The full text of the St. Louis American endorsement of Maria Chappelle-Nadal reads as follows:

Maria Chappelle-Nadal has six years of experience in Jefferson City and is a proven, stalwart progressive battler. Her youthful energy also gives her the edge over Joe Adams, the only other candidate in this race who is free of the taint of major funding by Rex Sinquefield. While we have some concern for her, at times, brash behavior and penchant for picking fights she doesn’t need, we feel she has learned some painful lessons in this regard. It is with raised expectations that we endorse MARIA CHAPPELLE-NADAL IN THE 14TH DISTRICT.

It’s amusing that the St. Louis American would qualify their endorsement with a note of concern, because that concern is well-warranted.

I pointed out in my most recent diary, Rep. Chappelle-Nadal completely altered the American’s endorsement to say that she was the only person in the race who had not received contributions from Rex Sinquefield. Even if that were true, that’s not what the newspaper’s endorsement said. The endorsement expressly stated that Joe Adams also has not received contributions from Sinquefield. And Chappelle-Nadal’s claim in the mailer, independent of the fact that she falsely attributed the claim to the St. Louis American, is simply not true as far as I can tell. Sinquefield didn’t contribute to Adams in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, or 2010. So naturally I felt pretty comfortable calling someone who completely misrepresented facts a liar.

Understandably, Maria Chappelle-Nadal was not happy to be called out for lying. I received a number of e-mails from Chappelle-Nadal expressing her disappointment and telling me that I was incorrect, but when I requested evidence to the contrary, she was not forthcoming in specifics. The only thing she was willing to say was that Sinquefield money paid for an Adams mailer back in 2006 (I’m assuming during his last re-election campaign for University City mayor), but when I requested a copy of the mailer in question, or contact info for a person who had a copy, I was told only that she wasn’t going to do my research for me. The last e-mail I got from her stated that a formal announcement from the AFT concerning the mailpiece would be forthcoming, and that I should expect to hear from her attorney.

Back to that St. Louis American endorsement. Can anyone have confidence that Chappelle-Nadal has learned “painful lessons” in regards to her “brash behavior” and “picking needless fights”? The easiest thing for her to do would have been to send me a scan of mailer that allegedly was paid for by Sinquefield along with some evidence that it was indeed paid for with Sinquefield money, or put me in touch with someone who could provide that information, and I would have gladly posted an update.  Instead, I got the threat of legal action.

Now, as a state senator, it’s not enough to be right on the issues. It’s not enough to make a nice red meat progressive speech, as I’ve seen Chappelle-Nadal do on more than one occasion. These are all well and good, but you’ve got to cobble together coalitions with allies who have been with you for a long time as well as allies that might only be with you on that day, or else you’re not going to get much done. This is doubly true in the State Senate, which is much smaller than the General Assembly. Given this personal interaction with Chappelle-Nadal, I have a hard time believing she’s going to be an effective legislator for the citizens in the Missouri’s 14th Senate District.

Last Tuesday (7/27), I posted about Claire McCaskill’s vote against, among other spending, the Pigford II settlement which would have awarded $1.25 billion to black farmers who experienced overt discrimination by USDA. Now, however, it looks likes she may get another chance to do the right thing. The Hill reports that there are plans this Monday to put to a stand-alone vote both the the Pigford II settlement and the Cobell settlement, which seeks to resolve Native Americans’ claims against the federal government for abuse of tribal land trust accounts.

It will be interesting in this case to see how far McCaskill will go to strut her  budget peacock stuff – to apply the Think Progress label for those legislators who prefer to make a show of addressing a long-term deficit problems with ineffectual and potentially harmful short-term cost-cutting fixes – during a major recession yet. Maybe this time, since it involves the government’s obligation to right a patent injustice, she’ll put the Republican party line aside and come through for the progressives in her base who are, to put it mildly, getting pretty disheartened with her performance.

Of course, precisely because these spending bills would involve righting injustices to minorities, they become especially difficult for timid politicians from red to purple states right now when there is a concerted campaign to whip up a spurious sense of white victimhood. If you doubt this, just consider some the comments to the Hill article. For instance:  

More giving away of white peoples money!!! I look at my little 2month old grandaughter and think about the $50,000 in debt this corrupt government has already burdened her with and the total lack of a future for her in the coming third workld [sic] we are becoming.

Or:

We must to stop with the REPARATIONS we have been paying for 50 years. … The DMV clerk looked at me cross eyed am I entitled to 50K? … .

