Progress Illinois

We know GOP Rep. Mark Kirk doesn't have much sympathy for the unemployed. But now he's trying to count Democratic opponent Dan Seals as a member of that population. From a Roll Call article published Monday:

“After losing his bid for Congress, Seals did not return to GE Finance and was unemployed,” according to a Kirk campaign memo out last week. “Near the end of the 2006 campaign, Seals paid himself $25,000 out of his campaign donor funds — an act that is legal but strongly discouraging to donors ... in May, Seals filed his 2008 financial disclosure with the U.S. House showing only $3,300 in earned income through the first quarter of the year.”

It's an odd criticism, especially considering that most candidates for Congress take leaves of absence from work to focus on hotly-contested campaigns. Archpundit agrees:

One of the most bizarre argument by the Frank Burns of the Blogosphere and Kirk is that a candidate should be employed full time while running -- which is convenient if you are an incumbent who is paid by the constituents, can mail to constituents with franking, can use your position to get your name out there, and generally have every advantage of incumbency.

But leave it to Kirk to mislead constituents. As the Seals campaign points out in the Roll Call piece, the suggestion that Seals is unemployed isn't even true:

“Mark Kirk entirely overlooks the fact that Dan Seals has worked as a business consultant and lecturer at Northwestern since 2006 and that Seals’ wife serves in a senior level corporate position,” the Seals campaign memo states. “So the question is, what does Mark Kirk find so objectionable that the Seals family, like many families in the 10th district have two working parents?”

Not convinced? Rob at Illinois Reason reminds us that we can look to the local conservative blogosphere for more proof.

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Talking Points Memo's top story at the moment is Rep. Mark Kirk's retraction of his false claim -- originally caught by Progress Illinois -- that China is drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Check it out:

After circling its way through the national media, our post nabbing Rep. Mark Kirk for his repetition of the debunked China drilling myth finally hit home. Today, the Tribune's Eric Zorn covered the story on his blog. Moreover, he got a statement from Kirk's office acknowledged that the claim made by the North Shore Republican on WLS Radio was false:

Monday, Kirk’s spokesman Eric Elk acknowledged the bloggers were right: “While the Cubans may have issued offshore drilling rights, Congressman Kirk has publicly agreed that the Chinese are not currently drilling for oil near Florida," he said.

UPDATE: Turns out it wasn't just a Zorn blog post -- he included the Kirk drilling story in his column in today's print edition.

During his June 18 appearance on WLS' morning radio show, we caught GOP Rep. Mark Kirk repeating a debunked claim about the Chinese drilling for oil in Cuban waters. Later that day, we published the audio to the blog, along with evidence that Kirk's assertion was false.

On June 30, TPM Election Central picked up on our original post and added Kirk to their growing list of Republican members of Congress who have persisted in advancing this falsehood despite the fact that Vice President Dick Cheney -- who was one of the first to make the claim -- retracted it on June 13.

Then today, the Washington Post's Capitol Briefing blog reported on the story, noting that Kirk was among the five federal lawmakers who have persisted in spreading this assertion long after it was debunked. The Post also pointed out that Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) -- one of the five -- ended up the subject of a Kansas City Star editorial as a result.

If only one of our local papers would do the same ...

Congressional candidate Dan Seals has a new web ad up, which incorporates our clip of Rep. Mark Kirk repeating the debunked claim that China is drilling for oil off American shores. Take a look:

Last week, we debunked Rep. Mark Kirk's bogus argument for why he opposed the federal unemployment insurance benefit extension: that it would lead people to cash in after two weeks of work. Take a listen as he tells a Chicago radio audience: "I think that in this tough economic time. A temporary extension for people that held the job for a long time, that makes sense. But two weeks, that's probably not enough":

Internal mp3

Of course, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out: "Only in rare circumstances could a worker with such a limited work record meet his or her state’s regular UI requirements, which target assistance on workers with a demonstrated attachment to the labor force." They added: "the share of the additional benefits under the bill that would go to workers with very limited work records is almost surely miniscule."

But while Kirk is manufacturing excuses for his vote against this common sense legislation, unemployed workers are hurting. Check out some of the comments that appeared below our original post on this subject:

my husband ran out of benefits and can't find a job. we filed bankruptcy and lost our home. i'm on food stamps for the first time in my life but the problem is we'll no place to live to use them.

I have over 20 years of experience and can't even find a min. wage job!! Now that's bad! I guess we are supposed to support our goverment but they won't support us!!

Laid off for a year now after working for the same company for 17 years. ... I have been actively searching for a job, even applying out side the box jobs, the few that have contacted me, either have said I was over qualified or the position has been filled. The majority do not even respond, even after a follow-up. ... Savings account is long gone. I'm tapping into my retirement funds just to keep the house payments going.

Oh, and did we mention that the unemployment rate jumped almost a full percentage point in the past month?

