Did The DCCC Muck Up Jim Graves' Run In Minnesota... Again?

If you want to know how "Minnesota nice" sounds, call Jim Graves. He picked up the phone yesterday morning with the warmest, friendliest of greetings... and immediately said he isn't talking to the press until July first and suggested we talk about my upcoming trip to Tuscany instead. He suggested I spend time in Siena, long one of my favorite small European cities. As for questions around his dropping out of the congressional race in MN-06... not a peep, although he did follow up a few minutes later by sending this copy of the Bill Maher "the lights are a little bit dimmer in Crazy Town" video about Bachmann's withdrawal. Like me, Bill Maher will never be cited as an example of Minnesota Nice: "Michele Bachmann is out... still no word on her husband Marcus."

I think Jim likes Maher's interpretation of his leaving the field after vanquishing Bachmann. "Mission accomplished." But that wasn't his first reponse to Bachmann dropping out.

The morning that Bachmann suddenly announced she wouldn't seek reelection, Graves still seemed very interested in making the career leap from hotelier to congressman.

"I never ran against her. I ran for the people," Graves told KARE Wednesday morning.

He had been up late the night before watching the Minnesota Twins 14-inning game against the Milwaukee Brewers on TV, assuming he could sleep in for a change. His phone started ringing with media requests before 5:00 a.m.

The next day Graves apparently had a change of heart. He told reporter Eric Black of MinnPost that he was suspending his campaign for Congress. And furthermore, according to Black's MinnPost article, he would not be talking the other media about it.

"I think he then talked to some advisers, probably got some phone calls, talked to some of the folks he was expecting to get some campaign contributions from," Jacobs said.

He theorized Graves could no longer rely on national political money aimed at ousting Bachmann because she has voluntarily removed left the ballot. And the hotel executive has often said he had little interest in self-funding a campaign.

Notorious drunk Tom Emmer is running instead. Granted, it would be hard to get further right along the political spectrum than Bachmann, but ex-state legislator Emmer, currently working as a Hate Talk Radio host, is certainly not to her left... on anything. He's probably best known outside of Minnesota as the guy who Target had to apologize about contributing campaign funds to after Emmer's deranged homophobic mania became a campaign issue. (Target was probably so enamored of Emmer because one of the planks of his campaign platform was to lower the minimum wage.)

“I’m running for Congress to change the culture in Washington and restore Americans’ trust in our government,” Emmer told a group of about 100 supporters gathered Wednesday in his hometown of Delano, a Wright County community in the conservative heart of the 6th District. “Let’s get excessive regulation and taxes out of the way.”

He likely will face competition for the Republican endorsement, which he said he would respect.

State Sen. John Pederson of St. Cloud said he intends to file as a candidate by the end of the month. Former legislator Phil Krinkie, a 16-year legislator who now is president of the Taxpayers Leauge of Minnesota, and state Rep. Matt Dean have said they’re considering entering the contest.

However, Emmer, a former three-term state representative and the GOP nominee who lost to Gov. Mark Dayton in 2010, already has a base to build on.

“From the minute Bachmann got out, Emmer was in very strong position,” said political consultant Michael Brodkorb.

“He has a donor file, access to major fundraisers and the ability to pull together a team quickly," he said. "He lost a very close race for governor. It will make him a disciplined and hungry candidate who will assemble a team that will put him in a position to win.”

Emmer’s advantage as a seasoned campaigner is also his liability.

DFL Party Chair Ken Martin was quick to point that out in a statement: “In Emmer’s unsuccessful 2010 run for governor, he drained Republican Party resources and turned off the party’s major donor community. Many attribute his Ron Paul- and Sarah Palin-backed candidacy to sending Republican and independent votes Tom Horner’s way.”

Regular DWT readers probably don't need to be reminded that I tend to see Steve Israel and the DCCC lurking behind every door. But weeks before Jim Graves dropped out, we talked about how they had sabotaged his run in 2010. They decided to make up for it this year and named him a "Jump Start Candidate," on a par with Israel's most wretched zombie-like conservative candidates like Michael Eggman, Ann Callis, Gwen Graham, Kevin Strouse, et al.

