A month back a few of us folks in the northwest Chicago suburbs launched an online fundraising drive for our local township Democratic organization. We got a bit more than half-way to our goal and due to a variety of events I ended up putting it on the back-burner.

Well, back-burner no more... I'm asking you to help me bring it to a boil.

Our goal is very modest: only $750. But, the results would be huge.

$750 was chosen because that's about how much it costs to keep the local Dem office open. What's that you say? Just another office? Big whoop? Read on...

This is a repost of yesterday's diary, which seemed to attract the lunch crowd. Hopefully today, the breakfast crowd will have a chance to offer their help.

Plus, we were issued a challenge by a Second Amendment fan yesterday afternoon. (This fundraiser has nothing to do with 2A, but the guy seems to be a critic of the low-dollar goal and our -- ahem -- "pace" in meeting that goal.)

Read the repost of yesterday's request below the fold.

"My friends..."

If you believe in the 50-state strategy and value the work of grassroots volunteers organizing in our neighborhoods and communities all across the country, please help keep one of those local efforts going this year.

I and a few friends have been trying to raise funds online for the Wheeling Township Democrats for a few days now. This is vitally important because our Dem organization is smack dab in the middle of Chicago's historically Republican northwest suburbs.

I say "historically" because, thanks to the hard work of many people (one hard-nosed individual in particular), this neck of the woods is definitely turning purple, if not downright blue.

(Note: I didn't see this diaried yet. If it has been I'll delete this one.

I've been posting about our local fundraising efforts the past few days, but this smear by Republicans John Boehner and Eric Cantor seemed more important.)

While it's despicable that GOP "leaders" such as Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) would choose to slice out only the few phrases that would make the presumptive Democratic nominee for president look bad (and they have to actually ignore those phrases' real intent even at that), it's equally deplorable that a well-respected journalist such as the Sun-Times' Washington Bureau chief and political columnist Lynn Sweet would let them get away with the distorted half-quoting via her own half-baked he-said/they-said stenography at her to-the-minute blog.

[FYI, Lynn Sweet has been a Chris Matthews regular as she has covered the Obama campaign from one of his hometown papers for well over a year.]

We're more than a third of the way through our fundraising to honor Pat Botterman's legacy and more than a third toward our goal -- right on track.

If you haven't already, please donate what you can.

As if you needed a reminder of Pat's impact on our little neck of the woods, check out the impromptu eulogies left at Capitol Fax when Rich Miller reported on his death... A lot of heartfelt mourning, for good reason, from Dems, Republicans, family and friends.

I introduced the Wheeling Township Dems Donor Drive online yesterday as a way to honor my friend and well-known Illinois Dem "operative" Pat Botterman.

Wow, one day down and only 9 to go and already the Wheeling Dems Donor Drive is off to a great start. That, of course, is thanks in no small part to the wonderful help of local activist and Botterman Alum Aaron Krager over at Faithfully Liberal who set up a goal of $250 over the next ten days.

In 10 days, the Wheeling and Palatine Township Democrats will be hosting a joint fundraiser (PDF) to help cover costs for keeping the only Democratic office in the northwest suburbs up and running.

The Wheeling Dems in particular will also be awarding the First Annual Pat Botterman Leadership Award to honor the legacy of the late, great Wheeling Township Committeman who died suddenly on March 10th.

Over the next 10 days, leading up to the brunch fundraiser, I'll be asking folks to help out the Wheeling Dems with a wee bit of a virtual fundraiser.

Two Illinois poliblog institutions, The Capitol Fax Blog (by political journalist Rich Miller) and ArchPundit (by political blogger Larry Handlin), are producing primers for the American people and the self-proclaimed media of record (not that the "national" media feels a need to be bothered with actual details when there's a good soap opera to splash some ink on).

For those interested in learning just what Sen. Barack Obama's not-very-much-of-a-relationship with Chicago developer Tony Rezko is, read up...

Boo hoo.

Illinois Review editor Fran Eaton is rather upset that  her bud John Bambenek is again being pilloried as a fool for his incredibly dense lack of reasoning when it comes to the application of electoral law. For some reason her dour mood has led her to pull a completely idiotic Potemkin argument out of her cracker jack box of irrational rants by suggesting that the American folks over at Daily Kos must be overly violent due to ... video games.

What?!

I don't take kindly to partisan attacks, least of all partisan attacks on people's faith (or even their atheism should that be their choice in our free society). I've written a number of times about crass, hypocritical smears coming from the ill-informed editor of the conservative blog Illinois Review, Fran Eaton, a long-time and well-documented Obama hater and former Alan Keyes campaigner.

Ms. Eaton is hardly alone in her partisan, anti-Christian zeal.

I have written several times before, as have others (here and here by ArchPundit plus here by Pastor Dan), about the anti-Christianism emanating from conservative Illinois Review editor Fran Eaton...

(Background: The conservatives recently wrapped up a week or so of faux outrage over Sen. Obama's lack of sufficient flag pin wearing...)

Anyone else notice that former Gov. Mitt "Multiple Choice" Romney was naked pinless (link to video, with commercial) on stage at the CNBC/MSNBC debate this afternoon?

Maybe, he had on his star-spangled underoos instead.

Let me get this straight -- Fundamentalist Dominionists feel a sense of entitlement and thus engage in a frivolous lawsuit to try and impose their way of revolutionary, outside-the-norm thinking on an entire state (California in this case) after becoming upset because a secular collegiate system declared their quasi-education standards lacking due to a religious-based rewriting of historical and factual information so as to actually remove factual info to the point of rendering the Dominionists' education meaningless.

It's fine if you want to educate students from a religious point of view, but this lawsuit by Dominionists against the University of California school system is beyond ridiculous. Basically, the UC has decided that any religious-based or secular-based high schools need to meet certain minimum standards in teaching information to their students. They've rejected curricula from both religious-based and secular-based schools due to their curricula being under those standards.

The recently completed Yearly Kos conference certainly seems to have thrown partisan-conservatives of all stripes into a tizzy. Indeed, one recent offspring of the burgeoning anti-Kos rhetoric has led Daily Kos diarist James Boyce to note that he is not anti-Semitic.

This might seem like an odd thing for someone to feel a need to write about, but Mr. Boyce's diary is a direct response to an email recently making the rounds in Illinois's Tenth District. (I myself do not know Mr. Boyce, though Mr. Boyce does seem to know Jay Footlik one of the Democratic candidates seeking to challenge Mark Kirk. Mr. Footlik is himself Jewish and his wife is Israeli, according to the Footlik for Congress website.)

The email itself is the basest form of attack by innuendo and smear, replete with half-quotes, lies, and twisted words. The acidic email is aimed squarely at Democratic Tenth CD candidates Dan Seals and Jay Footlik.

On Thursday, Illinois political journalist Rich Miller sent me a copy of a press release from Sen. Dan Kotowski's office. (I posted on the ongoing police investigation into alleged threats against Sen. Kotowski earlier.)

Here is Sen. Kotowski's statement:

Illinois State Senator Dan Kotowski (D-Park Ridge) says threatening phone calls, faxes, and letters his office received during the past few months were handed over to local law enforcement including the Illinois State Police.

Kotowski says, "When someone calls my office saying, ‘I have a gun. I am going to come and kill you’, I have to worry about my safety, and the safety of our staff." Kotowski added, "That is why I followed proper procedure and forwarded any correspondence with threatening material to the Illinois State Police."

(statement continues after fold)

Still more resonance over the weekend on the Obama Campaign's memo slamming Sen. Clinton's chumminess with outsourcing interests. This memo was supposedly written by someone low on the campaign totem pole, who was directed by a middle-manager to make it more harsh, according to Rich Miller's CapFax blog.

UPDATE: Rich Miller indicates he has sources telling him it was no middle manager, but was in fact Obama camp higher-up Robert Gibbs that ordered the 'harsher' rewrite ... Gibbs has a history of engaging in internecine bloodbaths and bullshit.

I'm a graphic designer helping out a local school board campaign -- election is in just over a month.

The folks I'm helping are running against a group of social conservative challengers. One of their allies (the cons) who managed to get elected a few years back is fresh off a drive to ban books. She lost, but would have a majority if all the challengers get elected this year.

I and a few hundred other folks are working to avoid that (the school district's as big as a Congressional district).

Details on the help I'm looking for after the flip.

So the nasty RNC robocalls worked. Guess what? Rahm Emanuel has half a middle finger and it still works too.

They won't go to jail. They likely won't even be fined. Heck, they probably won't even be investigated. It's up to us Americans to put a stop to it. We need to quit our whining and do something proactive about it.

If it wasn't Ken Mehlman running an obscene number of robocalls at the Dems' expense, it's going to be Karl Rove inviting bums to a Dem fundraiser, bugging Repubs' own phones and blaming the Dems, or the Maryland GOP printing highly questionable flyers, or Republican-paid Kerry-haters trumping up bogus BS about his combat service.

We already know they'll stoop to any level. Playing dirty is all a cheater has left in order to steal win.

Why do we whine about it? We must act.