Tag: ricky gill

DCCC covering up stalking videos?

People may recall that Politico published a story several days ago cataloging what appears to be a somewhat alarming trend: to wit, videos showing ostensible ‘tracking’ of Republican candidates by individuals. I say ostensible because the way that the videos come across are as rather obsessive stalking of said candidates. For example: while it is understood that a candidate will be followed around, casing a candidates’s house from several different angles (account name: WI08RawFootage) or deliberately putting another candidate’s address (account name: AR01RawFootage) online, is generally considered to be, well, creepy. And that’s what is happening.

Now here’s the thing. As Politico noted, the DCCC itself is apparently “unapologetic” about these activities, and ready to justify this practice:

House Republicans have spent this entire Congress trying to hide that they’re protecting benefits for millionaires and perks for themselves instead of protecting the middle class, but we won’t let them keep it secret any longer,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Jesse Ferguson wrote in an email. Democratic officials said placing the videos on the DCCC’s website and YouTube serve a useful purpose, most notably making the footage available to friendly outside groups for use in TV commercials. That way, they don’t violate laws against coordinating with those groups.

Which is a very interesting statement, and one which will be revisited in a little bit… because there’s something that Politico didn’t catch: the accounts that Politico found have been sanitized.

Just not well enough. Continue reading DCCC covering up stalking videos?

Jerry McNerney (D, CA) can’t find an in-district place to live?

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: the Ricky Gill campaign is busily bringing up the odd detail that his likely opponent for CA-09 – Rep. Jerry McNerney, who was essentially accused by ProPublica last month of having that district redrawn for his benefit – has not yet moved into CA-09.  Given that McNerney’s been putting this move off since at least last July, I think that this is a perfectly reasonable observation of the Ricky Gill campaign to make.  I understand that redistricting can make for temporary confusion and delay until things straighten out again, but at this point failing to find a new place to live in the district that you want to represents a certain lack of, ah, drive*.

As you probably recall, we interviewed Ricky last month at RedState.  Check out the interview.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*We will now pause while Democrats search frantically for any Republican legislator from the last thirty years who did not instantly relocate his or her primary residence because of redistricting.  Alas for them, it’s not really unlikely that any hypothetical GOP legislator had gone through the trouble of (allegedly) designing their district first.  In other words: shenanigans are one thing, but sloppy, ill-planned shenanigans?  That’s kind of… embarrassing, no?

RS Interview: Ricky Gill (R CAND, CA-09 PRI)

Before we talk about this race, some quick background on this district: as you probably know, California did some severe internal redistricting after 2010.  What you probably didn‘t know – but probably suspected anyway – is that the Democrats who run the state managed to pervert was supposed to be a nonpartisan process by the blatant use of astroturf, front groups, and damaging and/or starving the ability of redistricting commissions to detect both.

The not-exactly-known-for-being-nice-to-conservatives-and-libertarians group ProPublica has a lot of the gory details; held up for particular disgust in that article is the case of Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney, who had on the payroll Paul Mitchell, a redistricting consultant who just happened (according to ProPuiblica) to draw the maps for a supposed grassroots site called OneSanJoaquin.  OneSanJoaquin provided astroturf arguments to the commission designing the CA-09 district: “[t]ranscripts show that more than a dozen people delivered or sent the canned testimony to the commission, which accepted it without question. There’s no sign that commissioners were aware some of the letters had been downloaded from the mysterious OneSanJoaquin page. ”  End result?  McNerney is now literally moving from an old district that he barely won to a new one that’s scored as D+7.  Yes, literally: the man doesn’t even live in this district.

And thus we come to Ricky Gill, who is somewhat determined to not let McNerney do that without a fight.  Ricky is a local resident who was appointed to California’s State Board of Education by the previous governor; and while he’s very young (when he announced his candidacy earlier this year he was only 24) he’s already demonstrated an ability to outraise his opponent*.  We talked about the race and the district: Continue reading RS Interview: Ricky Gill (R CAND, CA-09 PRI)