* Business owners are routinely involved in lawsuits, and that can sometimes make for tough times on the campaign trail. This one doesn’t look good for Martin Ozinga…
Chicago-area businessman and 11th Congressional District candidate Martin Ozinga III lost his bid Friday to get out of a deposition in a Marshall County lawsuit. Ozinga’s concrete and construction company is suing an 83-year-old farmer in a real estate dispute. After hearing five people had directly contradicted statements Ozinga made in a sworn affidavit, Circuit Judge John Barra denied his lawyer’s request to block the deposition and ordered it to go forward later this month. […]
Orland Park-based Ozinga Bros. Inc. is suing to force Raymond Kunkel and his family farm corporation to sell 190 acres outside Henry, near the site where the company is developing a gravel pit and Illinois River port project with the city. […]
He claimed in the affidavit he “has had no contact or communication of any kind” with Kunkel.
But Barra heard Friday that Kunkel and four witnesses have signed their own affidavits stating Ozinga met with Kunkel in a rural Henry farmhouse in June 2004 to work out the terms of the deal that is now in dispute.
Not good at all. Allegedly lying under oath and a big man forcing a little guy to sell land to make the big man bigger? Nope. Not good whatsoever.
* Meanwhile, I’ve already told you several times that the Ozinga campaign has been in high attack mode recently, but this piece gives us an idea of some of the themes the Democrats plan to use…
Ryan Rudominer, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said the political environment in Illinois has led to the Republican Party choosing “inexperienced, unprepared, and controversial self-funders who are wildly out of touch with Illinois’ struggling middle-class families.”
* Halvorson tried to claim that she “improved” the recently agreed ethics bill by sitting on it for a year…
“(The Republicans) claim I’ve been sitting on this for a year,” Halvorson said. “I’ve been working on this for five years. I wish it was only a year. We do not, in the Senate, have to pass a bill that we don’t think is right. I did not think the bill in its current form was good enough.”
I don’t see the logic there. The original bill would bar campaign contributions to constitutional officers from contractors under their control who had at least $25,000 in bids or contracts with the state. The “new” bill basically just raises that floor to $50,000. That was worth waiting a year so the governor could continue to raise campaign contributions?
Gov. Rod Blagojevich is relying heavily on state-tied donors to pay off massive legal bills in the face of a federal corruption investigation — a probe that focuses on the very link between state contracts and such fund-raising. […]
• State contractors chipped in at least 55 percent of the $1.5 million Blagojevich raised from individual donors in the last half of 2007.
• Those contractors reaped nearly $6 billion in state business since Blagojevich took office in 2003.
• Road builders and construction companies were the most lucrative source of the campaign cash — $455,750.
* In other congressional campaign news…
Since losing the March special election to now-Rep. Bill Foster, Oberweis has been contacting people involved in the race, people who commented on the race, and people (like yours truly) who covered the race. He’s been meeting with as many of these people as he can, trying to pick their brains and find out where his campaign went off track.
I’m calling it the What Went Wrong World Tour, and I promise, that’s my last snarky comment about it because I honestly respect him for doing this.
According to Oberweis’ new campaign spokesman, David From of Burnham Strategies Group, the idea came from Oberweis. And From said they’ve learned a lot from the meetings so far. One of the most important lessons, he said, has been that voters haven’t gotten to know Jim Oberweis the man — father, grandfather, community member.
I still say that I doubt he can stick to that line. We’ll see.