McHenry County Blog

8th Congressional District Republican candidate Joe Walsh points out that President Barack Obama’s “Recovery Summer” theme hasn’t lived up to the Democrats’ expectations in the press release below:

The “Recovery Summer” Failed

Today the ADP released more bad news. The ADP Jobs Report, which monitors the strength of the U.S. private-sector, revealed that the U.S. economy shed 10,000 private-sector jobs in the month of August.

In May of this year, the Democrats promised the U.S. economy would begin to enjoy a significant economic recovery. The Democrats named this promised recovery “Recovery Summer.”

In reality, there has been no such recovery.

According to official government websites, since the “Recovery Summer” began:

• our nation’s economic growth has stagnated, prompting economists to warn about their    fear of a “double-dip” recession;
• retail stores across the nation have posted significant losses;
• manufacturing jobs have decreased;
• the dollar is weaker compared to the Euro and the Canadian dollar;
• the stock market has declined; and
• Treasury bond yields have unexpectedly fallen.

The Democrats have owned this economy since January 2007 when they took control of Congress. Joe Walsh, the Republican candidate for the 8th District of Illinois, commented today on the bad economy.

“The Democrats in Washington have been wrong about this economy from the beginning. Higher taxes and more bureaucracy will not put this economy back on track.”

Congresswoman Melissa Bean voted for the health care law, the Stimulus, and cap-and-trade. Economists warn that all three of these pieces of legislation will hamper economic growth.

Walsh, who is challenging Melissa Bean in November’s election, added,

“The recovery will begin when Democrats no longer control Congress.”

Frank Thomas’ number was retired on Sunday.

Seeing another White Sox player in the ceremonies reminded me of this question:

Which baseball player has his number retired by two teams?

That would be Carlton Fisk, whose numbers were retired by both Sox, Red and White.

It takes two to make a pair of Sox.

It takes electing only one more Democrat as Governor to give us all a huge tax increase.

The vote in the U.S. House was so close that electing Dem Melissa Bean got us Obamacare, which unless defunded by a new Republican House, will become a man and woman-made disaster the size of which will make the Katrina devastation look like a puddle.

Bean deserves an ejection in this November election.

It may be worthy of mass public jubilation along Rte. 14 to celebrate ejection day by all who value not having our health care system destroyed by Bean’s vote.

Ejection day may be a cause for celebration if independents get rid of enough Dems across Illinois and the nation.

There could be more spontaneous celebrating in the suburbs followed by more organized celebrating than when Barack Obama won election.

Don’t look for party bosses Richard Daley or Mike Madigan to do any of such organizing in Chicago.

I can see people saying to union leaders and Dems:

• Make fun of us independents and take us for suckers, will ya?
• You wanted the job, you got it, done terrible and now you’re fired!

One of McHenry County’s Members of Congress, Melissa Bean, isn’t making herself available to the public.

At least not for questions at a candidate debate.

She became an Obama-servant.

She’s dropped all pretense of being a public servant, except for her taxpayer-paid generous salary, benefits, perks and paid staff.

You can’t find her schedule or what public events she will be at on either her official government web site or her campaign web site.

She’s become an Obama Washington elitist whose deliberate plan is to be untouchable
the people of McHenry County and her district.

In 2004, when Bean got herself elected by doing a Blago and claiming to be for the people.

Now she’ hiding from them.

Isn’t that exactly what she claimed that long-time Republican Congressman Phil Crane was doing?

Liberal-biased newspapers are apparently forgetting to point out Bean’s deliberate keeping out of touch behavior.

While Alexi Giannoulias and Mark Kirk will debate for the U.S. Senate, Melissa Bean doesn’t want to have any debates with Joe Walsh and Bill Scheurer for the U.S. House.

She is following Rod Blagojevich’s and Jim Ryan’s lead in not debating me when I ran against them for Governor in 2002.

Bean doesn’t want an open comparison of her liberal voting record with Joe Walsh’s common sense conservatism.  And she doesn’t want criticism from the left from Bill Scheurer.

How would she answer Republican Walsh’s question,

“Where’s all of the jobs you bragged and campaigned on creating?”

I’m sure Green Party candidate Bill Scheurer would have some pointed questions, too.

Bean is stiffing McHenry County by not allowing a public discussion of her voting record.

Just as she would not hold a public town hall meeting on health care reform, on which she supported President Barack Obama.

The last time she debated was when she ran against David McSweeney and Bill Scheurer.

That was four years ago.

It was sponsored by the Northwest Herald.

She didn’t do well.

You might say it was a disaster.

She doesn’t want another one of those.

That 2006 debate, by the way, was before Labor Day, the tradition beginning of political campaigns.

