I’d be less unimpressed if he just texted strangers pictures of his junk.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Friday pressed Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) to drop his Senate bid amid scrutiny surrounding his hedge fund, according to a statement provided to The Hill.
Reid challenged Grayson’s progressive credentials and criticized the Florida congressman’s “moral compass” based on the recent reports about his fund.
“These deeply troubling allegations should disqualify anyone from a seat in the U.S. Senate,” Reid said in a statement, which was first reported by The Associated Press.
“Alan Grayson used his status as a congressman to unethically promote his Cayman Islands hedge funds, and he should drop out of the Senate race immediately. His actions aren’t just disgraceful to the Democratic Party, they disgrace the halls of Congress,” he continued.
I told you so, and I told you so.
When I think about watching him act like a moral crusader during hearings of the House Finance Committee, I just want to vomit.
He’s exactly who I thought he was.
And Harry Reid is who I thought he was.
If there is an ethics issue isn’t it the House’s job to address it, not the Senate Minority Leader’s?
He’s running for the Senate.
And a GOP lead House doesn’t start an ethics investigation, but somehow Harry Reid wants to.
You really love your establishment Senators.
I can’t stand Grayson – but this story is nonsense.
Oh, Christ.
LOL.
Gosh, maybe it’s worth reading the story. Reid isn’t calling on an investigation, he’s trying to make sure the Democrats can take this Senate seat.
It doesn’t do us much good to say “Well, Murphy’s a bad vote on progressive issues, so Reid’s action means he wants to elect a conservaDem.” If Grayson can’t win the election, who gives a shit if he would be a better vote than Murphy? And if progressive Dems were better organized in Florida, they wouldn’t have hitched their wagons so securely to Grayson.
Maybe it means something that multiple senior Grayson campaign staffers strongly advised their candidate that this hedge fund business would be an electoral loser, and he refused their advice.
If Hillary, or anyone even peripherally attached to her in Congress, were found to have done exactly the same thing, everyone on this thread would be ripping the shit out of her.
I have to confess, I sent him a couple of contributions over the years, but it was the way he was handling his divorce case that finally convinced me the guy was a shmuck. Gosh, that was only about a year ago.
I think that is the moral justification for the “tone of the place” police. His divorce.
Spitzer and Weiner could not survive it either.
John Murtha survived worse, but no females were involved and he was a staunch member of the club who rallied for him.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/30/clinton-system-donor-machine-2016-election/
It’s still okay for a presidential candidate, right?
That Simon Head article starts off with an anonymously sourced Fox New story–
–linked to a more respectable reprint (Business Insider) so the casual reader won’t know it’s from Fox, and by now pretty clearly false anyway, as every variation on the criminal email story has turned out to be over the past year.
Then it goes on to a similar laundering job on the trillion-word David Sirota series of deceptive hit pieces in International Business Times (at one point Sirota virtually accuses Clinton of taking bribes from the Algerian and other governments to supply them with “chemical and biological weapons” because the State Department gave an American company permission to sell them tear gas, as if any State Department would ever have refused such a request). It’s just another chapter in the story Jeff Gerth started writing with the first Whitewater “investigation” in 1992.
I’m not denying Clintons have made their way into an intrinsically corrupt ruling class and have a lot of disgusting friends and unseemly behaviors, but:
(1) It’s not a monolithic ruling class, but has its good and bad sides; for example our billionaires (Soros, Speyer, Gates, Buffett) are thousands of times better than theirs (Scaifes and Kochs).
(2) There’s honor among thieves, and there are serious rules in the ruling class; Grayson has egregiously violated them and Hillary Clinton has not, which is why all those efforts of the vast right-wing conspiracy (turned out it really existed!) have been unable to take her down.
Soros helped finance the coup in Ukraine through an NGO. Have you seen the flair that the Ukrainian army wears?
It doesn’t have to be a monolithic ruling class. If Clinton takes money from health insurance companies, drug companies, weapons manufacturers, energy companies, she’s not on my side.
There was also an article about her and the Honduras coup about a year ago in Salon, when Sanders was at one percent.
I don’t like her politics and I don’t believe she will succeed in advancing anything for the working class and I don’t believe she’ll try.
By the way, what part of the NYROB article is incorrect? Are the numbers incorrect?
Another Monsanto face.
I don’t understand your reference. Please explain.
Comments are interesting, too.
https:/consortiumnews.com/2014/03/16/corporate-interests-behind-ukraine-putsch
Also this…”Ukraine’s agricultural land is currently under a moratorium that bans its sale until January 1, 2016.9 Despite this moratorium, at least 1.6 million ha of Ukrainian agricultural land is currently in foreign hands. According to several reports, just 10 large agribusinesses control as much as 2.8 million ha.
http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/Brief_CorporateTakeoverofUkraine_0.
pdf
Yet Reid backs Menendez. Gotta love about Reid’s whining about morality though. Has Grayson actually broken any laws? And why does he want Murphy in the Senate so bad?
Has Clinton broken any laws? “Where’s the quid pro quo!?!”
You guys sound ridiculous defending this behavior.
