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Mark Kirk returned to the Senate in an emotional moment for everyone after he suffered a debilitating stroke almost a year ago. As many of you know, I am no fan of Kirk's, but a stroke like the one he had is a life-altering experience. Via the Illinois Daily Herald:

"A thing goes off in your head that this is the end," he remembered.

Kirk's life and outlook would be dramatically changed, the stroke serving as a defining moment that he said deepened his faith and altered his sense of purpose.

Sitting at the dining room table of his suburban townhouse, his left arm slack, Kirk gestures emphatically with his right hand as he says the experience made him resolve "to never, ever give up."

He is determined "to just keep going, even when things feel like we're at the end here. Which is what the ICU was like for me."

This Thursday, Jan. 3, Kirk plans to climb the 45 steps of the U.S. Capitol without the aid of a handrail.

The goal-driven 53-year-old visualized those steps as a source of inspiration as he toiled through the physical therapy sessions at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago that left him exhausted, sore and, at times, nauseated.

It's worth noting that those physical therapy sessions he received were a luxury most of us would not have had. Chicago Tribune:

Medical professionals who treated U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk said Thursday that the Illinois legislator received 300 to 400 therapy sessions during his ongoing recovery from his January 2012 stroke.

The intensive treatment, administered over 10 or 11 months in inpatient and outpatient settings, included 100 to 200 sessions of physical therapy, 100 sessions of occupational therapy and 100 sessions of speech therapy, officials from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago said at a news conference in Washington.

When asked how Kirk paid for the extensive therapies, his spokesman Lance Trover said Thursday that Kirk has the same health care insurance options available to other federal employees and has incurred major out-of-pocket expenses, which have affected his savings and retirement.

According to the medical professionals, 40 of Kirk's 300 to 400 sessions were not billable because they were part of a medical trial in which the senator took part. But the rest of the sessions appeared to be well beyond the number that would be covered for most Americans under commercial and government-subsidized health insurance plans.

"Generally, most plans have a cap of around 20 (sessions) for each of those three categories, which are subject to review by a medical management team," said Dale Moyer, president of Chicago-based Incentovate LLC, which advises employers on compensation and benefit plans.

Senator Kirk stood up on the Senate floor in March, 2011 and argued for repeal of the Affordable Care Act. It seems that his attitude has softened toward Medicaid recipients, at least.

In an interview published Wednesday, Kirk said that most Illinois residents insured through the low-income health program would be eligible for just 11 rehabilitation sessions following a stroke.

"Had I been limited to that I would have had no chance to recover like I did. So unlike before suffering the stroke, I’m much more focused on Medicaid and what my fellow citizens face," Kirk told the Chicago Sun Times. "I will look much more carefully at the Illinois Medicaid program to see how my fellow citizens are being cared for who have no income and if they suffer from a stroke," Kirk said.

Let's hope his attitude about health care in general has been changed. We could use a Republican with a heart for people in need of health care in the Senate, but he might have to change parties.

The merry pranksters from "RepubliCorp," a tongue-in-cheek political group in the vein of Billionaires for Bush, opens a "Mark Kirk for Senate HQ" immediately outside the Chicago Chinese Consulate. Mark Kirk is now notorious for his "Beijing Fundraiser" which preceeded by one day Kirk's vote against closing tax loopholes for companies that outsource jobs overseas.

We need more hilarity like this to get the attention of folks who don't ordinarily pay attention to politics. Kirk and his entire political party are completely cozy with Chinese interests and big corporations moving US jobs overseas and getting a tax break because of it.

Mark Kirk has a problem. Someone keeps leaking documents from his campaign -- highly confidential documents with donor names and fundraising information, goals and alliances. Via Capitol Fax Blog:

Congressman Mark Kirk’s US Senate campaign has been plagued by strange internal leaks for months. And now we have one that includes a plan for a “Bejing fundraiser,” which was held the day before a House vote to close tax loopholes for companies that send jobs out of the country.

