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2
Feb

Poll shows Nelson trailing Bruning — and Stenberg

Even the Democrats’ own polls show U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson is “in deep trouble.”
A poll by the Democratic Public Policy Polling firm shows Attorney General Jon Bruning would thump Nelson, 50 percent to 39 percent, if they squared off right now in a poll whose authors wrote, “It’s going to be a very tough road for Democrats to hold onto this seat.”

U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson

They continued:

It’s not hard to peg the reason for Nelson’s precarious situation: you need to have a lot of appeal to Republicans if you’re going to win as a Democrat in Nebraska, and while Nelson had that in the past he doesn’t seem to anymore. The 2006 exit poll showed him winning a pretty remarkable 42% of the GOP vote. Now his approval rating with Republicans is down at 26%, and he gets just 17% of their votes against Bruning and 16% against Stenberg. Nelson actually has a 9 point advantage with independents over Bruning and a 17 point one over Stenberg but that’s not enough given his lack of crossover support in the heavily GOP leaning state.

2
Feb

LPS spends $275,000 lobbying lawmakers

Wow. That’s a lot of dough.

Once again, the Lincoln school district leads the pack in spending money to lobby state lawmakers, according to a recent story by the Journal Star’s new state capitol reporter, Kevin O’Hanlon (whose recent column about dumb bills I loved, by the way — LJS could use more gritty, bold reporting like that).

This is not the first time this story has been told — Lincoln’s school district has been spending a lot of money on lobbying for some time. It’s just that despite negative publicity about it, they’ve continued undeterred.

Over the past three years, LPS has spent $275,000 on lobbyists — with a staffer who lobbies plus an outside firm. That’s more than Omaha Public Schools — which has 12,000 more students and 25 more schools than Lincoln but only spent $212,000.

And only 16 out of the 253 Nebraska school districts even have lobbyists. Why do the big districts needs lobbyists? To make sure the state aid formula works in their favor, primarily. So they spend Lincolnites’ tax dollars trying to get more tax dollars out of state coffers. Small districts that can’t afford to hire lobbyists are just out of luck.

Superintendent Steve Joel told O’Hanlon it’s critical that the district have lobbyists to (no I am not making this up) help administrators read bills, take positions and line up testimony.

Sen. Bill Avery said schools would be better represented by their own superintendents, rather than paid lobbyists. He added that LPS headquarters is only about 10 minutes away from the capitol. SNAP!

The city, by the way, also spends tax dollars on lobbyists on both the state and national level. The city has hired O’Hara, Lindsay & Associates to lobby state lawmakers since 2006. The county also spent about $53,000 on lobbying last year.

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