I can count on you for...

I'll tell you one thing, if I ever need to do an enormous number of different mass mailings, I know I can count on IL-10 Congressional Candidate Brad Schneider. I've received about 9 mailings in the past month or so, all of them different, but all of them saying pretty much the same thing...that Steny Hoyer loves him. Good for you, Brad! You'll be my resource if I ever need to discuss things with Steny.

If I ever need to accumulate a large group of high school students, I know I can count on Ilya Sheyman. He had his group at the Northfield TownshipDemocrats endorsement hearing, all in appropriate Ilya t-shirts, but none of them able to vote in the meeting and most of them probably cannot vote at all.

Ilya's also fairly good at getting his people to attack the other candidates while pretending he's running a completely positive campaign. It's like he has his own Mitt/Newt-style superPAC, except without the large amounts of money. The ever so underfunded, PCCC (the "Bold Progressives") his been caught sending around an email stating that Ilya's "opponent" 'supported Republicans who vowed to cut Social Security,' but failed to name the  opponent Apparently, they're happy to keep their folks assuming it's all of them. Alan Grayson wrote a post on Kos stating that Ilya is the candidate who fought Robert Gibb's attack on the "professional left." Grayson forgot that Sheyman and his local MoveOn actually participated in Gibb's attacks by attacking single payer advocates during the health care debate. Ilya would be your go-to guy on supporting the President every time he backs down which might come in handy because the President just backed down again on contraception.

Last night, I had the opportunity to continue my discussions with John Tree. Tree answered some questions about his experience. I already knew that he ran a marketing company and had previously owned a granola company, and marketed various consumer products in the corporate world. He knows a lot about healthy food and cereal. He'd be the go to guy on logistics, statistics and marketing of Rice Krispies treats.

However, cereal is probably not going to be on the Congressional agenda in 2013 much. So what else does John Tree bring to the table? In the mid-1990s, as an active duty officer, Tree was the Chief of West Mediterranean Logistics for the 16th Air Force at Aviano Air Base, Italy, responsible for Air Force logistics support for Tunisia, Morocco and Israel. He never met Mark Kirk at Aviano as Kirk was over there in 1999.

John, a full Colonel with TS and SCI clearance, freely states that he's not and never was an Air Force pilot. Now, John is an Air Force reservist, frequently workings at the Pentagon in logistics. Logistics folks are the people who assess  military resources and where to put them, often moving large numbers of people and equipment on a dime. One example John gave was the nuclear disaster in Japan. He was working at the Pentagon when that happened and he worked on the project of diverting resources to Japan as quickly as possible. There are also environmental components to logistics work and John can easily talk about and work on environmental issues such as clean energy and water safety and access.

Tree also answered the Ilya camp's new charge, one that has them absolutely Republican-style fake indignant, that he had not voted in primaries. John told my friend and I that it's military custom for officers not to vote in partisan elections. It's meant to cut down on political partisanship in the military. I can understand that because I always found it rather offensive when Mark Kirk used his military service for political gain and leveraged his political power to enhance his military resume. to enhance his political power. John promised me that we'd never have to see pictures of him in a fake flight suit pretending he's a pilot.

So, basically, John has experience in understanding, finding and allocating resources both internationally and locally, in businesses large and small and in the military. I think that's one of the major factors contributing to  John's campaign suddenly taking off as it has. He has skills that are necessary to effectively represent the District in Congress.