Good News You Likely Haven’t Heard From CNN Or The NYT

Here’s some good news you probably won’t hear from most nationally-focused US media:

— Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium (aka the guy who got all the 2012 Senate races right along with the Presidential race) has been saying that the Democrats have at least a 70% chance of keeping the Senate (today’s current snapshot gives them a 75% chance, with a longer-range Election Day forecast of 65%). How does he do it? By using poll data and not “secret sauce” (aka pulledoutmyass.com). (And the only reason I know about this is because of the cartoon in this Daily Kos post.)

— Mitch McConnell, who has been in a very tough race with Democratic candidate Alison Grimes, just took a big blow when his campaign manager, Jesse Benton, resigned today. Seems that back in 2012, when Benton worked for Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign, he was involved in getting Kent Sorenson, then an Iowa state Senator, to switch his endorsement from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul, a move which Sorenson, on pleading guilty to Federal bribery charges Wednesday, says the Paul campaign paid him $73,000 to make. (Benton, by the way, is married to Ron Paul’s granddaughter, Valori Pyeatt.)

— A town in West Virginia, where King Coal normally rules without question, has developed a useful funding model for converting to solar power.

So what’s the good word in your parts this week?

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Avidor Beat MJ’s Mariah Blake’s Bachmann “Scoop” By Four Months

Today, Mother Jones readers were breathlessly told by Mariah Blake about a Hot! New! Development! in the twisted saga of Michele Bachmann:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has quietly returned campaign contributions from an ex-con who lured investors for one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in US history—and on whose behalf the tea party lawmaker sought a presidential pardon. According to campaign finance reports, last quarter Bachmann’s campaign committee paid $14,000 to a bankruptcy trustee for Frank Vennes, a former North Dakota pawnshop owner who was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison for aiding and abetting fraud.

What she doesn’t mention is that Ken Avidor published this news back on June 16, a good four months before she did.

What she also doesn’t mention is that Avidor and the late great Karl Bremer are the persons who have done the most work on this story, a story she presents as if she had legworked it all herself. She doesn’t even mention their names.

UPDATE: Avidor reminds us that Our Miss Blake has done this sort of thing before, and even more blatantly:

You’d think jet-setting, East Coast reporters would have learned a lesson about plundering homegrown media in flyover country for content after Matt Taibbi got caught ripping off G.R. Anderson’s City Pages profiles of Michele Bachmann.

Now, The New Republic’s Mariah Blake thinks she can Google-up a whole bunch of articles by local reporters and cobble together a flawed, confusing, unfocused article.

[…]

The TNR cover claims the article tells the “untold story” of the Tom Petters Ponzi scheme – what horse crap!. That story was told by every major news outlet in the state, the news wires and national business news outlets. I covered the trial of Tom Petters for the City Pages and kept a blog titled Petters Info. I even won an SPJ award for my nightly video reports of the trial (sadly, swept away by Bradlee Dean’s You Tube take-down with only one remaining). Beth Hawkins wrote a long article for Minnesota Monthly in 2009 titled “Trust Me” and covered the trial for Bloomberg. There were many articles about Petters in the Strib, PiPress and on radio and TV. The trial and conviction of Tom Petters was one of the top Minnesota news stories of 2009 and the last decade. Untold? Really?

[…]

POSTSCRIPT: TNR left their fingerprints at the scene of the crime… They stole a photo without credit that appears on Karl Bremer’s Ripple in Stillwater blog and nowhere else. I was at the courthouse when Karl took that photo. It captures Vennes in full flight from reporters with Karl in pursuit. Karl ran after Vennes for several blocks snapping pictures of the fleeing felon. That’s the sort of effort real reporters put into getting a story.

Karl sued and settled with the New Republic for an undisclosed sum.

Michele Bachmann’s Teflon’s Wearing Thin: She’s Got A Primary Challenger

From Jeff Kolb at the local conservative blog Look True North (hat tip to Dump Bachmann’s Ken Avidor), we hear that Michele Bachmann has a primary challenger — as yet unnamed, but known to be male.

Boy howdy.

Last year, Bachmann was riding high. Her 2010 outing saw her crush the well-funded Tarryl Clark by thirteen percentage points. She had an immense warchest and lots of media exposure from her showing in the 2012 presidential primaries, her congressional district had just had a Democratic stronghold removed from it, and she was set to outspend her Democratic opponent by a twelve-to-one margin.

