Ethically-challenged sacrificial lamb Raczkowski launches a deceptive smokescreen

There is no doubt that all the hype that this is a Republican year is designed to suppress voter turnout, but it is a strange year when the likes of ethically-challenged sacrificial lamb Andrew Raczkowski has a chance against U.S. Rep. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township.

Peters has been running some very effective and true ads that highlight some of Raczkowski’s trouble with the truth. Raczkowski is being sued by his former business partners for fraud who claim that, as the head of Star Tickets until earlier this year, Raczkowski owes them more than $6 million after grossly underestimating the number of tickets sold for concerts at the 2008 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota.

According to the lawsuit, representatives of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally commented that the crowd for the Kenny Chesney concert – one of the performers along with Kiss and John Fogerty, alone “was the largest concert crowd ever at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally (and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was in its 68th year). An expert from the School of Engineering at North Carolina State University has viewed various photographs taken of the concerts and has opined that the crowd for the Kenny Chesney alone exceeded 42,000 people,” yet Raczkowski claimed he only sold 25,000 tickets for all three shows combined. The Kiss Army alone can sell 25,000 tickets.

The filing says “the simplest way to determine the number of persons who actually attended the concerts would be to take a count of the number of ticket-stubs collected at the gates of the concerts.” However, the claim is that Raczkowski took the unusual step of immediately seizing the boxes containing the ticket stubs and destroying them to jibe with his claim of 25,000 tickets. The lawsuit claims that in Raczkowski’s haste to cover up his crime he “ended up destroying more ticket-stubs than the number of ticket sales reported.”

Raczkowski’s response to the Peters’s ad has been to sue him to stop the truth from coming out. He figures he already has a team of lawyers on his payroll, so what the heck, what’s a $100 filing fee to the big corporate dollars rolling in to the Raczkowski campaign. So much for tort reform because he has zero change of winning.

But this is nothing but a smokescreen. In fact, he has taken the lead of fellow GOP Congressional candidate Rob Steele and misrepresented himself.

According to MLive, “Raczkowski supporters, calling themselves the Oakland County Truth Squad, protested on Thursday outside the Berkley Public Library as the Peters campaign debuted the ad.”

Like Steele calling his supports “Steelworkers” to make people think he has labor support, Raczkowski is trying to make people think he has the support of the Michigan Truth Squad, a project of the Center for Michigan that debunks political ads and claims in the current election cycle.

Health care petition drive signs up GOP donors

Political consultants Joe DiSano and Joe Munem offered more ammo for their theory that the petition drive to stop 32 million Americans with no health care insurance from getting it and place a constitutional amendment on the ballot to exempt Michigan from the historic health insurance reform law is little more than an exercise to build a mailing list of Republican supporters and contributors for the upcoming election.

The Astroturf “tea parties” are a Republican effort, and on their April 24 pod cast, the Republican and Democratic strategists connected the dots to show the petition drive is an effort to collect names and addresses the Republicans can solicit support and money from.

DiSano and Munem first floated that theory earlier this month, and in talking about the Republican primary in Michigan’s 9th Congressional district for the chance to run against U.S. Rep. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, they again floated that theory.

Perennial candidate Andrew "Rocky" Raczkowski and Paul Welday are the Republicans in the race. DiSano and Munem made the point that Glenn Clark, the Republican Chair of the 9th Congressional District who is supposed to neutral, is working for Strategic National Consulting, a Republican political consulting firm owned by Chuck Yob.

Raczkowski is a client of Strategic National, so how can Clark be neutral? Clark is also, apparently, the chair of the Oakland County Tea Party,” what ever that is.

One things political consultants do is collect and sell to candidates lists of supporters and potential donors. That’s exactly want Clark is doing with this petition drive, and he is directly getting the names right from the petitions.