Two years ago, she refused to debate Steve Greenberg in public as well. A joint appearance before the Chicago Tribune editorial board was it.

I don’t usually refer people to YouTube postings, but stimulated by 8th District Congresswoman’s inability to find time in her schedule for an interview with the Daily Herald, I thought you might like to see how she tries to control the few meetings she has.

“Bean declined a live interview, citing scheduling conflicts, but submitted her thoughts in writing,

” is what the Daily Herald article said.

Imagine that Bean hasn’t time to talk over the phone or in person to the newspaper that did repeated hit jobs on 8th District Republican opponent Joe Walsh.

She must really be nervous.

What you see on top is the threatening guy who walked around the audience when constituents were getting uppity.

The raw tape is below. It’s six minutes long. I watched it, but anything over three minutes on YouTube is pretty much too long for me. I figure if you’re making an argument and can’t make it in three minutes, you need to distill it.

After some criticism from a Bean supporter, whoever took the tape distilled it to a length that meets my requirements. So, if you have only three minutes take a look below. If you don’t, image the guy at the top of this article standing over you while you’re trying to ask a question.

Here the comments below the shorter version:

CStevenTucker
1 week ago

I attended this event and I assure you, Stanley Steroid was NOT reading. He made everyone in the room extremely uncomfortable. Again, this was DISGRACEFUL disregard for her constituents. We have had ENOUGH of the Political Elite in Washington. WE SURROUND THEM. If this makes you ANGRY help her opponent DEFEAT her in November! walshforcongress com

msjkulig
1 week ago

Here’s another blogger that thinks this video was “Over edited.” What a joke from someone who was not there to witness the THUGGERY firsthand! Visit the Foolocracy blog and tell them the truth!

msjkulig
1 week ago

The Thug exhibited this behavior without Bean saying a word about the blatant intimidation she knew her constituents must be feeling. I don’t care if the Thug worked for the library. Bean could have stopped the Thuggery at any time! She even “chuckled” when it happened. Bean chose this forum so she would not have to answer any questions about her voting record. Instead of having an open Townhall forum where citizens are free to have a dialogue with their Representative.

The following press release has been received from 8th District Republican candidate for Congress Joe Walsh:

JOE WALSH COMMENTS ON FAILURE OF STIMULUS BILL,

CALLS ON A NEW DIRECTION FOR THE AMERICAN ECONOMY

(Grayslake, IL) - Critics of President Obama’s nearly $1 trillion stimulus program have pointed out that the stimulus has failed to create jobs while wasting taxpayer money. A new analysis of stimulus spending in Illinois’ 8th Congressional District supports that criticism.

According to the Obama Administration’s “Recovery.gov” website, during the past 18 months the stimulus bill has spent more than $226 million in the 8th district to fund 244 projects, while only creating 169.46 jobs.

Joe Walsh, the Republican nominee for the 8th district, commented,

“If you do the math, you see that the Administration has spent more than $1.3 million per stimulus job!  While American families and small businesses are struggling and making tough choices, Washington is wasting their money.

“The stimulus has failed. According to the Obama Administration, this bill created fewer than 10 jobs per month in our district – 80% of those were government jobs. Sadly, this stimulus is a bailout for state and local government that was never designed to help the private sector grow the economy and create jobs.”

Joe Walsh’s opponent, Rep. Melissa Bean, voted for the stimulus bill.

In a February 13, 2009 press release, Rep. Bean promised the stimulus bill would create jobs, saying:

“This bold action is necessary to preserve and create jobs and spending.”

Bean stated taxpayer money would be spent in the right place, saying the bill “puts money where it matters.” In a January 28, 2009 press release, Bean touted the recovery.gov website, saying it constituted a new measure “of accountability and transparency [to] track every dollar of spending….”

Walsh commented on Bean’s empty promises,

“Melissa Bean promised the stimulus bill would create jobs. It didn’t. She promised our money would be well spent. It wasn’t.

“My campaign represents the voices of millions of Americans who believe we need new leadership in Washington.  With the support of the people of the 8th district, we are going to win this campaign.  When we do, we can begin to enact policies to promote private sector job creation – instead of pumping millions of taxpayer dollars into more government jobs.”

Thursday, as I was driving to the Post Office, I noticed a political tee shirted Terry Kappel walking west on Route 14.

You know I had to ask him why he was so attired in Crystal Lake.

Was he going door-to-door for a Democratic Party candidate?

I drove around the block, stopped in a parking lot and asked him.

He was on the way to his chiropractor.

But, our encounter wasn’t a complete washout.

He was wearing the a 16th District “Gaulrapp for Congress” tee shirt with buttons and stickers.

He told me that Independent (that’s what will appear over her name on the ballot in her race against Republican Associate Judge Gordon Graham) judicial candidate Sally Wiggins had found someone going through her garbage.

