Tom LoBianco, Maryland politics reporter

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will headline the Maryland Republican Party’s June fundraiser, Maryland Republican sources said Friday night.

Romney will deliver the keynote at the party’s Red, White and Blue dinner in June, the sources said.

(My latest for WYPR, linked here. – TL)

COLUMBIA & TOWSON, MD (wypr) – Gov. Martin O’Malley says he has a problem with the “fairytales” former Gov. Robert Ehrlich has been telling. Before a cheering crowd of supporters in Columbia Wednesday afternoon, the governor shot down some of the fallacies he says his opponent has been spreading.

“His campaign is based on a number of fairy tales. That might be believed when he’s on right-wing radio. But it doesn’t stand up to the facts, it doesn’t stand up to the truth of the matter. And I’m looking forward to having this conversation directly with him whenever he’s up to it.”

The rhetoric may be new, but the political hits are the same in this race as when the governors first ran against each other four years ago.

Ehrlich claims that O’Malley will raise taxes and kill business in Maryland. O’Malley, in effect, calls Ehrlich a right-wing demagogue, who is incapable of governing.

Full story here.

Former delegate Carmen Amedori has quit running with Brian Murphy against Bob Ehrlich in the Republican primary, Republican sources are reporting.

Murphy told a small group of Republican activists tonight that she quit the campaign, according to two Republican sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Republican Blog Red Maryland first reported the departure. Neither Amedori nor Murphy returned calls to their cell phones Thursday night.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski just launched her Twitter account about a week ago, and the best part? She does her own tweeting!

Check out some of these gems:

MarylandReporter.com has been doing an excellent series of exit interviews with Maryland lawmakers who won’t be seeking re-election this year.

Maryland cycles all its statewide constitutional posts and legislative seats every four years. So turnover in bulk is never surprising, as members of the “Lower Chamber (the House) run for seats in the “Upper Chamber” (the Senate) and a handful are knocked out in intraparty election battles and demographic and electoral swings during the general election.

What is interesting is when you get a good number of folks who decide to resign from public life altogether (at least for now.) Here’s Maryland Reporter’s collection thus far:

- Leaving the legislature, part 1: Murray Levy

- Leaving the legislature, part 2: Sen. Lowell Stoltzfus

- Leaving the legislature, part 3: Bill Bronrott

- Leaving the Legislature, part 4: Sue Hecht

- Leaving the Legislature, part 5: Henry Heller

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.)

We’re now abut 24 hours out from Martin O’Malley’s official campaign kickoff down in Fells Point. We already know what his key talking points will be, based on this e-mail sent to supporters this morning:

You can see from that first paragraph that “big money” and “special interests” are the key talking points. Fortunately, we have ways of quantifying and qualifying such statements, with campaign finance reports from the State Board of Elections. Unfortunately we won’t see the first reports of this campaign until August 17.

This is not to say the Ehrlich campaign has been without some unverifiable statements. The first one to jump out is the assertion in Ehrlich’s post-session comments that Maryland Democrats will raise your taxes next year. There is literally no way of checking that statement until months after the election is decided. Like all good political rhetoric (and I say “good” here indicating cleverness and efficacy) it’s bought on faith.

I’ll be talking about this at 1p on WYPR, but here’s a brief rundown on the new Rasmussen poll showing Bob Ehrlich and Martin O’Malley neck-in-neck (linked here):

- The poll shows O’Malley beating Ehrlich again, if the election were held today, 47-44.

- It shows strong approval for Ehrlich among men and for O’Malley among women.

- It also shows O’Malley with higher unfavorables than Ehrlich (no doubt a function of O’M being the incumbent.)

Some general critiques:
- Rasmussen only polled 500 likely voters. An excellent sample would be 1,000 likely voters and Gonzales Research, which has a long history in Maryland, typically does around 800 people.

So the margins are going to be bigger, making this either a lot tighter of race than the poll would have it appear, or a lot less close.

- Rasmussen’s robocall method of polling has drawn criticism because, among other things, it’s harder to judge the validity of your respondents than if you had a person asking the questions.

- All of that said, one national analyst, Nate Silver, has lauded Rasmussen’s national polling work.

- UPDATE: A reader took issue with the assessment that Nate Silver “lauded” Rasmussen and provided a link to this post. In the post, Silver lays out why Rasmussen’s polling methodology tends to favor Republicans. It’s a good read, tad esoteric, but worth the time as we are entering heavy-speculation and prognostication season.

Catch former WMAR/ABC 2 newsman Scott Broom at his Twitter account. When it comes to the future of TV journalism, this man is doing it. Here’s his aptly-named One Man’s Band blog.

One thing I noticed for the first time while covering the 2010 legislative session were TV reporters operating without cameramen and cameramen hopping in front of the camera to do the work that used to be done by reporters.

Broom’s a consummate pro, so the quality of work is great. But it ain’t going to be like that everywhere.

Check out this interesting post from union activist and MoCo blogger Adam Pagnucco. Looks like the WashPost is attempting to tap into a pre-existing online community in Maryland, this just a few weeks/months before the Allbritton, Jim Brady online venture starts up.

From Pagnucco:

Five weeks ago, I received an unsolicited offer from the Washington Post. They asked if they could post my picture and biography on their website and link to every new blog post appearing here if I agreed to produce regular original content for them at their request. I turned them down. Why?

Because they wanted me to work for them for nothing.

The Examiner chain already does this, of course, but they pay their bloggers something (not much as I understand it, but it’s still moolah.)