This is a special week for our campaign. First, this week we will be appearing at a voter forum in St. Robert. This forum will be the first and perhaps only opportunity for voters to see Congressman Skelton and me on the same stage. This forum will not be a full question and answer forum as we requested from the congressman, and as the voters deserve, but we have agreed to meet anyway. The forum will be held on October 12 at the St. Robert Community Center starting at 6:30 pm.
We are also holding a second public forum this week, in El Dorado Springs this Friday Oct. 15. We have invited Mr. Skelton as well. I encourage all Springfield area voters to come out, get some answers, and see the energy and excitement that is building around our race.
And finally, this Wednesday is my birthday. In honor of the occasion, we are holding a moneybomb fundraiser all week! If you support our campaign but haven’t yet found a way to express that support, please consider sending $20.10 for victory in 2010.
This congressional race is VERY winnable. Mr. Skelton has held this seat for 34 years and all the polls show us at a virtual tie. Ike Skelton has an incredible amount of campaign money at his disposal and he has used it to run constant television ads that lie about me and my record. We need to be able to get the truth out in every way possible. Could you spare just $20.10 to help us make our conservative case to the 4th District and the nation?
As a treat for the moneybomb, we will count down the days for you this week with the Top Five Reasons to Spike Ike this November:
Skelton has been smearing Hartzler’s voting record on military issues for months. She’s taken great pains to correct the misinformation on her Facebook page. Now, the campaign has an ad out to address the issue:
As the protesters were peacefully assembling, the Congressional Black Caucus decided it would be a good idea to take a “historic” walk through the crowd, aware of course, that the people they would be brushing up against, were adamantly against what they were about to do in Congress. What ensued was largely uneventful based on all of the evidence. The Congressmen worked their way through the crowd,(with one of their own members videotaping the scene with his cellphone) and they endured what should have been expected under the circumstances: protesters lustily booing and hollering, “kill the bill!” Cleaver, walking directly in front of a guy yelling, “kill the bill” through cupped hands, by all appearances, received some spittle spray on his cheek, which to any fair minded person watching the video, was obviously unintentional.
But that’s not what he reported to left wing news outlets immediately after their walk. Cleaver, for reasons known only to himself, decided to turn the minor invent into a grotesque racial incident.
His office released the following melodramatic statement, which wasposted at Huffpo at 6:55 PM ET on March 20:
For many of the members of the CBC, like John Lewis and Emanuel Cleaver who worked in the civil rights movement, and for Mr. Frank who has struggled in the cause of equality, this is not the first time they have been spit on during turbulent times. This afternoon, the Congressman was walking into the Capitol to vote, when one protester spat on him. The Congressman would like to thank the US Capitol Police officer who quickly escorted the others Members and him into the Capitol, and defused the tense situation with professionalism and care. After all the Members were safe, a full report was taken and the matter was handled by the US Capitol Police. The man who spat on the Congressman was arrested, but the Congressman has chosen not to press charges. He has left the matter with the Capitol Police.
This is not the first time the Congressman has been called the “n” word and certainly not the worst assault he has endured in his years fighting for equal rights for all Americans. That being said, he is disappointed that in the 21st century our national discourse has devolved to the point of name calling and spitting. He looks forward to taking a historic vote on health care reform legislation tomorrow, for the residents of the Fifth District of Missouri and for all Americans. He believes deeply that tomorrow’s vote is, in fact, a vote for equality and to secure health care as a right for all. Our nation has a history of struggling each time we expand rights. Today’s protests are no different, but the Congressman believes this is worth fighting for.
Cleaver told me: “I said to this one person, ‘You spat on me.’ I thought he was going to say, ‘Hey, I was yelling. Sorry.’ But he continuing yelling and, for a few seconds, I pointed at him and said, ‘You spat on me.’ ”
How about pointing and declaring: “Spit in my face, fist in yours”? But that’s just me.
Jack Cashill, researched the Capital steps tea party controversy of March 20, and came to this conclusion: The William Douglas story in the liberal McClatchy Newspapers, which broke the alleged racial incidents “seems to meet the standards for libel. It is provably false, preposterously reckless, quite possibly malicious, and has caused real damage to publicly identified Tea Party leaders”.
Here is what happened. Rather than use the tunnel from the Cannon Office Building to the Capitol, a contingent from the Black Caucus chose to walk through a crowd of protesters. In none of the videos shot that day, including those by the members of the Caucus themselves, has anyone identified a single audible racial slur.
