Tom LoBianco, Maryland politics reporter

We’re just about an hour from Gov. Martin O’Malley’s official re-election kickoff, so a perusal of Maryland’s political blogosphere seems fitting. Jobs, the economy, taxes and the state budget are going to be the keywords in this election (at least as it appears now) so let’s scope how the campaigns are dealing with money issues.

Republican blogger Mark Newgent writes that O’Malley’s claims of fiscal responsibility are suspect at best. Specifically, he targets the state’s Spending Affordability Committee (SAC) – a group run by the Legislature which advises the governor’s office on how much the state can afford while maintaining a strong credit rating. (UPDATED, see comments section) Newgent more or less calls the group O’Malley’s claims a fraud, though it stands to note that the SAC’s calls on what is affordable are not quite as arbitrary as Newgent makes them out to be hardly arbitrary and that O’Malley — whether by his own hand or the national economy’s — has not increased spending at a rate as much as Ehrlich did. The caveat here, of course, being that Ehrlich pumped most of those spending increases into education and O’Malley is campaigning on a stellar education system.

What is arbitrary, however (and this is true of both the Ehrlich and O’Malley campaigns) is the type of budget numbers used by each campaign and some of the looser definitions used in establishing “fiscal responsibility” supremacy.

I’ll go to Labor activist and Democratic organizer Adam Pagnucco for his critique of Bob Ehrlich, the day after his kickoff earlier this month. The outstanding question for Ehrlich, which he has yet to really detail, is how he would fix the state’s budget shortfall.

If Ehrlich were elected and successfully rolled back the state sales tax increase, passed a few years ago, that would presumably open a new $600 million hole in the budget. The Ehrlich campaign’s retort is that the tax actually curbs collections by curbing spending and that revenues would improve as the tax is rolled back. I don’t have the economic chops to evaluate that claim right now, but it is a stretch to assume that would

And, in the otherwise predetermined U.S. Senate race, we get a nice reminder that a race is still a race (even if you’re spending and playing like Orioles in the AL East.)

Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Blaine Taylor tipped off MarylandReporter.com, that there will, indeed, be a primary challenge for Sen. Barbara Mikulski. Len Lazarick does a solid job of couching Taylor’s election chances — almost zero — while reminding us that there are plenty of other candidates out there who never get any media attention. (This is where I kick myself in the ass for being just as bad as everyone else on this.)