The latest leak is the internal agenda of a mid-May Kirk campaign finance meeting. Click here to read it. (PDF)

[...]

The Kirk campaign says that the candidate held a “Skype” fundraising meeting with American businesspeople in Bejing, China. I’m told that 12 people participated in the event.

FEC records show that Geoffrey Enck contributed $1,000 to Kirk that day. Enck is the CEO of ITI China Holdings. One of the things the company does is investment banking for Chinese manufacturing plants.

And then the next day, Kirk voted “No” on a bill to close a tax loopholes that would prevent companies from “using current U.S. foreign tax credit rules to subsidize their foreign activities .”

Now, it’s not like the contributions from Americans doing business in China likely swayed Kirk much. Just about every Republican voted against that bill. And the Kirk campaign points to a story from 2008 about the Obama campaign sending people to China for fundraisers.

But Kirk co-chairs the China Congressional Working Group, and he’s taken heat several times for his ties to the nation. He infamously told Chinese officials that US budget numbers shouldn’t be believed, for instance. Kirk opposed legislation on Chinese currency manipulation.

“When you hear Congressman Kirk talk about job creation, he’s talking about jobs he created in China,” has been a standard line from Alexi Giannoulias this year. And while the campaign fundraiser looks legal, there are plenty of American businesses over there who are, indeed, exporting jobs to that country.

Of course, the author is right. Kirk would have voted against the bill because that's what Republicans do now. They don't really do anything besides vote against things. But the other side of it is also right -- Republicans have a vested interest these days in profiting from Chinese business relationships, and fostering the outsourcing of American jobs to China.

Just this past Tuesday, Think Progress reported on joint ventures between the US Chamber of Commerce and their Chinese affiliates, like the one sponsored by Sheldon Adelson teaching American businesses how to outsource to China.

Based on that alone, I'd say Mark Kirk isn't going to be a friend to unemployed Americans. Beyond that, it appears that he has some difficulty managing even the simple things, like keeping confidential memos secure.

Over at my home blog, OpenLeft.com, Mike Lux had a great piece last week on what he called "The most important political story of the year"- that being the blockbuster Think Progress report on how the Chamber of Commerce is raising money from foreign corporations and using it to run ads against Democratic candidates. He wrote:

Every single Democrat should be running ads based on this story. The Republicans have blocked any action to keep this foreign corporate money out of our elections, and if we allow this to stand we will be so awash in foreign money in our elections that we will never get our democracy back. Check this story out, and tell every Democrat you know: make this an issue. This is a very big deal, and Republicans should be made to answer why they are okay with foreign corporations being allowed to do attack ads in our elections.

Hot off the video presses, MoveOn answers that call in Illinois:

Echoes of Watergate, anyone?

The best part about this that makes the ad even more effective is that Alexi Giannoulias refuses to take contributions from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists.

Giannoulias and Kirk were on Meet the Press yesterday morning and Nicole Belle grabbed a great clip on Kirk's supposed fiscal conservatism:

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The end of that clip was left off, where Giannoulias finished:

The question is, for the Congressman, the $700 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, we don't have $700 billion. So my question to the congressman is, which country do you plan on borrowing $700 billion from? The Saudis, China? We, we can't afford it.

Hey, since foreign corporations are doing, maybe the Saudis and Chinese should think about contributing to the Chamber so Mark Kirk can vote for more tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, paid for by his friends overseas.

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Well, no one should ever accuse Mark Kirk of a lack of confidence.

In fact, he was so confident of his success on this morning's Meet the Press that the NRSC sent out a press release crowing about his performance. Only problem? They sent it out before the show even began:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee--the GOP senate political operation--in an audacious move, declared Illinois Senate GOP candidate Mark Kirk the winner over Democrat Alexi Giannoulias in Sunday's "Meet the Press" debate before it happened.

On Saturday night, the NRSC was running a fund-raising appeal pegged to the Sunday debate, with the time travel headline and opening paragraph:

Giannoulias Fails In Debate

"It was plain to see on Meet the Press. Alexi Giannoulias is wrong for Illinois and should not be elected to the United States Senate. For too long America has been on a similar course of more spending, more debt, and a weakened economic recovery. We are on an unsustainable path and the American people don't like what they see."

