With friends like these, Bush doesn't need any enemies. |
Saw them already. The Swift Boat Vets have WAY BETTER ads!
I'm not too impressed. May backfire with some swing voters.
What about the ChiCom money he took?
Why D.C.?
Willie Horton 527 ad
I don't like the Reissfelder ad.
The hazards are of the statistics and psychology of rare events. Statistically, you are a little better than chance at determining dangerousness unless you have an awesome data base. If you do better than chance at keeping people in who are dangerous, you will also have a similar percentage of people you keep in that don't need to be confined.
The psychological hazard is that even if you have only one serious recidivist in a hundred, that perpetrator will make the newspapers while the 99 successes will not.
Again, someone has to make these judgments. It is not only required but good Christian policy to give people another chance deemed worthy of that chance.
These adds will fuel the hostility to Republicans and Conservatives from both the minority and scientific communities. They should not be run!
This is a George Soros and Harold Ickes website. I think michael moore shot these ads and I believe katie couric served him ice tea and biscuits while he worked in the editing room on these.
Raising money from the Cali drug cartel? That will make for interesting reading!
This is pretty juicy though. Any thing that can bring to mind Dukaka and the evil Sharpton in association with Kerry can't be bad.
Note: Sharpton claims to be a man of God-I can assure you that its not my God.
With friends like these, Bush doesn't need any enemies. |
I'd prefer we take the high road. These 527's are going to get WAY out of hand, IMO.
Sorry, but these ads are off target against central themes of Kerry's campaign, confusing, and reinforce unflattering stereotypes of conservatives. They won't get any moral or financial support from me. I don't support running them in any state.
We've discussed these ads several times before. They are terrible ads that could only help Kerry.
However, these ads are great. http://www.pfavoterfund.com
Over the last few days, several leading news organizations have run stories about the creation of a new 527 'advocacy' group called MoveOnForAmerica.org. Not to be confused with the anti-Bush MoveOn.org, this new group headed by GOP consultant Stephen Marks hopes to pull a "Willie (sic) Horton"-style attack on John Kerry with two TV ads -- one linking Kerry to the parole of an escaped-on-furlough convicted cop shooter (somebody else made a deathbed confession) and one chronicling the most nefarious side of Kerry supporter Al Sharpton.
The story was run by the Associated Press, and versions of it were carried in the New York Daily News. USA Today, the Charlotte Observer, the Kansas City Star, and even India's Hindistan Times. Marks claims 522,636 Internet hits over Labor Day weekend.
He also made some interesting claims about his resume. The one that caught the eye of Campaign Extra! was that he'd been an "investigative reporter" for New York Newsday. We worked at Newsday during all of the New York edition's 10-year run, and were in the NY newsroom for five of them. The name of Stephen Marks didn't ring any bells. It also didn't get any valid hits on a Nexis search of the Newsday data base.
Marks claims "he has also been a press secretary in GOP campaigns (including Jeb Bush's bid for governor in 1994)." But if he was a press spokesman, he must have been a very soft-spoken one, because again there were no Nexis hits for Marks and the Jeb Bush campaign. So then Campaign Extra! tracked down the man who really was Jeb Bush's 1994 press secretary, Florida political consultant Cory Tilley. Here's some of what he told us in an email:
"I have to admit -- it has been 10 years so I guess I could have met Mr. Marks --- but I honestly have no memory of him at all -- and as far as I know he did not work on Governor Bush's 1994 campaign. I was his Press Secretary -- and since we had an unusually small staff -- the only spokesperson." Tilley went on to say it's possible that Marks could have been a county-level spokesman, saying "I am searching for some explanation."
So are we. We also noticed some things that Marks -- who attempted a similar TV-ad ploy against Al Gore in 2000 -- left off his resume. That includes his work in 1996 for Pat Buchanan and also a pre-war 2003 Web site called www.downwiththedixiechicks.com (Google cache) peddling a song entitled, "You Don't Speak for Dixie."
Campaign Extra! tried most of the day to get ahold of Stephen Marks. He didn't return several messages left on the machine at the MoveOnForAmerica.org office near D.C., and he hasn't yet responded to an email. If and when he does, we'll update the item. It's not certain whether his Horton-esque commericials will ever air. It's not even clear if he's raised any money, although his Web page promises that "starting Tuesday, September 7th by 5 p.m. EDT, we will be able to accept credit card contributions."
UPDATE: A Newsday source checked the in-house data base and came up with a 1986 op-ed piece -- a rant against Ed Koch -- in which he's identified as a "free-lance political journalist" living in Queens. Does one op-ed piece, which didn't involve any actual reporting, make a person an "investigative journalist" for New York Newsday? We'll let you decide.
Of course, Marks himself could clear some of this up, especially the Jeb Bush thing. He did return my original calls -- at 11:25 p.m. on Tuesday. Even Campaign Extra! doesn't work that hard. He left two numbers, the MoveOnForAmerica.org office near D.C. and one in Nashville. We left messages on both but 10 1/2 hours later we still haven't heard from him.
Posted on September 7, 2004 07:38 PM
Whose side are these guys on? See, this is what happens when stupid people get their hands on lots of money. Reprise the Willie Horton ad? Dumb, dumber, dumbest. And then jump on Sharpton? Why? To piss off black people? Sharpton is a non-entity.