There was a time when folks would have been far more careful about this type of overt racial begrudgery, but encouraged by the Tea Party and coddled by the Republican Party in general, they are now flaunting it. No matter how disappointed I am by McCaskill and her budget posturing, I at least understand that the aura of fiscal prudence that she is trying to suggest, no matter how wrong-headed,  is at least somewhat respectable. I just hope that she has not so totally succumbed to fear of her constituents darker angels that she will let misguided racial fear and resentment influence her as well.

Right wingnut republicans seem to look out for each other all the time, don’t they?

Previously: One right wingnut hand washes the other…

You’ve just got to love the Missouri Ethics Commission during primary season.

CONTRIBUTION OF MORE THAN $5,000.00 RECEIVED BY ANY COMMITTEE FROM ANY SINGLE DONOR – TO BE FILED WITHIN 48 HOURS OF RECEIVING THE CONTRIBUTION

C091153 SCHWEICH FOR AUDITOR [pdf] 7/30/2010

Friends of Peter Kinder

Jefferson City, MO 7/29/2010

$120,000.00

That’s some serious friendship before a primary.

Oh, that Tom Schweich. Rock stars. Go figure.

It’s kind of an unofficial tradition in Eastern Jackson County to dump your heavy ammo on the opposition in the last weekend before the Democratic Primary, and golly, it’s the last Friday and there’s eight Democratic primary mailers in my hands. Nice!

So I found one mailer that stood out, both for being hard-hitting, and for being totally illegal under Missouri campaign finance laws. And another which is making a claim which is likely to be a complete lie. First, the non-legal mailer

{did not catch that they misspelled his last name the first few times I saw that. The hat distracted me – RBH

P.S.: They were too busy flipping the picture to spell Ploeger correctly}

You can find a New York Yankee on the TV screen before you can find a “paid for by” line, which is kinda required. Well, I guess anonymous mailers are a tradition. Good thing we removed campaign donation limits to make sure these mailers disappeared, eh?

Under the fold: the questionable claim which is disputed in the Independence Examiner.

The claim which I put an arrow next to is disputed by the current 51st district incumbent (Ray Salva):

“That was my legislation, and he didn’t help draft it,” Salva said. “I wrote that legislation.”

(..)

Salva served on the Missouri House Judiciary Committee and said he drafted the original Sam and Lindsey’s Law legislation that was placed in an omnibus bill with other legislation. The bill passed the Missouri House but failed on the Missouri Senate floor because of other legislation in the omnibus bill, Salva said.

In a following General Assembly session, state Rep. Jason Kander, D-Kansas City, went on the Judiciary Committee while Salva exited the committee. According to Salva, Kander filed Salva’s legislation as House Bill 2420. A public hearing took place, though it never passed.

“He had nothing to do with it,” Salva said of Ploeger’s involvement. “I didn’t even know this guy. All of his other claims are just as ridiculous.”

Kander could not be reached for comment Thursday. According to the Jackson County Democratic Committee website, one of Kander’s 2010 resolutions in Jefferson City was to strengthen or preserve laws that protect Missourians at home and in court. Kander said he worked with other lawmakers to draft Sam and Lindsey’s Law, according to the website.

“My wording, my everything, 100 percent – I was the one that wrote it,” Ploeger said of how he was “instrumental in writing” House Bill 2420. “I was the voice and the strength in getting it before (Jason Kander) to get it to Jefferson City. It was Tina and I’s idea to put it together. We worked very, very hard to put this together and to strengthen the laws to protect children.”

Update: A longer counter on the whole matter of the second mailer.

“We had a press conference and Jeremy was there,” Kander said. “There was a group of people working on this and Jeremy was part of that group, and contributed to the draft of the original language.”

Slightly less than “My wording, my everything, 100 percent”. But still. Gotta love the primary process (and the complete apathy towards Ray Salva). Also, the current version of the star article seems to suggest that something is stuck in their spacebar.

—

There’s no season like primary season.

Maria, there’s another candidate in your race who is free from the taint of Rex Sinquefield donations, and his name is Joe Adams. He was actually your mayor for several years, if you can recall.

Maria Chappelle-Nadal, outgoing representative of the 72nd House District is running in a 4-way race for state senator of the 14th Senate District. She just sent out mailers to her prospective constituents that mangle a quote from the St. Louis American (and that’s being generous) to claim that Maria is the only candidate who hasn’t received money from Rex Sinquefield. Joe Adams, the former mayor of University City, has not received any contributions from Sinquefield, and the original quote from the American in no way resembles Maria’s claim.

