Call It A Comeback
Niecestro or Cohen.
Kind of like …and remember death is not an option…
Niecestro just told everyone that he relied on a notorious flake to gather his petitions and then came up with zero. Apparently he didn’t check or confirm progress, he just found out they didn’t get done.
Cohen is hiring Bradley Gator to do campaign work, has zero chance of winning, and is spending his own money….
Okay, Cohen is the biggest mark, but either way these two are incredible fools.
Via Rich
Scott Lee Cohen hired Gator Bradley to do his petition work. That should help the image out:
Cohen spokesman John Davis acknowledged that the campaign paid petition circulators $1.50 a signature and that the ballot drive was coordinated by former Gangster Disciples leader Wallace “Gator” Bradley.
More:
“At first I was a little bit hesitant or worried that maybe people wouldn’t sign,” Cohen said. “I was completely wrong. People were very anxious to sign and made it very clear that they’re anxious to vote in the general election in November.”
Cohen, 45, said most of the signatures on the 8,878 pages came from the Cook County area.
Davis acknowledged that some of the petition circulators have not been paid, and said Cohen planned to deposit money in his campaign immediately after finishing the task of filing in Springfield, and he promised that unpaid workers would received what they’re owed over the next two or three days.
I’m giving him about a 30 percent chance of being on the ballot. Using drunks and street people to gather signatures tends to result in lots of Mickey Mouses and Max E. Pads. Though Bradley may see the campaign as cash register and have gotten enough valid signatures to keep taking money from Cohen for a few months.
Via Rich
We hear that Mike Niecestro will not be on the ballot. This isn’t terribly surprising, but I love the description:
Millionaire mortgage banker Mike Niecestro, the west suburban conservative who talked for months about running as an independent against Republican Kirk, Democrat Alexi Giannoulias and the Green Party’s LeAlan Jones, did not file petitions for a position on the November ballot. Niecestro–who needed 25,000 signatures of registered voters–told me that his petition drive fell way short of its goal because a “certain republican politician” did not make good on his promise to get 45,000 signatures. In fact, according to Niecestro, the politician known as a “flake” in GOP circles, delivered a goose egg.
Any guesses?
Here’s a lesson for anyone running for office–when some assclown (either party here) says they can do something incredibly difficult and doesn’t tell you how hard it will be they are full of crap.
Or perhaps I’m the Daily Chump:
I thought it was bizarre at first, but accepted that a church pre-school might well take in some students who would be disadvantaged and Kirk was projecting a bit. No, he was just making shit up. I still believe he worked there–records and memories from that long ago aren’t that good and if he was a work study student, there’s some record somewhere, but good luck finding it. Maybe I’m still assuming Mark Kirk has some connection to reality and that may well be a bad assumption, but it’s hard to believe he didn’t teach at the pre-school. Actually a male teacher at a pre-school is a pretty important thing and I hand it to him. Usually teachers at the elementary level or pre-school level who are male are treated with a fair amount of suspicion which is silly and bigoted.
He ran play groups. Everytime I set the bar low, the guy finds a way to make it under.
No, I am serious. Officer is currently on the East Saint Louis School Board which primarily qualifies one to be a petty thief. In fact, just a few days ago, Durbin pointed out that the elected School Board needs an audit and probably is headed back to an oversight board:
Durbin wrote in his letter: “Recent media reports have detailed expenditures that appear extravagant and wasteful. In particular, I am concerned about reports that hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal funding are being used to pay high consultant salaries and that significant amounts of funding have been used for staff travel expenses.”
He also stated concern for, ” … reports of federal funding spent on entirely non-educational purposes.”
School board member Carl Officer, who was elected last year, said his requests for information concerning student performance, “have always been rebutted by saying that we needed to hire and pay these consultants which have been recommended time and time again in a variety of areas.” Officer, who has voted for consultants and has billed airfare and lodging to the district when traveling to conferences, said he welcomes any investigation, ” … to see whether or not these funds were spent judiciously, as we were told.”
On March 28, the newspaper reported that during the past six years the school district spent $2 million on consultants, according to incomplete financial records provided under the Freedom of Information Act. When the district refused to provide access to paperwork for at least half of the consultants listed, reporters turned up additional financial documents that upped the consulting total to at least $3.1 million.
