Bitter – Page 91 – Shall Not Be Questioned

More on the New Likely Brady Campaign Goals

John Richardson did some digging into the organization that Dan Gross founded to get an idea of what he bringing to the table. It definitely seems to be money.

…they use entertainment and New York sports figures as their draw. I think Brady is seeking an in to deep pockets and Gross will provide that. Iâ€™m sure he has a great Rolodex.

He also knows how to get taxpayer dollars according to what Jacob found.

I donâ€™t believe heâ€™s been on the receiving end of pork from Albany. He did get $50,000 (through PAX) from the NYC Council in â€™10

Jacob also did some digging through NY state political donation records and it seems to indicate that he is not the same Dan Gross who has given modestly to Democrats the last few years. Instead, the new Brady president has only given to one candidate. He was backing a Democrat though, so he is likely on that side of the political spectrum.

More and more, it looks like the involvement of Dan Gross indicates that the Brady Center will be the big focus and they are likely quietly handing off the political work to Bloomberg. I noticed that the Brady accounts have been promoting Bloomberg’s MAIG Super Bowl commercial in social media, so that could be read as another sign that they are leaving that work up to the billionaire while the Brady Center staffers just try to fundraise to save their jobs. (This also wouldn’t be unheard of since we know that the partnership started a few years ago when both MAIG & Brady were using the same lobbyist who now heads CeaseFirePA.)

Bloomberg’s Super Bowl Commercial

One of the things I’ve been wondering ever since the news broke about Bloomberg’s big spend on a gun control ad during the Super Bowl is where exactly the ad would air. I saw many reporters simply repeating the line that it would be regional. Since Bloomberg has spent so much money on Pennsylvania, I wondered if this area would be a target. One reporter made a mention of asking about the regions, but did not publish and answer.

Yesterday, the NYT finally answered the question. Bloomberg only funded his gun control ad to run in DC. Yup, that’s right. He won’t take the fight to the states, only to other politicians. I think it represents an important trend with the Mayor to consistently try to overrule the voters by keeping up his relationships with and only target other elites. He doesn’t want to be bothered by us little people who might dare disagree with him and his nanny-state tendencies.

What Does the New Brady President Mean for the Future of the Organization?

The Brady Campaign board decided to hire a president whose entire background is in advertising and non-profit work. He has no political background that I’ve seen, and what little does exist is entirely focused on New York. In other words, they hired someone who seemingly has no real network to get started on the DC political scene.

Now, assuming he’s a Democrat*, that will be an automatic in to gun control political circles that Paul Helmke never had. Unlike Helmke, he should have a background that the gun control caucus from highly urban areas can rally behind. But, since he doesn’t seem to have any direct experience playing the political game, it will be interesting to see how far this kind “in” can really take him politically.

In my mind, this type of hire gives a little more credit to the idea we’ve been talking about for a couple of years now that maybe the Brady Campaign is taking a backseat to the Brady Center. It’s probably easier to raise the (c)3 funds, and this would be a step in the direction of really focusing on the (c)3 work that isn’t just centered around Dennis Hennigan’s legal attempts to re-write the Second Amendment. Dan Gross can focus on happy, feel-good things that will look better to donors who might otherwise be tired of the losses they have faced politically and in the courts for the last three-and-a-half years.

*According to Open Secrets, there is a Daniel Gross from New York who has rather modestly donated to exclusively Democrats since 2007.

The New Brady Campaign President

UPDATE: It looks like the Brady Campaign’s new president is trying to play a game of Down the Rabbit Hole. Silly Dan! Screenshots save evidence of your fumble. (See, I can use the Super Bowl theme, too!)

***
I don’t even know what to say. They hired an advertising guy, and yet this is the mess that the Brady Campaign has been pushing lately. Racism, drug use, child neglect, embrace of the “thug” lifestyle, these are all things they have been promoting with the people they have been recently retweeting. I don’t know if I should feel sorry for the guy or if this is the kind of work he finds acceptable.

The Brady Campaign president, Dan Gross, lives in New York and pushed the ASK program at his previous job. In other words, he’s a big believer in the Bloomberg nannyism to get other people to dig into your personal lives at home. Perhaps the Brady board looked to Bloomberg’s work with MAIG and assumed that if they could just get someone like him, they could come back to the top of the gun control world.

This is rather funny since his first PR-related move as a leader of the Brady Campaign is a stumble. Or, rather, should I call it a fumble?

Um, no.

The first announcement is on their website. On Saturday. (Maybe even Friday since I didn’t look at it yesterday.)

The more cynical may point to this as another Brady lie. I just find it amusing and very much in line of their strategy for not actually reviewing anything before it goes out the door.

Also, I find it interesting that he has opted to make his announcement on a day where no one will care. Things people will talk about on Monday include the Nevada caucuses, the Super Bowl, the inevitable Boston riots, and Newt Gingrich’s lack of a plan. It won’t be the guy no one in DC has heard of taking over an organization that can’t even get their bills through a committee. I have to wonder if this was intentional on the part of the Brady Campaign.

On Making a Difference

Let’s face it, a lot of folks (even our dear, wonderful readers) like to bitch and moan. They also don’t like to do squat when it comes to their issue of choice. We usually hear that it’s because one person can’t make a difference. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, tell that to a piano teacher who just ended up cited by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in a decision that threw out all of our new legislative districts and forces us back to 2001 lines for the rest of the year – maybe.

Oh, and did I mention that this decision that relies on her proposal actually screws things up enough that candidates were already gathering petitions for the old (new) districts and now they may not even be able to run in them?

So, yeah, one person made a difference. Probably a bigger difference than she imagined.

Time for the Popcorn

The presidential race may soon be a source of entertainment worthy of a bucket of buttery popcorn.

