Kirsten Gillibrand

The Emergency Committee for Israel published this full page ad in today's New York Times:

On an MSNBC program yesterday, Democratic senator Kirsten Gillbrand promoted her website OffTheSidelines.org as a bipartisan pro-women-in-politics campaign, even though the website looks to be nothing more than a front for her own reelection campaign in New York. This isn't the first time, however, that Gillibrand has represented the site as something innocuous and nonpartisan rather than a fundraising effort.

Wendy Long, a Manhattan lawyer, activist, and former Supreme Court clerk, is projected to win the Republican nomination for Senate in New York.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has come out against fellow Democrat Charles Barron, a House candidate for the state's Eighth Congressional District. "Any candidate who is anti-Israel does not share Senator Gillibrand's values," says spokesman Glen Caplin in an email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Wendy Long is taking up New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand's challenge. “Senator Gillibrand has said she wants to see more women in politics,” Long said in her speech to the state GOP convention last week, responding to the Democratic incumbent. “I say let’s give her what she’s asking for.”

Peter Schweizer's book, Throw Them All Out, has been a topic of much discussion in Washington, in no small part because of shocking details about how congressmen trade stock based on their private knowledge of how legislation will affect markets. Amazingly, this is completely legal.

New York has two Democratic senators, both of them up for election this year. In the first race, Chuck Schumer has a commanding lead. In the other, Kirsten Gillibrand may be in trouble.

Everyone’s talking about the competitive governor’s and senate races in New York, with Carl Paladino surging against Andrew Cuomo and Joe DioGuardi pulling close to Kirsten Gillibrand. Given the nature of this year’s political environment, and Cuomo’s and Gillibrand’s weaknesses (see Hot Air’s analysis here), and given that voters only began to focus on the general election choice after last week’s primary, people shouldn’t be as surprised as they are that these two races now look to be very competitive.

Welcome. This is a regular feature I'll be offering every weekday, first thing in the morning. Basically, what I'll do is flag the most notable stories of the 2010 midterm campaign, and provide my two cents on what's really happening. 

A new Quinnipiac poll shows that New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand is leading her potential GOP opponents by about 20 points. New York Republicans have failed to get a big-name candidate (Giuliani, Pataki) to take on Gillibrand, and her seat is generally considered to be one of the few Democratic seats that Democrats don't have to worry about in 2010.

As the proposal to build a 13-story Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero moves forward and controversy surrounding the plan grows, top New York Democrats are maintaining radio silence on the matter.

Two weeks ago, Barack Obama got personal with Senator Mitch McConnell over financial reform regulation. In his weekly radio address on April 17, Obama claimed that McConnell was lying about the bill at the behest of Wall Street:

Just the other day, in fact, the Leader of the Senate Republicans and the Chair of the Republican Senate campaign committee met with two dozen top Wall Street executives to talk about how to block progress on this issue. Lo and behold, when he returned to Washington, the Senate Republican Leader came out against the common-sense reforms we’ve proposed.  In doing so, he made the cynical and deceptive assertion that reform would somehow enable future bailouts – when he knows that it would do just the opposite.