So says The Stakeholder.  It should average out to 9-10 viewings per voter between now and April 11.

There is no candidate for the NRCC to back, so this is going to be purely negative advertising attacking Francine Busby.

This says that the Republicans are scared.  Their field is weak, their leadership is corrupt (including Duke Cunningham, the former holder of CA-50 and Tom DeLay) and they know it. 

All they’ve got left is smear tactics — the choice of a weak party afraid to face the voters with what they’ve really got.

Howard Kaloogian’s campaign seems to have an integrity leak of monumental proportions. First, came his mislabeled Baghdad photo. It could have been an honest mistake. Still, it seems pretty sketchy that a photo that Kaloogian felt demonstrated the pro-terrorist bias of main stream journalists could have been posted for months at Kaloogian’s Move America Forward site and then for months more at his campaign website, without any oversight by the candidate. Whoops.

Today, we read that Kaloogian’s campaign had distributed a mailer that implied that conservative State Senator Tom McClintock endorsed Kaloogian. McClintock says, no, he doesn’t endorse Kaloogian. Whoops again.

In the San Diego Union Tribune, we read about another “mistake” on the Kaloogian website. Apparently, someone decided that a group called the California Pro-life Council had endorsed Kaloogian. They hadn’t and Kaloogian had to have their “endorsement” removed from the site. Another whoops.

More Kaloogian “mistakes” follow.

Sacramento conservative talk radio host, Eric Hogue, has some historical perspective on a potential source of Kaloogian’s problem getting his photos and endorsement straight.

Howard Kaloogian’s campaign is being run by Republican Strategist Sal Russo. This is the same Russo who operated GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Bill Simon’s race against Gray Davis in 2000. A campaign that featured an alleged photograph of Davis receiving a campaign check from the state’s CCPOA ‘in the governor’ office’…problem, it was proven that it was NOT the governor’s office!

Simon lost that election by 5%, and many point to the ‘photo-flap’ as the cause.

How about that, Sal Russo, Kaloogian’s partner in Move America Forward and a principal in the Republican public relations firm of Russo, Marsh + Rogers, made a false photo claim while running the Simon campaign in 2000. Maybe whoops isn’t the right expression.

Hogue has another complaint about the Kaloogian campaign. This one is a lot more critical than just misleading voters who bogus endorsements or doctored photos. Apparently, Move America Forward’s membership list was made available to Kaloogian’s campaign. Now Kaloogian is a director of the non-profit, non-partisan organization and Sal Russo is its chief strategist. It would be unethical and possible violate Move American Forwards tax exempt status if it were to work directly with specific political campaigns. When someone signs up for information from Move America Forward they are not signing up with the Kaloogian campaign. Or are they?

Again from Eric Hogue via California Republic:

“Eric, I have been on MAF’s e-mail list for a long time. When Howard announced he was running for Congress, I suddenly started receiving e-mails and updates from his campaign, even though I never signed up for them. They continue to this day. So it appears that MAF either gave or sold their e-mail list to Howard.”

Nice racket…campaign donations going to MAF for non-profit, fund stunts and chairman endorsements, or…MAF “donated” the email list to Kaloogian, which means non-profits collecting cash (material) and using it to support a former founder in a congressional race.

Isn’t this the race to replace “Duke” Cunningham? Hmm.

From another political campaign and contender for the 50th Congressional…

“This is typical Kaloogian sleaze. If he did not pay fair market value to MAF for the list, then they are breaking the law.”

One mistake earns the benefit of the doubt. Continual mistakes and oversight failure, that’s a pattern. A pattern of dishonesty and deception.

Two new CA-50 congressional race polls surfaced today. Both have similar results and both have much more immediate meaning for the crowded field of Republican challengers than they do for front running Democrat, Francine Busby.

A Lake Research poll, released today by the Busby campaign, conducted among likely voters on March 18-20, found Busby leading the pack with 39% of the projected vote.

Among her top three Republican rivals, Brian Bilbray came in at 15% with conservatives Howard Kaloogian and Eric Roach tied at 7%.

The rest of the Republican pack was far behind.  Big spender Alan Uke and state senator Bill Morrow at 4% and 3% respectively.

A Datamar poll, commissioned by local CBS affiliate KFMB, was conducted four days later than the Lake poll, also among likely voters. Datamar pegged Busby at 36%, but found the top three Republicans very closely clustered. According to Datamar, Bilbray and Roach were in a near dead heat, Bilbray at 11.7% and Roach at 11.2%, with Kaloogian barely trailing these two at 10.7%.