The district also spent that at least $200,000 on airline tickets and hotels, as well as $10,000 for original artwork, including $4,000 for a “historical quilt.”
District finance records showed that at least $138,000 was spent during just one 12-month period on lodging for school board members, administrators, teachers and consultants at Hiltons, Sheratons, a Ritz-Carlton and other top hotels in cities from Los Angeles to New Orleans to New York City. One district employee stayed six nights at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak Resort in Phoenix at a cost of $1,204.
My personal favorite was the day he gathered the press to announce that he was filing a federal suit to stop Gov. James Thompson from using the National Guard to seize the city. When I broke the news to Thompson’s press secretary, I thought the poor man would laugh himself into a stroke. No troops ever showed up.
Or maybe the best was the time Carl began a speech by greeting me from the podium, by name, but then complained the next day to my editor that the resulting story was unfair because he wouldn’t have spoken so candidly had he known a reporter was present.
No, I think it was the opening of an obstetrical unit to help deal with the community’s soaring population of unwed mothers. Carl, a bachelor, publicly announced that he was personally going to start work on populating the place that very night.
Oops, I almost forgot the major MetroLink ceremony where Carl wiped the smile off every face by vowing to block the project because he wasn’t consulted. (Civic leaders unanimously insisted that Carl was invited to every meeting but never once showed up.)
You’ve surely heard about how Zaire un-invited Carl to help fine-tune its government after he announced that he would take his own blood supply, so if he got sick he wouldn’t depend on its “monkey blood.”
Perhaps the best was when he got stopped by police doing 108 mph in a Jaguar borrowed from a convicted drug dealer. Carl bitterly denied the cop’s version, insisting he really had been doing 140.
Is there no end to it?
I haven’t gotten to the bodyguard with the Uzi. Or the $2,200 Carl claimed for trips never taken. Or the consulting contract the city council approved for $545,000 but Carl signed for $1.3 million. Or Carl’s hearty endorsement of a $450 million riverfront development plan long after everyone else, including a federal grand jury, figured out that it was just a big scam.
Officer is running as a pro-life candidate. As we can see from Gauen’s piece, he apparently practices what he preaches.
Roll ’em up.
It’s like they took a stupid pill. Not that I mind, mind you:
The oil spill in the Gulf is this nation’s largest natural disaster and stopping the leak and cleaning up the region is our top priority. Congressman Barton’s statements this morning were wrong. BP itself has acknowledged that responsibility for the economic damages lies with them and has offered an initial pledge of $20 billion dollars for that purpose.
Natural? How is an oil rig explosion and leak natural?
Just wondering?
That he could probably have killed the school issue by saying he said something stupid and regrets the error. He talks a lot and says something dumb every now and then sorry for the misleading statement.
Instead he issues a correction dripping in condescension and passive aggressiveness to a story by claiming he was referring to two different schools in two different countries in the same sentence. Mark Kirk–making himself look worse than any one else ever could.
June 17th, 2010
Yesterday, in its story confirming that Congressman Kirk once worked as a teacher, the New York Times incorrectly attributed a background statement to Kirk campaign spokesperson Kirsten Kukowski as follows:
“His spokeswoman said the congressman was referring to nursery school students in Ithaca, not his students in London, during that speech on the House floor in 2006.”
Before and after publication, the Kirk campaign made it clear that the clause “brightest lights of our country’s future” referenced nursery school kids in Ithaca, New York while the “bore scrutiny” clause referenced a few kids at Milestone School in London. As we told the reporter, Mr. Kirk taught mainly English and some foreign students at Milestone. A few of the kids he taught came from difficult family backgrounds and he was surprised by what they saw at home and regarded as normal behavior.
The Times’ mistake is unfortunate – but sometimes mistakes do happen.
Hmmmm…the quote from the NYT:
In a speech on the House floor on Sept. 19, 2006, as he talked about school safety, Mr. Kirk spoke about “the kids who were the brightest lights of our country’s future, and I also remember those who bore scrutiny as people who might bring a gun to class.”
So before the comma he was referring to pre-schoolers and after the comma he was referring to the middle schoolers. While I don’t have the beginning of the sentence handy, I’m finding that to be a bit….ummm… ludicrous.
