As I reported last week, Democratic Fourth District Candidate Rick Cornstuble has registered a web address similar to that of his Democratic primary opponent David Sanders. Specifically, Mr. Cornstuble has registered the URL sandersforcongress.com while the actual Sanders for Congress site is sandersforcongress.org. Cornstuble or someone acting on behalf of his campaign has made the .com address redirect traffic to Mr. Cornstuble’s campaign site.

Rumor has it that Democratic voters in Indiana’s Fourth District are becoming aware of this sketchy behavior and are none too thrilled with Mr. Cornstuble. That is entirely appropriate. It would be awfully hard for Mr. Cornstuble to effectively make use of the growing Republican ethics scandals if he is busy pulling crap like this.

According to an article by James Wensits in the South Bend Tribune, Chris Chocola from Indiana’s Second District is the target of a national ad campaign that accuses he and a handful of other Representatives of being in the pocket of the oil companies.

Specifically, the Tribune characterizes the ads as follows:

“Instead of protecting us, Congressman Chocola has been caught red-handed, protecting oil company profits while we pay more at the pump,” the ad proclaims while showing Chocola with a raised hand that is stained red.

According to the commercials, Chocola has accepted more than $80,000 from various energy and natural resources PACs since he began running for Congress “while voting against bills that would have penalized those companies for price gouging.”

Chocola has called on Democratic opponents Joe Donnelly and Steve Francis to side with him in opposing the ads. He has not made a similar request of his primary opponent Tony Zirkle.

Donnelly responded by saying “I find it hypocritical that Chris Chocola is now complaining about special and outside interests money after receiving millions of dollars in this same type of money in past years in his campaigns.”

Steve Francis responded by saying:

“this type of ad is legal under lax campaign finance laws” and asked Chocola and other candidates “to commit to meaningful campaign finance reform” and agree to debate the issue.

“I agree that the campaign finance system is broken and needs reform,” Francis said.

“Rep. Chocola wants it both ways: to accept money from outside the district from special interests and to cherry-pick which ads and which outside funding sources are fine and which are not. I do not support that approach.”

Upon reflection, I think it’s incumbent upon Mr. Chocola to specify which assertions in the ads are factually incorrect and ask his opponents to join him in disapproving of those assertions. If it’s simply a matter of the ads making factually correct assertions but putting them in a context which Chocola finds unflattering, I think it’s up to him, and him alone, to provide the context. Certainly he has the resources since President Bush generated a fat wad of campaign cash for Rep. Chocola.

But, frankly, I had not considered Chocola’s relationship to Big Oil as a potential issue. I’ve been more focused on Chocola’s ties to the Tom DeLay/Duke Cunningham/Jack Abramoff corruption scandals that have been rocking the Republicans in Congress, his support for President Bush’s social security privatization scheme, and the declining support in his district generally for the quagmire in Iraq.