house, and a few years later when I could, I was able to move on and I did.

With the sub-prime mortgages, people were trying to jump into these big houses. They were basically being encouraged to do so, by a number of forces. One factor was that the bankers of the type I just described were gone and they were replaced with loan-originators who were commissioned salespeople. Those salespeople get some number of points on whatever happens. What they want is to have a closing. They don't really care if you're going to pay it back. They don't care if they sell you something where a balloom payment doubles your monthly mortgage payment 12 or 14 months in. They just want to get you started and will blow through all the legalities of a closing. Everyone tells you that it's in your best interests to read all that stuff before you sign it, but if you recall how much paper there is at a closing, it's a practical matter that you're not going to do that. You're just going to rely on legal counsel, and how many people do you know who don't bother to hire a lawyer, and just rely on the one who's there anyway – the one that the bank is paying for.

People say the don't want to spend the extra $200 or $300. They say they don't know a lawyer or they don't have one. They don't know how to go about finding one or evaluating one. Well shame on you for all of that stuff. But you need that protection, and it's a $200 life insurance policy. If more people had taken it, we would be having fewer problems now. There were other problems, but that was one.

Anyway, what's happened is that, because of the global nature of the economy, and because the loan orginators have begun essentially using derivates as an insurance policy to lay off their own exposure, because those derivatives are backed by U.S. real estate -- that gotta be good, right! -- they have gone and sold those derivatives world wide, and the whole sub-prime mortgage question was raised by some little bank in Germany that was the first domino that went over in that whole line.

When the U.S. credit market came to a standstill, it sent tremors everywhere. It sent financial people not just running for the doors but diving for the exits. That's the thing that Paulson probably got faster than anybody in the administration. That's why he's been so aggressive in trying to get all of this done.

AR: [As of Saturday], from what I understand, the President, the Senate, and the House Democrats wanted to do one thing, and the House Republicans were saying not-so-fast…

MZ: As I understand it, when Paulson came down and said, quick, we need to inject a bucket of money into this economy, the government essentially has to buy these securities, it has to take these things into ownership, that's exactly the model we used in the 80s and the early 90s with the savings and loan crisis. The Resolution Trust Corporation was created to do that and has done it. They've even done it profitably – we made money on that deal. A similar situation potentially exists here. The government obviously could wait a little while, but if we give it four or five years as a cycle, the government can almost certainly make money back from owning all those things.

The real problem, that they really don't talk about in the media quite a lot, was that this was an opportunity for members of the majority party in both the House and Senate to say let's hang a couple of ornaments on this Christmas tree. So, there were provisions inserted into the plan to use a certain amount of the money to fund future proposed low-cost housing authorities, and to do a variety of other things that were not directly related to resolving the crisis. Now, Paulson agreed to these things -- I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he grudgingly agreed – because of how important it was to restore confidence in the marketplace, by starting to buy up some of those bad loans, so that banks didn't just sit on their cash and started it moving around the track again.

Rep. Hensarling and the House Republicans didn't want to take 15 or 20% of 700 billion dollars and divert it to pork. For that, my hat is off to them.

There's another interesting piece. Even the casual observer may recall that late last week, the Democrats were specifically naming John McCain as somebody who had to be on board. They said there is no deal, unless McCain says there is a deal. He turned the tables on them and said, fine, I'll suspend my campaign, come to Washington and let's go solve this thing. I don't think they were ready for that.

What they really were saying was that since this plan has so much of the money being skimmed – frankly, so much so that the plan had the potential not to really work – the Democrats didn't want to be left twisting in the wind as the sole proprietors of this thing if and when it failed. They wanted to get everyone in on the dirty little secret, so that nobody would tell. The House Republican caucus, specifically Rep. Hensarling's wing of that caucus, specifically may have been encouraged by McCain, because he saw very clearly that there was something else going on. So I think that what you might have seen, although it's all inside baseball, and the kind of thing that may never hit the headlines, is that McCain has done the country quite a favor by in essence playing a game of chicken over this thing, to get them to take the pork out of it to make it more successful.

Mark Zaccaria on the Big Bailout

On Saturday, I had the chance to interview Second District Congressional candidate Mark Zaccaria on the big bailout plan that was taking shape. Details were still emerging and not yet final, so I still wanted to keep the questions general.