Even before Bachmann dropped out, I started getting an inkling something was wrong. Rumors emanating from the DCCC were undercutting Graves' campaign and his relationships. One of the most corrupt DC organizations, the DCCC wanted to move their own band of incompetent crooks into the campaign so they could start pocketing the big cash the DCCC intended to spend there. With the DCCC, it's always about the rake off for the revolving door staffers. And then, on May 24, the Graves campaign sent out a press release slamming back at the DCCC:

Team Graves Running Independent Campaign

Following rumors reported in the national press from anonymous Washington “Democratic sources” that congressional candidate Jim Graves was pressured to replace his 2012 campaign team with Washington insiders, Graves released the following statement:

“We want to set the record straight. With all due respect to national figures rooting for our success, we are running our own campaign. One of the most valuable rules I have learned in business is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ While Adam Graves, my 2012 campaign manager, decided to turn down the position of campaign manager for 2014 in order to focus on his life’s work as an accomplished philosopher and academic, he remains the closest advisor and strategist to our team. I promoted his deputy campaign manager, Aaron Wells, to manage the 2014 race.”

“Our 2012 team ran an extremely effective and efficient campaign to restore real leadership to our community. We place a high value on loyalty, particularly when folks work tirelessly and with great passion like our 2012 campaign team.”

When the DCCC moves into a campaign, they always try taking over so they can funnel the money into the pockets of their cronies. I can't think of a DCCC campaign where this hasn't happened. And Jim Graves won't be the first.

So, while we're on the subject of MN-06, who will the Democrats put up against Emmer? Thank goodness we haven't heard any stirrings from Elwin Tinklenberg. Tarryl Clark has been telling half the people she meets she's running again. Problem is, she's telling the other half she's not. Another would-be candidate is the anti-Choice mayor-- yes a Democrat-- of Sartell, Joe Perske. And then there's a "secret businessman" who's nosing around and who may or may not run. This one should be safe for the Republicans for another cycle.

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Mainstream Republican Conservatives Battle Tea Party Nihilists In The U.S. Senate

Miss McConnell lays down with the GOP's 3 nihilist psychopaths

A few days ago, television personality Bill Maher was musing about the idea of Texas teabagger Ted Cruz running for president. Maher is certain that it's inevitable, pointing out that Cruz has "Newt Gingrich's ambition and ego mixed with the steely-eyed focus of a serial killer." Good description! And he added that Cruz has been "totally unwilling to compromise with liberals on anything, including eating with a knife and fork." NY Times political reporter Jonathan Weisman, might agree, but he takes Cruz more seriously and honed in on how he and a few other Tea Party Senate freshmen are gumming up the works in that body and forcing people concerned with the smooth function of government to confront deranged right-wing ideological nihilism that veers frighteningly close to outright fascism. And this is all inside the Senate GOP caucus!

In full view of C-Span cameras trained on the floor this week, Senators John McCain of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine jousted with a new generation of conservatives-- Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky-- over the party’s refusal to allow the Senate to open budget talks with the House despite Senate Republicans’ long call for Democrats to produce a budget.

It was the Old Guard versus the Tea Party, but with real ramifications, as Congress careens toward another debt limit and spending crisis this fall with seemingly no one at the steering wheel. The newer members say negotiations should go forward only with a binding precondition that a budget deal cannot raise the government’s statutory borrowing limit.

“I have tremendous respect for this institution,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview on Friday. “But I’m not all that interested in the way things have always been done around here.”

Republicans made the failure of Senate Democrats to pass a budget a central talking point in the 2012 campaign, going so far this year as to pass legislation withholding Congressional pay if budgets were not approved this spring. Now, some Republicans say the fact that members of their own party are standing in the way of a House-Senate conference committee undermines their fiscal message.

