Can't wait til next Wednesday til all the SMEARING ends!

This ad is rated 'C' for controversial
Republican's attack on Kind's 'sex study' vote finds home online only
By DAN EGAN
degan@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Oct. 12, 2006

It's apparently quite another to run one so dirty it rates an XXX.

Republican challenger and political newcomer Paul R. Nelson has taken his race against five-term U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-La Crosse) to apparently new territory in Wisconsin politics. Consider his latest video advertisement, which is so far too lewd to find a home on television in western Wisconsin's 3rd Congressional District.

"Ron Kind has no trouble spending your money, he'd just rather spend it on sex. That's right. Instead of spending money on cancer research, Ron Kind voted to spend your money to study the sex lives of Vietnamese prostitutes. Instead of spending money to study heart disease, Ron Kind spent your money to study the masturbation habits of old men," states the 80-second "sex study" ad Nelson has posted on his campaign Web site.

It is an ad, Nelson boasts, that "the mainstream media won't show!"

And for obvious reasons.

"Ron Kind," the ad continues, "even spent your tax dollars to pay teenage girls to watch pornographic movies with probes connected to their genitalia. Ron Kind pays for sex but not for soldiers."

Nelson's ad so irked state Republican leaders that it merited a call last week from Wisconsin Republican Party Executive Director Rick Wiley to Kind's campaign manager, Matt Sweeney, in which, Kind said, Wiley took pains to "denounce" it.

Wiley acknowledged Monday that he called Sweeney about the advertisement last week but said the discussion was "off the record." He said he called Sweeney only to weigh in on what he thought about it.

So what does he think about it?

"It's not a good ad. There is no doubt about it," Wiley said. "(Nelson) would be better served if he sticks to the issues out there that folks want to hear about."

However, on Thursday, La Crosse County Republican Party Chairman Chris Muller disagreed with Wiley and said Nelson and his ad are "shining a light on Ron Kind's disgusting voting record." Muller issued a statement that criticizes GOP leaders for not supporting Nelson.

"Unfortunately, some leaders in the Republican Party have chosen to turn their backs on Paul. This is the kind of weak-kneed leadership that grass-roots activists have been complaining about," Muller said.

Nelson said he recently got a call from Wiley.

"Mr. Wiley expressed his unhappiness with us," Nelson said. "We told him we thought the ad accurately depicts the shameful, deplorable waste of government dollars that we say it does."

Nelson said he did not conceive the ad. In fact, it originally wasn't even his; the advertisement was put together for a congressional hopeful in North Carolina. Nelson said he paid its producer something less than $5,000 to fashion it to target Kind.

"Most voters don't believe this actually happened. They think, at best, this was buried in some large appropriations bill," Nelson said. "This is not the case. (Kind) voted . . . in the middle of the day on a roll call vote . . . They were voting specifically on these (National Institutes of Health) studies."

That vote, according to the non-partisan Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, was on a failed Republican-sponsored amendment in July 2003 to deny funding for five research grants for studies that "had such stated goals as slowing the spread of AIDS, understanding homosexuality and improving the lives of senior citizens as their sexual function declines."

The measure failed 210-212.

As for the teen girls referenced in the ad, "this grant actually proposed to study sexual arousal in 180 lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual 'women' and makes no mention of 'teenage girls' as test subjects as the ad claims," according to the center.

The Annenberg Center reviewed the version of the ad launched by North Carolina Republican hopeful Vernon Robinson. Nelson recycled the same ad, with some minor tweaks.

Kind appears more baffled than upset by his opponent's decision to throw someone else's mud. "That just shows the desperation of this campaign. They're willing to go to any extreme," he said.

Kind has agreed to at least two debates with Nelson. He did so, he said, because he is eager to talk about other issues.

"As I've been traveling around western Wisconsin, there is an overwhelming sense that we're heading in the wrong direction, not only in foreign policy - the situation in Iraq - but also for what is not getting accomplished at home: rising health care, the energy crisis, rising tuition, real wages for working families that have declined, and the huge deficits that have returned that we're heaping on kids' future."

Nelson said: "There is an enormous disconnect between the way American families live their lives and what goes on in Washington, D.C."

Ron Kind
Age: 43
Address; time in district: 205 5th Ave. S., La Crosse; lifelong resident
Occupation: U.S. congressman
Elective Offices: Five terms in the U.S. Congress
Family: Married; two children
Education: Bachelor's degree, Harvard; master's degree, London School of Economics; law degree, University of Minnesota

Paul R. Nelson
Age: 40
Address time in district: 2693 60th Ave., Woodville; 31 years
Occupation: real estate agent
Elective offices, other government experience: none
Family: married; four children
Education: High school diploma