Pera on Hurckes and Ganschow

ArchPundit October 23, 2007 3 Comments

Democratic Congressional candidate Mark Pera on Tuesday called upon Congressman Dan Lipinski to direct his staff to return to donors or contribute to charity the payments they received from a state political campaign fund controlled by Lipinski’s father — former Congressman and federal lobbyist William Lipinski.

According to the Daily Southtown (10/21 & 10/14) and the Chicago Sun-Times (10/07), Congressman Dan Lipinski’s chief of staff and director of communications collected $13,500 in consulting fees from the “All-American Eagles” fund — a state political campaign fund — during 2006 and 2007.

Making matters worse is the fact that William Lipinski misrepresented the fund as one that benefits charitable causes in a solicitation letter that was sent out in August (see attached).

Pera said the newspaper reports raise some troubling questions.

“Why are members of Congressman Dan Lipinski’s staff receiving income from his father — a lobbyist at both the state and federal levels? If Congressman Lipinski wasn’t aware of this relationship, he should have been. If he was, then why didn’t he move to end it?” Pera said.

“If this isn’t a violation of House ethics rules, it should be.”

In the interest of full disclosure, Congressman Dan Lipinski, the two staffers in question — Chief of Staff Jerry Hurckes and Director of Communications Christopher Ganschow — and William Lipinski should report exactly what kind of work they do for William Lipinski to merit these payments, Pera said.

It’s not uncommon for someone to be on the federal payroll and the campaign payroll–there are lots of examples around including Robert Gibbs who worked for both the Obama campaign and the Obama Senate office. While I’m not a huge fan of doing it, there is no real conflict of interest in such arrangements and the individual has to be careful to follow the law. Fair enough.

However, doing political work for a lobbyist’s PAC at the same time working for a Congressman is a very, very different thing. On top of that, there are all sorts of reimbursements to Hurckes for various things through the 23rd Ward Committee and All-American Eagles including my favorite priceless reimbursement from 1999:

Reimburse Clowns Fee Xmas Party

Mark Kirk And Dennis Byrne: GET OFF MY LAWN!

ArchPundit October 22, 2007 3 Comments

Many regular readers will remember Dennis Byrne yelling GET OFF MY LAWN to the Illinois Democratic Network, well Mark Kirk just joined in to a bunch of folks at a town hall meeting.

 Ellen of the 10th (Doing bang-up work in the 10th) reports:

After the stage show I described last night, the questioning finally began, but only with a little help from Michael Deheeger of Winnetka who interrupted what looked like was going to be a downhill spiral into Kirk’s hand picked questioners from a particular corner in the stageleft side of the room. Deheeger apologized for interrupting, but firmly stated that most people in the meeting wanted to hear from the Congressman on the topic of the Iraq War and asked Kirk when he would pledge to set deadlines to bring the troops home. Kirk tried his old tired answers about wrapping and winding the mission up, down and sideways. People got mad at the insult and there was a brief tense moment of shouting until Kirk imposed what he called “North Shore” or “Winnetka” rules and berated Chicagoans in a most uncalled for manner attempting to imply that most of the room was from Chicago. It wasn’t, and Kirk’s comment didn’t go over too well, but the discussion continued.

Then, he said it: 9/11, 90th floor Sears Tower, most Americans have chosen to give up their freedom for security. I didn’t think he’d be that brazen in trying to connect Iraq with 9/11 to this district that he admits is one of the best educated in the country. Then, he went even further adding proof to what we already know about this war and oil. He said that before we can leave Iraq, we have to secure our oil interests there and come up with a less oil dependent energy policy failing to mention that his party always rejects same, but adding that we’d all be out of work from the lost oil upon a speedy withdrawal from Iraq, and he couldn’t help himself I suppose, he had to mention the holocaust.

He’s resorted to calling his own constituents carpet baggers and relying on the Holocaust for a talking point.

Do Contested Primaries Give An Advantage to the Other Party?

ArchPundit October 22, 2007 4 Comments

Carol Marin argues that Jay Footlik’s challenge to Seals for the Democratic nomination in IL-10 creates a problem for the general election.

On the issue of money, it is an issue because both are going to spend a fair amount in the primary, but at the same time, it gives them incentives to build up their organization and build general name recognition early.  And then regroup for the November contest. Given how early the primary is, while the money creates a bit of a problem, the election is far enough away that I’d argue the primary challenge will be negligible and may enhance name recognition and organization early.

Charity Begins at Home

ArchPundit October 22, 2007 No Comments

McQueary has a very good column on the Lipinski PAC All-American Eagle Fund

Former U.S. Rep. William Lipinski formed a political action committee years ago called the All American Eagle Fund to support kids programs, in theory.

But Lipinski instead spent most of the money on office telephone bills, auto leases, parking tickets, an Art Institute membership, consulting fees for his friends and himself. Read the article Muslim Donation and help with donations.