I opened with a reference to Federalist 52. Mr. Zaccaria responded with the best explanation that I've heard so far of how the financial crisis has spread from the housing market to the wider economy…

I think that one of the reasons that you are seeing such a quick and deep response on the part of the Executive Branch is that the people like secretary Paulson stopped breathing a week ago Wednesday, when basically credit came to a halt in this country. We think of this in terms of the sub-prime mortgages and people buying houses they couldn't afford, and so forth and so on, but there is also this huge credit market in the United States.

When McDonald's needs hamburger, they use short-term paper and overnight loans. They call Merrill Lynch and say I need a billion dollars until noontime…

When UPS buys diesel fuel, they do it that way. Their cash flows on a cyclical basis, and their expenses are on a cyclical basis, and if the waves are out-of-synch, they use very short term borrowing.

That all stopped a week ago Wednesday. They just couldn't get it. That would have brought the entire economy to its knees very, very rapidly, and that's what made Secretary Paulson leap out of his chair and do something.

…and what was the principled objection to the original version of the plan…

The real problem that they really don't talk about in the media quite a lot, was that [the bailout plan] was an opportunity for members of the majority party in both the House and Senate to say let's hang a couple of ornaments on this Christmas tree. So, there were provisions inserted into the plan to use a certain amount of the money to fund future proposed low-cost housing authorities, and to do a variety of other things that were not directly related to resolving the crisis. Now, Paulson agreed to these things -- I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he grudgingly agreed – because of how important it was to restore confidence in the marketplace, by starting to buy up some of those bad loans, so that banks didn't just sit on their cash and started it moving around the track again.

Rep. Hensarling and the House Republicans didn't want to take 15 or 20% of 700 billion dollars and divert it to pork. For that, my hat is off to them.

This kind of exchange is why it's great to be a part of the blogosphere in a democracy. The entire interview is below the fold.

(p.s. McCainiacs will want to click here).

Anchor Rising: Federalist 52 says that the House of Representatives is supposed to be the branch of government with the most intimate sympathy with the interests of the regular American people. Based on what you know of the big bailout plan, do you think that the House is performing that function well, and that the House Republican Caucus is performing that function well?

Mark Zaccaria: I would say that, as a body in general, the House appears to have been caught pretty flat-footed by this, the way just about every other branch of government was.

I think that one of the reasons that you are seeing such a quick and deep response on the part of the Executive Branch is that the people like secretary Paulson stopped breathing a week ago Wednesday, when basically credit came to a halt in this country. We think of this in terms of the sub-prime mortgages and people buying houses they couldn't afford, and so forth and so on, but there is also this huge credit market in the United States.

When McDonald's needs hamburger, they use short-term paper and overnight loans. They call Merrill Lynch and say I need a billion dollars until noontime, how much is that going to cost? They have cash flow issues that are multiplied.

When UPS buys diesel fuel, they do it that way. Their cash flows on a cyclical basis, and their expenses are on a cyclical basis, and if those waves are out-of-synch, they use very short term borrowing. That all stopped a week ago Wednesday. They just couldn't get it. That would have brought the entire economy to its knees very, very rapidly, and that's what made Secretary Paulson leap out of his chair and do something. I'd venture to say that nobody in the House of Representatives knew about this until well after the fact, when the financial insiders sat them down and made them listen to a briefing on this.

In retrospect, there were plenty of signals that this was going to happen, but we humans like to ignore things like that, because we think it's going to happen some other time.

A week ago Wednesday was that some other time.

We've been hearing about the San Andreas Fault through Los Angeles for 40 years that I can remember, and the big one being right around the corner. Guess what, if you want to go start a real estate development in the San Fernando valley tomorrow, you'd find plenty of support. Someday there will be a big one along the fault line, and everyone will say Oh my God, what's the government going to do about this. It's sort of a natural human trait to bet that things are going to be as they are now.

In retrospect, I think that a body like the House of Representatives should exert a little bit of leadership in a case like this – that's why people hire representatives, to take care of things like this in advance. I think that there were so many different facets that went into making a short term crisis. It was like having the ocean open up and be about to engulf the entire country, then burp once, close, and say not now.

I was that kind of a shock to the people who really know inside finance. It's a situation where any of a number of things need to be done to correct it. I don't believe that clamping down harsh regulations on 50 different facets of our society is the right way to go. I have sympathy with representative Hensarling from Texas and his colleagues in the Republican House Caucus who basically said wait a minute, wait a minute, government's going to own all this stuff? You are supposed to have private ownership. This is America.