“This to me is an issue of integrity,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee. “We’ve pressed for a budget. We ought to go to conference.”

But the budget hawks have not budged, and they have even taken aim at their party in strikingly critical language.

“Here is the dirty little secret about some of those on the right side of the aisle,” Mr. Cruz said of his fellow Republicans. “There are some who would very much like to cast a symbolic vote against raising the debt ceiling and nonetheless allow our friends on the left side of the aisle to raise the debt ceiling. That, to some Republicans, is the ideal outcome.”

Mr. McCain called the demands of his Republican colleagues “absolutely out of line and unprecedented.” The Senate passed the budget before dawn on March 23 after a grueling all-night session, he noted, saying it was time to try to reach a final deal with the House in a negotiating conference.

“Will this deliberative body, whether it is the greatest in the world or the worst in the world, go ahead and decide on this issue, so we can at least tell the American people we are going to do what we haven’t done for four years and what every family in America sooner or later has to do-- and that is to have a budget?” he asked. Although few of Mr. McCain’s colleagues took to the floor to join him, many have expressed similar views.

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership, said that at this point, resistance had to give.

“I suspect senators have held back long enough on the decision to go to conference,” he said.

...House Republicans had envisioned a plan to reach a comprehensive deficit reduction deal predicated on a showdown in July over the debt ceiling. That showdown was supposed to drive both sides back to the bargaining table, but a rapidly falling deficit, rising tax payments and huge infusions of cash from the newly profitable, federally controlled home financing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have scrambled those plans. Now, the debt ceiling may not have to be raised until October or November, in the next fiscal year.

Before then, unless a budget deal can be struck, Congress must pass bills to finance the government based on very different guidelines in the House- and Senate-passed plans. The House Appropriations Committee will have to draft a bill financing labor, health and education programs at $121.8 billion, a 19 percent cut from current levels even after the across-the-board cuts took effect. The bill to finance the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency cannot exceed $24.2 billion, down 15 percent from the current levels after the cuts.

“There is not a member of our committee, Republican or Democrat, who is happy with these numbers,” said Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for the committee.

The Senate has no intention of swallowing those cuts, so unless budget negotiators can meet and reach a deal, Congress will be headed back toward a crisis come Sept. 30, said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the Senate Budget Committee chairwoman.

“They could create crisis by having a government shutdown or holding everything back until November and threatening a debt default. That would be to their political detriment,” Ms. Murray said. “I think the American people have had it with that kind of hostage-taking.”

Cruz may be the ringleader of mindless nihilism but his rivals for the worthless 2016 presidential nomination, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio can't cede the far right fringe of the party-- which completely controls the nominating stage in most states-- to get out ahead of them on the crackpot ideas the Hate Talk Radio-brainedwashed base loves so much. Rubio, in fact, claims he could be the last man standing on preventing a majority in the Senate to move forward. “I’m not sure this is an issue I can ever change my opinion on,” he said. Already grievously damaged in the eyes of the extremist for his collaboration with Democrats on comprehensive immigration reform-- which is vehemently opposed by the Canadian-borm Cuban from Texas, Cruz and which the Hate Talkers only refer to as "amnesty"-- Rubio is looking for an opportunity to be seen taking a kamakazi-like stand on behalf of... Alex Jones and Glenn Beck fans. He'll find Ted Cruz and Rand Paul already have those folks sewn up. Their grandstanding is pushing Harry Reid towards a Senate rule change that would allow for a majority vote-- something so detested by the demented Cruz-- which would deflate the Senate Republicans' ability to obstruct government to further their ideological and narrow partisan agenda.

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How Long Before Half the Gays Will Vote Republican?

Very nice; not for me

There was a time when no self-respecting son of Ireland or Italy, not to mention the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, would consider voting for he stuffed shirt party of richie rich Republicans. Republicans were class enemies and Democrats were working for the betterment of working families. Republicans backed busting their unions to keep them down, while Democrats helped expand the middle class by passing minimum wage laws, extending the franchise, outlawing child labor, mandating collective bargaining, writing legislation to protect employees at their workplaces, all things the GOP fought tooth and nail. And the result? Millions of the grandchildren of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Russia, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany moved up the economic ladder into prosperity and many of them went with the instinct of pulling up that economic ladder with them and... voting for Republicans. It's a cycle and it's worked for the GOP for decades.

