news-record.com

Just to balance out my partisan karma for the day, Sen. Kay Hagan, a Greensboro Democrat, wasn’t the only U.S. senator from North Carolina to get hit with some populist-ish outrage (prior post.) Sen. Richard Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican running for re-election this year, came in for his lashes related to a fundraiser he attended in September. The Web site thatsmycongress.com (more on them in a minute) notes that Burr declined an invitation to meet with some tea party activists but attended a fundraising dinner in the same time frame. From the post (click here for the whole thing):

Richard Burr did, on the other hand, have time to party hardy with lobbyists from the financial services industry. They took him to the Oceanaire seafood restaurant, a swanky establishment that features the quote, “to eat an oyster is to kiss the sea on the lips.” I don’t know what Richard Burr was kissing that night, but his lips were definitely puckered up, at a price of $500-$2500 per smooch.

A couple things worth noting about this post: The fundraiser and the tea party event were not on the same night, and Tuesday is typically a busy legislating day in Washington.

Also, thatsmycongress.com describes itself on its masthead as “A politically independent journal of the campaigns and legislation of the United States Congress.” However, their content is more consistent with an entry on their domain registry (click here) that seems to indicate ties to Democratic or at least liberal/progressive politics.

It seems to me that this is part of a campaign to turn Burr’s fundraising prowess (AP reports he has $4.3 million in the campaign kitty) into something of a liability. However, it seems unlikely that the people who are the audience of this post (politically conservative grass-roots folks) are going to turn away from Burr for whichever Democratic nominee wins in May over something like this.