Republican Dirty Tricks Campaign -- Don't believe the lies

With a clearly inferior candidate, the Republican smear machine has one strategy left: lie, lie, and lie some more. Following up on an outrageous "2005 Official Democrat and Progressive Voter Guide", they have started using a recorded phone message that begins with what sounds like Tim Kaine expressing his opposition to gay rights and abortion. In actually this message is the product of the "Honest Leadership for Virginia PAC" an organization that has donated 100% of its money ($2,852,603) towards Jerry Kilgore.

The purpose of this (possibly illegal) smear campaign is to discredit Tim Kaine among progressive voters and to suppress the vote by taking Tim Kaine's political views from their context. I would ignore anything that you hear from an automated dialer in the next 48 hours.

You can read more about this story at Raising Kaine and at Daily KOS

Updated, Monday November 7, 1:48am:

The PACs official website, www.honestleadershipforvirginia.com, seems to have been pulled offline, but a little research reveals that the Honest Leadership for Virginia PAC is not only Kilgore's #1 contributer, but was created and funded by the Republican Governor's Association. They also were responsible for the attack ad entitled “Another One” which showed clips of John Kerry and implied that Kaine raised property taxes as Mayor of Richmond (Kaine actually twice cut property taxes as mayor).

The excellent Raising Kaine site has more on the RGA front and its connections to the dirty money of Delay and Abramoff and the media's failure to follow up on it.

If you think this type of campaigning crosses the line, perhaps you could try contacting the “Honest Leadership” PAC (located at 1251 Dartmouth Ct. Alexandria , VA, 22314) by calling them at: 703-751-0612
(contact info taken from www.vpap.org)