Bill Foster on Ethanol (What's he say on imported ethanol?)

Msg to Foster Staff: If Foster has a position on that tariff on Brazial Ethanol Durbin and Obama have supported, please send it to me and I will publish. From his site on ethanol,

There are both opportunities and dangers in biofuels. Here are two examples that indicate how the 14th District is dependent on the technological and business sense in Congress:

1. Over-Subsidization of Corn-to-Ethanol Plants. The large subsidies for corn-based ethanol plants is causing large numbers of them continue to be built even thought they are known to be non-competitive in the long term. To understand how serious the situation is, consider that by some estimates, when all of the planned corn-to-ethanol plant capacity is built, Iowa will become a net importer of corn. Those most likely to be hurt when the ethanol "bubble" bursts are not the large agribusiness and large-scale producers of ethanol, but the small groups of independent farmers who have banded together to invest in small scale corn-to-ethanol operations.

2. Which Biofuel Should Congress Invest in? It is far from clear that ethanol is the best long term bio-energy fuel. Other bio-fuels (such as butanol or 2,5-Dimethyl Furan) get more miles per gallon than ethanol and they do not corrode piping and storage tanks. However, the House of Representatives recently passed legislation providing money to upgrade piping and storage to avoid the corrosion problems of ethanol. If the final best choice for biofuels is not ethanol but some less corrosive fuel, then much of this money will have been misspent. As always, good business judgment is essential.

Right now I'd say Durbin and Obama want Congress invested in ADM and that convinces me it would be best to get Congress out of the investment business all together and leave this one open for market solutions. Right now... I'm betting on much more misspending.

xp Bill Baar's West Side

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Bill Foster: A Public Document for Offical Business

Bill Foster must think we in the sticks need big glossy pics to answer the questions on the small card attached to this Public Document for Official Business at the taxpayer's expense.

Gosh darn but we ain't that stupid.






xp Bill Baar's West Side

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Daily Herald: Fight still left in Laesch

Daily Herald with this and then Downtowner over at PSB on Laesch's press conference yesterday. From the Herald,

Among those encouraging Laesch to keep fighting was state Sen. Mike Noland. The Elgin Democrat, who referred to Laesch as "Cinderella Man" and compared him to presidential hopeful Barack Obama, lost two state legislative races by close margins before finally winning in 2006.

"It's so close, we have to do it," Noland said. "The fight goes on. No matter what the result, young man, you have an extremely bright future."

All the energy and money devoted to Pera running in the southwest side as pro-abortion and pro-embryonic stem cell research, when you could have betted on running Laesch against Oberweis in Elgin and Aurora on immigration.

A lot of progressives underestimated their own lured by a guy with money and slim experience. Read Lisa Smith: Group questions Foster's experience

Highlighting a Foster campaign mailer describing how Foster was "serving on Murphy's congressional staff" before deciding to run for office himself, the Washington-based Majority Accountability Project claimed that House payroll records don't list Foster's name anywhere on Murphy's staff. Foster's news release clarified that Foster "was an unpaid staffer after Murphy's election." But working for free for a member of Congress could be considered a violation of House ethics rules, Majority Accountability Project pointed out Friday.

Laesch may have some quirks, but compared to Oberweis's own quirks; that'll be a wash. Foster's puffing will be tougher to shake.

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Mark Pera's campaign

Considering the energy posting for Pera here and here, you have to wonder if it was time really misspent due to a badly flawed understanding of the issues and voters in Illinois's 3rd district.

Take a look at some of the postings on why Pera's campaign made so much sense and you really have to wonder if Pera's supporters aren't way out-of-touch.

Compare their disconnect in the third with many of these same folk's abandonment of John Laesch in the 14th --a guy who I think would stand a chance against a widely disliked Oberweis especially with Obama at the top of the ticket in November-- and you really have to wonder about their political horse-sense.

The silence on Pera, or worse: WestsideGirl in Kos, doesn't auger well for progressivism.

So seduced by a millionaire's money as the path to power, they'll dump their political principles. That McCain doing just the opposite and winning should tell us something about 2008.

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Fighting John Laesch

I heard Laesch at the League of Women Voters describe how he was sent to Africa with the Navy after the USS Cole bombing and he conjured a Rambo image of a guy single-handedly out for Osama bin Laden.

Let's see how long he hangs in on this fight. Given the history of snafus in Kane County, and the complicated two ballot voting, he may have a case. From NPR,

The election in Illinois' 14th Congressional District was anything but cut and dried. Voters had to cast two ballots: one for November's general election, then another one for the March 8th special election. That's needed because Hastert resigned before his term was over.

Former Fermilab scientist Bill Foster claimed victory in the special election. But the general's not so clear. Carpenter John Laesch is barely behind Foster and says he's not giving up yet.

LAESCH: We're gonna make sure every vote's counted, recounted if possible, and certainly we're gonna make sure all the provisional ballots and absentee ballots are counted. So, we're gonna be hiring a lawyer and this will go on a couple days.

Foster spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money on the primary. He faces Republican Jim Oberweis in the special election.

