-By Warner Todd Huston
Despite claims made earlier in his campaign, Democrat candidate for Senate Alexi Giannoulias has said that he’ll be quite happy to take campaign donations from lobbyists as he vies to take Barack Obama’s old Senate seat this year.
WGIL News reports that Giannoulias claimed earlier in the campaign that he wouldn’t take donations from lobbyists. However, Giannoulias limited the scope of that claim to encompass only federal lobbyists and political PACs. He has taken donations from state lobbyists.
The difference between a state lobbyist and a federal lobbyist seems vague with Giannoulias, but he claims there is a difference.
WGIL also reports that the Mark Kirk campaign, Alexi’s GOP opponent, is saying that Giannoulias has already taken $87,626 from lobbyists. The Giannoulias campaign disputes that number but has not released any figures to prove Kirk wrong.
As reported earlier, Kirk has a fundraising lead over Giannoulias, so perhaps that is why Giannoulias is suddenly finding a difference between state-registered lobbyists and federal ones?
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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. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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