30,563 Total number of votes Christine O’Donnell received to win the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Delaware, according to the state’s official tally. Her opponent, liberal GOP Rep. Mike Castle, received 27,021 votes — or did they? Election fraud expert Brad Friedman at The BRAD BLOG is not buying it.
As we noted earlier, the announcement by the nonpartisan ethics group CREW that it will file a complaint on Monday charging Delaware’s GOP-Tea Party Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell with misappropriating campaign donations apparently struck a nerve. O’Donnell reneged on two invitations to appear on Sunday political shows, including — and this is telling — the GOP-friendly show on the Fox.
O’Donnell’s alleged financial corruption may be news to the rest of the country, but on Election Day, the Delaware Republican Party, no less, released an anti-O’Donnell robocall in which Kristin Murray, O’Donnell’s former campaign manager accused O’Donnell of using campaign donations to pay personal expenses and of incompetent financial management that left bills unpaid and the campaign thousands of dollars in debt.
Transcript:
KRISTIN MURRAY: This is Kristin Murray. In 2008, I was the campaign manager for Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell. I got into politics because I believe in conservative values and wanted to make a difference. But I was shocked to learn that O’Donnell is no conservative.
You see, this is her third Senate race in five years. As O’Donnell’s manager, I found out she was living on campaign donations — using them for rent and personal expenses, while leaving her workers unpaid and piling up thousands in debt.
She wasn’t concerned about conservative causes. O’Donnell just wanted to make a buck. That’s why I left and why I won’t trust O’Donnell with my hard-earned tax dollars.
This ad has been paid for by the Delaware Republican party, www.delawaregop.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
As Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said in a release last week, “Ms. O’Donnell has had no discernible job for several years, and instead has lived the life of a professional candidate, using the generosity of her campaign donors for her support … That may just be freeloading to most people, but it’s embezzlement for a federal candidate.”
In the robocall, Murray suggests that O’Donnell’s financial shenanigans somehow make her “no conservative.” This is laughable, of course. Based on the right wing’s abysmal track record in managing the economy, O’Donnell’s financial incompetence and malfeasance make her a textbook conservative.
O’Donnell became the right wing’s latest overnight celebrity when she defeated Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware’s Republican primary on Sept. 14. She promotes herself as a Christian whose morality forbids her from lying. “A lie, whether it be a lie or an exaggeration, is disrespect to whoever you’re exaggerating or lying to, because it’s not respecting reality,” she said in a televised exchange years ago. When asked if her adherence to the truth would have prevented her from lying to protect Jewish families who were hiding from Nazis during World War II, she demurred. “You never have to practice deception,” she said. “God always provides a way out.” (In other words, “no.”)
The funds in question were donated to her two previous Senate campaigns, first in 2006, when she came in third out of three in the Republican primary, and then in 2008, when she won the GOP nomination but was soundly defeated by Sen. Joe Biden in the general election.
On AC360 Friday night, CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan told Anderson Cooper that witnesses had come forward who had firsthand knowledge that O’Donnell had illegally put donated funds to personal use in 2009 and early 2010 when she was not an active candidate for any office:
CNN:
A watchdog group says it plans to ask authorities in Delaware to investigate Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell’s finances.
At issue are more than $20,000 of spending in 2009 and 2010 that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington claims was illegal.
“It turns out Miss O’Donnell has treated her campaign funds like they are her very own personal piggy bank. She’s used that money to pay for things like her rent, for gas, meals and even a bowling outing. And that’s just flat-out illegal,” said Melanie Sloan, the group’s executive director.
In an interview on CNN’s “AC360,” Sloan said her organization would be sending letters to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware and the Federal Elections Commission on Monday asking them to investigate.
“For example, in 2009, Miss O’Donnell wasn’t a candidate for anything, yet she had numerous campaign expenses, things like travel and gas, and yet she had no actual campaign,” Sloan said.
Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer released a blistering new ad Wednesday that accused rival Carly Fiorina of enriching herself as the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard while presiding over thousands of layoffs and the relocation of American jobs overseas.
The 30-second ad, airing on broadcast and cable channels in California’s four largest media markets, hews to the central theme that Boxer has tried to drive on the campaign trail: that Republican nominee Fiorina was an unfeeling CEO who valued personal ambition over the jobs of average workers.
“Fiorina shipped jobs to China and while Californians lost their jobs, Fiorina tripled her salary and bought a million-dollar yacht,” the narrator says. “Carly Fiorina. Outsourcing jobs. Out for herself.”
In spite of the media’s set-in-stone narrative about the 2010 midterms that Republicans are ascendant, a new CBS poll finds that just 20 percent of voters approve of the job Republicans in Congress are doing, while over two-thirds — 68 percent — disapprove.
Conversely, approval of the Democrats’ performance in Congress is at 30 percent, with 58 percent disapproving.
The poll found a statistically even split in the generic House race question, with 40 percent saying they would vote for the generic Republican and 38 percent saying they’d vote for the Democrat.
Pundits have also been flogging away at the enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats — but if you factor in those who say they are “more enthusiastic” with those who say they are equally as enthusiastic now as they were in 2008, the gap narrows to 6 points.
Last week, when Democrat Jerry Brown demanded that Meg Whitman, his Republican opponent in the California governor’s race, pull an ad that was based on a lie about his tax record, her campaign spokesman scoffed at the idea, saying, “That’s ridiculous.”
His reaction is telling in light of the fact that a representative from the California Department of Finance had confirmed to reporters that, based on nonpartisan analysis, the Whitman was indeed a lie:
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
