Senate hopeful heckled for fund-raiser on 9/11

(Corrected paragraph:) He’s got a video camera and a mission to make big conservative noise. William J. Kelly - an independent conservative TV producer that produced a show for FOX on WFLD-TV in Chicago and an on-camera host on Comcast - is not beyond lunging at political candidates, bristling with “gotcha” questions. Mr. Kelly’s latest target is Illinois state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, now a Democratic hopeful for the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by Sen. Roland W. Burris. The candidate was racing to make a $500-a-plate fund-raiser at the Union League Club in Chicago at 8:45 a.m. Friday when Mr. Kelly stepped forward.

“Why are you having a fund-raiser at the exact moment the first plane struck the Twin Towers on September 11, eight years ago?” he asked Mr. Giannoulias as the camera rolled.

The flustered candidate immediately withdrew his handshake and ducked through the hotel door.

“Another Barack Obama/Tony Rezko farm team candidate running for higher public office in the state of Illinois. Oh, great, terrific,” Mr. Kelly said. “This was shameful, thoughtless, selfish and typical Giannoulias. As America paused to remember the fall of the Twin Towers, he focuses on the rise of his own campaign.”

Mr. Kelly has been a gadfly for some time, and was arrested in 1994 for heckling President Bill Clinton over gridlock in a Democratically-controlled Congress. The new social media appear to be his ideal milieu.

“He’s a new kind of press entity. If conservative values are overlooked in the media, Kelly is going to go in there with a camera and get the values and ideas out there himself. And if no one will pick up the video footage, he’s going to put it up at YouTube and let the public decide what’s what,” said Laura Grock, Mr. Kelly’s spokeswoman.