Hamm shilling for Hill

In Sunday's (Jeff/NA) News-Tribune, Christopher Hamm of Sellersburg attacked Mike Sodrel after his recent op-ed piece on property taxes. While there are some legitimate critiques of Mr. Sodrel's essay, Mr. Hamm uses it as an opportunity to play campaign PR stiff. Perhaps Mr. Hamm works for Mr. Hill-- or he dislikes Mr. Sodrel and is an able student of (nasty) political rhetoric.

Here is Mr. Hamm's letter-- with my running commentary...

His campaign has only just begun, but it’s clear to see that Mike Sodrel learned absolutely nothing from his loss last year — he is still completely out of touch.

Huh? How so? Because he wrote an op-ed on the most important issue in Indiana politics? This is a spurious accusation-- and a reflexive criticism of politicians one doesn't like. Ironically, Mr. Hamm is out-of-touch with Mr. Sodrel's essay!

And, it’s actually offensive to me that he chooses to jumpstart his campaign by taking a purely political stance on such a critical issue — property taxes.

I covered the "jumpstart" part of this in my blog comments. As to "a purely political stance", is there any other when it comes to a deeply flawed public policy?

Even though I’m sure a millionaire like Mike doesn’t worry too much about trying to make ends meet, I guess he finally realized how skyrocketing property taxes are really affecting the voters.

A nice millionaire slam...classy. And he "finally realized"? Mr. Hamm is apparently a mind-reader too.

Yet, he chose not to say what he would do at the federal level to assist homeowners in this crisis.

Right, Sodrel said (correctly) that it's not a federal issue...

On the complete opposite side you have Congressman Baron Hill, who addressed this issue months ago by introducing legislation that provides taxpayers with real relief. Yes, Baron Hill knows that property tax assessments are a state government issue, but he doesn’t shirk responsibility like Sodrel suggests. Instead, Hill addressed this difficult issue head on.

OK, now it's a state issue. But Hill is to be praised for making it a federal issue? Sodrel only alludes to Hill-- and doesn't critique him for shirking, but for taking action when it's not appropriate.

As for me, I want our representatives at every level — local, state and federal — working on this issue.

Huh? Now there's a prescription for chaos!

Thank you Baron Hill for working to provide us with real property tax relief and for working with your colleagues in Congress to get property tax language added into the Temporary Tax Relief Act — instead of just trying to score useless political points like Sodrel. We can clearly see who tackles issues most important to the people of Southern Indiana and who wants to exploit them for political gain.

Mr. Hamm's political rhetoric reaches its climax here-- from the overly-sincere opening sentence to the use of "real", "useless", "tackles" and "exploit". Very nice! You may have a future in political spin...