Progress Illinois

The 2010 election cycle was the first since the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which opened the floodgates for corporate interests to influence campaigns through huge, untraceable donations. Citizens United overwhelmingly helped the GOP last year, and no candidate benefited more than Illinois' Republican Senator Mark Kirk. Political organizations set up to accept unlimited sums of money or groups that do not disclose their donors spent more than $8.7 million, according to a Public Citizen report (PDF), supporting Kirk, as compared to about $787,000 these outside groups spent supporting Democratic candidate Alexi Giannoulias.

A new study by the Center for Responsive Politics shows again how conservatives are using Citizens United to dominate the political spending on the federal level. Their analysis found that between 2009 and 2010, the top conservative groups spent more than $97.6 million on campaigns, accounting for about one-third of all non-party spending. By contrast, labor unions contributed $46.7 million to political campaigns, or 16 percent of non-party committee spending, almost all of which went to Democrats, over the same time period.

The disparity promises to get worse. Amidst the union-busting attempts by Republican governors in the Midwest comes a report that American Crossroads, a 527 group founded last year by Karl Rove, plans to spend $120 million in 2012.

Senator Mark Kirk must have a very short memory. During his campaign last year, Kirk was caught needlessly and repeatedly embellishing his resume. After receiving a "stronger reaction" than he expected from his support of cap and trade legislation, he flip-flopped on that proposal.

Now Kirk is criticizing an economist whose ideas he once touted. On Monday, Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats and served as an advisor for John McCain's presidential run in 2008, released a study showing the Republican House budget plan could result in the loss of 700,000 jobs. Kirk ripped Zandi, calling him "a fairly discredited economist." Watch his comments here.

The attack on Zandi's credibility is strange coming from Kirk given that, as Media Matters pointed out, Kirk agreed with Zandi's analysis just months ago that ending the Bush tax cuts for the rich would hurt the economy. But Kirk must not remember that.

Sen. Mark Kirk continues to ratchet up the ridiculousness. The junior senator is now blaming gossip about Al Gore's personal life for his own flip flop on global warming. Try and wrap your head around that one.

First, some background. In 2009, Kirk voted in favor of cap-and-trade climate change legislation while a member of the House of Representatives. The then-congressman received what he described as "a stronger reaction than I've ever seen before" from opponents of the bill and soon after was insisting that he voted for cap-and-trade only to satisfy the "narrow interests" of his district. He went on to say that he wouldn't support that bill should he be elected to the Senate. Kirk's opponent in the 2010 campaign, Alexi Giannoulias, enlisted Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), an architect of the cap-and-trade bill in the Senate, to criticize Kirk for the flip flop.

Now, Kirk is pointing to the former vice president as the reason for his change of heart on global warming. Talking Points Memo flagged a comment Kirk made to Greenwire, in which he said, "The consensus behind the climate change bill collapsed and then further deteriorated with the personal and political collapse of Vice President [Al] Gore." The Kirkian logic is that because Gore recently got divorced and an investigtion into an alleged 2006 incident in which Gore was accused of sexual assault was reopened, Kirk turned against cap-and-trade. Again, we invite you to wrap your head around that one.