And one day, as hard as it is to believe for non-gays now, it will work with gay people as well. In the current issue of Out there's a prominent sidebar on their "Power 50" feature, The Conservative Gay Tipping Point by Jason Farago. "It's too soon to call the GOP gay-friendly," he acknowledges, "but the rise of the pro-gay marriage Republican is a sign of a shift."

The Obama administration’s recent briefs to the Supreme Court against DOMA and Proposition 8 attest to the huge progress gays and lesbians have made in our fight for equality. But another, more unexpected brief may reflect an even greater change. In February, more than 130 Republicans petitioned the court to strike down the discriminatory California amendment-- and asserted that there’s no contradiction between conservative principles and same-sex marriage.

Many of them seem to have had a recent change of heart. Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor who opposed gay marriage when he ran for president last year, signed the brief. So did Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who during her campaign for governor of California said she’d voted for Prop. 8 due to her “faith and conscience.” Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s campaign strategist, is there too, as is Stephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s national security adviser.

The brief’s main engineer was Ken Mehlman (No. 32 on Power List 2013), the gay Republican investment banker who managed Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, which you may remember for its vicious strategy of demonizing gay Americans to drive evangelical turnout. But with younger voters decisively in favor of gay equality, Republicans have no choice but to adapt, and Mehlman, a consummate GOP insider, is now in the vanguard of an effort to reposition the right as a tolerant force. He’s not the only power player. The lead counselor in the Prop. 8 case is himself a veteran conservative: Ted Olson, who successfully fought Bush’s side in the 2000 Supreme Court case that won him the presidency.

It’s far too soon to call the GOP gay-friendly. Mehlman could find only two sitting members of Congress willing to join the Prop. 8 brief; only one Republican senator, Rob Portman of Ohio, is on the record as personally supporting gay marriage, and even he stopped well short of endorsing a constitutional right to wed. Conservatives still bridle at other political goals shared by many gays, from employment protections to AIDS research to transgender rights. All the same, the rise of the pro–gay marriage Republican is a sign of something: that in less than a decade, our relationships have won broad acceptance and that, at this rate, even the right will soon have more to gain from tolerance than from bias. That may be progress of a cynical sort, but it’s progress all the same.

Progress! Because half the gays would rather be Ward and June Cleaver than live the heroic bohemian life outside the cookie cutter mainstream inherent in what it meant to be gay to Jean Genet or John Rechy. Ah, alienation!

Conservatives say gays "choose" to be gay. That's not completely false. You may be born gay but to a good little Republican, the choice comes in on whether or not you open that closet door. A few days ago we looked at the tragedy of Mississippi Republican Congressman Jon Hinson, one of the dozens of closeted Republican elected officials whose lives were defined by the wrong choice, the only choice permissible for a conservative-- life in a dark, tortured closet. His miserable ending is the only permissible ending for a gay Republican... at least if they want to stay Republican (which really is a choice).

Let's go, Wally!

I acted on my unexplainable, mysterious biological feelings because-- at least in part-- I didn't want to be Ward and June Cleaver. Not ever. Not for one second of my existence. I would rather be an outlaw. I read The Thief's Journal and Querelle by Genet and my fate was sealed. I read Rechy's City of Night and Numbers, started supporting myself as a male prostitute and bought a VW van so I could drive across the country to L.A., specifically to Griffith Park (where, totally coincidentally, I live now). I would have been happy to screw Wally Cleaver when Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont were at church with Beaver but there was never a day in my life when I wanted to join a church, join an army or get married-- or be a Republican. Enjoy the video; there's no reason it's part of this post... except that it insisted on being included. So what the hell; it's good.

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