It's hard to argue that Kirk doesn't have his GOP talking points down--wailing and gnashing over tax increases (note to reality-based voters: it is the expiration of tax cuts, not a tax increase, and one that the Republicans organized) to the top 2% of income earners. Just those top 2%. But watch how David Gregory--who famously rejected the notion of asking journalistic questions--points out that Kirk was very much talking out of the other side of his mouth not so long ago.

Continue reading »

Republican Mark Kirk is vying for Barack Obama's Illinois Senate seat. But he's got a little bit of an honesty problem. So far, he's been caught out lying about his teaching career, his military career, his sexuality and that's just the beginning.

Mike Lux looks at Kirk's chances:

In my view, the race for Obama's old Senate seat is the most important race in the country for progressives. Kirk has been proven to be a serial liar about his biography, and a staunch supporter of the big banks and corporate America, but with his moderate social issue views, if he becomes an incumbent he will be tough to beat in the future even in a Democratic state like Illinois.

Alexi Giannoulias, on the other hand, is a crusading reformer who has staked his campaign on taking on big money and big business, and has pledged to form a Senate progressive caucus if he wins the race. He has lost a lot of money by turning down corporate lobbyist contributions, though, and Kirk has a $3 million edge, and the Chamber of Commerce is running attacks ads for him. Every dollar we can swing toward Alexi in this race right now is critical. The symbolism of winning this race and the stakes for the future only adds to its importance.

Those deep pockets of the Chamber of Commerce can easily erase the memory of Kirknocchio's honesty problem in the minds of the less engaged voter. And that's a dangerous thing. I admire Giannoulias' stance refusing corporate lobbyist money, but that puts the burden on us to support this progressive candidate.

Rep. Mark Kirk seems to be having an issue with the facts that make up his own life. First there was his military service that he got caught lying about, then his closeted love life and now his teaching career.

NY Times:

Representative Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, a Republican candidate for the United States Senate, has often reminisced about his time as a teacher.

On the floor of the House, in campaign commercials and during interviews, Mr. Kirk has invoked his experience in the classroom. At a speech this spring to the Illinois Education Association, Mr. Kirk declared, “as a former nursery school and middle school teacher, I know some of what it takes to bring order to class.”

A review of public comments that Mr. Kirk has made over the last decade shows that while he may refer to himself as a former teacher, he does not talk about the brevity of his experience: a year in London at a private school and part-time in a nursery school as part of a work-study program while he was a student at Cornell University.

The biographies of political candidates are receiving extra scrutiny this year, as accusations of embellishments or exaggerations have touched Democrats and Republicans. With an unusually high number of candidates on the ballot, strategists in both parties are beefing up their teams of researchers to pore over résumés line by line.

The background of Mr. Kirk, a five-term congressman who is running for the Senate seat once held by President Obama, has come under additional examination after he apologized this month for errors and discrepancies about his military record.

His Democratic rival, Alexi Giannoulias, is raising questions about Mr. Kirk’s classroom experience, including his time as a nursery school teacher. The Giannoulias campaign provided The New York Times several examples of Mr. Kirk referring to himself over the years as a former teacher. The comments were verified and more imprecise references were found by The Times as it reviewed his background.

Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the Kirk campaign, said that his work in the nursery at a United Methodist ministry called Forest Home Chapel in Ithaca, N.Y., took place in his final year of college in 1981. The campaign did not provide verification, and it could not be independently confirmed. A longtime member of the church who had a son in the nursery around the same time said she did not recall any male teachers...read on

This is starting to look like a pattern. First Mark Kirk, now Jan Brewer. Governor Brewer's effort to stir sympathy for her cause seems to have backfired on her.

Via the Arizona Guardian:

Gov. Jan Brewer said in a recent interview that her father died fighting Nazis in Germany. In fact, the death of Wilford Drinkwine came 10 years after World War II had ended.

