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Boehner Super-PAC Aides Push Senate Amnesty Bill

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Photo Credit: Business Insider

Photo Credit: Business Insider

Senior GOP aides of a super PAC linked to Speaker John Boehner are lobbying House Republicans to pass the Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, legislation that Boehner has said he will not bring to the House floor.

The lobbying effort is coming under the umbrella of the American Action Network, a nonprofit 501(c)(4) “action tank” led by former senator Norm Coleman, which is touting the “major positive economic impact” of the Senate bill in e-mails sent to individual House Republican offices.

AAN is housed in the same office as the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC associated with Boehner, and the two organizations share senior aides, including Brian O. Walsh, the president of both organizations, and Dan Conston, the spokesman for both.

Boehner spoke at a fundraiser for CLN earlier this summer and also headlined the organization’s inaugural event. The group’s website has posted links to numerous news stories that refer to the group as “Boehner’s” super PAC.

The AAN’s e-mail, sent to GOP offices, touts the number of jobs the group estimates the Senate bill would create for the congressional district and state of that office. The group also released an embeddable “widget” that allows users to find out how many jobs the Senate bill would create in the district of their representative.

Read more from this story HERE.

Public Citizen, Greenpeace Target Chevron

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Photo Credit: Free Beacon A consortium of environmental and consumer advocacy groups filed a Federal Elections Commission complaint Tuesday alleging that oil giant Chevron violated pay-to-play laws when it donated $2.5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, a “super” political action committee tied to House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio).

Consumer advocate Public Citizen, as well as environmentalist groups Greenpeace, Oil Change International, and Friends of the Earth, called on the FEC to “undertake an investigation into and enforcement action against Chevron USA, Inc., a federal government contractor, for making a $2.5 million contribution to the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Super PAC, for the purpose of influencing the 2012 federal elections.”

“This is an obvious, coordinated intimidation tactic from the left masquerading as another baseless complaint,” Congressional Leadership Fund spokesman Dan Conston said.

The complaint comes two months after Greenpeace met with dozens of other liberal interest groups at the National Education Association to discuss, among other things, punishing Chevron for contributing to the GOP, according to Mother Jones.

Some D.C. insiders say the FEC complaint is the realization of that meeting. “You had an event in January where you had these liberal donors get together and say let’s go after our enemies … now they have an FEC complaint, a weak complaint at that,” one source said. “It’s a pretty blatant connection; it’s a scary thing.”

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Super PAC: Progressive/Tea Party Alliance Aiming To Topple Mitch McConnell?

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Photo Credit: APRepublican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is becoming increasingly concerned about his 2014 re-election chances in Kentucky, according to a progressive Super PAC that says it is partnering with unnamed Tea Party groups to paint McConnell as a corrupt insider and knock him out of his longtime Senate seat in a Republican primary.

A recent McConnell campaign fundraising email accused liberals of “attempting to infiltrate conservative” groups in Kentucky. Another McConnell campaign email accused the liberal organization MoveOn.org of supporting a “phony tea party” in an attempt to beat the senior senator. Though MoveOn disputed the McConnell campaign’s charges, the progressive super PAC Progress Kentucky is openly waging the kind of attack that McConnell seems worried about.

“Mitch McConnell has recently contributed through [his wife] Elaine Chao’s family $80,000 to the Kentucky GOP,” Shawn Reilly, executive director of the progressive super PAC Progress Kentucky, told The Daily Caller. “It looks to me like he’s trying to buy the Kentucky Republican Party in order to try to avoid a primary.”

“He also set up his campaign office a year earlier than he ever has, and he placed it in the same office where his 1984 campaign — his first successful Senate race — was housed,” Reilly added. “I hear from people that he’s pretty superstitious.”

Progress Kentucky, which filed as a Kentucky-based super PAC on Dec. 13, says it is making a concerted push to align itself with tea party groups in order to field and support a viable Republican primary challenger for McConnell. Reilly said that his group is already in productive communication with tea party leaders across the state.

Read more from this story HERE.

Karl Rove Defends Himself Against Attacks (+video)

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Photo Credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com Karl Rove is defending his new super PAC’s intention to get involved in primaries, and criticized Bob Woodward’s assertion that he was creating a “politburo.”

“[Bob] Woodward goes on Fox News Sunday and calls me a member of the Politburo,” Rove said on Fox News’ “Hannity.” “The last time I checked the Politburo was the ruling body of the Soviet Communist party and oversaw the extermination of tens of millions of people and during the Cold War threatened the United States with nuclear annihilation and just because Woodward is a center-left journalist, he can get away with calling me a communist and nobody is bothered by this.”

Woodward was critical of Rove’s new super PAC, the Conservative Victory Project, during his Sunday appearance, arguing it was against Republican traditions.

“You’re going to set yourself up as a kind of Politburo vetting these candidates,” Woodward said. “I mean, the whole theory of Republicanism is to let the local, state or district decide.”