Roseanne Barr said Thursday sheâ€™s running for the Green Partyâ€™s presidential nomination â€” and itâ€™s no joke.

Some of the first live political blogging I ever did was when Jello Biafra was trying to get the nomination at the Green Party convention in 2000. That was funny.

MAIG Mayors Paid to Represent NYC

Did you know that political interests of New York City were absolutely vital to Durham, NC voters in 2011? You didn’t? Well, the voters of Durham probably didn’t know that either.

[Mayor Bill] Bellâ€™s year-end campaign-finance report to the county Board of Elections showed that he banked $4,000 â€“ nearly a third of the $12,550 he raised in 2011 â€“ from one source. …

No one from around here, as it happens: The $4,000 check came from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. …

A Bloomberg aide, Amanda Konstam, on Tuesday said her boss gave to Bellâ€™s campaign because the Durham mayor â€œis a longtime supporterâ€ of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. …

Bloomberg is a strong proponent of gun control. He offered the donation to Bell because he â€œsupports those who support New York,â€ Konstam said.

Emphasis added for those of you Durham-area folks who are wondering just why Bloomberg’s spokeswoman believes that supporting New York City is on your city’s political agenda at all.

This is not the first time that Bloomberg has bankrolled his little minion mayors who “support New York” in their states hundreds and thousands of miles away from the Big Apple. His goal is to invest in these guys and hope they run for higher office.

Great Dirty Minds Think Alike

I just can’t help it. This is a great headline find by Wyatt:

USAFâ€™s Big Penetrator Needs To Be Harder

I just… There’s not much else that can be said.

What is an Establishment Candidate?

I can’t tell you how many places I’ve read that have people on the farther side of the right spectrum complaining about how Mitt Romney has been “forced” on voters as the GOP nominee. He’s just what the establishment wants. Well what does being the establishment candidate who is forced on us really mean?

It’s a legitimate question to explore since I don’t particularly like him. But, I don’t think forced is an accurate term, nor do I think what is happening with Mitt an example of the establishment anointing a candidate. If you really want to see a case of that happening, look no farther than Pennsylvania.

Consider the Keystone State’s U.S. Senate race this year. There are three reasonably well-known candidates, and one really rich guy who can buy enough ads to make himself well-known. Candidate A from the state’s population center is wealthy, but he’s never run a campaign. He’s only reasonably well-known in political circles because he has tried to run before, but he never actually got any campaigns off the ground since better-known Republicans stepped in and asked him to step aside. Candidate B has run a campaign and came within a very close margin of winning in a district that had voted Democratic for the seat since 1974. He has a national fundraising list to bring to the table, and he has a record with a campaign that could put numbers on the board even in a tough district. Candidate C is a former gubernatorial candidate who really didn’t resonate with GOP voters in his last primary, but he at least has experience trying to run in a statewide race. He would have a statewide donor list, presumably, so that should count for something. Candidate D is just the rich guy who doesn’t seem to bring much else to the table.

So, given all of these factors, you’d think that Candidates B & C would be the likely strongest candidates, right? Well, the state GOP leaders decided that they liked Candidate A. They liked him so much that they will provide him with official party resources in order to win the primary so he can work against other Republicans. Voters will technically have a say in the primary, but they want to make sure that party resources are provided for shoving their choice in our faces before the general election.

That, my friends, is what I call an establishment candidate. When the party quite literally spends official resources to back their personal favorite and possibly use the resources to attack other Republican candidates, that’s not allowing voters to really decide. I had never heard of such a process until I moved to Pennsylvania. It’s not just at the state level. I’ve watched county GOP officials disparage other Republicans who aren’t in their little approved circle and take them to court for minor things. It’s absurd to waste party resources eating our own, but that seems to be the official GOP way in Pennsylvania.

So, considering this example of truly having a candidate financially backed by party resources and picked in a room of party leaders, is Mitt in the same category?

The fact is that Mitt has won 772,064 Republican votes, according to the Wall Street Journal. To me, that means that Republicans are voting for the man. I may not like him, but I’m not going to claim that those 772,000 are all secretly party leaders picking the presidential nominee for the party. They are voters.

Extinct Species are Better than Hunting

This video is a must watch from CBS on the economics of saving endangered species through hunting. Though a couple of the questions are a bit over the top (how do you kill something you love?), it’s overwhelmingly fair. And yes, the animal rights activist argues that she’d rather see a species struggle to survive than be raised in the United States and potentially hunted once the numbers are high enough.

The rule the mention that will basically slash the numbers of near-extinct animals to almost nil can be found here and has a bit of history to it. Consider this from the background information from the Fish & Wildlife Service:

With the exception of reintroduced animals, no sightings of the scimitar-horned oryx have been reported since the late 1980s. …

Based on a 2010 census of its members, the Exotic Wildlife Association (EWA) estimates there are 11,032 scimitar-horned oryx, 5,112 addax, and 894 dama gazelle on EWA member ranches.

Just on member ranches, there are more than 11,000 animals of a species that hasn’t been see on its original home turf in North Africa in 30 years. Yet, it’s not acceptable that these animals are raised and thrive in a new land according to an activist who purportedly wants the species to live.

I asked someone who knows animal issues and the federal government if this falls squarely on the Obama Administration. I was told yes and no. As it was explained to me, while the Fish & Wildlife Service was forced into the position by the courts, the Administration could have fixed the flaws in the original rule that allowed the hunts to take place. They didn’t, so now the hunts are ending.

As I’ve grown so fond of saying in recent years, elections have consequences. For these 11,000 scimitar-horned oryx, it’s pretty much a death sentence with possible extinction of the species. For hunters, it’s access to unique hunting opportunities where the profits will go back into recovering the species for future generations. For gun owners in general, well, it’s just another door closing on one the traditions for some in our community.