West Virginia Blue
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Have you ever noticed - and we certainly have - that vulnerable Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito's "supporters" never praise her, her policies or her votes in Congress? They have a long history of making baseless smears of her challengers.
But even her most vocal "supporters" never praise her work in Congress.
The Wheeling Intelligencer has a story on campaigns raising money for the 2008 races at different levels. It's a fairly ho-hum story stating the obvious - that it's early in 2007 yet and that money doesn't always measure support (corporate fatcats are going to pour money in to try to keep vulnerable Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito in office since she's a reliable vote against workers).
But at the end of the article, the reporter, Joselyn King, allows the NRCC spokesman Ken Spain to take a cheap shot on Rep. Alan Mollohan (D). Considering that the National Republican Central Committee cannot find a candidate to run against Mollohan is a testament to Mollohan's effectiveness and popularity. Even with the most partisan Justice Department in the nation's history backing them, the NRCC has nothing on Mollohan. As weak as the GOP brand is in the state and nation, Spain should spend more time cleaning his own glass house than in throwing ineffectual stones at Mollohan's.
Hoppy Kercheval has a good column today on the so-far unsuccessful efforts by the Republican Party to find a candidate to run against the very popular Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV-01).
Print StoryEmail StoryThe National Republican Congressional Committee is fishing in West Virginia's first congressional district, but as any angler can tell you, just because you drop a line doesn't mean you're going to get a bite.
The Republican congressional committee has been running 60-second radio commercials in Morgantown, Wheeling and Parkersburg attacking the district's Democratic congressman, Alan Mollohan.
The ad reminds voters that Mollohan's distribution of federal earmarks in the district and his personal finances remain under investigation by the FBI.
The announcer intones gravely, "West Virginians expect more and deserve better."
Why now? There's nothing new in the Mollohan investigation -- if in fact there is still one going on.
And it's the middle of August, when people are going to fairs, getting ready to go back to school, taking their final summer vacations. It's unlikely voters are thinking about the `08 congressional election.
Evidently the Republican ads are a kind of political fishing trip to see if they can stir up any interest in a viable Republican opponent for Mollohan in the critical next election.
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Print StoryEmail StoryThe National Republican Congressional Committee is fishing in West Virginia's first congressional district, but as any angler can tell you, just because you drop a line doesn't mean you're going to get a bite.
The Republican congressional committee has been running 60-second radio commercials in Morgantown, Wheeling and Parkersburg attacking the district's Democratic congressman, Alan Mollohan.
The ad reminds voters that Mollohan's distribution of federal earmarks in the district and his personal finances remain under investigation by the FBI.
The announcer intones gravely, "West Virginians expect more and deserve better."
Why now? There's nothing new in the Mollohan investigation -- if in fact there is still one going on.
And it's the middle of August, when people are going to fairs, getting ready to go back to school, taking their final summer vacations. It's unlikely voters are thinking about the `08 congressional election.
Evidently the Republican ads are a kind of political fishing trip to see if they can stir up any interest in a viable Republican opponent for Mollohan in the critical next election.
As partisan as the Bush-Cheney administration has made the Department of Justice (see the U.S. attorney scandal for details), if there was any hint of wrong-doing on Mollohan's part, Alberto Gonzales would have leaked it already. The fact that nothing happened to Mollohan means that fishing expedition failed too. No one is going to run against Mollohan and Kercheval is right: there's only one Capito. Thank goodness. Because the state can't handle more than one doubletalking misleader who's so out of step with the public on the Iraq occupation and worker safety and labor rights.
The rescue effort to find the missing six coal miners trapped in a Huntington, Utah mine may have ended when a cave-in killed three people and injured several others. From the Associated Press:
HUNTINGTON, Utah -- The search for six miners missing deep underground was abruptly halted after a second cave-in killed three rescue workers and injured at least six others who were trying to tunnel through rubble to reach them.
It was a devastating turn for the families of the six men trapped in the Aug. 6 collapse at the Crandall Canyon mine and for the relatives of those trying to rescue them. It's not known if the trapped miners are alive.