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DownTowner: IL-14 The Losing Strategy

DownTowner writs an excellant history of Bill Foster and his campaign in IL-14.

Prior to leaving his job at Fermilab in disgust over lost federal funding in 2006 for the project he managed, multimillionaire Foster's FEC record of donations to Dem candidates totaled two, one in 2000 to fellow physicist Rush Holt and one in 2004 to Obama. There is no record of multi-millionaire Foster contributing a single dollar to any local Dem organization or candidate, and he was at that time wholly unknown to any local Dem organization. Foster's campaign manager has confirmed that prior to his 2006-07 year-long sojourn in DC, he was just not political.

Upon leaving his job at Fermilab and moving to DC, Foster stated his distress with the federal funding situation at Fermilab, noting as he did that since Dennis Hastert would shortly no longer be the Speaker, he would no longer be in a position to defend Fermilab funding. Foster also stated that his intent in moving to DC was to seek a non-partisan job on Capital Hill and that upon his discovery that non-partisan is not an option there, he chose the Dems. A perusal of the FEC and statewide records will reveal that his family in Wisconsin, in stark contrast to Foster himself, have a history of donating early and often to a wide variety of Dem candidates, so this choice should be unsurprising.

While in DC he attended a Rahm Emmanuel DCCC Red to Blue fundraiser, decided to work for the Patrick Murphy campaign in Pennsylvania, and spent six weeks doing that.

Gives you a taste of Foster but please go over and read the whole post.

Foster's grated me from the get go not because of his politics, but because of his phoniness. Read all of Downstate's post and you see Foster's whole phoney story.

The Democrats dilemma is they believe they can't run a Laesch-style progressive in Il-14 CD and other places, but they make it impossible for Lieberman-style Democrats to find a home in the party.

So Illinois Democrats are stuck with a party of progressives and phonies. Worse, the phonies have all the money. So it's no wonder besides being the most Liberal State, we also seem the most corrupt.

I think that's what happens when progressive roll over for the phonies.

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Saturday mailer fest - Oberweis

Four pages from an eight part mailer.

Also check a Paulista for Leasch here. HT Bored Now's IL-14 Roundup.

If Illinois if going big for McCain, have to wonder if featuring Hastert so much wasn't a mistake.

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Saturday mailer fest - Lauzen

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Friday mailer fest - more Foster

He won't stay out of my mail box.

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Friday mailer fest - Foster

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Friday mailer fest - Oberweis

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Prairie State Blue: Kane's Early Primary Numbers - Are Dems abstaining from Special?

A good post by Jordal over at Prairie State Blue: Kane's Early Primary Numbers - Are Dems abstaining from Special? Looks like the proprotion of Democratic and Republican ballots in the Congressional Primary are even, and then a disproportionate share of voters pull GOP ballots in the special.

Why are 12% of early-voting Democrats not voting in the Special Primary? Are they waiting until Feb 5th? (Is it even possible to wait?) Whether or not it’s intentional on the part of voters, it seems reasonable to state that the closer the race is, the more likely it is that Democrats will wind up with two different nominees for March and November, and given that these discrepancies disproportionately affect the Democratic Primary, there should be special attention paid amongst Kane County Democrats.

I'm guessing it's Democrats crossying over to vote against Oberweis after having cast a ballot for Obama.

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Lauzen's Moolah Mailers

...as negative ads go, Lauzen's are fun.

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Weekend mailers - Foster

Foster bores more than watching a Federally-subsidized ethanol-train roll through Freeport Illinois.

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Weekend mailers - Oberweis

This one is dirty.

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Weekend mailers - Lauzen

Not much to say other than this one's fun.

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Illinois 14th CD Thursday mailer fest - Lauzen

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Illinois 14th CD Thursday mailer fest - Foster

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Illinois 14th CD Thursday mailer fest - Oberweis

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Bill Foster's America Firster mailer

Foster's latest. He's gone America First.

Also, he says on the third page he quit Fermi Lab to do something about Bush's War and that doesn't square with the lengthy four page resignation letter he wrote about the resignation.

...I also realize that my voice will not be heard, since after years of insisting that unpleasant technical realities be respected in strategic planning in HEP, I find myself branded as a troublemaker with an axe to grind.

No mention of Bush's War in that letter.

Now he's ready to walk from our Iraqi allies. Democrats weren't always so quick to abandon friends. Even when the majority of Americans weren't always with Democrats.

Far from it, while Lindbergh was talking America First (and even Lindbergh dropped the America First talk after we were in it, and fought like heck over FDR's objections to get in it); FDR's Harry Hopkins said this to an ally few Americans were ready to stand with at the time,

Few dramatists could match the poignant scene when Britain stood alone against the Nazi power that dominated a conquered or fawningly neutral Europe. Roosevelt sent his envoy Harry Hopkins to Churchill. At dinner Hopkins quoted from the Book of Ruth: "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people and their God my God," softly adding, "Even to the end." --From Meachem Franklin and Winston

Even to the end... no more Democrats like that. The world (and history) will note that from now on.

The mailer,

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