The quote on the front of the mailer says, “I’m proud to be the only candidate in this race that has not been bought by billionaire Rex Sinquefield who is trying to own state government.” The quote on the back appears to directly cite the St. Louis American: “Her youthful energy gives her the edge [and she is] the only candidate in this race who is free from the taint of major funding by Rex Sinquefield.”

In fact, the quote from the American explicitly states that Joe Adams has not taken money from Sinquefield. In other words, Maria’s mailer “quotes” the opposite of what the American said, and one can’t draw any other conclusion than that the quote was deliberately altered. Maria is flat out lying.

It must be nice to have friends in right wingnuttia with money. Via the Missouri Ethics Commission:

CONTRIBUTION OF MORE THAN $5,000.00 RECEIVED BY ANY COMMITTEE FROM ANY SINGLE DONOR – TO BE FILED WITHIN 48 HOURS OF RECEIVING THE CONTRIBUTION

C041029 CITIZENS FOR WILL KRAUS [pdf] 7/29/2010

Citizens for Brad Lager

15891 Hwy 71

Savannah, MO 64485 7/28/2010

$125,000.00

[emphasis added]

CONTRIBUTION OF MORE THAN $5,000.00 RECEIVED BY ANY COMMITTEE FROM ANY SINGLE DONOR – TO BE FILED WITHIN 48 HOURS OF RECEIVING THE CONTRIBUTION

C041029 CITIZENS FOR WILL KRAUS [pdf] 7/29/2010

Jeff Roe

Kansas City, MO

consultant 7/28/2010

$10,000.00

[emphasis added]

The candidates:

State Senate – District 8

Republican

BRYAN PRATT BLUE SPRINGS MO 53 2/23/2010

WILL KRAUS LEES SUMMIT MO 238 2/23/2010

GARY DUSENBERG BLUE SPRINGS MO 340 2/23/2010

Libertarian

KEVIN PARR GRAIN VALLEY MO 3/19/2010

Why is it that Libertarians never seem to get those big campaign contributions? You’s think proponents of the laissez faire, hey big government leave me alone, political philosophy would be raking it in from all those corporate capitalists. You’d think.

Conventional wisdom has it that, given the unbalanced turnout that is expected next Tuesday, the Missouri effort to weaken health care reform, Proposition C, will prevail. A comment on my earlier post about the Missouri Hospital Association’s anti-Proposition C campaign noted that when it passes it “will not be pretty …, especially on Fox and hate radio.” Well, I’m here to tell you that the triumphalism has already gotten bizarre.

The St. Louis Beacon reports that State Senator Jane Cunningham believes that Proposition C is divinely ordained since its assured passage just goes to show that God “interferes in the affairs of men.” According to Cunningham, God doesn’t want all Missourians to have equal access to health care.

What I want Cunningham to ask God next time she and he get together for coffee is why he’s so worried about requiring individuals to take responsibility for their health care? She and the people she represents affirmed, after all, that they want a private rather than a public health care delivery system; did they do so only because they thought that they could push the cost of their emergency room visits onto the rest of us, helping to push health costs ever upward, and sending deficits spiraling?

Cunningham seems to imply that God opposes the individual mandate because it limits “personal freedom,” and requires people to spend money. But God doesn’t seem to be at all worried about mandates for the purchase of auto insurance. Nor does he seem to be worried about requirements for building standards, food safety measures, disabled access and a whole slew of “mandates” that have associated costs, but which make our country a decent place to live.

Cunningham and her pals also seem to think that God is all lathered up about “state’s rights” – which leads me to ask why he didn’t intervene more forcefully when that issue was settled at the conclusion of the American Civil War. Somehow, I find it hard to believe that a supposedly all-powerful God really gets too worked up about weak constitutional arguments.

All this leaves me with just one question.  If it isn’t God who’s working to deliver a victory for the Proposition C forces, who could it be?  Could it have anything to do with that force darker forces that manifest as apathy, stupidity and cupidity?  I don’t know about you, but that’s not exactly what I describe as divine intervention.

You can manage to spot a few good ones.

Given the latest news today:

Poor wording in bill helped judge reach decision on SB1070

…The poor phrasing of the central provision in SB 1070 led to it being blocked, according to the injunction issued today by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton….

Lunatic right wingnuttia teabaggery exists everywhere, and they wear it on their…vehicles.

You have just got to love the Gadsen Gadsden rattlesnake superimposed on the Arizona flag with the legend “bite me”. Not really.

