Running scared:
The pro-House GOP Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC is prepping a $1.5 million TV campaign to save a vacant southwestern Pennsylvania seat.
The advertising campaign will begin on Friday and continue through the March 13 special election, according to a party strategist briefed on the plans. The super PAC has already begun a field deployment effort in the district.
The TV blitz is part of a broader Republican effort to keep Pennsylvania’s 18th District, which former GOP Rep. Tim Murphy recently resigned from following allegations that he asked a women with whom he was having an affair to get an abortion. President Donald Trump won the district by 20 points in 2016, and a loss would be widely seen as a major blow for the party.
Yep, because Trump’s endorsement of Saccone in a district that heavily went to Trump isn’t enough to prevent the loss from happening:
Fourth time's the charm?
President Trump, who backed three failed candidates in the last year, threw his support behind congressional candidate Rick Saccone — a conservative from Pennsylvania who once introduced legislation that would allow customers at Chuck E. Cheese to carry guns.
Trump tweeted his “total support” for Saccone just hours before he flew to Pittsburgh and met the candidate running in the first congressional election of the year.
"Will be going to Pennsylvania today in order to give my total support to RICK SACCONE, running for Congress in a Special Election (March 13). Rick is a great guy. We need more Republicans to continue our already successful agenda!" Trump tweeted.
By the way, here are a few things you should know about Rick Saccone. He doesn’t care about the separation of church and state:
In 2012, Saccone sponsored a resolution declaring it the “Year of the Bible” in Pennsylvania because it would serve “as a reminder that we must look to our faith in God and the Holy Scripture to provide us with the strength, wisdom and courage to conquer these great trials.”
In 2013, Saccone sponsored “National Fast Day,” saying we owe our “dependence upon the overruling power of God” and that the only nations that are blessed are the ones “whose God is the Lord.”
Later that year, he sponsored the “National Motto Display Act,” which would put the words “In God We Trust” in every public school — and possibly every classroom — in the state. He later claimed the bill was “bipartisan” because a single Democrat voted in favor of it and that even atheists backed it, citing his conversation with an unnamed leader of the Pennsylvania Atheists, a group which doesn’t exist. (In response, more than a dozen atheists who lead local groups across the state wrote an open letter denouncing Saccone’s bill.) He also said anyone who opposed his bill wasn’t really a patriot.
In 2015, Saccone was still stumping for Jesus. He told a church audience that our nation needed to “return to God through prayer” because that was the best way to prevent the country from descending into a “culture of chaos and destructive behavior.” (I can’t decide if Christians prayed too hard or not enough, based on what’s happened since then…)
He likes torturing people:
In his book, “The Unseen War in Iraq” and in a series of newspaper columns, Saccone argued for the use of such tactics, claiming that so-called enhanced interrogation methods are both legal and effective means for extracting intelligence. International human rights attorneys reject the former claim, and an extensive investigation by the Senate intelligence committee rejects the latter.
Since “the enemy is not an Army, wears no uniform,” Saccone wrote in his book, the U.N. Convention Against Torture does not apply. Saccone dismisses federal law defining interrogation methods that inflict “severe mental pain and suffering” as torture because “the threshold of pain varies among individuals.” Any methods that do not inflict “long lasting pain that leaves permanent physical damage,” Saccone argues, should be considered.
Saccone told local media in Pittsburgh that he arrived in Abu Ghraib “long after the scandal that brought that wretched place such fame.” But the infamy of the scandal, in which contractors and military officers tortured and raped Iraqi detainees at the U.S.-operated prison, left a deep impression on Saccone.
“Images from Abu Ghraib prison, splashed across newspaper front pages and TV news screens for months on end, did more to damage honest discussion than the acts themselves,” he later argued. “The press refused to mention that in our system those who abused prisoners were punished as opposed to our enemies who encouraged abuse.”
In “The Unseen War,” Saccone spends two chapters discussing anecdotes in which other forms of interrogation human rights experts have criticized as torture should be embraced “when administered in proper measure and with proper skill.”
Saccone has long maintained that the simulated drowning of several suspects, a technique known as waterboarding, does not qualify as torture because it is quick and does not inflict permanent physical injury. The technique, he claims, produced “valuable information in the war on terror” when it was used on suspects such as Abu Zubaydah, who he says divulged much-needed intelligence in only 34 seconds of waterboarding.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, however, found that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, so brutally in fact that he became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The Bush administration claimed that Zubaydah was a high-profile member of Al Qaeda and that through brutal interrogation, he had revealed ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
But Rebecca Gordon, the author of “Mainstreaming Torture,” notes that the government later retracted claims that Zubaydah was an Al Qaeda leader and that the supposed intelligence he provided on Saddam has been widely debunked. Torture can indeed prompt a detainee to provide their abusers information, but oftentimes that information is simply false, delivered in hopes of ending the torture.
Gordon also points out that Saccone is simply misinterpreting the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which plainly restricts torture against all people, not only uniformed combatants.
Also, Conor Lamb (D. PA-18) has pointed out that Saccone’s biggest Sugar Daddy is the wealthy union-busting Chicago Cubs owner:
Lamb took aim at the dark money flooding into the district — money intended to decrease the sense of momentum on the Democratic side in this pivotal Western PA special election that will likely draw international attention.
Last week, Speaker Paul Ryan’s Super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), announced that they plan to open two campaign offices in the district. However, unlike the volunteers who were knocking doors, Ryan’s Super PAC intends to hire over 50 paid, full-time canvassers to go door-to-door.
In a bellwether Georgia special election last year, the CLF raised more than $7 million dollars to knock on over 300,000 doors.
Also, last week, the Ending Spending Super PAC backed by billionaire Chicago Cubs owners Joe Ricketts, who fired 115 reporters at Gothamist and DNAInfo after they unionized in November, announced a $1 million ad buy in the #PA18 Special Election.
“It doesn’t surprise me that the other side is relying on outside money because our opponent already said from day one that his agenda was someone’s else agenda. It wasn’t the agenda,” said Lamb. “So, therefore, the owner of the Chicago Cubs [Joe Ricketts] is the one paying for his first TV commercials.”
In a jab at Ricketts — who owns the Cubs through a family trust — Lamb held up a Pittsburgh Pirates cap and implored the crowd to join him in zero degree weather to knock on doors.
“Yes it’s cold, yes it’s going to be an uphill fight for the next 9 weeks, but I think everyone in this room knows that we can do it,” said Lamb to the sound of raucous cheers.
“We have all that we need in this room to win this race,” Lamb told the crowd at Democratic Party headquarters. “You had it already today when you walked in the door. It’s in the hearts and minds of our people, and that’s something that the people with dark money on their side will never be able to catch up to.”
Let’s seal the deal and win this race. Click here to donate and get involved with Lamb’s campaign.