During the war, Drinkwine worked as a civilian supervisor for a naval munitions depot in Hawthorne, Nev. He died of lung disease in 1955 in California.

Brewer made the comment to The Arizona Republic while talking about the criticism she has taken since signing SB 1070, the new immigration law that makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally.

"Knowing that my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany, that I lost him when I was 11 because of that... and then to have them call me Hitler's daughter. It hurts. It's ugliness beyond anything I've ever experienced," Brewer said in the story, published Tuesday.

How exactly does one stretch work for a munitions depot stateside into "fighting the Nazis"? Evidently by making the claim that the lung disease that killed her father was caused by toxic fumes at the munitions factory.

Her claim that she didn't mean to embellish the story rings hollow to me. The phrase "my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany..." clearly intends to convey the impression that he fell in combat in Germany fighting Nazis. If she had intended to convey otherwise, she would have framed it as the result of the country's war with Nazi Germany. She did not.

Of course, she is now trying to spin as a simple misinterpretation on the part of the reader, which points directly to my overall problem with the faux patriotism candidates put on under the guise of military service. We live in a country where service is voluntary (despite our unenforced draft laws). Serving or not serving is not a benchmark measure of anyone's patriotism.

As far as I'm concerned, military service should not be a marker of a candidate's qualification to run for or hold office. When it starts being pimped as some kind of extra qualifier, or when candidates use their family's service as a qualifier (as Brewer did), it's an insult to every member who is or has served in the military today.

Brewer just keeps proving her ambition and lack of qualification for office. Arizona, you can do better than this.

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This isn't the first time Tea Party organizers have announced their intentions regarding the Republican Party. And it probably won't be the last.

But it's nonetheless well worth documenting that Judson Phillips, the organizer of last week's National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, went on Fox News yesterday with Gretchen Carlson and said it quite clearly:

Phillips: And part of it's gonna end up -- where this Tea Party movement goes, is partially gonna be dependent on the Republican Party. If they're going to keep pushing people like Dede Scozzafaza or Mark Kirk on us, the Tea Party movement is not gonna vote for somebody just because they have an R behind their name. We don't like people like John McCain. We want good conservatives in office.

And if the Republican Party is not going to help us do that, then in 2011 there's probably going to be a pretty big push to set up the Tea Party as a separate political party. I don't think that's the best idea in the world, I'd really prefer to see us take over the Republican Party. But there's a lot of pressure from our people right now because we want conservatives in office.

Bet that works out about as well as NY-23 did.

Illinois Republican Andy Martin is about as slimy as they come. He gleefully accepts credit for starting a nasty smear campaign against President Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, and continues to ramp up the hate as he runs for a seat in the U.S. Senate:

Andy Martin, a noted conservative dirty trickster, put out a spot on local radio in which he pushes a "solid rumor" that fellow Senatorial aspirant, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), "is a homosexual."

"I helped expose many of Barack Obama's lies in 2008," the ad goes. "Today, I am fighting for the facts about Mark Kirk. Illinois Republican leader Jack Roeser says there is a 'solid rumor that Kirk is a homosexual.' Roeser suggests that Kirk is part of a Republican Party homosexual club. Lake County Illinois Republican leader Ray True says Kirk has surrounded himself with homosexuals."

The seedy spot seems to take a page out the Karl Rove playbook -- in which allegations of homosexuality are pushed by innuendo and 'simple demands for the truth.' In a statement to a local Illinois station, the Kirk camp vehemently condemned and denied its content.

In a stunning move, the Illinois Republican Party has denounced Martin and his tactics. Maybe Republicans is learning?

The Illinois Republican Party disavows the statements made today by Mr. Andrew Martin in his statewide radio advertisements. His statements today are consistent with his history of bizarre behavior and often times hate-filled speech which has no place in the Illinois Republican Party. Mr. Martin will no longer be recognized as a legitimate Republican Candidate by the Illinois Republican Party. Read on...