What the videos show are protesters booing the black congressmen as lustily as they did their white counterparts. The one thing they do scream is the racially neutral “Kill the bill.” The caucus members pass without incident until they reach the Capitol steps. There, an inattentive Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), flanked by a police officer, walks right in front of a man who has been screaming “kill the bill” through cupped hands for at least the last ten seconds.
Cleaver appears to get caught in the vocal spray. Once the videos emerged, Cleaver would tell the Washington Post that the man “allowed saliva to hit my face.” In the immediate aftermath of the incident, however, a visibly angry Cleaver — he poked his finger in the man’s face after being sprayed — spread a much darker story. As Douglas reported in his 4:21 posting, Cleaver’s office claimed in a statement “that [Cleaver] had also been spat upon and that Capitol Police had arrested his assailant.” The Cleaver statement continued, “The man who spat on the congressman was arrested, but the congressman has chosen not to press charges.”
Yael T. Abouhalkah, the editorial page columnist in Cleaver’s hometown Kansas City Star, a McClatchy paper, captured the party line nicely with the claim that “some Tea Party supporter spat on Cleaver Saturday on Capitol Hill because the U.S. congressman is black.” The video evidence belies all this nonsense.
About a minute after the incident, Cleaver returns to the scene of the crime with a Capitol Police officer. The “assailant” is still standing there shouting, unaware that he has committed anything like a crime. Heck, until a year or so ago, he had been led to believe that dissent was patriotic, not racist. More embarrassingly, Cleaver fails to recognize the man even though he is standing right in front of him, and the man is making no effort to hide. There is no arrest, no detention as Cleaver’s office would later claim, no noble decision to not press charges.
See the above press release.
“There were no elements of a crime, and the individual wasn’t able to be positively identified,” a spokeswoman for the Capitol Police would tell FoxNews.com. “[Cleaver] was unable to positively identify.” More troubling, in Douglas’s report, it was only Cleaver who was said to hear the word “nigger.” Even in the later posting, “Tea party protesters call Georgia’s John Lewis ‘nigger,’” Lewis himself does not make this claim.
“They were shouting, sort of harassing,” Lewis told Douglas. What they shouted, Douglas reports, is “kill the bill, kill the bill.” House majority whip James CIyburn, who walked with the contingent, heard no racist remarks, either. “I experienced some of [the anger],” Clyburn told Keith Olbermann on March 22. “I didn`t hear the slurs.“Douglas cites only Cleaver as the person who “distinctly heard ‘nigger.’” It is Douglas himself who inflates that one one word into multiple “protestors” who “scream” it at Lewis. There is no story without that word, and given the lack of video evidence and Cleaver’s willingness to dissemble on the alleged arrest, there is no reason to believe him.
Here is a video, created by Cashill, that lays out how it all went down:
In an interview about a week later with Fox 4 in Kansas City, Cleaver denied ever saying anything about the incident:
” I never reported anything…I never reported anything in Washington – not a single thing….”
“I’ve never done an interview on it…”
“…I didn’t plan to have it known by anybody…”
He told Fox 4 that had the incident not been caught on tape, no one would have even known it had happened, because he wouldn’t have made it an issue.
Riiiiiiight.
On March 20, not long after the minor incident occurred, someone from Cleaver’s office released a completely bogus statement about what had happened to the left wing media. That is called a report. Then he talked to WaPo’s Courtland (fist in your face) Milloy, that’s called an interview.
That is not what someone does who wants to “defuse” a situation. Cleaver is lying.
What Emanuel Cleaver and the CBC attempted to do to the tea party on March 20, was beneath contempt.
L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Media Research Center (MRC), the parent organization of CNSNews.com, said the goal of this 2010 “Tell the Truth!” campaign “is simple: to force the liberals in the media to stop pushing an agenda and just tell the truth.”The “liberal media news networks” need to report the facts about “massive growth in government and its control over our lives, and about spending, deficits and debt,” he told CNSNews.com. “They also need to tell the truth about the efforts to turn our country into a European-style Socialist state.”
They’ve created a series of short ads to get their point across.
Tell the truth about the Ground Zero mosque:
Tell the truth about ObamaCare:
Tell the truth about Arizona’s Immigration law:
The MSM may be a lost cause, but I applaud Bozell for trying. You can support the MRC’s effort by signing their petition, here.
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Nice Deb 