Fresh Loaf

You’d think that by this point in the U.S. Senate Runoff race between incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss and Democratic nominee Jim Martin all the issues would be hashed out. But that’s not the case.

On Sunday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released an ad that questions why Chambliss has refused to testify about whether executives from Imperial Sugar — they owned the Savannah refinery that exploded in February and killed 14 people — asked him to help the company avoid blame for the incident. Chambliss has received campaign contributions from Imperial Sugar and browbeat a company whistleblower during legislative testimony.

A Chambliss spokeswoman told the Associated Press that U.S. Senate legal counsel told the incumbent Republican the U.S. Constitution prevents him from testifying.

But government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington says the senator has it wrong. And in a post on the group’s website, executive director Melanie Sloan delivers the senator a zinger.

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Allen Buckley, the Libertarian nominee for U.S. Senate, has three new radio ads targeting incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss. Whereas the first ads focused on Chambliss’ spending policies and his first term in the U.S. Senate, these spots — which don’t mention Buckley’s name or say he approved the ads — look at the incumbent’s ties with Imperial Sugar and his “bum knee” that got him out of serving in Vietnam. One even depicts a phone call between a soldier in Iraq and his mother talking about Imperial Sugar, the Savannah sugar refinery that exploded earlier this year and killed 14 people.

Just like the first set of ads, these ones are quite interesting. The Imperial Sugar ad will be targeted around Savannah, the “Chambliss deferments from Vietnam” ad will be aimed at Columbus and Augusta, and the one that discusses Chambliss’ alleged role in the nation’s faltering economy will be geared toward smaller Georgia towns where workers are most likely feeling the pinch.

The gentleman who dropped off the ads at CL’s offices — the same man-in-the-bad-Hawaiian-shirt who gave me the first set of spots a few weeks back — says the Buckley campaign has been working with a 527 to promote the candidate’s message. He declined to name the group, but said it’s “not a Libertarian one.” He said the campaign is also reaching out to Chambliss’ old Sigma Chi brothers from the University of Georgia for information about his deferments. (”We hear Saxby used to like to play football behind the house,” he said.)

Follow the jump to hear the ads and read the scripts.

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Why am I not surprised that Sen. Saxby Chambliss’ response last week to a whiste-blower’s testimony about February’s deadly Savannah sugar plant fire was to harangue the whistle-blower?

Not surprised either that Chambliss received a $1,000 campaign contribution from the Imperial Sugar Co., which ran the plant so unsafely that OSHA lobbed an $8.8 million fine at the company. All told, Georgia’s senior senator has received $21,500 from the sugar industry in 2007-8 to fund his re-election campaign.

Thirteen employees died in the fire, which was caused by combustible sugar dust. Graham H. Graham, who was Imperial’s vice president of operations for all of 90 days before the fire, testified that he tried to get Imperial to clean up the plant, but: “I was told that my passion was extreme and I had to temper it.” (more…)

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