Pima County Democrats are getting into a tizzy now that Gene Chewning has started a TV advertising campaign against Grijalva. The website Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion attacked Gene and ran off to the FEC website to check out Chewning’s campaign contributions. Unfortunately, Tedski, (RRR’s owner and webmaster) doesn’t know how to run a search through the FEC website and came back and complained that there was no listing of such a candidate, or contributions to him. When readers told him that Gene was listed on the FEC website, he backed off a bit, but still complained that there were still no records of contributions to him.

If Tedski took the time to read up on federal campaign contributions, he would know that since Gene didn’t declare until after July 1, 2007, he isn’t required to make any contribution reports yet.

So, why are the Democrats so worried about Chewning’s contributions? It’s probably the content of the TV ad that hit Grijalva on his ethics votes. It seems that Grijalva didn’t support a bipartisan bill that would investigate indicted congressmen. Why, you may ask? Maybe it’s because the FEC and local officials might want to check out Grijalva’s expenditures first.

Maybe Raul Grijalva doesn’t want anyone to know that his biggest campaign expenditure is for catering. In fact, one out of every three dollars spent by Grijalva’s campaign committee is spent on catering. In Washington, “catering” is often a euphemism for the bar bills of alcoholic politicians. Gee Grijalva, you can buy a lot of chardonnay with that sort of money.

Some of that catering money looks a bit suspicious. For instance, on June 1 of this year, his campaign committee paid $4,500 to Bedroxx for catering. That’s a lot of money to pay a bowling alley for food. Then 10 days later they paid Arthur Chapa another $4,500 dollars as a reimbursement for catering to Bedroxx. Come on guys. Nine Grand for food from Bedroxx! Do you think you can slide that by the FEC? Maybe, the second $4,500 was just a payment to Chapa for other services.

If you don’t know Arthur Chapa, he is an attorney who gets a lot of his money from the public trough. Did you know that on June 19 of this year, the Pima County Board of Supervisors agreed to pay him $300,000.00 to be a lobbyist for the county for the next two years. This isn’t the first time he has received such a lucrative contract. However, as a representative of the county, he should answer why he got that $4,500 and be able to prove it was actually a reimbursement for a payment to Bedroxx.

There are other things that stink in the Grijalva campaign. The campaign spent $6,489 for T-Shirt printing from TUTTI in Los Angeles. These T-Shirts were for the immigration townhall meeting held June 3, 2007 at the El Pueblo Community Center. The problem is that the Grijalva congressional office told the center and the city that the event was non-political. I’m sure the City of Tucson and the FEC would like to know why the largest campaign expenditure for the year went to a “non-political” event. Considering the fact that the police department had to spend money to protect Grijalva at this non-political event, we may want to know if Grijalva owes us taxpayers some money.

So, now we know why Grijalva and his people are worried about those TV ads hitting him on his ethics votes. Maybe he wants to stop investigations against indicted congressmen because he is worried he may become one soon.