Politics State GOP Senator Just Makes Shit Up
posted by on November 6 at 15:45 PM
It turns out that state senator Brad Benson (Spokane), the state senator who says Planned Parenthood’s condoms have an 80% failure rate (a number he appears to have simply made up) —has a bad habit of trotting out make-believe percentages.
According to Marcus Riccelli, the campaign manager for Chris Marr, Benson’s Democratic opponent, Benson has been telling folks at candidate forums and debates that Marr got 78% of his campaign money from “West of the mountains.”
Truth is (according to the PDC): 56% of Marr’s money comes from within Spokane County. And it’s a majority of Besnon’s money, 58%, that actually comes from Western Washington or out of state.
A conservative independent expenditure group got caught trying to push Benson’s lie in a radio ad and had to yank it.
Here are the details from a Spokesman Review article that ran on Saturday.
A radio commercial from It’s Time for a Change, another independent group, had to be rewritten after it claimed three-fourths of state Senate candidate Chris Marr’s campaign money comes from Western Washington or out of state and that GOP incumbent Brad Benson is a Spokane native. It was pulled from at least one radio station Friday when the Marr campaign showed KXLY-AM staff that more than half of his money comes from inside Spokane County, and that Benson, like Marr, is a California native.The new ad says “nearly 50 percent” of Marr’s campaign funding comes from Western Washington or out of state. A check of the Public Disclosure Commission reports shows that even more of Benson’s money — about 58 percent — comes from Western Washington or out of state.
The radio ad criticizing Marr is funded by a group called It’s Time for a Change, an Olympia-based group that got all of its money — nearly $1.3 million, according to the most recent PDC reports — from another Olympia-based group, ChangePAC.
ChangePAC has raised about $1.5 million in this campaign cycle, about half of it from the Building Industry Association of Washington. Both groups have the same post office box for an address and the same treasurer, Elliot Swaney, who is a lobbyist for the BIAW.
When will they institute serious penalties for this kind of behavior? I guarantee that 99% of the people who heard the original ad believe it's true. Corrections never reach nearly the audience of the original error. Benson's campaign should have to pay serious money for this -- and It's Time For A Change should have to pay a half million or so, enough to force them out of business.
Do you realize if the media starts calling these LIES, that people might stop doing it?
Why do you hate our Overlords so?
Makes shit up? Josh, that's your franchise.
Lou Reed sings: "Marguerite totale." Or was it Margaret told Tom.
NO, Will, it wouldn't matter. If you spout lies in public, no amount of media correction will matter one iota.
Thank you, Dan. I had contacted all of the media outlets in Spokane, including KXLY about these issues and received no response. Apparently it takes someone who will expose the deceptions in print to get attention. And I apologize in advance to fnarf and anyone else for my inability to express my concerns in correctly worded sentences.
Sorry. Thanks JOSH!
In addition to pulling false ads, campaigns should be forced to air corrections on every network they advertised on, at their own expense.
Good point, Fnarf. The media may correct it later, when noone is paying attention.
We need jail terms for this stuff.
In Iraq.
If Planned Parenthood condoms had an 80% failure rate, I'd be SERIOUSLY fucked.
Remember when Ellen Craswell, Kook-R candidate for governor, said at her first press conference that homosexuals live on average thirty years less than normal people? I think that came from the Family Research Council too.
Wait, there isn't enough "balance" to this report. Surely there's some unrelated Democrat who was vaguely misleading somewhere that you can paint as equally bad and thus further justify voter non-participation.
Spokane politics are getting really interesting these days. Has anyone noticed? Secret gay mayor, secret gay mayor's secretly gay replacement, nasty d vs r battlefield... is there anything like The Stranger in Spokane? If so, they should start a blog.
I'd call Benson a complete and utter douchebag, but that would be an insult to the humble and useful device itself. I guess I'll stick with calling him a lying moron instead.
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