Time for a Sharp Stick in the Eye…

When a fellow Republican is attacked by liberals, I am usually the first to give them the benefit of the doubt, pending the facts. But it appears that might be alone in that practice.

Fellow Sacramento area Blogger Jason Daniel has chosen to join local liberal media and a political adversary of mine to take a swipe at yours truly.

At his website The Eyes of Argus Daniel writes:

Sacramento City Council will create an ethics commission for investigating campaign money violations because Election Loser Craig DeLuz blew campaign money on a silly rug and cross country trips

His comments are based on a Sacramento Bee article published last week regarding the City of Sacramento’s Campaign Matching Funds Program. The article reported the following:

The one candidate to receive matching funding, Craig DeLuz, ran against Sheedy in 2004 and collected nearly $17,000 in city funds.

A 2005 audit discovered that DeLuz used his campaign funds to fly to Washington, D.C., Chicago and San Francisco and purchase a rug for his office. Receipts were sometimes handwritten.

DeLuz defended his expenditures, saying it was necessary to raise money from people living outside the city in a tough fight against an incumbent.

DeLuz didn't violate the ordinance as written, the audit found.

Now I first commented on these false allegations when they first surfaced back in September 2005 in my post “What a ‘Sheedy’ Thing to Do!” where I wrote the following:

First of all, the total amount for the items mentioned above was a little over $725. $286 went for a stay at the State GOP Convention and $321 was for a fundraising trip to Washington DC (with a two hour layover in Chicago.) That makes a grand total $607 in travel expenses on two fundraising trips.

And as for the $126 spent on a rug; we had a space for volunteer operations donated to the campaign for the final three months. The storefront location consisted of bare walls and a dusty concrete floor. But we were grateful to have it. So in order to make the place a little more pleasant for volunteers, we purchased a large roll of carpet remnant to roll out on the floor to cover the bare concrete floor and keep the dust from flying around.

I shared this information with the reporter who covered this issue back in 2005 and yet she repeated the same false statement in last week’s article. But as much as that bugs me; what really upsets me is when a guy like this jumps on the liberal’s bandwagon and attacks a fellow Republican without getting all the facts. It especially gets my goat that he could have easily contacted me and ask me what was up.

Before posting this piece, I attempted to contact Jason via the email address on his website and got no response. I wanted to speak with him to clarify what was going on and give him an opportunity to publish the whole truth. Unfortunately, four days later I have heard nothing. But it took him less that 24 hours to slander my name. I now know where his priorities lie.

It is this sort of irresponsibility that gives bloggers a bad name. It is why we have such a difficult time being taken seriously by the Main Stream Media. In the past I have enjoyed his incite on local issues affecting Elk Grove. But I now have to question the accuracy of what he writes along with his motivation for writing it. I no longer can count on him as a credible source of information. That’s really too bad!

*********

UPDATE 2/28/2007

Hours after this post went up, I recieved an email from Mr. Daniel apoligizing for not getting back to me sooner. Unlike most of us bloggers, he actually has a life... go figure!

In his email he stated the following about his comments:

I have not checked but I hope that you do post a responce. I would have to check into it a bit before I retract anything. Besides I'm not sure how I added on to a sac bee hatchet job. I just posted a link and you happen to be connected to the topic. I don't blog on you much. And I'm not sure what your buying a rug for your campaign head quarters amounted to your questioning my conservatism. I would think that me not being to hip to you buying a rug (when we all know that you got matching city money to run) with campaign money, would be considered a Conservative position. I don't really read you blog because you tend to blog on state and national issues so I did not read your defense posting.

I did not remove any benefit of doubt to your spending. The real issue is the fact that you made some decisions with the money that seem to be questionable. it stands to reason that if its an issue 2 years later, you might have to ease up on defending yourself and agree that it did raise eyebrows.

I will take more time to read your position when i get the chance this weekend.

I would say that if you would like to write an opinion piece on the issue of this campaign reform movement i would post it for a day as a guest piece. Let me know what you think.

I will contact you next week.

And to his credit he didn't even wait until next week, but followed up the same evening with the following:

Well, I just saw your blog posting. Bravo. Thanks for lighting me up. fair is fair. The offer to write a post for Argus is still on the table.

Good stuff though! If you think that MY creditability is in question, I would give it a litte more time and thought. I would'nt get so caught up with your Battle against liberals that you hit everybody with your vitriol. Maybe the point of my mention of you is that I think that your actions might have been a little irresponsible? Not anything to do with my turning to the liberal dark side. LOL!!

Fair enough Jason! All is good!