The kind of thing that regulation is not going to help quite so much is leadership. Rep. Hensarling is one of my favorite guys down there, and I hope I get to meet him and work with him starting in the next session. But the fact is that we need to exert leadership. This is a perfect example of how we don't necessarily have a cohesive society that agrees on a number of subjects broadly or deeply, finance being one that's key to all of us.

In the past, we used to have bankers who were little bit like physicians. If you came in and said can I please have a loan for 10 times more than I'm worth, they had a fiduciary responsibility to their bank to say, "I'm sorry, you can't afford that". That's exactly what I was told, when I tried buying my first house. My first house was a typical starter house, and a few years later when I could, I was able to move on and I did.

With the sub-prime mortgages, people were trying to jump into these big houses. They were basically being encouraged to do so, by a number of forces. One factor was that the bankers of the type I just described were gone and they were replaced with loan-originators who were commissioned salespeople. Those salespeople get some number of points on whatever happens. What they want is to have a closing. They don't really care if you're going to pay it back. They don't care if they sell you something where a balloom payment doubles your monthly mortgage payment 12 or 14 months in. They just want to get you started and will blow through all the legalities of a closing. Everyone tells you that it's in your best interests to read all that stuff before you sign it, but if you recall how much paper there is at a closing, it's a practical matter that you're not going to do that. You're just going to rely on legal counsel, and how many people do you know who don't bother to hire a lawyer, and just rely on the one who's there anyway – the one that the bank is paying for.

People say the don't want to spend the extra $200 or $300. They say they don't know a lawyer or they don't have one. They don't know how to go about finding one or evaluating one. Well shame on you for all of that stuff. But you need that protection, and it's a $200 life insurance policy. If more people had taken it, we would be having fewer problems now. There were other problems, but that was one.

Anyway, what's happened is that, because of the global nature of the economy, and because the loan orginators have begun essentially using derivates as an insurance policy to lay off their own exposure, because those derivatives are backed by U.S. real estate -- that gotta be good, right! -- they have gone and sold those derivatives world wide, and the whole sub-prime mortgage question was raised by some little bank in Germany that was the first domino that went over in that whole line.

When the U.S. credit market came to a standstill, it sent tremors everywhere. It sent financial people not just running for the doors but diving for the exits. That's the thing that Paulson probably got faster than anybody in the administration. That's why he's been so aggressive in trying to get all of this done.

AR: [As of Saturday], from what I understand, the President, the Senate, and the House Democrats wanted to do one thing, and the House Republicans were saying not-so-fast…

MZ: As I understand it, when Paulson came down and said, quick, we need to inject a bucket of money into this economy, the government essentially has to buy these securities, it has to take these things into ownership, that's exactly the model we used in the 80s and the early 90s with the savings and loan crisis. The Resolution Trust Corporation was created to do that and has done it. They've even done it profitably – we made money on that deal. A similar situation potentially exists here. The government obviously could wait a little while, but if we give it four or five years as a cycle, the government can almost certainly make money back from owning all those things.

The real problem, that they really don't talk about in the media quite a lot, was that this was an opportunity for members of the majority party in both the House and Senate to say let's hang a couple of ornaments on this Christmas tree. So, there were provisions inserted into the plan to use a certain amount of the money to fund future proposed low-cost housing authorities, and to do a variety of other things that were not directly related to resolving the crisis. Now, Paulson agreed to these things -- I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he grudgingly agreed – because of how important it was to restore confidence in the marketplace, by starting to buy up some of those bad loans, so that banks didn't just sit on their cash and started it moving around the track again.

Rep. Hensarling and the House Republicans didn't want to take 15 or 20% of 700 billion dollars and divert it to pork. For that, my hat is off to them.

There's another interesting piece. Even the casual observer may recall that late last week, the Democrats were specifically naming John McCain as somebody who had to be on board. They said there is no deal, unless McCain says there is a deal. He turned the tables on them and said, fine, I'll suspend my campaign, come to Washington and let's go solve this thing. I don't think they were ready for that.

What they really were saying was that since this plan has so much of the money being skimmed – frankly, so much so that the plan had the potential not to really work – the Democrats didn't want to be left twisting in the wind as the sole proprietors of this thing if and when it failed. They wanted to get everyone in on the dirty little secret, so that nobody would tell. The House Republican caucus, specifically Rep. Hensarling's wing of that caucus, specifically may have been encouraged by McCain, because he saw very clearly that there was something else going on. So I think that what you might have seen, although it's all inside baseball, and the kind of thing that may never hit the headlines, is that McCain has done the country quite a favor by in essence playing a game of chicken over this thing, to get them to take the pork out of it to make it more successful.