Now, that was interesting.

I’ve heard of one party’s operatives going through the garbage of campaign offices locally, but never a home. Took me back to J. Edgar Hoover garbage gathering efforts I’d read about.

Wiggins showed up at McHenry County State’s Attorney Lou Bianchi’s fund raiser last night.

She was working the crowd and even had a young man writing names and phone numbers in a spiral notebook.

I asked to speak with her and she shoehorned me in.

“Tell me about the garbage guy,” I said.

She told me that Saturday morning she saw a man going through the garbage in her can at the end of her driveway.

When she asked him what he was doing, he reply,

“I’m re-cycling.”

“Do you have a re-cycling can?” I asked.

She said she did, but

“He was in by regular garbage.”

Wasn’t it the Laugh-In Naze who said, “Ver-r-r-r-r-y in-ter-r-r-r-r-es-s-s-ting.”

It should be noted that Judge Graham is the one who named a special prosecutor at Bianchi’s GOP primary opponent Dan Regna’s request to investigate whether Bianchi used tax dollars for political purposes.

In related news, the hearing to decide whether a similar prosecutor should be named to investigate whether McHenry County Sheriff Keith Nygren used tax dollars for political purposes has been postponed. That effort was initiated by Nygren’s primary opponent Zane Seipler.

It’s costly for McHenry County to have liberal Democrats, Melissa Bean in the U.S. House and Jack Franks in Springfield, especially when rules get written that penalize the schools in our districts from receiving grants.

Liberal Dems discriminated against McHenry County and Franks and Bean apparently did not object.

Or, if they did, any such objections had no effect.

There’s an example in a press release with the following headline from the State Board of Education on a federal pass-through grant:

For Immediate Release
June 9, 2010

State Board Awards Nearly $1 Million to Improve School Cafeterias

Of the 57 schools and 43 districts that got the money, not a single one was in McHenry County, as best I could tell. In other words, a million dollars widely distributed and not a dime ended up to McHenry County, one of the state’s largest counties.

The Lake County Juvenile Detention Center got a bit more than $5,000. It qualifies as an academic center because its detainees go to school on site.

“We bought a new milk cooler and an auxiliary refrigerator and we got some new shelving for our walk-in freezer,”

the knowledgeable woman in administration who answered the phone told me.

In how the state board of education does accounting, the $903,000 of grants were described as “nearly $1 million.”

How liberals decided to discriminate against McHenry County was by specifying this requirement:

“Participating sites had to have at least 50 percent of students eligible for free and reduced-priced meals.”

Not 25% or 20% or 30%, but 50%.

I would think some schools in District 300 qualify. Most of those aren’t located in McHenry County, but the district does cover much of Lake in the Hills and Algonquin.  Some of its schools in Carpentersville have high concentrations of poor families.

Not all of the public funds went to public schools.

Beacon Hill Preparatory Academy is a private, not public school, with about 200 students in Harvey. It received $26, 610.

The New Village Leadership Academy is a private school for 60 students in Chicago. It’s not a public school. It received $18,477. How much cafeteria equipment do you need to improve its existing cafeteria to feed 60 students?

Do you think liberal Dems like Bean don’t look at spending to see how much is necessary to meet critical needs?

If someone took the time to investigate what each of these grants was actually going to be used for, it’s likely one would find a lot of spending that went to additional extras and not critical, if-we-don’t-have-the money-we-won’t-have-a-pot-to-cook-the-food-in expenses.

Bean voted to increase wasteful government spending and our national debt to where she can’t explain how we can pay for the interest on the debt in a few years.

Joe Walsh, who is challenging Bean in November, has a different approach. He is committed to common sense spending restraints and moving the country away from a steep cliff of debt and high unemployment.

Whenever I hear President Obama describe his driving the country as if it were a car, it’s obvious he and Bean are driving in Thelma-and-Louise fashion over a huge cliff of debt.

In the Bean-Obama script, they probably exit the car as millionaires or positioned to make big money before it goes hurtling over the cliff.

A jobs announcement that

• Melissa Bean,
• Bill Foster,
• Pat Quinn and
• Alexi Giannoulias

won’t highlight.

500 good paying new jobs.

Caterpillar makes excavators in Aurora.

In a liberal Democrat’s Congressional district.

So where in Illinois did Caterpillar, headquartered in Peoria, decide to build a new plant to build more excavators?

Nowhere in Illinois.

They decided on Victoria, Texas.

How much money was given to Caterpillar to incentivize them to locate those jobs in Victoria?

$300 million?

$200 million?

$100 million?

None of the above.

It was a $1.18 million grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund. Yes, for a measly 1million dollars, 500 good paying new jobs went to Texas.

