Campaign Literature

It's cop against cop in a standoff over the use of a police badge in a race for the Baltimore County Council. Baltimore County Police Chief James Johnson has sent a cease-and-desist letter to council candidate Charles "Buzz" Beeler of Dundalk over the retired officer's use of a police badge in campaign literature. The chief threatened legal action in the Aug. 11 letter to Beeler, a veteran of the county force for more than 30 years, if he did not immediately stop using the badge and retrieve any fliers or mailers with the symbol.

Two of Baltimore's high-profile Democratic mayoral candidates launched yesterday a barrage of more than 320 television commercials targeting undecided voters during the final weekend of the campaign while a third is targeting African-American voters in particular by saturating certain cable television shows with more than 700 spots scheduled to run before Tuesday's primary.The blitz came on a day when a candidate for City Council president had to clarify an "endorsement" from NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, city elections officials noted a rise in absentee ballots and campaigns took to city street corners with workers waving at intersections clogged with honking drivers flashing the thumbs-up sign.

After a week of out-of-town meetings, Commissioner Julia W. Gouge resumed her regular schedule of monthly public meetings Friday.The public meetings -- instituted a little more than a year ago in a moveto become more accessible to Carroll residents -- are meant to give anyone who wants to a chance to talk with Gouge.Friday afternoon's two-hour meeting attracted three people, two of whom spoke to Gouge behind the closed doors of her third-floor office."I wish everybody in the county would come out for these," said Robert Neal, a Taneytown resident who was the only one to talk to Gouge in front of the press.

With biotechnology considered one of Maryland's top future industries, O'Malley latched onto it during his campaign and pledged to strengthen the state's position - though how he plans to do that isn't clear. He has been a supporter of the city's two biotechnology business parks and has announced plans to create a "vaccine task force" that will offer advice on incentives and regulatory changes "needed to recruit vaccine-related businesses." He's used city funds to help pay for a study that assessed the region's ability to support and attract such facilities.

As a volunteer in the Gregg Bernstein campaign, it saddens me racial demographics are being so minutely analyzed ("Bernstein crossed racial lines to win," Sept. 30). I happen to be white, but that's not why I volunteered for Mr. Bernstein. His skin color was no concern to me, it was his position on crime in Baltimore. I spent most of the day handing out his literature near my polling place in a predominantly white neighborhood (Little Italy), and I was appalled by the low turnout.

Two days before the Baltimore Teachers Union election, candidates for president outlined their philosophies on radio, traded barbs and papered city schools with campaign letters.Incumbent President Irene B. Dandridge and challenger Marcia Brown, 52, the BTU's executive vice president, distributed letters to teachers citywide. Both debated with a third candidate, teacher Adolph McDonald, 59, yesterday in the studio of WEAA-FM radio at Morgan State University."You can choose to vote for experienced leadership or vote for amateurs," Dandridge, 61, wrote in her letter to teachers and reiterated during the evening broadcast.

JOHN G. GARY, the Republican executive in Anne Arundel County, and Janet S. Owens, his Democratic challenger, have pledged to be civil to each other during the five weeks leading to the Nov. 3 general election.Most voters would welcome such a refreshing departure from what has become the norm.With the advent of paid consultants and large campaign contributions, state and national political campaigns have adopted an increasingly hard edge. The "experts," relying on polls and focus groups, convince candidates that they are better off attacking their opponents than promoting their own records and qualifications.

The feud between Sen. Delores G. Kelley and Del. Emmett C. Burns intensified last week when she mailed out campaign literature claiming he "made life easier for wife-batterers" and voted to cut public school funding, charges Burns characterizes as outright lies. Kelley pointed to three bills Burns voted against in the past three years as evidence that "his sympathies are with the abuser, not the victim," of domestic violence. But Kelley also voted against one of them, a bill in 2000 that would have classified certain domestic killings as first-degree murder.

Del. Cornell N. Dypski, one of Baltimore's longest serving state legislators, ended his bid for re-election yesterday on the deadline for candidates to withdraw from General Assembly races. Dypski is the second incumbent from Southeast Baltimore's 46th District to drop out this week, making his decision days after the withdrawal of Sen. Perry Sfikas. "We all know that redistricting is a bloodletting, tortuous process," said Dypski, 70. "I reached the conclusion that it was time to go."

Defying police orders to stop putting campaign literature on cars, supporters of mayoral candidate Andrey Bundley slipped fliers under the windshield wipers of cars owned by several city employees yesterday during a rally outside Baltimore police headquarters. Bundley, who is challenging Martin O'Malley in the Sept. 9 Democratic primary, was handcuffed and charged with a misdemeanor Sunday night for putting fliers on cars. Such leafleting is illegal, but the law is seldom enforced. At a news conference outside police headquarters yesterday, Bundley said officers had no justification to handcuff him for doing what politicians have done for years.