“Where did you get this?”

The question hit like a ton of bricks. The person asking me it was one of several people that have been accused of leaking me stuff to put on here. Like usual, the accusations were wrong. There are some people upset about things I find out and print here, things like Governor Shapiro getting ready to endorse the man known as Crooksy or that the State Democratic Party is helping Crooksy’s campaign. The thing is, they don’t deny these things, because they’re true. They just don’t want them talked about. So they want to know who is leaking me the info. They want to stop the leaks. Never mind that they are getting ready to nominate a deadbeat. That’s not the problem for them. They’re ok with that. They’re living in denial.

Look, I’m a political dinosaur at this point. I’ve been around campaigns long enough to remember who managed the Governor’s first campaign and what happened to them. It shouldn’t be a shock that there are a few people who will tell me what the state party is doing, or what the governor is doing, or what Crooksy shot his mouth off about in a room of people he thinks won’t tell. I have friends in this business who literally came to see me at the hospital, but I also have tons of acquaintances, and I know the difference. They’d stick a knife in me if convenient. Apparently the folks around Crooksy and Harrisburg don’t think that happens to them. They don’t get that the calls come from within their own house.

None of this really matters though. The truth is, all I write about Crooksy, or Crosswell, or anyone else, is quite literally things that are verifiable facts. Crosswell doesn’t deny that he was a Republican registrant and primary voter in at least four separate states and districts, or that he worked at a union busting firm, he just claims somehow that he “wasn’t partisan” while he was voting in Trump’s elections, even as he consciously re-registered as a Republican and voted in Republican primaries that featured Trump. Crooksy doesn’t deny that he failed to pay his mother-in-law back one cent of the $55k they had loaned him and his ex-wife for over 15 years, or that he lost twice in court, he just tries to deflect by saying it only was an issue because of a messy divorce. He doesn’t even bother to make up a spin for his racist social media posts or his lax attitude on political violence, or for that matter his belief in school prayer. He knows he posted this stuff. He just hopes you don’t care.

Look, whether it’s a Nazi tattoo in Maine, a Hamas supporter in New York City, a Republican union-buster from Pottsville, or a deadbeat right-winger from Nazareth, I am not going to be okay with crooks, lunatics, liars, and terrible people taking over the Democratic Party in some vain hope of “taking back” young male voters. This stuff is unacceptable. I get that there are staff people in the Harrisburg establishment who don’t want people to get to read about these people and what they did. They hope you never learn about it. I’m not going to oblige them. I’m going to make sure it’s out there for everyone. There are downsides to this, of course. I know that several staff members from Congressman Mackenzie, and many other Republicans also read my blog, and they will use this stuff against these folks. So be it. These are not good people.

I think it goes without saying, voters get to make the last call. If voters don’t care that Crooksy is untrustworthy, if they don’t care about the things he did, so be it. Same for Crosswell. If Democratic Primary voters in Maine don’t care that a self-professed history buff claims he didn’t know he had a Nazi tattoo, when he clearly did, then so be it. As long as they know, because the truth is that they will find out, either from us, or from the other side. You can’t hide it as a candidate.

Welp, we have updated finance numbers. If it wasn’t clear before, Ryan Crosswell is going to have the most campaign cash in the PA-7 race. The former Trump Administration Republican from DC won the money race by a lot. Since we know the DCCC values that over everything, obviously they will go looking for a sixth candidate now, right?

Anyway, here’s the numbers here in PA-7, followed by some other races of note.

• Crooksy brought in $308,259.47. He has $243,615.75 on hand.
• Crosswell brought in another $380,000. He has raised $701,108.08 in two reports. He has spent $266,743.94, leaving him with $433,791.14. That’s some burn rate.
• Carol Obando-Derstine brought in $123,000. She has raised $317,006.02. She has spent $198,245.98, leaving her with $127,513.18. That’s a really astounding burn rate.
• Lamont McClure’s report doesn’t seem to be fully up on the FEC site yet. He raised $229,000 according to press reports, which should put him at $458,386.04. He had burned through $135,267.89 in the first two reports, which should leave him at $323,118.15, minus whatever he spent this quarter. That was a fast burn rate, but we’ll see what he did this quarter.
• Mark Pinsley’s report isn’t up on the FEC site yet. Press reports indicate he has raised $73,000. I have nothing to add to that.

Crosswell is raising serious cash, but spending just shy of 40% of it on staff and things that aren’t voter contact. He’s spent $266,743.94 and 10% of voters or less really know anything about him. I actually have to compliment Crooksy’s campaign, their burn rate is like half of Crosswell’s. They might catch him in money if there was more than two and a half quarters left at this rate, but they won’t. Carol’s number slowed and her burn rate is very high. McClure wrote himself most of what he raised this quarter, but the word is he stopped most of his spending so he may have a decent cash on hand number, but we’ll see about that. Pinsley’s number won’t do it. Crosswell and Crooksy have decent numbers here, but not Neary enough cash on hand with their low name ID’s. We’ll see here.