"It just feels like a really hard blow to swallow after all we've been through the last week and a half and everyone trying to hope in their own individual way,'' Huntington Mayor Hilary Gordon said in telephone interview today with CNN's "American Morning.''
When Mr. George W. Bush and President Dick Cheney decided to let industry re-write safety rules and call the shots on enforcement, you end up with disasters like this. As Mother Jones said, pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
(If you didn't get to read this yesterday, read it today. - promoted by Clem Guttata)
wvblueguy wrote before about the mine owner in Utah being critical of safety rules in his other mines in West Virginia and elsewhere.
As I pointed out (hat tip to wvtrueblue in the comments), the mine owner Robert Murray has contributed heavily to Republicans, including vulnerable Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, the Zelig of national scandals.
Turns out of course that Murray expected his Republican friends in Congress to do his bidding when he snapped his fingers.
Greg Collard: In 2001, a belt foreman named Tom Ciszewski had his arm ripped off by a conveyor belt at Ohio Valley Coal's Powhatan No. 6 mine in Belmont County, Ohio. He bled to death.
Later, a belt repairman testified that Robert Murray pressured miners not to shut down the belt, "unless there's a man it," and that he would fire them on the spot.
A judge ruled the company was not negligent.
But problems at the mine continued.
Eventually, MSHA ordered the mine to shut down after repeated violations.
Murray had enough.
He was upset at MSHA's action, and met with Tim Thompson, then the head of MSHA's District 3 office that covers a portion of Ohio and northern West Virginia.
Back in 2003, Jeff Young of West Virginia Public Broadcasting obtained the notes from the meeting:
Jeff Young 2003 report: Those notes show Murray repeatedly threatening to have MSHA employees fired. `I will have your jobs. They are gone. The clock is ticking," Murray said at various points.
And he stressed his political influence with the agency, saying, "I talked to Laresky (former MSHA director) personally," and again, quoting, "Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and last I checked he was sleeping with your boss.' Sen. McConnell of KY is married to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, who oversees MSHA.
If you want unsafe working conditions and more dead miners, vote Republican.
Murray has personally donated $115,050 to Republican political candidates over the past three election cycles. He has given another $724,500 to the GOP over the past ten years through political action committees connected to his businesses.
Here's a treat for our labor brothers and sisters. The anti-worker Linda Chavez - Mr. George W. Bush and President Dick Cheney's former nominee as Secretary of Labor - knows how to make money without doing any work.
In the years since she was forced to pull her nomination as Bush's labor secretary after admitting payments to an illegal immigrant, Chavez and her immediate family members have used phone banks and direct-mail solicitations to raise tens of millions of dollars, founding several political action committees with bankable names: the Republican Issues Committee, the Latino Alliance, Stop Union Political Abuse and the Pro-Life Campaign Committee. Their solicitations promise direct action in the "fight to save unborn lives," a vigorous struggle against "big labor bosses" and a crippling of "liberal politics in the country."
That's not where the bulk of the money wound up being spent, however. Of the $24.5 million raised by the PACs from January 2003 to December 2006, $242,000 - or 1 percent - was passed on to politicians, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal election reports. The PACs spent even less - $151,236 - on independent political activity, such as mailing pamphlets.
Instead, most of the donations were channeled back into new fundraising efforts, and some were used to provide a modest but steady source of income for Chavez and four family members, who served as treasurers and consultants to the committees. Much of the remaining funds went to pay for expenses such as furniture, auto repairs and insurance, and rent for the Sterling office the groups share. Even Chavez's health insurance was paid for a time from political donations.
"I guess you could call it the family business," Chavez said in an interview.
Yeah, I guess you could. She really could give pointers on shakedowns and betrayal, couldn't she? Can you say "projection", everyone? I knew you could.
I'm kinda bummed that her little scam's been exposed. Chavez's efforts have kept at least a cool $24 million out of the hands of Republican campaigns over the past four years, and I hope that she continues to divert GOP donations from their intended targets for years to come.
Paul Brinkley, deputy under-secretary of defense for business transformation in Iraq, said Iraq's shattered industrial base had to be revitalised to bring down unemployment levels of about 60 percent and help reconciliation.
He said political, social and economic stability would be much easier if factories, many left idle since the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam, could win even a small fraction of the trade the United States conducts every year with economies like China, India, Indonesia and Thailand.
"If we could just get some of that factored into Iraq we'd uplift the lives of every Iraqi and al Qaeda wouldn't have any people to recruit," Brinkley told Reuters in an interview.
Brinkley said early economic planners had made the understandable mistake of assuming that a free market would rapidly emerge to replace what he described as Saddam's "kleptocracy", and create full employment.
This mistaken assumption led to a series of decisions which "sowed the seeds of economic malaise and fuelled insurgent sympathies" after industrial production collapsed and imports flooded in to replace locally made goods.
Understandable mistake? Retired Gen. Jay Garner, who was first tapped as envoy, and the State Department had a plan to employ the Iraqi Army immediately after the invasion succeeded for the rebuilding of Iraq, a massive FDR style jobs program that would have rebuilt Iraq cheaper and kept the Iraqis employed and give them a stake in the return of Iraq.
But that plan was not followed. Instead the money went to Halliburton and Bechtel for the contracts. The rightwing ideologues wanted to turn Iraq into a free market paradise. Coalition Provisional Authority hires were asked about their contributions to the GOP, their views on tax cuts for the rich and reproductive rights to get jobs with the CPA while experienced people in nation building were passed over.
The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.
Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.
The Republican National Committee is using a fundraising tactic that is very similar to the Nigerial email scams. From TPMmuckraker:
What 83 year-old William Sidwell of Queen City, Missouri found in his mailbox last week scared him. It was a letter from the Republican National Committee, but it seemed to bear grave news: "Our records show that you registered as a member of our Party in Schuyler County, MO," the letter said. "But a recent audit of your Party affiliation turned up some irregularities."
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The letter, it turns out, is just a misleading pitch for a contribution to the RNC -- one of the "irregularities" cited in the letter is that "I cannot find a record of you taking a single action in support of the Republican Party -- not locally, not nationally!" A contribution, the letter suggests, would help set the record straight.
The letter is signed by Bill Steiner, the director of the RNC's Office of Strategic Information, a title Steiner assumed at the end of July. His responsibilities "include managing the RNC's national voter file and Voter Vault, the committee's highly touted micro-targeting operation," Roll Call reported last month. And indeed, the voter "audit" requests detailed information about the voter's voting history and current opinions on the 2008 presidential race.
It's unclear how many similar letters (tens of thousands? millions?) have been sent by the RNC. The RNC did not respond to our requests for comment.
As we've posted before, the GOP has desperately sought anything to throw at State Sen. John Unger, Democratic challenger to the vulnerable Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito.
With her neverending Iraq occupation stance, her handcuffing herself to an incredibly unpopular president, the DCCC making this a top tier race, the growing anti-Capito sentiment with the netroots, and the overall weakness of the GOP bench, the West Virginia Republicans are desperate to find something to throw at Unger to protect her even when they have to make it up.
We've called the rightwingers on it before. This time Unger called them on it and it's good to see the campaign fighting back.
Once again a Republican attempt to throw mud at Unger has splashed back on Capito.
The latest attempt is a variation of one they've tried before on Unger's employment as a federal contractor and yet it only highlighted how much better qualified Unger is for the job than Capito.
This time, however, the effort not only shows a potential ethical breach by the WV GOP, but it reveals dirty tricks by Capito. So much for her genial, civility veneer.
From Unger's statement to the media today:
CHARLESTON – To combat the State Republican Party’s early smear campaign against him, Senator John Unger today made public a letter from Lewis G. Brewer, Executive Director of the West Virginia Ethics Commission, directly contradicting the State Republican Party’s attack on Senator Unger’s 2007 financial disclosure form.