Previously: The bumper stickers of July: an appropriate warning label for noxious exhaust fumes

Linda Schuch is a business success story. She is the co-owner of the Island Seafood Market in St. Petersburg, Florida. In the year since its opening, the restaurant has gathered a steady following of locals. While the Market originally opened as a fish market that served the occasional sandwich, its tasty options and devoted ownership have led to a need to expand the restaurant.

Did I say Shuch is a business success story? Make that “was” a business success story. Because the Gulf Oil Spill is ruining her venture. Schuch speaks in the video of how proud she was to make a success of her first year in business but admits ruefully that a five year plan, for someone dependent on fishing in the Gulf, is probably a waste of time. She concedes that she may have to move back to Pennsylvania, where she was raised. Multiply her sad story by hundreds of thousands or millions, then add in the sad stories of dead birds, turtles, and alligators.

As long as I’m altering my wording, make that “Gulf Oil Gusher”, not “Spill.” A spill is something the baby does with his milk. Rick Roberts made that observation when he and Schuch and another Gulf Coast resident, Linda Hawkins, were in St. Louis. The three of them have been visiting various states under the auspices of Repower America, working to convince people that the Gulf Oil Gusher is not a regional problem but a national one and that, above all, we need a comprehensive clean energy plan.

Linda Hawkins, who was raised in the New Orleans Ninth Ward, who lost everything to Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and who saw the destruction of Katrina, spoke about the difference between those natural disasters and this much more destructive man made one. Then she described how Louisiana differs from the other Gulf Coast states. Texas is the only one of the five with a diversified economy. Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi, where most of the population is near the water, are tourist or retirement destinations. But Hawkins said that Louisiana’s beaches are working beaches. Cajun fishermen, whose forbears left Canada in 1755, bring in shrimp, oysters and blue crab. They are closed down now. Fishing and the industries that depend on the offshore oil rigs support the economy. Louisiana, like the tourist states, is reeling. Many people are talking about which spouse will have to leave the Gulf Coast for work in another state and which spouse will stay home with the kids. Suicides are up. Animal shelters are overwhelmed with pets that people can’t afford to feed.

All the recent damage done by BP to Louisiana is on top of damage already done by our need for oil. Hawkins points out that 25 percent of the oil the U.S. imports comes in through canals built in Louisiana–canals that have destroyed coastal wetlands.

Despite the horrors of the Gusher, the three Gulf Coast residents know that most Americans don’t see the problem as anything affecting them. They don’t understand how the ripples from the economic devastation will spread to them, and they don’t see that if the U.S. had focused on clean energy forty years back, we’d have avoided this Gusher–not to mention wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’d have saved the trillions lost to those wars and thus had more money to deal with the recession that the bank profiteers caused.

Hawkins, Schuch, and Roberts have spent time lobbying Congressmen for a comprehensive clean energy plan. I asked them what their sense of the reaction in Congress was. Rick Roberts, a fishing conservation advocate, responded:

“When we were in Washington, it was interesting because the people that we spoke to from Ohio said, ‘Well, you know, it’s the people in Missouri, it’s the people in Nebraska, it’s the people in Michigan, they don’t really see this as being a problem that they have.’ Right. If you can’t make them aware of that, then the solution is not going to happen because those senators will vote for anything other than spending money on our regional problem.

The sense I got of it is that November is rapidly approaching, and the Democrats are running scared. When we were there, I got the impression that that news cycle [talk about the oil spill] was gonna shift out of focus very shortly and that they didn’t want to light on it. So they didn’t want to, like, say ‘Yes, we’re very concerned.’ What they said was ‘we’re doing all we can’–all the time thinking ‘Well, in a couple of days this’ll be over,’ right?

No, it won’t. Not only will the damage to the Gulf continue, not only will those wasteful wars continue, but the planet will keep on heating up. While our senators dither. Paul Krugman’s recent column examines the failure to pass strong climate legislation, blaming it on the campaign by energy companies to derail anything that would interfere with their profits. He sums up with this:

Greed, aided by cowardice, has triumphed. And the whole world will pay the price.

A sign held by a protester outside an Exxon-Mobil shareholders meeting said: “NO PLANET NO DIVIDENDS.”

The oil companies refuse to face that. Their greed focuses their sights on short term profits. Claire doesn’t get it either. Her cowardice makes her focus on saving her butt in 2012. Apparently, whoever told Rick Roberts that the people in Missouri don’t see the Gulf Oil Gusher as their problem has taken a look at Claire McCaskill’s chicken hearted abdication to the forces of greed and ignorance on the paramount issue of our time.