-By Warner Todd Huston
The Daily Herald is reporting on a pointed exchange between 22nd District incumbent State Senator Mike Noland and GOP challenger Steve Rauschenberger over the Democrats reliance on revenue from video gambling to fund state pork projects.
Noland was desperately trying to make the GOP out to be the bad guys because some Republicans were for the video gambling law when it was implemented last year but now some of them are balking at the spending that Democrats want to do with the money they think they are getting from gambling.
Noland whined that “now it’s largely Republicans who are trying to create a roadblock,” to use of the money. Noland is trying to claim that state Republicans are merely trying to prevent people getting jobs from the capital bill just before an election, intimating that state jobs on Quinn’s attach would bring Democrat the votes that the GOP wants to prevent.
In reply Rauschenberger made some excellent points.
The Herald quotes Rauschenberger to wit: “Blaming this on the Republicans is kind of like blaming it on witchcraft or voodoo. When do Democrats look in the mirror and take responsibility for the circumstances they’re facing?”
One of the things Democrats are finding vexing is that they planned all this massive spending based on the “revenue” they expected to see from gambling yet many communities (“more than 70” as the Herald has it) have taken advantage of the opt out clause that Republicans insisted be put in the bill. So many, in fact, that the Democrats are trying to write a new law that penalizes communities that opt out because the Democrats aren’t getting all the tall spending cash they expected to get from gambling.
One wonder why they bothered with the gambling law at all if all they were going to do is simply create a new giant tax to slam down on the necks of every community anyway!?
Rauschenberger also said…
Rauschenberger said video gambling is an untested, unstable and, therefore, irresponsible funding mechanism for the capital bill. Democrats are in control and should own up to the flaws in video gambling income that local communities are increasingly finding, he said.
It is absolutely irresponsible to base spending on the morally questionable video gambling law and even more irresponsible to assume that a certain level of new “revenue” is going to come of it and base spending ON that false assumption before those funds are ever realized.
But it’s all business as usual for our profligate Illinois Democrats.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, and the New Media Journal, among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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