Jon Scott on Hot Dogs & the Big Bailout

Republican First District Congressional Candidate Jon Scott kicked of his Work-a-Day campaign this past Friday at the Spike's on Thayer Street in Providence…

Jon Scott has invited his opponent, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, to join him as he works one day with various businesses around the First District in the weeks leading up to the November 4th election. He issued the invitation, along with a challenge for a series of four debates via email to Kennedy's new Press Secretary earlier today.

Scott will make a brief statement to the press, will answer questions and then serve customers at Spike's Thayer Street Providence location until 5pm. In coming weeks he plans on doing work days with a small construction company and an independent lobsterman, as well as other (as yet unscheduled) jobs. Kennedy, who once boasted that he had "never worked a day in (his) life", has been invited by Scott to join him on these work days.

"We're kicking this off at Spike's because they're not going to be in business after Sunday", the candidate continued. "Spike's is an iconic establishment with dedicated owners who put their hearts and souls into building something for themselves. The rising cost of rents and supplies and some missed signals on a possible contract have taken their toll, and now the Ocean State is losing a fixture. I wanted to start our Work-a-Day

Anchor Rising took the opportunity to ask Mr. Scott at his public appearance for his thoughts on the big bailout speeding its way through Congress. Because the bailout deal was still very much in flux on Friday, I asked Mr. Scott a general question, appropriate to the particular venue...

Anchor Rising: I hope you don't think it's too much of a softball if I ask you if you think that the owners here at Spike's are as deserving of help as much as the people who the government wants to hand $700 billion to in the next couple of days.

Jon Scott: I think they're more deserving, because of the hot dogs!

The owners here put their heart and soul into the business. The difference is that they they never expected to be bailed out. Garreth and Dana are going out of business, but when they got into business, they knew what the rules were.

Their rents have gone up and their costs have gone up. The part they really didn't expect was ethanol subsides to corn farmers that caused prices to go up.

They didn't expect the government to interfere in their business. They didn't expect their taxes to go through the roof. They didn't expect all those other things that come along with government interference. All of that bad side is what's caused what we have going on right now. This crisis is one that's caused by Congress, and it's one that could be fixed by Congress, but the fix isn't to nationalize more private wealth than at anytime in the history of the United States.

More from RI's Congressional candidates on the big bailout to follow…

Mark Zaccaria on How the Federal Government is Killing the Fishing Industy in Rhode Island and Elsewhere

Second District Congressional Candidate Mark Zaccaria doesn't think that it makes sense to ask a fisherman to go out to sea and come back with less than a full haul...

If you're about to go buy a $7,000 or $8,000 load of diesel fuel, but are only allowed to catch some small amount of the total amount of fish you're actually capable of catching, then you're in big trouble.

Yet, as he points out, that is exactly what our Federal government does…

The fishing catch is based on the number of pounds of a particular type of fish, and the numbers are low enough so that they are well below a boatfull.

So what would Mr. Zaccaria do differently, if he were elected to Congress…

We should devise a new way of doing that that's consistent with the way the fishing industry really works. Rather than say let's take this boat out, but you can only catch 3 fish – with a boat capable of hauling tens of thousands of pounds – what we need to say is that when you do go out, knock yourself out. We'll limit the number of times you can go out, and on an annual basis limit the catch, rather than in a given week.

As to the priority he believes this issue should be given by Rhode Island's Congressional delegation...

I'd be jumping up and down about the fact that we're killing an industry that contributes mightily to our economy, which means we're going to export that industry to others who are not going to do it as well as we do while, at the same time, not doing a good job of doing our stated goal, making fisheries sustainable forever. We're screwing everything up.

For the full detail on the type of thinking that Mr. Zaccaria believes needs to be brought to Congress on this issue, continue below the fold…

Anchor Rising: You believe that your opponent is completely missing the boat on the issue of fisheries, the Federal government is very much out-of-whack, compared to what it should be doing, and that there are changes that need to be made...

Second District Congressional Candidate Mark Zaccaria: There are a number of things going on. Let me describe the problem that I see, and why I think it's important to the people, and why as far as I can figure out, why we aren't doing anything better.