As with the Lake poll, the remainder of the predominantly Republican field is far behind the three Republican front runners. Morrow and Uke continue their lackluster performance at 4.8% and 3% respectively.

The Datamar poll leaves 3.6% undecided, where the Lake poll asks the undecided to select the candidate to which they are leaning.

At the heart of both polls is the reality that Busby is going to dominate the field in the special election and then have to go to battle with Bilbray, Roach or Kaloogian in June. Preliminary polls show that in a head-to-head contest between Busby and either Bilbray or Roach, the contest is too close to call.

On the Republican side, it is hard to determine if the ground Roach appears to have made up between the March 18-20 Lake poll and the March 22-24 Datamar poll is real or just within the two polls’ margin of error.

California News Roundup for today on the flip. Teasers: Pot, minimum wage, end of life choices, three strikes, State Senate District 35, CA-50, salmon, immigration, stem cells, and the race for lieutenant governor.

• Sick people vs. cannabis prohibitionists in the 9th Circuit. I thought we settled this in the 1920’s: prohibition doesn’t work.
• Governor Schwarzenegger is threatening to veto any minimum wage bill that indexes the minimum wage to inflation.
• Assembly Member Patty Berg (D-Whole Damn North Coast) is preparing to introduce a bill to allow Californians to choose the way they face the end of their life.
• L.A. County DA pushes for reform to 3 Strikes.
• LA Times has a rundown of the Special Election for State Senate District 35. Republican lock, but the infighting is fun to watch from the outside.
• The Chron on CA-50. Nothing particularly new, but it is amusing to see the Flash Report simultaneously claim CA-50 as a safe Republican seat and bash the current districting scheme.
• Op-Ed from the Chron on who gets to benefit from state-funded stem cell research.
• SacBee editorial on the looming salmon fishery closure. Turns out there was a plan to restore the fishery — just nobody did nothing in the plan. Shocking.
• New America Media has an article about the various immigration plans and some Latino groups’ reactions.
• Interesting piece from the LA Times about labor’s growing clout in Los Angeles.
• Inside Bay Area profiles Jackie Speier and Liz Figueroa, two of the three Democratic candidates for Lieutenant Governor.

The most recent publicly available poll regarding the special election to replace convicted felon Randy “Duke” Cunningham in the 50th District continues to be bad news from most of the candidates in the crowded field.

A SurveyUSA poll conducted the weekend of March 18-19, finds just four candidates with 20% or higher “favorable” public perception:

Francine Busby (D)  38%
Brian Bilbray (R)  23%
Howard Kaloogian (R)  20%
Eric Roach (R)  20%

As far as familiarity goes, Democrat Busby is far ahead of all candidates. The poll found that most of the vast number of Republican candidates are simply unknown in the district. Only former congressman Brian Bilbray comes close to Busby in name recognition.

When asked about the candidates, district residents had the following degree of unfamiliarity with the top tier candidates.

Francine Busby (D)  20% (unfamiliar)
Brian Bilbray (R)  29% (unfamiliar)
Eric Roach (R) 32% (unfamiliar)
Howard Kaloogian (R) 40% (unfamiliar)

Perhaps the most disappointing revelations of the poll relate to State Senator Bill Morrow, who has achieved a rare political double-double. Despite his years in public service, Morrow is unfamiliar to 35% of the voters in predominantly Republican district and his unfavorable rating is higher than his favorable rating. Morrow’s recent mud slinging support from the California Republican Assembly isn’t likely to do much to improve his already shaky image.

San Diego Politics continues to do an outstanding job reporting on the CA-50 congressional race. On Tuesday, San Diego Politics posted about howardisaliar.com, a website devoted to debunking candidate Howard Kaloogian’s claims that he was a major force in the Gray Davis recall movement. Kaloogian’s campaign has responded that howardisaliar.com is a liar, nana nana nana.

Is former congessman and current candidate, Brian Bilbray a liar?  More follows.

So, the Kaloogian campaign claims that rival Republican candidate Brian Bilbray is behind the howardisalair.com website and that his campaign’s involvement with the site is a violation of Federal Election Commission rules.

Whoops. The Kaloogian forces have some pretty compelling circumstantial evidence that links not only Bilbray’s campaign to the website, but also Congressman Darrell Issa (CA-49), who has endorsed Bilbray and who was deeply involved with the Gray Davis recall.

There is a lot more detail at San Diego Politics. Including an electronic smoking gun that links howardisaliar.com to the same Internet servers as the Bilbray campaign website.

It appears that North County Republicans are having a lot of trouble playing nice together.