Democrats from Foster, Bean, Giannoulias to Quinn can chalk this up to as a failure to get 500 new good paying jobs to anywhere around here and anywhere in Illinois.

Illinois Democrats seem to take voters for granted where they don’t have to work to bring good jobs to Illinois.

With new capacity in Texas, once the facility is up and running, you can bet over time, jobs will be shifted more to Texas and less in Aurora.

The prior week Caterpillar announced a plant expansion in North Carolina and 325 new jobs to build skid loaders.

Expanding in North Carolina, but not Illinois.

Not in a liberal Democrat Bill Foster’s district. By voting for Obamacare, he cost Caterpillar a huge earnings hit.

Illinois Democrats like Foster, Bean, Giannoulias and Quinn all favor and support aggressive tax raising policies and aggressive unionism. Something Caterpillar is obviously saying they don’t need more of.

Foster wouldn’t help Cat and voted for changes in tax law that punished Caterpillar and pushed huge costs onto Cat. You can bet Cat couldn’t care what Foster had to say if he even bothered to be involved with this new jobs decision.

Groundbreaking for the 600,000 sq. ft. plant will be in September according to Texas Governor Perry’s press release.

Texas Governor Perry is a Republican. So Illinois Democrats lost 500 new good paying jobs to a Republican politician for a measly $1 million.

It appears Democrats in Illinois don’t have a job creation strategy.

Maybe that’s why the Illinois Chamber of Commerce endorsed Republican Bill Brady for governor.

Losing these new jobs is an enormous failure of first-term Democratic Party Congressman Bill Foster, as Aurora is in his district.

It shows how out of touch he is with a huge employer in his area.

It may become the largest local issue in the Congressional campaign.

One that Randy Hultgren can point to as an obvious new jobs failure when campaigning against liberal Democrat Foster.

It’s pretty easy for people to conclude Foster is inept at this jobs and economy stuff.

How could a Republican do worse?

Losing 500 new jobs that could have been in Illinois, McHenry County or in Aurora to Texas is Rod Blagojevich-like incompetence as a politician.

Perhaps Republicans can rally working Democrat voters to select the Republicans.

Both Democrats Melissa Bean and Bill Foster voted on Tuesday for a $10 billion giveaway to the teachers unions, along with a $16 billion bailout spending to the states.

The politics included cutting serious dollars from food stamps.

To show how the Democrats are into free spending now with “savings” much later you have to look at when the “savings” will happen.

The spending is immediate to maximize the political benefit, but the food stamp cuts won’t go into effect until 2014, well after the next presidential election in 2012. The food stamp program is officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

It’s a blatant political payoff to the unions.

This is Bean’s and Foster’s politics, which Republican challengers Joe Walsh and Randy Hultgren are working hard to point out to voters.

I pointed out Monday how the teachers unions alone will rake in at least $83 million in more teacher dues as a result of this giveaway.

You can expect any mainstream or local newspaper coverage to omit the $83 million union dues part that can fund Democrat campaigns for the November election.

The idea that enormous giveaways to the unions are going to create economic growth with taxpayer money giveaways to unions is absurd on face value and any serious, objective analysis.

Penalizing the poorest Americans to the tune of $57 per month for a family of four to pay for it is political arrogance.

Illegal immigration and not seriously enforcing immigration laws are favored as a practical matter by Bean and Foster.

What they won’t tell Democratic Party voters is how 11 million illegals have forced down wages for millions of working Americans.

An obvious example is one of restaurants able to hire cheap workers rather than hire legal ones who they may have to give higher wages and benefits to.

Here’s one way it’s done.

Small businesses can withhold federal taxes from illegal’s pay checks and never turn in the deducted money to the government. If you turnover the illegals so they don’t stay working there too long, an owner can use the excuse, if ever caught red-handed, that it was a bookkeeping error for that one person, for example.

Think of who now owns the typical convenience store, gas station or dry cleaning business.

Think these owners want the flood gates of illegal immigration to stay open and are willing to reward liberal Democrats with campaign contributions for doing so.

For some reason social justice for liberal Democrats like Bean and Foster means having American wage levels being suppressed in the real marketplace.

It’s supply and demand.

No wonder teens can no longer find summer jobs.

Certain job openings, when they occur, are being slotted for illegals.

When Democrats call for immigration enforcement, at the same time with both hands they are preventing the feds from actually doing so.

Illinois Dems, Bean and Foster, learned a lot from the Blago playbook of politics – you are for, whatever you say you are for.

For example, Blago will prove his innocence by testifying at his own trial.

It will happen, until it doesn’t.

Obviously the Dems are betting any poor people won’t believe Dems voted to cut food stamps because it won’t happen for a few years.