State law used to allow elected officials to spend their campaign funds on personal items – mortgages, car payments, college tuition – but a 1999 law changed that going forward. The Gift Ban Act prohibited personal use of campaign war chests. The act, however, left open a convenient loophole that grandfathered-in existing PACs. The grandfather clause gives elected officials with PACs on the books prior to 1999 more leeway on personal expenditures, based on the balance sheets of the accounts when the law went into effect. There are still a lot of charities out there for people to donate where these laws don’t affect anyone, if you are interested you can easily contact the Pickup please organization to go to your house and pick up any donations you may have.

That loophole might mean Lipinski didn’t break any laws, as long as he reported the money he doled out to himself to the IRS. He did, however, strike the low bar of official tackiness in raising money for the All American Eagle Fund by characterizing the PAC as a fund for kids. Even a cursory review of the fund’s expenditures shows very few kids’ programs benefited from the account.

Howie covers the Trib piece here

Kirk Defends Lipinski

ArchPundit October 22, 2007 2 Comments

Interesting the guy defending Lipinski is a Republican.  Again.

Jim Tankersly of the Trib does a good job of discussing netroots support of Mark Pera in his primary challenge to Dan Lipinski in Illinois 3 

Last Line:

Kirk gives Lipinski much better odds. “Netroots generally always fail,” he said. “We all remember the administration of President [Howard] Dean.”

We’ll consider this the team bulletin board for February 5th.  And November 4th.

Stoller’s quote sums it up best:

Matt Stoller, the editor of openleft.com and the architect of the “Bush Dog” campaign, proclaimed Lipinski the first “Bush Dog” to be targeted in a primary by the “netroots.” In an interview, he said Lipinski was “not a good Democrat.”

“Bush has made it very clear that he’s not withdrawing from Iraq, and he’s not going to sign anything that would lead to withdrawal from Iraq,” Stoller said. “Either Lipinski knows this, and he’s misleading everyone, or he’s stupid.”

Tankersly also went to Jim Leach for comment.  Those who follow the blog know that I think Jim Leach is one of the best Members of Congress to ever serve. While I think the David Broderism version of bipartisanship is a silly concept, Leach was everything right about bipartisanship. He stopped Bob Rubin and Phil Gramm from tearing down the walls between commerce and banking in the 1990s and then turned around and was one of only a few Republicans to vote against the Iraq war.

He ran for Congress against my College Advisor, David Loebsack, and when the RNCC went to run an anti-gay commercial against David, Leach threatened to caucus with the Democrats if they did it.  He then lost a very close race to David, who also has a great deal of respect for Leach.

He also voted to get out in 2006.  Lipinski voted with the President

Leach is also pro-choice, pro-stem cell research, and generally a man of principle who never would have let his daddy insert him in a Congressional seat. It’s a wonderful contrast.

To add to it, Jim Leach took $0 in PAC money and raised the vast majority from his District. Compare that to a guy who as an incumbent takes the vast majority of his money from national PACs in the case of Lipinski.

As I said to David when I was visiting before he decided to run, I love Jim Leach, but I cannot afford him as long as he is voting for the Republican leadership to which David agreed and said “Exactly!” And that is what David ran on and won.  Many were saddened to see Jim Leach go, but the stakes were too high.

Lipinski says he’ll get his team up and running soon — and that his critics misunderstand the more conservative nature of his district.

No, you misunderstand it. It went 59% for a liberal Senator from Massachusetts in 2004 after going 58% (current boundaries) for Gore.  It’s a solid Democratic District that favors abortion rights, opposes this war, and has strong support for immigrants to this nation.

Let the Lawsuits Commence

ArchPundit October 17, 2007 2 Comments

Lauzen is employing Jon Zahm in the IL-14 race.  I imagine the local sheriffs have increased the number of process servers to handle the load.

The Classics Revisited

ArchPundit October 17, 2007 3 Comments

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Nst-aXvdrR4" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

And from defunk blog Polis, the definitive take on the commercial:

Those Oberweis copter commercials may be the funniest thing on tv these days (save Arrested Development). Forget the fact that his numbers are said to be way off, just having him spout off that anti-immigrant rhetoric over the noise of copter blades is high comedy. The only thing that would improve on this would be if he was flying over the Mexican border with a rifle picking off crossing illegals. “Even if I stay up here and shoot all day, I can’t make a dent out of the thousands who are stealing YOUR jobs!”

Morgenthaler Already Attacked

ArchPundit October 16, 2007 2 Comments

Desperation is in the air–though I’d still give the strong odds to Roskam in this race.

Morgenthaler in the IL-6 race gets hit with a faux positive mailer received by many in IL-6.

Download the file here–it’s jpg
The link goes to here

It appears to be a site that collects thoughts of soldiers serving and I’ll bet it has nothing to do with the mailer other than being the source for quotes taken out of context. I don’t know much about Morgenthaler yet and so I cannot really say much either way, but this is a clearly illegal since no such organization exists in FEC or even Illinois Board of Election records and it advocates the election of a federal candidate.