Meeting and greeting

Talking Point

‘It’s the media’

The Point tagged along to a meet-and-greet event Thursday night with Rep. Lee Zeldin at a private home in Patchogue. Zeldin spoke about local issues like help for veterans and dredging Moriches Inlet, but when he invited questions, it was national issues that got the audience of approximately 30 going.

One woman said Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had “obviously been cleared.”

A man said that Democrats had “tarnished a great man” and wanted to know when the GOP would “take the gloves off?” He bemoaned the state of discourse where “our congressmen can’t even go to a restaurant.”

“Is it the media?” someone else asked.

Zeldin said the good news was that “the unhinged extreme” was not normal for the country, and then pivoted to the importance of voting and accepting the outcomes of elections.

Suffolk County Clerk Judith Pascale then took the floor to talk for about 10 minutes about the clerk’s job, urging people to vote for her in November. She also plugged her son-in-law, Dean Murray, who is running for the State Senate in the seat vacated by Tom Croci. She closed by saying, “I share everybody’s outrage over how Kavanaugh was treated. And it’s the media. And the media hates the president, and you know what, they’re not gonna let up, so let’s just get used to it, that it’s so biased and so slanted.”

She added Newsday into the fold, saying that she sometimes read things that she knew weren’t accurate, “or they twisted it.” She also said she had been misquoted in the past. She later told The Point that she doesn’t believe she has been misquoted but was speaking in generalities about some outlets rushing to report without having all information.

Meanwhile at a Brentwood Chamber of Commerce event that evening, Newsday and the media were taking some of their usual hits from Rep. Peter King, who has a competitive campaign this cycle.

King called Newsday “a rag of a newspaper,” adding, “I’ve got nothing but contempt for them,” according to a video shared with The Point by Democratic challenger Liuba Grechen Shirley’s campaign. King was responding to a question about what he would do to take money out of politics. He also said, “I’m not going to let Newsday do millions of dollars of free attacks on me.”

“I’m glad my opponent is looking to Newsday for help,” King emailed The Point, returning to his long-held issues with the editorial board dating back to a contentious 2006 election cycle. Since then, he has not met with the board for an endorsement interview. “While I respect certain individuals, I have none (Zero) for the institution,” he wrote.

Mark Chiusano

---

Pencil Point

‘Tis the season

---

Daily Point

Money talks

You might have missed a little Long Island connection when Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke announced a jaw-dropping $38.1 million in fundraising in the third quarter.

It was a record haul in his U.S. Senate challenge against Sen. Ted Cruz — and the record he broke was that of former 2nd Congressional District Rep. Rick Lazio, who set the standard for a single calendar quarter by raising some $20 million in his losing bid for U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton in 2000.

That election cycle was an expensive one for the tristate area in general. If you look not at quarterly fundraising, but at receipts for full U.S. Senate campaigns, the four candidates who raised the most in total that 2000 cycle were Democrat Jon Corzine in New Jersey, then Clinton and Lazio in New York, followed by Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who withdrew early for health and marital reasons.

This year’s U.S. Senate contest in New York is not as high profile. Indeed, O’Rourke himself is attracting some of the spotlight, even here. The “bar-and-nightlife provocateurs behind anti-Trump resistance bar Coup,” in the words of O’Rourke supporters, are holding a cocktail fundraiser for the Texas candidate in Manhattan’s East Village Monday evening. O’Rourke won’t be there, but the rich candidates this cycle are likely to get richer still.

Mark Chiusano

---

Quick Points

Believe it when you see it

• President Donald Trump and Republican allies deny that last year’s tax cut was a giveaway to the rich. They might have a point, given that Trump’s wealthy son-in-law, Jared Kushner, appears to have paid almost no federal income taxes over the last several years.
• The Philippines won another three-year term on the UN’s Human Rights Council. Which raises an interesting question: Will the new term expire before the country stops the extrajudicial killing of suspected drug dealers and the jailing of its critics?
• President Donald Trump said he’s not sure that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis will remain in his administration, calling Mattis “sort of a Democrat.” Unlike Trump himself, who for years really was a Democrat.
• New polling finds voter enthusiasm is way up among younger adults. You know what they say: Believe it when you see it.
• The National Park Service is considering whether to make protest organizers pay for the cost of law enforcement and other support services for demonstrations held in Washington. Of course, this has nothing to do with all the protests staged since Donald Trump’s inauguration.
• White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow says the nation is in such an economic boom that “people thought it would be impossible.” People, that is, who hadn’t been paying attention to the previous six-plus years of post-recession recovery.
• Andrew Brunson, the American pastor freed by Turkey, met President Donald Trump at the White House and prayed that God give Trump “supernatural wisdom.” It’s not clear that Trump thinks that’s something he lacks.
• Sen. Bernie Sanders says the United States should pull its support for Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Yemen’s civil war over its alleged killing of a dissident journalist in Turkey. How about the United States pulls its support of Saudi Arabia over the Saudi-led coalition’s killing of thousands of Yemeni civilians in the civil war?
• Hillary Clinton said that husband Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was not an abuse of power because the then-22-year-old Lewinsky was an adult. Proving that men in the #MeToo era aren’t the only ones who have learned nothing.
• A member of Idaho’s Fish and Game Commission is facing calls to resign after he shared photos of himself smiling with a family of four baboons he killed — as well as a giraffe, leopard, impala, sable antelope, waterbuck, kudu, warthog, oryx and eland he and his wife shot — while hunting in Namibia. Blake Fischer told an Idaho paper, “I didn’t do anything illegal. I didn’t do anything unethical. I didn’t do anything immoral.” He left out revolting, gross and wrong.Michael Dobie