In the attached letter from July 16, Executive Director Brewer states:
“Marking ‘other’ on your form would not meaningfully change the financial information you have already disclosed in completing the form. Accordingly, it is my opinion that you are not required to file an amended financial disclosure statement.”
In simple words even rightwingers can understand the West Virginia Republican Party Chairman Doug McKinney filed an ethics complaint for Unger filling out the disclosure papers properly. How much more desperation are they going to get?
Seriously, they filed a complaint for someone filing a form properly. What's next from the West Virginia GOP? "Unger places stamp with torn corner on envelope."
Anyway, back to Unger's statement:
West Virginia Republican Party Chairman Doug McKinney filed a formal complaint with the State’s Ethics Commission on July 17 alleging Senator Unger did not properly complete his personal financial disclosure statement.
“I am very proud of my employment with EG&G Technical Services and the work I do in the area of homeland security,” Senator Unger said. “As can be seen by my financial disclosure forms, I have been open and transparent about my employment with EG&G.”
Filing ethics complaints against challengers of Shelley Moore Capito’s is not uncommon practice with the state’s Republican Party. In 2000, Shelley Moore Capito ran ad campaigns alleging at least 18 ethics charges had been filed against her opponent Jim Humphreys in an effort to attack his credibility.
In her ads, Capito herself said her intention was to state “the truth about Jim Humphreys’ questionable conduct, deceit and repeated violations of personal and professional trust.”
“It is unfortunate that the West Virginia Republican Party has run out of meaningful ideas about solving the pressing challenges our state and country are facing today, and instead has decided to engage in these petty character assassination attempts,” Senator Unger said.
What will be interesting to see in the days ahead is whether the media digs into how Capito's supporters are filing false ethics complaints and abusing the ethics system for partisan political reasons or whether the press simply parrots Republican talking points.
Jake Stump of the Charleston Daily Mail already debunked the smear on Unger's employment.
An employee at the National Energy Technology Laboratory recommended him for the EG&G job, Unger said.
"I'm not a federal employee, but I work with federal officials," he said. "The reason I don't talk much about the particulars of the job is because we're dealing with sensitive materials and homeland security."
The senator said he believes the company tapped him not because of his political background, but for his experiences overseas.
He has worked with Mother Teresa in India during monsoons and riots in 1990. There he coordinated the distribution of relief supplies.
Before that, he worked for the United States Refugee Program in Hong Kong and helped Vietnamese refugee children there.
He's also aided in disaster relief efforts in Turkey and Iraq, where he has traveled twice.
Unger said those experiences provided him with knowledge concerning international relations and security.
"Part of our training in Iraq dealt with security," Unger said. "When you're working with government in the area of human relief, there's a large component of security."
I've said it before and I'll say it again of the rightwing whining smears on Unger: That's it? That's all you've got?
Capito's got no record to run on after six years as an ineffective representative for West Virginia. All she and her supporters got against Unger is he filled out a form correctly and they've tried to make an issue of it.
They've done it before because they've got no ideas to run on and no facts to use against him. So they throw mud. They throw mud and it splashes on Capito. With friends like them, Capito doesn't need any enemies.
I attended a recent Chamber of Commerce meeting in a Maryland county, one of the most economically successful counties in the entire nation. I was there on a business trip and to make contacts -- typical work-related networking.
As also typical at these events, the business folks got talking about economic development issues and the expense of doing business in their county and how that has created more traffic and higher office space rents and construction costs.
That led them to West Virginia.
They talked about how so many businesses are moving further out from suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia to West Virginia.
In their view, West Virginia has become an economic development competitor.
I sat back and smiled. I didn't mention I was from West Virginia. I liked hearing their unfettered discussion of how they view West Virginia from a business standpoint.
They talked about the lower cost of doing business in West Virginia. They talked about the fact it is less crowded. They talked about how West Virginia's government is business "friendly."
This was a smart, successful crowd in a smart, successful county. They once viewed Northern Virginia as their biggest competion in attracting new businesses to the region.