Now for context, some other numbers of note:

• Paige Cognetti, the Mayor of Scranton, running in PA-8, announced she raised over $500,000 in under a month. She currently has no primary and probably won’t get one.She has $442,966.97 on hand. That district won’t be easy for her, but those are damn good numbers.
• Janelle Stelson brought in $1,249,712.55. She has $969,643.79 on hand. The burn rate is a little higher, but damn!
• Not enough numbers are out yet in PA-3, but so far the leaders in cash-on-hand are Sharif Street at $372,089.87 and David Oxman at $331,724.05. I’m really interested in Dr. Ala Stanford’s number to see if they hype is real.
• Across the river in NJ-7, two candidates have crossed the $1 million mark raised. Rebecca Bennett still has $922,757.14 and Brian Varela has $805,278.44 left. Tina Shah has $481,396.28 on hand and Michael Roth has $290,302.11 left.

At this stage in the game, the most important number is really your cash on hand number. Sure, the DCCC and a bunch of DC types care about the total raised and quarter raise for their horse race purposes, but if you spend everything you raise, who cares? Campaigns are, in the end, about talking to voters. Right now, no one in PA-7 is really prepared to spend on the level they need.

He’s got the black hoodie. He talks about “fighting” in Washington. He claims he’s a blue collar guy. He’s supported by Bernie Sanders. He has the same media consultants as Bernie, Fetterman, and Zohran. He’d like you to call him Brooksy. He stiffed his mother-in-law though, so on here we call him “Crooksy.”

Crooksy went on the Upper Lehigh Dems podcast/zoom to talk about his campaign. I needed to watch the leaves fall off trees in my neighborhood though, so I was too busy to listen to this guy lie about what a champion for the little guy he is. He is only the champion for some little guys, I think. I’m not going to listen to him lie when everything we need to know about him was litigated in public. A friend of the blog did watch though, a very skilled friend, and they had some thoughts.

Gotta tell ya, he is just not political material. I cannot imagine him going toe to toe with Rs in Congress or even some of his D colleagues.

Yep.

DC people pushed him and his head got big

Even more yep. He’s not at all of the caliber to do this. He’s not even someone who has shown us he can win anything. If we nominated this guy, one of two things will happen. It’s most likely that everything I received on him, and probably worse, is used against him, and Ryan Mackenzie wins another term. Under the unlikely scenario where this guy wins, he goes to Washington and is the next John Fetterman. Look, I was for Conor Lamb, so I don’t want to watch the rest of you get duped again. Send Crooksy off to the retirement he earned and give someone real a chance.

I haven’t seen any full reports yet, but apparently we’re in for a bit of a surprise. Bob “Crooksy” Brooks definitely didn’t “rake in the cash,” only so far saying he beat $300k. That’s definitely not the $400k the DCCC rumor mill pushed. Despite touting his backing from a bunch of people from out of town and the non-endorsement that is supposed to be an endorsement from Governor Shapiro, Crooksy isn’t keeping pace with what his handlers are saying about him.

Meanwhile the word was that Ryan Crosswell was going to underwhelm. Well it doesn’t matter if it’s crushing Coors Light in DC or raising cash, he’s apparently keeping a serious pace. His campaign says they’ve raised $700k so far in two quarters. That would mean he raised $380k this past quarter. He probably beat Crooksy pretty badly.

Both of these guys have awful negatives and I think are very vulnerable. I think Crooksy probably has insurmountable negatives, no one likes a guy who stiffs his mother-in-law. Neither is a Democrat really, so I guess they both have primary problems. Crooksy was already $320k behind Union Busting Ryan to begin with, now it’s probably like $350k. Nobody knows who Crooksy is out there, it’s so bad that Mackenzie just left him out of his poll this week. Of course, earlier polling showed people didn’t really love Crooksy even when they were read a positive bio, so that’s probably for the best. Neither of these two are well known, but Crosswell will at least have money to try and cover up his bad behavior. If Crooksy keeps spending away his campaign money and missing his goals, he’ll be lucky to finish fourth in this primary. He should never have ran.

Street word is that Bob “Crooksy” Brooks is going to fall well short of the $400k the DCCC and his campaign were putting out there. Now it sounds like $300k. That’s a very good first quarter. That’s not “clear the field” level numbers. That comes as no one on the ground is endorsing him and his union support has stopped after his own IAFF and the crooked SEIU endorsement. While Crooksy is popular with some Harrisburg types, people on the ground are scared off by his lazy personal campaign style and the abundance of negatives that follow this guy around. Deadbeat Bernie Sanders is for Crooksy, but PA-7 is not. This fire is too big for Crooksy.

There is the whole matter though of how Bob “Crooksy” Brooks is raising $300k in the first place though. In multiple calls with local party leaders this week, they all remarked how he’s late for events and leaves before they’re over. At least two of these leaders made the remark to me though, “he does have the state party helping him.” Really? I’m not shocked that he has the Bernie grifters helping him raise money, and for that matter the same people who created Fetterman. The state party though? That’s fascinating. This is a Democratic Primary, almost all of the other candidates are definitely Democrats. The state committee, the elected body that governs the staff at the party, has not voted to endorse in this or any other Congressional Primary in years. No county party in the district has voted to endorse Crooksy. In fact, no elected official in this district is backing Crooksy. So under what authority are the new chairman and his staff helping this guy? Seems crooked as hell.