During an appearance on WLS' Don Wade & Roma last Wednesday, Rep. Mark Kirk asserted that China has been drilling for oil just off American shores -- in the Cuban-controlled section of the Gulf of Mexico. But as we noted, that claim is blatantly false. In fact, it had been earlier used by Vice President Dick Cheney, who then had to retract his statement. Apparently that wasn't enough to keep Kirk from peddling it days later. Have a listen:

Internal mp3

Yesterday, Ellen of the Tenth live-blogged a teleconference Kirk held with constituents and, lo and behold, the GOP congressman apparently repeated the China drilling claim. From her post on the call:

More on gas prices. Open up areas off Am shorelines to oil drilling? (That question is misleading--see why by looking at my recent post on why that is not the real question -- and he's making reference to the already proven false comment about China drilling offshore Cuba again--unbelievable).

Unfortunately, there's no audio of the call, so we can't check Kirk's exact language.

Today, the Seals campaign put out a statement calling on Kirk to retract his assertion about Chinese drilling in the gulf. From their press release:

"For weeks, Mark Kirk has engaged in tired scare tactics to justify his support for environmentally destructive drilling," Seals Communications Director Elisabeth Smith said. "Once again, he has shown how far he is willing to go to enrich the big oil companies that have funded his campaigns. Mark Kirk owes it to his constituents to apologize for these grossly misleading comments after even Dick Cheney acknowledged this information to be false."

It should be noted that Kirk isn't the only GOP member of Congress repeating this garbage to his constituents. Reps. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) and Sam Graves (R-MO) have also been caught repeating the claim, despite Cheney's retraction.

Conservative bloggers, various GOP members of the Illinois congressional delegation, President Bush, and John McCain have all called for more oil drilling to lower gas prices in the short-term. We did our best to beat back this shaky contention, but alas, we're only bloggers. There has to be some expert out there who can prove us wrong, right?

Not quite. According to The Huffington Post's Sam Stein, it was impossible to find any economist -- from the left or right -- willing to back the proposition that offshore drilling could have a short-term impact on the market dynamics:

The Huffington Post took on the task of finding an expert who thought that Americans would, within the next decade, receive relief at the pump from McCain's plan. Querying the entire scope of the ideological spectrum -- and putting aside the debate over whether or not offshore drilling was sensible policy -- the consensus seemed to be that if the presumptive GOP nominee was persuading voters that he could help decrease their gas bill, he was either living in a political fantasy or being disingenuous.

Maybe Rep. Mark Kirk read Stein's piece. After calling for more drilling off the coast of Cuba, he and Rep. Judy Biggert released an energy proposal yesterday that doesn't include a single mention of additional drilling.

(h/t David Roberts)

Although the Prairie State has survived the severe economic downturns faced by other states in the region, the local economic landscape isn't too pretty these days. The Illinois Department of Employment Security reports the state's May jobless rate was 6.4 percent, up one full percentage point from last month and 1.5 percent from this time last year. Illinois sits well above the national unemployment rate of 5.5 percent as well.

Employment agency director James Sledge told the AP that this uptick further proves the need for Gov. Blagojevich's capital improvements plan. I'd say it also proves the need for more robust unemployment insurance, something Rep. Mark Kirk and his Republican cohorts in the Illinois Congressional delegation aren't too interested in providing.

Rep. Mark Kirk covered a lot of ground on WLS' Don Wade and Roma yesterday. In our rush to knock down his false claim on Chinese oil drilling and his major Obama-Osama gaffe, we forgot to highlight his objection to the recent Supreme Court ruling reinstating Habeas Corpus rights to Guantanamo Bay detainees, a decision Barack Obama supports.

Listen to Kirk assert that if we were to give Osama bin Laden the right to challenge his detention, "You could have a scene like Johnnie Cochran saying, 'If the headdress doesn't fit, you must acquit!' ":

Internal mp3

Kirk's silly analogy is based on the assumption that any legal standard extending habeas rights to bin Laden (or anyone else for that matter) necessarily means the statute is immoral and worthless. Tell that to the Founding Fathers, who inserted it in our Constitution as a basic human right, even before the Bill of Rights was enacted. From the Supreme Court decision (pdf):

"The Framers viewed freedom from unlawful restraint as a fundamental precept of liberty, and they understood the writ of habeas corpus as a vital instrument to secure that freedom."

Just because the man is one of the worst on the planet doesn't mean we shouldn't uphold our oldest and most foundational laws. As Anonymous Liberal writes, "The whole point of due process is to determine whether someone is guilty. It’s the punishment that is supposed to vary depending on the seriousness of the crime, not the process."

And frankly, what is Kirk so afraid of? It's implausible to imagine any jury hearing the challenge of bin Laden and then overturning his detention. The Nation's Chris Hayes clearly articulated this on MSNBC's Countdown last night:

HAYES: I don't actually understand what Giuliani and McCain and Bush and conservatives are so scared of. I mean, let's imagine we got Osama bin Laden in custody and he challenged his detention before a court of law. Do we really think that there's any court that would look at the evidence and say, "Okay, you're free to go, Mr. Bin Laden"? Of course not.

The whole idea of Habeas Corpus is to allow people who have been wrongly imprisoned to bring their case before a court -- an impartial fact-finder. And we know there are people in Guantanamo who probably are there for the wrong reasons and it would mean they could go home to their families.

But in the case of Osama bin Laden it's just ludicrous to imagine that Habeas Corpus would lead to him being released.

Ludicrous, indeed.

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