Waiting for the Iglesias's Ad

Joel Gay put up an article today in which he acknowledges the fireworks have begun in the 1st Congressional District race between Darren White and Martin Heinrich. And, by fireworks he means the negative ads.

If you think the race for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District seems quieter than anticipated, you’re not alone. What was widely expected to be a barn-burner has largely been a snoozer. The candidates have kept relatively low profiles and the airwaves have been largely devoid of their names and faces.

That’s started to change, with Republican Darren White and Democrat Martin Heinrich trading blows over debate schedules, resumes and flip-flops on various policies. And just this week, White came out with the first negative ad.

Hmm, Joel, you might want to go back and review the ad releases dates. I'm pretty sure that Mr. Heinrich beat Darren in the "first negative ad" category. There was that embarrassingly cheesy hit piece that Mr. Heinrich put out a couple of weeks ago, and there was at least on other one before that. Although, on second thought that first ad I'm recalling may have been paid for by the DCCC, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the Heinrich campaign - just like Martin Heinrich didn't really need to register as a lobbyist when he was lobbying.

But, I will agree with your assessment that the negative ads are going to start to fly now from both camps. In fact, I couldn't help but notice that David Iglesias was back in the news:

"Looking back on all of this, in hindsight, I wish the department had not gone down this road," he said. He said he would not have included on the dismissal list U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico, who has said he was pressured over a corruption investigation.

Of course, we all know that the "pressure" that David Iglesias received was not over a corruption investigation (he would have been required to report that - kind of the requirement to report you're a lobbyist], but the pressure was about his unwillingness to prosecute ACORN's fraudulent voter registration election cycle after election cycle.

You probably have noticed the result of Mr. Iglesias ongoing failure to prosecute has embolden the organization. ACORN is now acting in such a fraudulently criminal manner that even the Democratic Bernalillo County Clerk has had to call in to question their practices - something Mr. Iglesias never had the stomach for.

Such is the situation for Bernalillo County, which reported, the day before Obama’s Española rally, that it had received 1,100 fraudulent voter-registration cards. While there is no information, yet, on where those cards came from, Matthew Henderson, ACORN’s New Mexico head organizer, acknowledges some could have come from his group. ACORN, he says, has registered 75,000 New Mexicans during this election cycle. While the group separates suspect forms into a separate stack, he says, it’s ultimately up to county clerks to decide which are valid.

In the case of Bernalillo, County Clerk Maggie Toulouse-Oliver notified the district attorney, Attorney General and US Attorney Offices about the bogus voter-registration cards. “If they want to conduct an investigation,” she says, “that’s their prerogative.”

Now, I've got a prediction. I'm willing to bet that Heinrich's campaign (or it's alter ego, the DCCC) will put out an ad trying to link Darren White to David Iglesias as Election Day gets closer. Heck, they'll probably even use an article the Albuquerque Journal published on April 15, 2007, which places Darren White at a meeting with the Department of Justice during the 2006 election cycle. Of course, there would be one problem with that tactic...

FOR THE RECORD: This story has been corrected to reflect that Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White met with Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in Washington in 2005 — not in 2006.

Now, if I know the record has been corrected, we know that Martin Heinrich and his alter ego the DCCC know that it's been corrected. The question is will they let the truth get in their way? You know, like the truth about needing to register as a lobbyist when you're lobbying.

Busy Season for the Attorney General

This should be a busy election season for Attorney General Gary King. He has already had to push the Secretary of State to act on Eli Lee's creatively questionable use of not for profits, and now it remains to be seen whether he will begin investigations in the other efforts going on in New Mexico to undermine our elections.

I have long held that we don't need to create ethics laws. We just need to enforce the laws on the books, and I believe it is up to the Attorney General to put partisanship aside (justice is neither Republican nor Democrat) and fully prosecute those who break the law.

Dave Maass of the Santa Fe Reporter has a recent article about PRC candidate Jerome Block Jr. writing check after check to a county clerk:

The money in the fund comes from inspection fees placed on utilities and a tax on insurance premiums. In other words, publicly-financed candidates receive their money from the state government.

In Block’s case, some of it ended up in the San Miguel County Clerk’s Office.

According to Block’s campaign records, a few days after the June 3 primary election, Block cut a $300 check to San Miguel County Clerk “Pecos” Paul Maez for “campaign coordination.”

San Miguel is the only county Block won in the six-way Democratic primary. Block used Maez’ official clerk’s office address on the report.

That same day, Block also cut a $2,500 check to the country-western band Wyld Country, in which Maez is a guitarist. According to Block’s campaign, the payment was for a rally in San Miguel County just prior to the primary election. Block deferred questions to his recently appointed campaign manager Jonathan Valdez.

Block used nearly 10% of his taxpayer funded (not government funded Mr. Maass) campaign funds to write checks to the county clerk in the only county he actually won in a primary. If this doesn't scream for an investigation by the Attorney General, then I don't know what does.

Oh wait. I do know something else that is just as atrocious...

Election season after election season the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) gets a pass as it strives to undermine the election system by paying people to turn in fraudulent voter registrations or intimidate voters. And, Scott Sandlin's recent article shows that this year is no different:

Clovis native Rebecca Sitterly registered to vote soon after returning to her native state in 1979 and jumped right into Democratic politics about the same time.

So the former Bernalillo County district judge was surprised to get a July 3 call from a community nonprofit that was checking on her new registration.

When Sitterly said she hadn't filled out a registration form � indeed, she'd been regularly voting in the same place on Mountain Road NW in Albuquerque for nearly 20 years � a supervisor with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now promised to destroy the card, Sitterly said in a phone interview.

"He said, 'Don't worry, it won't go anywhere,' " she said.

More surprises were in store. She got a call from the Bureau of Elections in the Bernalillo County Clerk's Office three weeks later, asking again about the registration card, which was missing its required Social Security number.

"They were finishing out the card � they weren't calling about the fraud," she said.

Sitterly went to the sixth-floor clerk's office, got a copy of the card and discovered that it understated her age by three decades.

So, let's review, shall we?

We have a "former" Democratic political consultant, Eli Lee, running not for profits and pledging to spend a million tax deductible dollars to "educate" voters. We have a Democratic candidate for the PRC [side note: there is no Republican in this race, so I don't have a partisan motive here] writing big checks to sitting county clerks to help him win the election. And, we have ACORN continuing their well documented efforts to pay good money to submit fraudulent voter registration forms in an effort to undermine the election process.

My only question... When is someone going to jail?

ACORN's Aggressive Use of Intimidation Tactics

We've had a lot of experience in New Mexico with the criminal activities of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN. Due to New Mexico's role as a swing state, ACORN operatives are already generating more than their fair share of complaints for legally questionable tactics in this election cycle:

Association of Community Organizations for Reform, more commonly known as ACORN. The group has been actively trying to register voters in Doña Ana County in recent months. It has also received national attention in recent years for allegations in other states of voter fraud and shoddy work, which you can read about from CBS News by clicking here and FOX News by clicking here.

Of course, a quick internet search shows that the aggressive and criminally questionable tactics used by ACORN in New Mexico are nothing compared to the intimidation and misinformation strategies employed by ACORN in states that allow ballot initiatives. Watch the videos below to see ACORN in action...