From the ILGOP Press Release:
But while Alexi is talking tough about BP today, according to the City of Chicago’s Board of Ethics disclosure forms, from late 2003-2008, Alexi’s Political Director Endy Zemenides — often referred to as “a top aide to U.S. Senate hopeful Alexi Giannoulias” – was lobbying for BP Bovis Global Alliance. This means that in 2007, when BP attempted to increase “the dumping of pollutants into Lake Michigan,” Alexi’s “top aide” was working for BP.
Zemenides appears to be working as an unpaid adviser to the campaign, but he is clearly a top counselor to Giannoulias, and is frequently identified as a “top aide” or “political director.”
That Alexi would hire a former BP lobbyist isn’t terribly surprising. As the Examiner’s Tim Carney reported,
BP has more Democratic lobbyists than Republicans. It employs the Podesta Group, co-founded by John Podesta, Obama’s transition director and confidant. Other BP troops on K Street include Michael Berman, a former top aide to Vice President Walter Mondale; Steven Champlin, former executive director of the House Democratic Caucus; and Matthew LaRocco, who worked in Bill Clinton’s Interior Department and whose father was a Democratic congressman.
So what does this mean? To be sure, this is not likely cost Alexi the election, though it may cause him to dismiss Zemenides.
But when you consider that BP is behind the largest ecological disaster in this nation’s history, and that they have clearly become enemy number 1 for liberals and environmentalists, the connection becomes more problematic. And when you consider what this crisis has done to President Obama’s first term, and that Alexi and Kirk are competing to win Barack Obama’s former U.S. Senate seat — the story becomes even more interesting. Can Alexi criticize BP while simultaneously employing a former BP lobbyist?
The problem with this stinging indictment? Bovis and BP work together on creating retail establishments for BP. Does that mean that the BP/Bovis Global Alliance wants lobbyists to lower regulations? Probably, but that most likely means in relation to the regulations for retail establishments not for drilling. This is like attacking a lobbyist for NBC the television network because the lobbyist works for GE and is then responsible for then responsible for GE dumping PCBs in the Hudson It’s technically true that the person lobbied for the parent corporation, but not terribly substantive.
Now, what this really reminds me of is that Mark Kirk used to have a good record on the environment and supported legislation to reduce carbon based fuels such as the energy bill he supported and then came out against right after voting for it. So if Mark Kirk wants to claim that Alexi has ties to the oil industry in an unpaid ad, that’s fine, but frankly, I’m more worried about whether Alexi is going to vote to fundamentally change the energy policy in the United States and not change his mind right after he makes that vote….
Mark Kirk wants it both ways in everything.
From the inbox
“I oppose the compromise that would exempt the NRA from the disclosure and disclaimer requirements in the current bill. It’s sadly ironic that legislation entitled the DISCLOSE Act would permit non-disclosure from one of the most powerful lobbies in the country.
Compromise is a necessary part of policy making, and any proposal that must earn the support of a multitude of diverse interests will never be perfect. However, this deal is not designed to represent a multitude of interests, but instead only to serve one.
In light of what this legislation seeks to achieve, the NRA carve-out leaves the bill an empty contradiction. The bill attempts to shine a light on the financiers of political messages designed to advance special interests. The deal assures a heavyweight in the room that it may stay in the dark.
This two-tiered system of campaign finance laws gets us nowhere. It not only chooses a winner in the gun control debate, but implicitly says that some points of view are more worthy of protection than others.
I understand that this deal originated from a well-placed concern that granting an exemption for all 501 c-4 organizations would allow corporations to game the system by setting up sham non-profits through which they could funnel money. But the remedy does not treat the sickness; it only creates another ill.
Today, there is sensible, bi-partisan legislation before Congress that would close the gun-show loophole which inexplicably permits felons, terrorists, and the mentally ill to purchase weapons without a background check. An organization that may allocate resources to defeat such legislation simply cannot be allowed to play by a different set of rules than one that seeks to advocate for such sound policy. There is too much at stake.
I applaud the goals of this bill and other efforts aimed at making our government more transparent and accountable to the taxpayers. But we do not advance those ends by picking and choosing who we will hold accountable based on power, influence, and fear of political reprisal. I will vote against any amendment that creates a carve out, and if such a carve-out amendment is approved, I will vote against the bill’s final passage.”
Good for him. Quite a change in the 5th District substance and style.
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