A few weeks ago, a scandal broke involving John Oxendine and (potentially) illegal campaign contributions.
This morning, the story got even more interesting.
Three weeks to the day after the original article was posted on AJC.com, a follow-on story comes out that is even more interesting than the first one.
Apparently, the donor that gave John Oxendine $120,000 – 10x the legal limit from a single donor – has been pretty closely tied to Ox for at least a decade. While Ox has been the public figure, this donor has been the guy behind the scenes working as head of the Georgia Life and Health Insurance Guaranty Association – an organization that apparently is state-mandated that all insurance companies participate in and has broad powers to seize assets and divvy them up as it sees fit.
But these two men have been good buddies at least as long as a decade, when the donor was first appointed to this board, even taking hunting trips to Mexico together.
And yet in the original article, Ox claimed “I had no knowledge it came from an insurance company…. If those facts are true, they do concern me.”
Is Mr. Oxendine really so stupid as to either a) travel internationally – with guns no less – with a guy he barely knows or b) to think that something like this wouldn’t come out?
While the contributions may have been technically legal, that doesn’t make them right, and neither does giving them back – as he has said he has done. (I’ll believe that when I see the campaign reports. Ox has proven that he will lie at the drop of a hat, so please forgive me if I’m less than trusting of him.)
If the first is true, maybe he needs to go work at something less pivotal than Governor – I hear a lot of McDonald’s restaurants need help in the kitchen, maybe he should run for that job instead.
If the second is true, he is really nothing more than a conniving politician seeking more power who has already proven that he expects to be able to flaunt the law and get away with it.
Me, I prefer a Governor that I can trust to do the right thing, and Ox has proven repeatedly that such a Governor simply isn’t him.
nice blog!
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I must say, this whole campaign contribution scandal really is starting to make me question why I support him. I think the only keeping me on his side now is the FairTax. This is really starting to concern me, with all the new facts coming to light. Very well written blog post; keep up the good work of informing us on this situation!
Kyle,
In all honesty, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done before we can even begin to consider changing tax systems, and I’ve outlined my basic ideas in my comments on the PP ‘Fair Tax Friday’ post. Heck, I may even go into a bit more detail in a post here in the next couple of days.
The overall point though is that I don’t rule out FairTax yet, honestly I don’t know enough about it – which is one of the reasons I like hanging around you and Charlie some. I just think that there is a lot that could be (relatively) easily done within the current system to fix it as much as possible first – and then when people STILL see there is a problem, ideas such as FairTax or some others should be openly examined and we as a State and Nation should decide what we want to do from there.
There was a great proposal by Steve Rathje from Iowa. He ran for the Republican nomination for Senate and came in third losing by 2,000 votes with over 94,000 votes cast. Regardless, he is a successful businessman and has a tax proposal that he calls, “a step between our current tax system and the FairTax.” You can read it here:
http://www.steverathje.com/pdf/Rathje%20stimulus%20proposals.pdf
He summarizes each of his proposals and tax cuts. It’s a great proposal and should be put in place as soon as possible!
Let me correct the results from my previous comment. He came in third, losing by 3,000 votes with 85,000 votes casts.
Hey wasn’t there a group called FREEDOM WORKS out there supporting John Oxendine…where are they now? This is a good blog and I hope more poeple will respond saying what they think. It just goes to show ( the world ) the only way you can gain more power is to LIE….
Shame on you Mr. Oxendine!!!!!!
FreedomWorks is still around, but I don’t recall them explicitly endorsing Oxendine. All I’ve been able to find is that they hosted him at one of their meetings and allowed him to speak. I’m not sure that actually counts as “support”.
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