Rosemary's Risky Business!

Note -- PRU will be coloring a bit outside the lines today, but when garbage like this lands in the mailboxes of unsuspecting Park Ridge residents, we can't resist.



The PRU Crew was doing some after-election reading and ran across this on a dailyherald.com blog called 'Animal Farm' -- which by the by we think is a pretty great name for a political blog.

Blog author JP wrote the post which contains the following quote from State Representative Rosemary Mulligan: “I had my people ready to vote for McCain. Then they put Palin on (the ticket) and they look and me and say, ‘What do you want me to do now?’” (sic)

We guess Rosemary had a "eureka" moment while searching her soul for an answer, and then she had her campaign and political operatives mail out the following, which some faithful PRU readers and Park Ridge residents were kind enough to send us --












We know who "Citizens for Rosemary Mulligan" are, but we had never heard of the "Independent Campaign Committee." So, we looked them up. And we still aren't too sure about who they are, but if they're sending out political mail with Obama's picture on it, we're willing to take a wildass guess that they're probably on the liberal side of the aisle.

And as long as we were digging around the Illinois State Board of Elections Campaign Disclosure website, we decided to take a look at Rosemary's disclosure filings too -- to see if Rosemary had declared an in-kind contribution from the "Independent Campaign Committee", who were kind enough to inform the voters of Park Ridge of Rosemary's political similitude to Barack Obama.

We found that the $84,058.76 Rosemary reported in in-kind contributions came from three sources:

1 -- the Illinois Republican Party gave Rosemary $30,607.84

2 -- the House Republican Organization gave Rosemary $26,144.88

3 -- Personal PAC gave Rosemary $27,306.04

Personal PAC gave more in-kind moola to Mulligan than the House Republican Organization. And can anybody guess who is largely responsible for funding Personal PAC? We'll give you a hint -- the label starts with a capital "D" and ends in "emocrats."

For those of you not familiar with who Personal PAC is, they bill themselves as "a bi-partisan political action committee dedicated to electing pro-choice candidates to state and local office in Illinois." And from what we can tell, they do conduct themselves in a bi-partisan way. But one of our faithful PRU readers is of the opinion that Personal PAC will bend over backwards to ruthlessly endorse pro-choice Republicans because there aren't all that many currently holding office -- and Personal PAC needs to maintain the appearance of bi-partisanship.

Welcome people to a taste of the more local version of what columnist John Kass calls "the Combine."

What the PRU Crew believes is that politicians have long understood partisan politics only really matters to ignorant voters that can't be bothered to pay attention, and easy labels are a useful tool for confronting the ignorant. So we strongly suggest that the next time somebody like Rosemary's Political Baby tries to play you for a fool, short-hand the discussion, and warn you that he's the only thing holding back the marauding Democrat horde from invading Park Ridge, tell Rosemary's Political Baby they're already here and they helped get Rosemary re-elected.