I’m just pointing out the inconsistencies.
This:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2016/02/hillary-misleader-and-her-superpacs.html
Does Reid back Menendez? Most recent statement of “confidence he did nothing wrong” I can find is February 2013.
After the indictment last April,
I don’t count that as “backing”.
Grayson has always been an ass, just a troll who won a House seat
Yes, but he was our troll! 🙂
don’t include me in that 🙂
Looks at some the comments on this thread
So y’all really gonna put on the capes for Alan Grayson knowing that if this exact same story came out about a Dem you hated you’d be screaming? All because this grifter played the role of “Bold Progressive”? LMAO y’all are hilarious.
Except, no one here, to this point (6:26 am 2016/02/13), is “putting on the capes” or otherwise saying anything positive about Grayson. So when you say “y’all” what are you talking about? Please read what others have said before making sweeping, ridiculous claims about other posters here. – “Massa”
Okay Progressive Massa….once again I’ll pretend not to see what I see because the emo tone police doesn’t like it being pointed out.
it’s not about tone police, it’s about the fact that on this blog we have constructive conversation. feel free to stay away if you don’t prefer that or if you’re looking for a place for name calling
One simple question: How is he worse for the people of Florida and the US than the Republican that Schultz is backing?
Grayson is significantly worse for both the people of Florida and the progressive movement because
And what’s going on with all the posting about Hillary here? Defending Grayson with “Her stuff is just as bad or worse” is a bad position to take, not to mention a pure electoral loser. And if you can’t see the differences between Alan’s bill of particulars and Hillary’s, we’ll continue to talk past each other.
Why is this so hard to understand? I simply don’t get why so many people feel so compelled to defend this behavior.
Reid isn’t the most liberal person in the world, but he is a very successful tactician in winning seats. He’s doing this because he wants to win. Not because Murphy is a conservadem (well, Crist style).
Funny you should mention Crist… how did that work out for the Democrats? Leaving aside whether Grayson is a criminal (seems like not quite that, but I don’t really know) or an ass (much stronger case here), what makes people think Murphy is more electable? These electability calculations drive me nuts, because they tend to be wrong, and they tend to be wrong for the same reason every time – they assume the base and go for the middle/establishment. That does not appear to work, the base can not be assumed. If Grayson is nothing more than a hedge fund vulture in it for nothing but himself.. well, why did he bother to try to appeal to that liberal base? Seems like the party establishment would be perfect for a wealthy capitalist, no (or is that just my cynicism showing)?
So why go for the base? Because scumbag nor not, he’s not stupid and he knows that what works.
Unless you believe that a convicted child rapist and murderer is exactly as electable as a figurative ‘Boy Scout’ and Congressional Medal of Honor winner, then the concept of electability is perfectly sound. (Note, the above mentioned categories are purely demonstrative of overall principle and not actual references to the candidates in particular.) The only points in contention are where and how you draw your lines.
In this case lying hypocrite who claims to be a liberal fighter but who appears to really just be a hedge fund daddy with a good liberal-skin suit(a.k.a. Grayson) is less electable than a conservadem because of a judgment that people in Florida hate open Dem. hypocrisy while tolerating Repub. open hypocrisy. This is generally a pretty sound argument because the rules are very different between Dems. & ‘Liberals’ and Repubs. & ‘Conservatives’ in pretty much any activity under the sun.
It’s also important to note that these are almost always relative calculations. So Murphy may be more electable than Grayson at this point, but that doesn’t mean either of them are actually passing the threshold for absolute electability or that they are or ever were above their opponent in electability.
Yes, not defending Grayson in specific here, but just pointing out that the general idea of what “electable” is is wrong. And Grayson, for whatever other faults he may have, seems to agree with this.
Here is a progressive defender of Grayson:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2016/02/which-side-will-you-be-on-schumer-reid.html
I don’t see any moral high ground here other than who is better for Democrats. I mentioned Clinton because anyone who reads the various stories about her wealth from the rich should be more appalled by her record. If it’s wrong that Grayson is an arbitrager then is it wrong that Hillary’s son-in-law is one too? Will this make Chelsea unclean for electioneering?
Here is an article from a year ago about Clinton’s monetary dealings, which the author of Harper’s calls “money laundering”. How does this get a pass?
That’s why. If you can’t vote for Grayson because he’s an arbitrager, then where’s the clause that lets you vote for Clinton? Plus, as these articles keep surfacing are there any Clinton supporters worried about actual indictments over the Clinton Foundation et al?
https:/harpers.org/blog/2015/11/shaky-foundations
“Massa”
Was it really necessary to do this?
gave him a polite warning; could troll rate probably
Just quoting what KennyMack called me in a previous post.
I remember the old days, when texting strangers pictures of your junk was a revolutionary act.
But think of the children!!!!!!
Here’s a defense of Grayson. Why does Reid feel the need to intervene in that race in favor of the Republican?
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/13/1484927/-Why-do-establishment-Democrats-hate-Alan-Grayson-
so-much
I keep getting radicalized. I’m this far from joining the Greens or a militia.