By now though everyone knows what’s going on here. Brooksy has no shot in hell against Ryan Mackenzie, they’ll drown him just with the fact that he stiffed his mother-in-law for $55k, let alone all the other stupid things. That was a temporary distraction though. No one has shown they are the certain nominee in this district, and Crooksy is good for the good ole’ boys in Harrisburg’s bottom line. Senator Fetterman’s mouthpieces get paid. The out-of-district legislators endorsing him get to come back to the IAFF later and remind them how they supported their guy. The Governor can say to IAFF leadership in his gubernatorial run, and his future Presidential run, that he has been a loyal soldier with them. Here’s the thing- that’s all true. The folks at the DCCC got to push some work to consultants they like too. Absolutely none of this does anything to win this seat and give the Democrats a majority in PA-7. We actually run the risk of nominating a dude who will be way over his head and get mugged by the GOP money machine in November. It’s a political dead end, and worse yet, even if I’m wrong and he does win, the guy is just another John Fetterman. Wasn’t it enough for the good ole’ boys in Harrisburg to push one massive mistake on us all? Do we need to do that again?

Does one district decide everything? No. This one is as close as you can get though. Nominating this guy and either losing or getting a shit Congressman will hurt people who need government to work. No one benefits from that. We need to sink this guy, and sink him fast. He’s a nightmare in waiting.

I was invited to tonight’s Lehigh Valley 4 All meeting to ask Bob “Crooksy” Brooks questions about the things I’ve written about him. I’m going to decline at this time. I’m sure his team would say that vindicates him, that it shows I’m throwing baseless accusations at him from behind a computer screen and won’t defend them. If I were him, that’s what I’d say too. I’m going to proceed to tell you why that’s a pile of shit.

I’ve been at an event with Crooksy and Crosswell since I started writing about them. If they were truly mad and felt they had a legitimate beef with what I wrote, they could have addressed it then. Neither of them did. I have no reason to give either one a chance to prepare answers for an audience. One’s a bartender and one’s a lawyer, two professions that know how to talk their way around anything. In both cases, I have laid out unassailable facts, not opinions or presentations, about them. I posted the Superior Court’s opinion on the matter of Crooksy stiffing his ex-mother-in-law, which clearly shows he didn’t pay her back for 14 years, meaning no, it wasn’t just part of a messy divorce like he claims. Why would I give him equal footing with me to lie about that for an audience? I posted the actual screenshots of his social media where he says he thinks we need more guns and prayer in schools, and where he talks about hating Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem. Did I add on my opinions? Sure. But what I gave you out front was the documentation of this man’s views and actions. I am not going to literally debate if they happened with him. If he wants to accuse the Superior Court of Pennsylvania of lying, he can do that himself. Bob Brooks did everything I said. If you want to decide those things don’t matter to you, you can do that on your own.

I’m going to say the same for Ryan Crosswell, who no one is asking me to give a forum to at this point. Again, I’ve laid out the facts here. Crosswell is not from here and is a lifelong Republican until a few months ago. Voter registration is a public record, and it shows him repeatedly registering as, and voting as, a Republican in such far off places as Louisiana and Washington, D.C. There’s not much to argue there. I showed you Crosswell’s LinkedIn, which talks about his work at an infamous union busting law firm, and in which he talks about his work to screw workers. Crosswell filed a finance report in July that showed almost all of the money he is raising is from out of town, with just one donor in the district. Again, these things aren’t really up for debate.

There are five candidates in this race. I’m not going to debate all five of them about their life stories. I’m not attacking three of them, all of whom are long time Democrats who have lived in the Lehigh Valley for years. I’m attacking two guys who really shouldn’t be running in a Democratic Primary in the Lehigh Valley. The response both have given so far is to tell people that I’m attacking them on the behalf of Lamont McClure. That’s a load of shit. Go check McClure’s campaign finance reports, I do not work for him. I will not be working for him in this primary either, including in the future. I like Lamont enough, but he’s not paying me a check to do anything for him. I have not worked for a political candidate since May of 2024, most of my work is now for independent expenditures, and will be remaining as such. I’m not going to debate these kinds of lies for an audience, where how one presents themselves can sway the crowd on who they are going to believe, these guys are both trained talkers. I am laying out the facts on these individuals in black and white letters. This shouldn’t be a matter of interpretation, it should be a matter of facts. If Crooksy wants to debate if he’s a deadbeat or not, he can send mailers to the voters telling them he’s not. I sure as hell am not going to give him a platform to do so.

The primary voters in 2026 can decide what they think of the facts, but I’m not going to debate what the facts are with people that would screw family members or working people. If primary voters choose one of these guys, we’ll see how the full electorate reacts. My guess is not very well.