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Robo-lying for Luke Esser
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| Parent(s) |
Race
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| Contributor | Ralphie |
| Last Edited | Ralphie Oct 18, 2006 01:00pm |
| Logged |
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| Category | Blog Entry |
| News Date | Monday, October 16, 2006 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | On Saturday I was sitting at my computer and enjoying a cup of coffee when the phone rang. The “conversation” went something like this:
Me: Hello?
(*silence*)
Me: Hello? Hello?
Recording: An ethics investigation has been opened against Rodney Tom. Rodney Tom took compensation for days he didn’t work. Rodney Tom has one of the worse attendance records in the legislature. Rodney Tom has missed 84 votes. Again, Rodney Tom is being investigated for ethics violations.
(*click*)
What an interesting call…Rep. Rodney Tom (D WA-48), who is running for the Washington Senate, is under an ethics investigation. And so close to the election. This must be Sen. Luke Esser’s (R WA-48) lucky week!
The problem is, nothing in the phone call is true. Some organization is making robo-calls on behalf of Luke Esser that are outright lies. Whoever is making the robo-calls is doing so anonymously, as there was no indication as to who is paying for or endorsing the calls. Is this the politics of desperation, or what?
The second point in the phone call, that Rodney Tom has one of the “worse attendance records,” is apparently a lie as well. In a previous post, I mentioned a push-poll, seemingly from the Esser campaign, that offered this same meme without actually claiming it as true. The robo-call asserted it as the truth. I contacted Rep. Tom’s legislative office to ask about this. I learned that he missed no votes in the 2006 session, and his calendar showed him there for all days of the session. But I also learned that attendance records are not kept, as such. In order to assert that Tom had the worse record, one would need to go through, by hand, voting records of every legislator and check for days that they did not vote. I sincerely doubt anyone has done that, but I started doing that for Tom, and see he only missed votes on about 6 days since 2002—an average of 1.5 days per session. |
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