Progress Illinois

U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) swung into Chicago this morning to join Democratic Senate hopeful Alexi Giannoulias in blasting U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk's flip-flop on climate change legislation. Kirk famously voted in favor of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in the summer of 2009, felt pushback from the GOP base, and then assured Republican voters by that fall he would not support a similar bill in the upper chamber. Here's Kerry talking about the (stalled) Senate climate change and energy bill he drafted with Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), followed by comments from Giannoulias:

Since abandoning cap-and-trade, Kirk has gained financial support from the coal industry and libertarian ideologues at Koch Industries. We should know by November 3 whether it costs him votes outside of his core Republican backers. By bringing Kirk's shift on climate legislation up today, ahead of their second debate tonight (scheduled for 7 p.m. on ABC 7), the Giannoulias campaign seems to betting on exactly that.

Last night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann examined Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Mark Kirk's "voter integrity” program. Michael Dorf, General Counsel for the Alexi Giannoulias campaign, told the anchor what steps his office was taking to ensure nobody in the precincts Kirk allegedly wants to target will be scared away from the polls. Watch it:

Perhaps the most interesting tidibt from the spot was the news that Hans von Spakovsky was in Chicago yesterday talking to a local Federalist Society chapter about "steps [that] can be taken to minimize the opportunities to commit fraud and change election outcomes." Von Spakovsky, a member of the Federal Election Commission during the last Bush Administration, was one of Karl Rove's voter suppression gurus, helping to politicize the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. As Talking Points Memo put it, the man worked to "purge voters from the rolls, ensure that voter ID laws were approved with no fuss, and punish lawyers who did not toe the line."

While the Federalist Society is not connected to the Illinois Republican Party in any way, it's certainly conceivable that the folks who attended his lecture might be game to volunteer for poll-watching duties organized by the party.