And she very nearly lost, a fact which does not seem to have gone unnoticed by various local Republicans.

Last year, no one would have considered giving Bachmann a primary challenge. That was then, this is now.

Will Redistricting Mean An End To Boondoggle Bridge Plans?

It’s been a good news, bad news kinda week so far for Michele Bachmann.

The good news: The Stillwater area, the most liberal part of her district, now is in another district thanks to redistricting — which means that she’s Congresswoman-for-Life, with the Wright County Megachurchers backing her. (Well, so long as they’re not too upset that she doesn’t want to live near them, being that she lives in the Stillwater area.)

The bad news: The Stillwater area is where her pet boondoggle, the planned $700 million replacement for a historic bridge that MnDOT says is safe and doesn’t need replacing, is slated to go — and now that area is in the CD of Betty McCollum, who has been opposed to the $700 million Boondoggle Bridge from the get-go.

As Karl Bremer says over at Ripple in Stillwater:

Bachmann’s marquee issue—the $700-million Boondoggle Bridge across the St. Croix River—will be null and void for her if she decides to run in the 6th CD, as the proposed new bridge site in Oak Park Heights, the City of Stillwater and the old Stillwater Lift Bridge are now in the 4th CD—McCollum’s district. That will leave the Star-Tribune and Pioneer Press newspaper editorialists, along with Stillwater Mayor Ken Harycki and his cronies, looking like fools for chastising McCollum to stay out of the bridge debate because it’s not in her district. This scenario would clearly make the bridge debate McCollum’s issue and not Bachmann’s.

Indeed. And, as it turns out, Bachmann is indeed going to run in the Sixth, even though she now lives in the Fourth.

Do GOP Base Voters See Ron Paul’s Racism As A Bad Thing? Probably Not.

If you’re part of the reality-based community and you’ve been following politics in America for the last decade or so, then you likely knew about the Ron Paul newsletters — and their bigoted contents — well before establishment Republican media outlets dredged them up again to lob at him. (The first time they were dredged up, it was lefties who did the dredging.)

You will notice that while the establishment GOP’s favorite mouthpieces and megaphones have been taking about the newsletters to anyone who will listen, Ron Paul’s Republican rivals generally aren’t touching them. (Bachmann’s the only one to actually do so; Romney, on the other hand, would not even when a reporter offered him the opportunity.) Instead, they’re largely attacking him as being “dangerous” on foreign policy (which is their way of saying he’s against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars).

In other words, most of the other Republican candidates know full well that racism is not considered a bad thing by most GOP base voters. After nearly half a century of the corporate-bigot alliance that is the GOP’s Southern Strategy, the Republican base sees bigotry not as a bug, but a feature.

Bachmann’s Iowa Chair Defects To Ron Paul’s Campaign

Right after he appeared with Bachmann at a 4 o’clock afternoon campaign stop in Indianola, state senator Kent Sorenson, Bachmann’s Iowa campaign chair, defects to the Ron Paul campaign.

This is fantastically good news for Ron Paul. If he can Hoover up even a quarter of Bachmann’s Iowa supporters, he beats Romney easily. Mitt’s going to have to go into fricking overdrive now — I expect to see him dump another $10 million in ads in the next few days.

Here’s the press release announcing this news:

“My Number One Goal Is To Not Go To Jail”

From the November 13, 2006 StarTribune:

New members did their work behind closed doors, learning how to get their offices up and running, prepare their budgets, use franking privileges and how to keep abreast of complicated ethics rules.

“My No. 1 goal is to not go to jail,” [Michele] Bachmann said, chuckling.

Ironic, that she’d say that. Especially with the trial of Frank Vennes scheduled for February of next year.

GOP Sends O’Reilly to Battle Bachmann

Republican bigwigs fear a Michele Bachmann candidacy almost more than they fear taxing the rich.

This was shown yet again by FOX News mainstay Bill O’Reilly’s adversarial treatment of Bachmann when she was on his show Monday night:

Bachmann refused to directly address any of O’Reilly’s tough questions, prompting the visibly frustrated conservative host to role his eyes, audibly sigh, and finally laugh in Bachmann’s face when she invoked her “titanium spine.” Noting that the Republican leadership understands the need to raise the debt limit, O’Reilly chided Bachmann, saying, “You are the renegade here.”

