ICFST

Daily Dolt: Illinois Review and Porno Pete

Both are very upset about Steve Sauerberg hiring Teh GAY!

One suspects there is another thing at play though when this is said:

The LCR ad was designed to embarrass Bush by purposely pitting the President’s position in support of the marriage amendment directly against his VP Dick Cheney’s 2000 debate comments . . .

Now, Petey is pretty much against all things teh Gay, but there is one major thing worse than being gay, it’s embarrassing the child king.

What’s the Best Thing the IL GOP Has Going for It?

Rod Blagojevich.

So what do they appear to be ready to do?

Nominate a guy in the 11th who has given Rod $23,000.   

The entire rap on Halvorson is that she is close to Emil Jones and thus Blagojevich.  By choosing this clown (who also has some issues with minority contracting fraud), that entire avenue of attack is closed off.

Wait, Republicans, don’t read that until March 31, the day after you choose the candidate.

Today’s Tosser: Illinois Review, Apparently Jim Oberweis’ Web Site is Lying About Him

Illinois Review, with issues of honesty themselves, attack Bill Foster’s commercial as being untrue because it claims:

The false claim in the ad is that somehow Jim Oberweis doesn’t support employer provided health care. However, according to the correction that ran in today’s Chicago Tribune, Foster’s charge is false. You have to read the fine print, but hey, it’s there . . .

Well, let’s look at Jim’s web site:

In the long run, then, a fundamental element of health care reform must be to move away from the third party payer system, and reintroduce incentives for managing one’s own health care expenditures. Tax-free Health Savings Accounts are an excellent first step in the right direction.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/hobjGiNadCc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

So, Oberweis does say he wants to end employer provided health care insurance.  It’s on his web site.  Did someone hack into it and put it there to smear him?

What’s the problem here?

Do Steve Greenberg’s Loyalties Lay With Israel over the US?

That’s the kind of bullshit line you find all of the time about Jewish candidates at White Supremacist and Anti-Semitic sites–like JewWatch, the site run by a gay Nazi.

I think we’d all be appalled by such a line.  And we get such a line from the Greenberg campaign:

Republican challenger Steve Greenberg circulated a news release Wednesday referring to the Barrington Democrat as Melissa Luburich Bean, adding her Serbian maiden name.

The news release blasted Bean for not supporting Kosovo’s move to separate from Serbia and her backing by pro-Serbian organizations.

Greenberg defended the news release Wednesday, saying her maiden name was fair game and her support for Serbia is disturbing, especially in light of last week’s attack on the U.S. embassy in the Eastern European country.

“I think ultimately when you run for office you are being vetted many ways — your middle name and last name and you get called many names,” said the Long Grove businessman. “If we are thin-skinned about it … we are probably in the wrong business.”

Bean has a long record of supporting Serbian groups and Serbia’s efforts to prevent a Kosovo succession. The position is in conflict with the official stance of the Bush administration and that of several key Western European allies.

The attack on the embassy was reportedly carried out by rioters upset with the U.S. support of a separate Kosovo state. The Serbian government denounced the attack.

Bean was not available for comment Thursday, but her spokesman did issue a one-sentence statement.

“As a rule, the congresswoman does not respond to ethnically and religiously divisive statements,” Jonathan Lipman said.

Disagreeing with Bean over policy on Serbia is fine and I’m frankly closer to Greenberg on this very narrow issue. However, trying to slur her ethnically is beyond the pale.

The Professional Oberweis Campaign Continues

His ads got pulled off of the local television stations for violating disclaimer rules in political advertising.  That Bill Pascoe sure is on top of everything:

From the Foster Campaign

Oberweis Ad Pulled Off Local Stations
In continuing pattern of breaking the law, Oberweis’ TV commercial violates FCC regulations

(Geneva, IL) – A television commercial by 14th congressional district candidate Jim Oberweis has been pulled from rotation by WGN and NBC-affiliate WMAQ, in response to violations of Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The ad in question contains multiple failures to comply with disclaimer requirements, representing an attempt on the part of Oberweis to evade responsibility for the allegations levied against Mr. Foster contained in the ad.

This violation comes on the heels of the revelation yesterday that Oberweis appears to have broken federal election law by triggering the Millionaires’ Amendment without notifying his opponent as required by law.

This is not the first time that Oberweis has run afoul of FEC law. After his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, he was fined $21,000 by the FEC for benefiting from a television ad, in which he appeared, for the Oberweis Dairy. The FEC found that the ad constituted a prohibited corporate contribution to his campaign. [Associated Press, 7/27/07]

In addition, Oberweis used fabricated newspaper headlines to attack his opponent in his 2006 run for Illinois Governor. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3/2/06, Chicago Tribune, 3/1/06]

Wow, talk about incompetence.

Sydney Sounds Kind of Like a Fairy Doesn’t It

Dan Zanoza helps underscore the race baiting going on with Obama over at Illinois Review:

I don’t think there’s any problem with using Obama’s middle name.  It’s part of his heritage.  It’s part of who he is.  And, if that heritage, combined with some of the recent comments made by Obama and his wife, Michelle, shed light on this man’s true world view, the American people have a right to know it or hear it.

Bring Out the Self-Funders

Rich runs down a bunch of the potentials to replace Tim Balderman as the Republican nominee for Congress in Illinois-11.  God cannot love me enough to let Chris Lauzen run so I’ll discount that possibility right now.

The name that has floated around the most without being shot down is a potential self-funder in Martin Ozinga, one of the brothers running a concrete pouring company.  The business has some issues.  From the Chicago Tribune January 27, 2005

The trucks have brought their owners, Ozinga Bros. Inc. , tens of millions of dollars in city contracts and launched members of the family-owned firm to noted positions in local political and charitable circles.

But behind the scenes, documents and interviews show, the Ozinga firm repeatedly dodged city rules and exploited an affirmative-action program to win lucrative contracts.

Now Ozinga trucks pour concrete for the city under an unusual deal: The city has exempted the company from virtually all minority set-aside requirements.

As City Hall wrestles with scandals in its programs to lift minority- and women-owned businesses, the Ozingas provide a case study in how a white-owned company can work the system–and win.

The company’s actions include creating a spinoff concrete firm in the 1980s to win city business reserved exclusively for minority-owned companies. Martin, Richard and James Ozinga–all white men–enlisted the help of two African-American churches in Chicago’s depressed South Side, giving nine church members 51 percent ownership to technically meet the city’s rules.

But two of the African-American church members now say the spinoff company was bogus and that minorities had little control of the business. “It was a classic front,” church member Henry Washington says.

It’s messier than that and I’ll have more later, but this looks like a fine choice for the Illinois GOP.

Trib Front Pages the Illinois Circular Firing Squad Team

It appears the Illinois GOP (ICFST) is concerned that they might be LaRouched. For those that don’t recall, the Illinois Democratic Party slated two guys with ethnic names in the 1986 election and two LaRouche candidates with names like Fairfield and Hart.  Fairfield and Hart won and so Adlai Stevenson formed a third party ticket to compete leaving the loons to themselves.

So now they have the inexperienced Steve Sauerberg running against two loons who they are terrified might win! Sauerberg is a doctrinaire conservative Republican and family doctor.  Nothing exciting and he has all of $67,000 in the bank.

This time, the GOP primary contest features three contenders who have never held a public office. It has been a below-the-radar race featuring a party-backed candidate against a perennial contender with a controversial past that includes making anti-Semitic remarks and a fringe candidate who has made the elimination of toll roads a top agenda item.

The state Republican Party took the unusual step of issuing a primary endorsement of Steve Sauerberg, a Willowbrook family practice physician, in part to try to marginalize his challengers. But some Republicans have expressed fears that Sauerberg’s low-volume campaign might not be enough to defeat Andy Martin and Mike Psak, a result that would cast further doubt on the GOP’s relevance in Illinois.

Andy Martin is the assclown who started the Obama is a Muslim smear.

One challenger, Martin, has been a frequent candidate in Illinois and Florida in the last three decades. His last appearance on the state’s Republican primary ballot was two years ago, when he received 6,095 votes in finishing last in a five-way race in which more than 729,000 ballots were cast.

In 1973, the Illinois Supreme Court refused to allow Martin admission to the bar, saying he lacked the fitness to be an attorney.

Federal courts have repeatedly sanctioned him for what judges said is his filing of hundreds of largely meritless legal actions.

In early January, a Cook County judge tossed a lawsuit Martin filed against the Tribune alleging the newspaper portrayed him in a false light, contending that his name was not surveyed in a poll of the GOP primary candidates for governor that showed he had less than 1 percent support.

Judge Stuart Palmer ruled Martin’s allegations about the poll appeared to be “simply wrong” in that Martin’s name was included in the survey.

Palmer also rejected the lawsuit, in part, because he said Martin had failed to adhere to a federal court injunction preventing him from initiating lawsuits in state courts without filing a document reciting his litigation history.

In his past, Martin also has expressed anti-Semitic views. When he ran for Congress in Connecticut in 1986, the name of his congressional campaign committee included the phrase “to exterminate Jew power in America,” Federal Election Commission records show.

In a 1983 personal bankruptcy case, he referred to a federal bankruptcy judge as a “crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.” In a related court filing in the case, he also expressed sympathy to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

And there’s more.

Circle ’em up and fire.  I think after the gift of Keyes I can not ask for Martin to win this, though I’ll be delighted to watch Andy McKenna try and spin that.