Annie Kuster For N.H. 2nd District In Congress

   Annie Kuster, Democrat candidate for Congress in our Second District, inherited her political drive and ambition from her two parents, her father who was mayor of Concord and ran for governor as an Independent and her mother who served as a state senator. She ran a brilliant campaign two years ago against present incumbent Charlie Bass, losing by 1 percentage point (48-47). Bass was the recipient that election of New Hampshire’s Republican Red Tide, a conservative resurgence that due to GOP enthusiasm and Democrat inaction has led to both rampant job loss and destructive education cuts in the Granite State, as well as the ugly right-wing social engineering by Bill O’Brien’s House of Representatives in Concord.

   Kuster’s June 7 announcement to run once more against Bass was great news to both citizens who have watched the scuttling of our former "New Hampshire Advantage" that governor John Lynch built over his eight years in office, as well as for Independents and Democrats alike who are tired of the anti-everything agenda of the Grover Norquist-cowed Republicans in Washington, D.C.

   Along with her legal career with law firm Rath, Young and Pignatelli (which included work as an adoption attorney), Annie worked on the presidential campaigns of both John Kerry and Barack Obama. She also has served on the boards of numerous charitable organizations including founding and vice-chairing the Women’s Foundation of New Hampshire, as well as helping to create the Granite State’s UNIQUE College Savings Plan and the New Hampshire Medication Bridge Program.

   Unlike Bass, who has demonstrated the same lurch-to-the-right voting record and ideology that most modern-day Republicans "boast" in order to gain any traction with their Tea-Party mandated madness (see latest example Missouri Congressman Todd Akin), Kuster has the backs of America’s middle class, a constituency that is under siege currently by the GOP on both state and national levels. While the priorities of the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan collaboration is an open-faced boon for the nation’s affluent and a knockout punch for our middle class and poor, Kuster’s centrist platform is a common sense series of policies that will raise the boats of most of our citizens while reducing the national deficit. Here is a good overview of her platform from the candidate herself:

   "I believe we need to cut wasteful government spending -- like the billions in subsidies for oil companies, the corporate tax breaks for moving jobs overseas, and the billions more spent on redundant weapons systems that our military leaders have identified as wasteful and unneeded. But instead of these cuts, the US House of Representatives is cutting what we need most: education, public safety, and the clean energy research that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil. It makes no sense. America can do better than this -- so, it's time for all of us to do something about it."

   Kuster will work and vote to end the obscene $4 billion in subsidies that our tax dollars inexplicably still funnel to Big Oil every year, as well as stop the annual windfall realized by offshore corporations and direct those funds to creating more jobs here in New Hampshire. She will fight the financially-nonsensical GOP aims to change Medicare to a voucher program, invest in the welcome national trend to renewable energy to reduce our overlong dependency on foreign oil, and increase college student loans while keeping their interest rates low.

   Annie Kuster has a present small lead over Charlie Bass in current polling, a lead that won’t mean a thing in November unless voters who want to restore our state to where it was two years ago, as well as prevent America from falling into the anti-middle class morass promised by Romney/Ryan, exercise their voting rights more purposefully than they did in 2010. She will be a welcome panacea to the O’Brien-led devolution of the state we all love, as well as a sure vote in Washington to counter the erosion of everything 99 percent of us are working for in order to line the pockets of the nation’s corporations and multi-millionaires.