An environmental group on Tuesday plans to start airing more than $1 million in TV ads attacking U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk for a recent vote to block an Obama administration effort to curb global warming.
The Natural Resources Defense Council’s ad campaign, which it said will run through July 17 on Chicago broadcast and cable stations, comes as the first-term Republican senator already faces a difficult re-election effort next year.
The 30-second spot contends that a vote Kirk cast last month on an Environmental Protection Agency bill allowed power plants to “keep polluting our air.”
“Polluters are breathing a lot easier, but nearly 300,000 Illinois children aren’t,” the narrator says in the spot, which depicts pollution streaming from smokestacks, a field of withered corn and an infant breathing through a nebulizer mask.
Kirk, a member of the panel, had a provision in the Interior spending measure he was championing — a ban on sewage dumping into the Great Lakes by 2035. Kirk has worked on protecting Lake Michigan since he was a member of the House.
The sewage ban is one of his signature issues.
Nonetheless, Kirk was a key vote against an amendment by Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., which would have taken out of the EPA bill the provision letting states opt out of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan. Udall would have prevailed if Kirk sided with him. […]
Kevin Artl, Kirk’s campaign manager said, “Sen. Kirk’s most recent clean water legislation creates a strict new ban on sewage dumping in the Great Lakes, including a $100,000 per day fine on polluters that would fund the construction of new treatment plants. The simple truth is that Sen. Kirk is responsible for the most aggressive measure ever taken to protect the Great Lakes.”
Kirk could not have been expected to vote against his own “landmark Great Lakes protection language,” Artl said.
The Sierra Club launched a week-long advertising campaign Monday to slam Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) for voting to scrap the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) climate rule for power plants.
The environmental group started its “aggressive” campaign with a full-page ad in the Daily Herald, circulated in Chicago’s suburbs.
It accuses Kirk of voting three times “to put big polluter profits before the health of Illinois families,” and urges readers to tell Kirk to “stop attacking clean air” and “support the Clean Power Plan.”
Kirk For Senate campaign manager Kevin Artl has released the following statement in response to the ads by the Natural Resources Defense Council attacking Senator Mark Kirk’s environmental policy record:
“Senator Kirk has shown bold, independent action in Congress to reduce carbon emissions, protect against air pollution and enact aggressive measures to protect our great lakes from polluters and oil spills. The recent partisan attack ads by DC special interest groups, the same groups that once praised Senator Kirk’s work on behalf of protecting the environment, are not only false but sickening, beyond the pale of reasonable discussion and should be taken down.”
Southern Illinois Congressman Mike Bost says the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right puts clergy in a tough spot.
The Murphysboro republican says he doesn’t believe the high court’s justices should be deciding issues like this because many churches believe same-sex marriage is not right before God and should not be allowed.
“But, my fear is that ministers that come from a faith that do not believe it’s right, can be forced to perform marriage ceremonies, and thus violate what they believe is their oath before God.”
Oy.
* Perhaps he’s just trying to distract the folks back home from this…
Congress is moving away from its longtime use of taxpayer-financed mail to constituents, but not Rep. Mike Bost.
The freshman Republican from Murphysboro, Ill., spent almost $113,000 on what is called “franked” mail in the first three months in office, amounting to more than 244,000 pieces. That is nearly twice the amount spent by the next biggest frank-mail user.
He sent more individual pieces of mail in that time than the roughly 210,000 people who voted when Bost defeated Democrat Rep. Bill Enyart in last November’s election. […]
Because of the rise of electronic communications, franked mail is falling in usage, and it is under increased scrutiny. A Congressional Research Service report released in May said that the volume of mass mailings sent by members of Congress to constituents fell from 103 million in 2008 to 40.3 million last year. The cost to taxpayers in that window fell from $25.2 million to $15.8 million.
Mundelein Mayor Steve Lentz on Monday defended widely criticized comments he made about the legalization of gay marriage and other societal issues during an Independence Day speech. […]
Near the midpoint of his remarks Saturday morning at the village’s Fort Hill Heritage Center, Lentz said he wanted to “address the elephant in the room” and started talking about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on marriage equality.
He called it one event in an ongoing “moral crisis” in the U.S.
Lentz went on to discuss people having children without being married, saying “the out-of-wedlock birthrate is just crazy high compared to our history.” Such parents are part of a “crisis against the family” in the U.S., Lentz said.
He then defended Prohibition, saying, “It’s just what the doctor ordered.”
Lentz then referenced an anthropologist who he said had, in the 1930s, studied different cultures. Lentz said the man, J.D. Unwin, found a link between conservative sexual practices and a society’s success.
“The cultures that had a strict code of marital monogamy, heterosexual marital monogamy, those cultures had the most vibrancy and affected those around them the most,” Lentz claimed in the speech. “When the wheels came off and the standards began to decline in that area, within two to three generations, that culture would end.” […]
In his remarks, Lentz also said the government can address social problems through the Constitution and used as example the 18th Amendment, which banned alcohol in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Lentz said alcohol caused issues such as spousal abuse and led to other societal ills. Prohibition worked, he said.
I wonder if Mayor Lentz actually looked around the world for countries that ban alcohol and severely punish homosexuals and women who have sex out of wedlock. He’d find them, for sure. I’m not so sure he’d want to live in them, or believe that they are infinitely superior to our own country.
Also, Mundelein is in Rep. Ed Sullivan’s district, one of the few Republicans who voted for gay marriage. Sullivan went on to thump a conservative challenger. The mayor may not quite understand his home turf.