Whoa! Not only is he ripping into Bachmann, he’s also telling FOX viewers that the debt ceiling must be raised. Guess Boehner and McConnell, on orders from the Wall Streeters who will be hurt first and worst in event of a default, have asked FOX to both try to explain fiscal reality to teabaggers thus far sheltered from it AND to try and hamstring Bachmann before she achieves her goal of becoming the next Tom DeLay: a powerbroker with access to the wallets of the religious right and thus the ability to run primary candidates against Republicans she doesn’t like.

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)

Petters, 2008: Bachmann Pal Vennes Says He’ll Get Pardoned ‘Next Year’

Once again, Ken Avidor comes through with the goods.

In this case, the goods involve a trial audio recording and transcript. The recording and transcript (from which the above YouTube is excerpted) document Ponzi schemer Tom Petters, in a September 8, 2008 conversation with Deanna Coleman (who he didn’t know was recording the conversation as the government had already nabbed her), saying that Frank Vennes, longtime Petters associate and friendly with Michele Bachmann, Norm Coleman and Tim Pawlenty, had told him in August 2008 that he, Tom Petters, was going down but that Vennes was “going to get a pardon next year”:

Now, why would Vetters think that? Probably because Michele Bachmann had already written to then-President Bush asking him to pardon Vetters:

KARL BREMER: Frank Vennes, Jr., was one of her largest contributors in 2006. He’s a convicted money launderer. He did time in federal prison in Sandstone Prison in northern Minnesota. And upon his release, he became involved in Tom Petters. And if you are familiar with the Petters Ponzi scheme, about a $3.5 billion Ponzi scheme that operated in Minnesota, Frank Vennes steered primarily evangelical Christian groups to invest with Tom Petters. And he became implicated in the Petters scandal in 2008. But that was after Michele Bachmann had written a recommendation for pardon for Frank Vennes. Vennes and his family and his personal lawyer have given Bachmann tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Vennes also contributed heavily to another Minnesota presidential candidate, Tim Pawlenty, and the state Republican Party. And Vennes got letters of recommendation from Tim Pawlenty, or recommendations for a pardon from Pawlenty, from Norm Coleman, former U.S. senator from Minnesota, and from Bachmann.

When Vennes was implicated in the Petters scandal in 2008, Bachmann withdrew her letter of support for a pardon, and she gave back a portion of the money that Vennes had donated to her campaign. Just in April of this year, Vennes was actually indicted in the Petters scandal, and he’s scheduled to go to trial later this year, which could make for an uncomfortable time for Michele Bachmann, because in her letter of support for a pardon, she indicated she had a very close personal relationship with Frank Vennes and was quite familiar with his personal finances. She has, of course, never returned my calls regarding Frank Vennes, and she’s really never explained fully her relationship with this convicted money launderer.

Vennes’ trial is set to start roundabout the time the GOP primary season begins in earnest. (By the way: Republicans are trying to deflect this scandal by pointing out that Vetters gave money to Amy Klobuchar as well as to Norm, Timmy and Michele. What they don’t point out is that, unlike Norm, Timmy and especially Michele, Amy Klobuchar didn’t work to get Vetters pardoned.)

Minnesota Republicans Frantically Rewriting Their Long History with Bradlee Dean

Even as the same conservatives who cheered on Neal Boortz for saying that then-congresswoman Cynthia McKinney “looks like a ghetto slut”, “an explosion at a Brillo pad factory”, and “like Tina Turner peeing on an electric fence” have now suddenly and loudly rediscovered their moral compass by having Laura Ingraham, who Ed Schultz called a “right-wing slut”, complain about Schultz on FOX to accused sexual harasser Bill “Falafel” O’Reilly, we find the local conservatives and Republican operatives who have for years gladly and frequently associated with rabid anti-gay bigot preacher Bradlee Dean are now practicing saying “Bradlee Who?” with a straight face.

Thanks to the efforts of Ken Avidor, who has been documenting Bradlee Dean, his good friend Michele Bachmann, and several other local far-right looney tunes for the better part of a decade, I can now treat you to the varying ways in which local right-wing blogger and radio personality Mitch Berg has described Bradlee Dean over the years.

As noted in the screen shot above of a recent Tweet by Mr. Berg, who you may remember from an earlier posting, he’s been one of the many prominent Republicans practicing their “Bradlee Who?” routine lately. Yet Mr. Avidor was kind enough to point me in the direction of Mitch Berg’s postings over the years concerning Bradlee Dean at Berg’s “Shot in the Dark” blog, postings that belie this posture. Follow me over the hump for visual and textual documentation: