From The Columbus Dispatch, news from yesterday that you may have already seen regarding Ohio state employees conducting deep record searches on Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher. Somewhere, someone must have noted the most unbelievable part of the whole defense: The inspiration behind the searches.
Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, disclosed today that computer inquiries on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher were not restricted to a child-support system.
The agency also checked Wurzelbacher in its computer systems to determine whether he was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes, she wrote.
Jones-Kelley made the revelations in a letter to Ohio Senate President Bill M. Harris, R-Ashland, who demanded answers on why state officials checked out Wurzelbacher.
Harris called the multiple records checks “questionable” and said he awaits more answers. “It’s kind of like Big Brother is looking in your pocket,” he said.
If state employees run checks on every person listed in newspaper stories as buying a business, “it must take a lot of people a lot of time to run these checks,” he said. “Where do you draw the line?”
The checks were run after the news media reported that Wurzelbacher was considering buying a plumbing business with more than $250,000 in annual income, Jones-Kelley wrote.
Oh come on. How stupid does she think the public is? The inspiration behind the deep background searches – and the release of the information to media allies, mind you – was the revealing and damaging unscripted remarks Joe Wurzelbacher elicited from Barack Obama.
Why does Bill Harris, President of the Senate in Ohio, even afford this dissembling explanation any sense of plausibility?
Hardball is being played from the top of the campaign, to the grassroots individual actions to the ‘underground’ funneling money via the Obama campaign’s intentionally fraud-friendly online campaign donation operation.
Yet Harris gives plausibility by responding that “it must take a lot of people a lot of time to run these checks. Where do you draw the line?”
His response should have been, “Oh, please. He was not being systematically destroyed because he said he wanted to buy a business, and Jones-Kelley’s department’s role in it wasn’t because of that either.”
When will Republicans stop showing up to a tackle football game with red and yellow flags hanging from their waists and unprepared for an impact sport?
NOTE: Such checks are run by state departments when an individual or group actually files to purchase a company, not when they express interest, whether on air or over a beer at the pub. That’s the whole purpose of filling out the reams and reams of official forms and applications. Jones-Kelley’s lying explanations should be treated as such, without equivocation.
I should lay off Bill Harris perhaps. He did, after all, demand the report in the first place. But for crying out loud, afford such abuse of government position and access by state employees no quarter when clearly lying through their teeth.