Now their fear is losing businesses to West Virginia.
The rightwingers in West Virginia – the professor using false data already debunked, the ladies gym franchise owner who constantly breaks his vows and can't tell the truth, the rightwing ideologues eager to turn the state into the same "free market utopia" they created in Iraq — constantly bad mouth West Virginia. They tell us that the state is unfriendly to businesses, it's too costly for businesses to locate here because of the taxes, it's too friendly to labor.
Yet listening to the business people at the Chamber of Commerce meeting in Maryland, not one of them mentioned West Virginia's taxes, it's labor unions, it's judicial system. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Zip.
They see West Virginia as competition for them in economic development. They bemoaned the businesses that have moved there that they would have liked to have kept in their county. They worry more people will discover the good aspects of doing business in West Virginia.
Why is it business people in a neighboring state who compete as economic development rivals speak so highly of West Virginia's good qualities and business policies while West Virginia's rightwingers speak so negatively about the state?
Is the state perfect? Of course not. But the rightwing critics don't want to be participants in making the state better. They want to break the current system, pointing to examples overseas such as Ireland as role models while ignoring that while Ireland cut corporate taxes, Ireland also received government funding from the European Union to invest in education and infrastructure improvements. Conservatives love to ignore that aspect of Ireland's growth, but the boon in Ireland's high tech sector is attributed to the government spending more money on education so that the labor force would have the skills to do the work. The rightwingers also ignore the fact that Ireland's policy of low taxes, low services for decades led to Ireland's poor economic standing in the first place.
West Virginia, however, is already attracting businesses and seen an increase in economic growth, according to a nonpartisan business study (see links above) and the state. So why do the rightwingers bash West Virginia as a place to do business?
Several reasons: they're habitual liars; they've got nothing to run with against Gov. Joe Manchin; they're parochial and don't know that other surrounding states see West Virginia as an economic competitor; they're stuck in a mindset that only Republicans are good for the economy even when evidence points to the contrary; they're incapable of doing more than parrotting rightwing talking points sent from the Heritage Foundation and Grover Norquidst.
But while the rightwingers tie themselves up speaking ill of the state to make it seem unattractive, the rest of us are busy telling folks how much we love West Virginia and that it is open for business.
Meanwhile, the party is still struggling to get rid of debt left over from 2004 and to get the rank and file excited about its presidential preference convention on Feb. 5, a date labeled as “Super-Duper Tuesday” because of all the states holding primary elections that day.
The state party is bringing in enough money to pay daily bills and keep the machinery operating, but many of those who have donated in the past “don’t trust the party anymore,” McKinney said.
Instead, they are still angry that 2004 party Chairman Kris Warner spent party funds to help the unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign of his brother Monty.
“Kris ordered stuff for Monty and billed it to the party,” McKinney said.
In addition, only 20 of the 55 county GOP organizations gave money to the state party last year, he said. “All some of them have done is have a Lincoln Day dinner and get their poll workers,” he lamented.
Republicans like to talk about personal accountability, but they never hold themselves accountable when they screw up. The West Virginia Republicans made Kris Warner their chairman and Monty Warner their gubernatorial nominee. McKinney sounds as if the Warners were appointed in a vacuum. They were not. The GOP party leaders played a hand in naming Kris Warner chairman and Monty Warner their party's gubernatorial nominee.
Why should the rank and file of the GOP trust the party's leaders? They haven't exactly done anything to earn their trust.
Meanwhile, the West Virginia Republicans are going to have to make a decision. Either offer up Capito as a sacrificial challenger to Senator Jay Rockefeller so that it appears they have a legitimate candidate (unlike what's his name? against Senator Byrd in '06) or else they're going to have to run yet another no-name against him, which will free up Democratic campaign contributions for other races. Hoppy Kercheval is reporting that Secretary of State Betty Ireland, the only Republican holding a statewide office that has any name recognition, apparently is going to not seek reelection for her post to run for state senator. So Capito either has to challenge Rockefeller for the Senate like her Republican handlers want her to do or she'll have to run an increasingly uphill re-election bid against Unger or Barth.