We have a situation based on a 1976 law that was put through by a Senator named Warren Magnuson from Washington State. Senator Magnuson's name is still associated with some of the restrictions on commercial fishing catch.

The 1976 law did a number of things, like expanding the U.S territorial waters for fishing out to 200 miles. Overall, what it tried to do, which was a very good thing, was try to make commercial fisheries sustainable. It tried to apply science to the question of which fish do we have a lot of and should try to catch, and which fish do we not have a lot of, so we shouldn't try to catch. The result is a set of restrictions on the commercial catch that are based on 1976 technology and science and that are slowed down even further by the bureaucracy that's involved.

We have a Bureau of Marine Fisheries that is charged by this law with doing the basic science of determining what the fish populations are. The problem is that because of the layers of review and, dare I say, bureaucracy that has to go into it, by the time that a determination can be made, several generations of new fishes could have been born and taken to the school. It's just too slow.

The other problem that we have is that the fishing catch is based on the number of pounds of a particular type of fish, and the numbers are low enough so that they are well below a boatfull. The net result is that you can only land a catch of a certain amount, and fishermen have to throw rest back. They throw it back dead. It's not an ecological disaster, it's earth to earth, dust to dust, but it's still not the best use of the resource of fish. So, they kill an awful lot of fish that never get counted in the quota because they're not landed.

The current law is terrible from the point of a small business planner. If you're about to go buy a $7,000 or $8,000 load of diesel fuel, but only allowed to catch some small amount of the total amount of fish you're actually capable of catching, then you're in big trouble.

There are a number of things we can do to revisit the idea of this law and make the fisheries really sustainable, while giving small business people like fishermen some way to plan. We could restrict the number of days at sea, but allow fishermen to land whatever they catch from a full day's work, as long as it fits into the boat. The fishermen will be able to choose when those days are, based on what they know about the movements of the fish, so they can pick the fish they want to go catch.

This will impact the fishing industry, obviously, but also upstream if you will, the seafood industry and the restaurant industry.

Now this is one of those things that is absolutely a matter of passion down at the docks if you go down to Point Judith and start talking to the folks down there. But if you get people who don't have jobs directly related to that industry, they don't know what you're talking about. You have to have somebody in government who's willing to do the research to figure out what the right thing to do is and then what we need is a rule change in this game.

I'm proposing a couple of different things. I'm thinking in general terms here -- I haven't got into the real nitty-gritty of creating legislation, I have to get elected first before that can be done. But just take a look at the basic science of where the fish are and how many of them there are. It's being done already by a number of different organizations. It's being done by non-governmental organizations whose primary goal is conservation of some sort. The World Wildlife Fund is the group that I think probably has the best fisheries program, though I might be proved wrong here. The Sierra Club and the Audubon society have programs – the list goes on. These are all large international organizations that have respectable, reputable scientists working for them, and they work a lot faster than the government does, because their goals are different. Their goals are about the fish.

As well trained as dedicated individually as our government scientists are, they have to work on the fiscal year. They have to work on the resource allocation that the Federal government does and, as a result, it changes the way they do things. So rather than have them do the basic science, let's have them do the oversight. Let's have them do their careful and reasoned investigations of the NGOs who actually do the basic science to double-check and be the umpire.

AR: So right now, the Federal government is employing scientists directly, to go count the fish?

MZ: It's not quite the simple, obviously, but they are asked to determine and to offer an opinion of fish populations by species that are growing and declining. The object is fairly simple, really, you want to promote a catch among populations of fish that are growing, and especially, as happens more frequently than you might think, among populations that have grown dramatically, because they'll tend to implode on themselves. They'll consume all of the resources, so you want to fish some, to cull the herd or the school, if you will. And obviously, if you're running low on species A, don't fish it for a while so they can rebound. All of that is fairly straightforward.

It's our response time that's the problem. We are way too slow in determining what these species are and which ones we should fish and which ones we shouldn't. Plus, the way we subdivide the proposed catch is arcane, at best. We should devise a new way of doing that that's consistent with the way the fishing industry really works. Rather than say let's take this boat out, but you can only catch 3 fish – with a boat capable of hauling tens of thousands of pounds – what we need to say is that when you do go out, knock yourself out. We'll limit the number of times you can go out, and on an annual basis limit the catch, rather than in a given week. Telling fishermen that this week you can go out and catch 2 cod, that's not a good way to build a business.

What this will do is promote efficient fishing and an efficient fishing industry with better science at a lower price. If we take a government agency and back it down from doing the basic science, to reviewing the basic science that somebody else is doing, it will ultimately take less human beings to do it, and to do it effectively.

If the government finds some problem with the way the non-governmental organization is doing the science, they can run up a red flag and the Congress or some other agency can come over and say let's review this, but the problem that we have right now is that the government process for determining what the catch ought to be is cumbersome and once they finally do make that determination, the catch quotas that are put out are killing the fishing industry.

Do we want to outsource fishing along with all of the other things we outsource, because of bad regulations? I say no. I say fishing is an absolute traditional Rhode Island core industry – they call us the Ocean State for a reason -- and we certainly should take the lead, join with other coastal communities and say let's get this right.

Another interesting fact I'm told, though I haven't independently verified, is that
when we extended the territorial limits of the United States to 200 miles, which was much farther than any other nation at the time had even contemplated going, we encompassed in the Northeast US and the Northwest US an enormous percentage of the most fertile fishing on earth. In the shallow seas of the Caribbean and around the Equator, they just don't grow fish like we do in the Grand Banks. We are therefore doing the science and managing sustainable fisheries for a gigantic portion of the world, far more than the percentage of our population would indicate. It's a pretty big resource that we are all of the sudden in charge of and that's all the more reason, in my opinion, to do it right.

AR: Is your opponent anywhere on this issue?

MZ: I'm aware that Mr. Langevin has had the briefings and listened to the fishermen and should be aware, if he was listening, to the problems. What I don't see coming from him anywhere at all is the kind of passion that I think this issue deserves. I don't know exactly why. Maybe I'm misreading the guy. Maybe he's really taciturn and is really passionate underneath -- or maybe he's been in Washington long enough so that he tries to do things the government way, or he's been persuaded by the forces of bureaucracy, which are themselves self-sustaining by nature.

AR: Probably more self-sustaining than the fish.

MZ: If the bureaucracy was as interested in keeping the fish as well self-sustained as their own jobs, we'd have a wonderful world. The thing that I believe is that, given how much he has been involved with and immersed in the Federal Government way, Mr. Langevin may very well have a reflex at this point towards the government way.

He's certainly not making the noise I'd make. I'd be jumping up and down about the fact that we're killing an industry that contributes mightily to our economy, which means we're going to export that industry to others who are not going to do it as well as we do while, at the same time, not doing a good job of doing our stated goal, making fisheries sustainable forever. We're screwing everything up. Let's see if we can do a little better than that. We've got real Rhode Island families that are twisting in the wind.

People in government talk about farming a lot. We should talk about fishing in the same way. It's easy to overlook how complex it is. I don't know what fish are down there, but the fishermen do. They go out in their boats and it's not like the boat you'd go water-skiing behind. This is some serious, expensive equipment. In order to make the payments on it, in order to have it be sustainable as a tool for their business, they've got to use it.

Think of someone paying $6,000 or $7,000 for a tank of gas and going out and getting nothing. You can't do that very often.

What we need to do is work together, to make everything more efficient. We can make the science more efficient and we can make the quotas more efficient, based on how the industry really works, rather than by saying there are this many fish out there, so divide by 2 and that's what you can take. We need to find a way to match the catch to the boats, so that as a small business person, a fisherman can say when he does go out for something like a set number of days per year, he'll pick the days based on what fish he thinks are running that day and how it matches to his equipment. That's real planning, to help a small business.

Maybe we'll even start to get over our fear of using any number that hasn't been developed by someone other than by the Federal government.

Zaccaria Challenges Langevin to A-Debate-Per-Town

According to Cynthia Needham of the Projo, Republican Congressional candidate Mark Zaccaria would like to offer each city and town in Rhode Island's Second District an opportunity to host a Congressional debate...

“I look forward to a vigorous race against my opponent and I would like to challenge Mr. Langevin to a minimum of 20 public debates: one in each town in the Second [Congressional] District,” the former North Kingstown Town Council member said in a release.

“It is time for our elected officials to stop avoiding political debates. The voters deserve to be able to hear directly from the candidates in an open forum.”

Mark Zaccaria on the Republican Energy Policy Floor Revolt

Republican Second District Congressional candidate Mark Zaccaria, last Friday, issued this statement on the U.S. House Republican floor revolt regarding energy policy and domestic drilling for oil...