Of course, Capito saw she had no chance to defeat Rockefeller. She's vulnerable in her own re-election bid.
State Republicans don’t plan to give away the Secretary of State’s Office in 2008, despite incumbent Betty Ireland’s announcement Wednesday that she would not be a candidate.
“When you lose somebody known statewide like Betty, it hurts,” Dr. Doug McKinney, state GOP chairman, conceded Thursday.
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Facing a Democratic ticket led by U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Gov. Joe Manchin will be a challenge for the GOP, McKinney admits. Candidates for those two posts haven’t been knocking down his door, he aid.
John Raese, the Morgantown multimillionaire businessman who lost in 2006 to Democratic U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, has done extensive polling throughout the state, a statewide radio show operated by his business said earlier this week. The show released only portions of the poll dealing with presidential preferences and showed Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., leading in the state.
Raese has been mentioned as an opponent to Rockefeller, who defeated him in a close 1984 race. The MetroNews statewide radio show did not release any information about another potential Raese-Rockefeller race, though McKinney said he’s been told the results were not good.
“I haven’t seen the poll,” he said. “I understand it was not very favorable [between Rockefeller and Raese].”
I've got an idea I've been working on for some time to help out the West Virginia GOP.
The rightwingers in the state have been doing such a great job at making Capito look bad -- not that she needs their help in doing that -- that I feel I owe them one. So I have the perfect candidate for them to run against Gov. Joe Manchin. I'll announce it soon.
(Welcome Republican Gazette readers! We hope you'll stick around and learn from our Reality-Based community. - promoted by Clem Guttata)
I read the latest drivel from rightwing "strategist" and former West Virginia Republican Party executive director Gary Abernathy and had the usual reaction: "That's it? That's all you've got?"
In taking aim at State Sen. John Unger, however, Abernathy inadvertantly shot Unger's opponent, vulnerable Rep. Shelley Moore Capito in the foot.
Unger's WEPM radio cohost, news director Chris Strovel, took a job as a field staffer for Capito. Now I'm about as partisan as you can get and no fan of Capito's, but my initial reaction was I was glad Strovel finally got a job that would pay him money. After carrying water for conservatives for years, it was about time he got some pay back for his efforts.
My second thought was how weird the Martinsburg Journal was for not mentioning Unger in their story on Strovel.
But Abernathy, political "strategist" that he is, tries to make it about Unger.
Probably no one knows John Unger better than Chris Strovel, and the fact that Strovel is taking a job with the person Unger wants to topple should tell us all we need to know about Unger and the feelings of the people who know him best.
That's it? That's all he's got?
As a regular listener of Panhandle Live, I know that Strovel and Unger have commented on their friendship and respect for each other many times over the years.
Now Abernathy can either call Strovel a liar or he can admit he is desperately throwing any kind of mud, including made-up mud, to find something to stick to Unger.
Considering how often Abernathy has made up shit about Unger, it's pretty safe to say Strovel is not a liar.
But what is interesting is how Abernathy's post also reveals about his "skill" as a political "strategist."
I'm an amateur blogger. I saw how he shot Capito in the foot immediately. Professional Republicans are probably screaming, "Abernathy, you f'n idiot! Capito doesn't need friends like you!"
You see, in his poor effort at reading the tea leaves, Abernathy highlights a story that:
1. Shows a veteran staffer of Capito's left her before an election where many consider her vulnerable. In other words the rats are leaving her sinking ship.
2. We can read Strovel's words for ourselves and not only does he not say anything negative about Unger, he also does not say anything positive about his new boss Capito.
Now I'm not dumb like Abernathy, so I won't read anything into that and unlike Abernathy I'll let Strovel speak for himself.
But if Abernathy wants to continue to make things up, I'll be happy to report soon on what I "dug" up on him. It's despicable behavior even for a Republican and it is something he has never denied doing.
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