Mark Zaccaria today denounced Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her fellow House Democrats for adjourning for the August recess without having allowed a vote on the offshore drilling ban. Speaker Pelosi refused to allow a vote that could repeal the Congressional ban on offshore drilling. The White House recently repealed the executive ban on offshore drilling, and has called on Congress to do the same.

“I find it very disturbing that my opponent would follow Speaker Pelosi in adjourning for August recess without addressing the most pressing issue facing us today,” said Zaccaria. “Gas prices are having a devastating effect on everyone. Unfortunately, my opponent finds his vacation more important than the livelihood of his constituents.”

As part of his energy plan, Zaccaria has illustrated how speculators are the driving force behind high gas prices; however, initiating domestic oil exploration could drive the price of gas down within days.

Jon Scott Applauds the Republican Floor Revolt on Energy Policy

Last week, Congressional Democrats voted to take their summer vacation without voting on a bill that would expand the Federally-owned lands and areas of the outer continental shelf that could be drilled for oil. In protest of the Democrats non-action, a number of House Republicans remained on the House floor after Friday's adjournment, making public calls for Congress to return and take a position on domestic drilling.

According to the Politico, the Republicans have returned to the House floor today to continue their protest...

House Republicans vowed to continue their talkathon on the House floor "as long as it takes," saying Monday they would continue their protest indefinitely if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi does not allow for a vote on domestic oil drilling.

"There are plans underway to be here into next week," said Rep. Mike Pence, one of the organizers of the protest. "We will be here as long as it takes."

Republican First District Congressional Candidate Jon Scott has issued a statement applauding the efforts by the Republican members of Congress to take definite action on the energy issue…

Allow me this moment to applaud Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) and his Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives for exercising political courage on behalf of the American people. Last week's Republican floor revolt was an appropriate response to the Democratic majority's unacceptable failure to address our nation's energy concerns.

America faces an energy crisis that threatens our economy, standard of living and national security. Real leaders act in times of crisis. Nancy Pelosi, Patrick Kennedy and the Democratic majority failed America on Friday. They should be replaced.

Congress created this energy crisis, common sense can solve it. Congress must authorize more drilling. At the same time we need to pursue all alternative energy options including wind projects such as Cape Wind. We need to create solar panels, build nuclear power plants and use more natural gas. Every energy option must be placed on the table. Energy prices will drop when the supply increases.

The people of Rhode Island need representatives who are patriots first and party members second. Those who feel well served by the Democratic majority's failure to address the energy crisis should vote to send our current representatives back to Washington. Those being harmed by the burden of unprecedented and unnecessarily high fuel costs should vote for new representation in November.

Expanding the First Congressional District, to Include the South Kingstown Town Council?

The Rhode Island Secretary of State's website lists 3 candidates who have qualified for the ballot for the U.S. House of Representatives seat for Rhode Island's First Congressional District. The candidates are Patrick Kennedy of Portsmouth, Jon Scott of Providence and Kenneth Capalbo of South Kingstown.

You read that right. Somehow, for the purposes of this Congressional election, South Kingstown has moved to the First Congressional District. The Federal Election Commission's website, in the link to the one filing that Mr. Capalbo made during his 2006 candidacy for the same office, lists "South King" as his community of residence (type the name "Capalbo" in here, to see for yourself), so this appears to be more than a typo.

There's more. Campaign finance paperwork filed with the state Board of Elections on July 8 shows that Mr. Capalbo indicated "Town Council" as the office he is seeking. An entry for his South Kingstown Town Council candidacy appears on Secretary of State's website, though no signatures are indicated. The entry for his Congressional candidacy, on the other hand, indicates over 600 signatures.

So how does a guy who says he's running for Town Council in South Kingstown end up collecting over 600 signatures for Representative in the First Congressional District?

ADDENDUM:

Commenter "Brassband" reminds me that there is no Constitutional requirement that a Congressional candidate live in the district he or she seeks to represent...

A candidate, or Member, of the U.S. House of Representatives must live in the state from which he or she serves, but need not live within the district that he or she represents. Here are the qualifications for the House, from Art. I, sec. 2 of the U.S. Constitution:

No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen.

Now that Brassband has jogged my memory, I have a vague recollection of this issue being discussed in the 1990s when term-limits for Congress were seriously under consideration, and that there is a definitive consensus in the courts that no restrictions, beyond those specified in the Constitution, can be placed on the qualifications for Federal office.