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Newt Blasts ‘Repugnant’ Rove Super PAC, GOP Consulting Class

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Photo Credit: BreitbartOn Wednesday, Former House Speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich blistered Republican consultant Karl Rove, saying Rove’s new super PAC that was created to wage war against conservatives and Tea Party candidates in GOP primaries should be “repugnant” to every conservative and Republican.

Gingrich, in his weekly newsletter, writes of Rove, “no one person is smart enough nor do they have the moral right to buy nominations across the country” and that a “bunch of billionaires financing a boss to pick candidates in 50 states” is “the opposite of the Republican tradition of freedom and grassroots small town conservatism.”

“That is the system of Tammany Hall and the Chicago machine,” Gingrich writes.

Gingrich points out that, while Rove likes to point to Christine O’Donnell’s 2010 loss in the Delaware Senate race as a reason for creating his super PAC, Rove-backed candidates in 2012 lost “winnable senate races in Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida.”

“So in seven of the nine losing races, the Rove model has no candidate-based explanation for failure,” Gingrich writes. “Handing millions to Washington based consultants to destroy the candidates they dislike and nominate the candidates they do like is an invitation to cronyism, favoritism and corruption.”

Gingrich writes that it is “appalling how little some Republican consultants have learned from the 2012 defeat” and “even more disturbing how arrogant their plans for the future are.”

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Meet The Rand Paul Super Pac Founder Who Wants To Purge ‘Statists, Do-Gooders, Planners And Neoconservatives’

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore The 2016 election cycle may be years away, and the Republican party may still be reeling from the aftershocks of 2012, but some of Rand Paul’s supporters aren’t waiting any longer to press their case for his presidential candidacy.

Even though Paul hasn’t officially declared his intention to run for president, and won’t for at least a year, a fledgling pro-Rand Paul super PAC is aggressively pushing for the Kentucky senator to lead a revolution within the GOP, calling for the expulsion of what they call “statists, do-gooders, planners, and neoconservatives.”

This new super PAC, called Human Action PAC, describes its mission in the starkest possible terms:

It is an open secret that those in the establishment have no loyalty to the scolds, the bigots, the defenders of the gerontocracy and the people for whom “big government for me, but not for thee” is a rallying cry. In fact, their leaders seem to acknowledge, deep down, that those people are killing the Republican party.
To those leaders looking for a way to excise that cancer, we offer a candidate who can purge those people’s ideas while still holding onto the mantle of principle.

Senator Paul’s office has not commented on these claims.

Human Action PAC, which launched its Web site officially this Monday but has been live for several months, has raised a little over $1,000 and lists more than $8,000 in debt, according to OpenSecrets.org, and their first FEC filing. The organization first began spending money on December 31, 2012, when they spent just over $3,000 to support Rand Paul for President, according to the same FEC filing.

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Iowa Gov. Branstad To Rove: ‘Stay Out’

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Photo Credit: Breitbart Republican Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad told Karl Rove to keep his new super PAC, which some conservatives believe was created to wage war on them, out of Iowa’s Republican primaries.

“I basically told Karl Rove that what he was doing is counter-productive and he needs to stay out of it,” Branstad told the Associated Press last Friday. “If some outside group that has no connection to Iowa attacks somebody from Iowa, that is not smart.”

After Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat, announced he would be retiring from the Senate in January, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) indicated he may be interested in pursuing the Senate seat, which has been held by a Democrat for 30 years, in 2014.

Rove’s group promptly decided to smear King a week later, indicating he would be a Republican against whom the group would try to obliterate with negative ads in a potential Iowa GOP Senate primary.

After Rove leaked the details of his super PAC to the New York Times, American Crossroads President Steven Law blistered King in the same publication, telling the Times the group was “concerned about Steve King’s Todd Akin problem” and that “all of the things he’s said are going to be hung around his neck.” These comments enraged King because they falsely implied King endorsed Akin’s views and comments about “legitimate rape,” which cost Akin Missouri’s Senate race in 2012.

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Tea Party Super-PAC Girds For Coming Primary Clashes With Karl Rove Group

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photo credit: donkeyhoteyOne of the nation’s most prominent Tea Party groups has launched a super-PAC that will challenge GOP strategist Karl Rove’s plan to wage primary warfare against other Republicans, opening a new front in the escalating fight between the establishment and grassroots factions of the GOP.

“He sounds like he’s challenging us, and we’re ready to rise to the challenge,” Jenny Beth Martin, founder of the Tea Party Patriots, told The Hill.

Martin’s group last week launched the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, a super-PAC that will be active in House and Senate races in 2014, largely through providing organizational support to help get out the conservative vote.

“I’m going to be engaging with the donors over the next several weeks to let them know what we’re doing and to show them that we can do what the Republican Party is not doing right now, which is building a ground game,” Martin said.
News of the Tea Party super-PAC arrived in Republican circles with substantially less fanfare than the attention lavished in recent weeks on Rove’s new Conservative Victory Project.

The CVP was created specifically to engage in primary races going into 2014 with the aim, Rove says, of backing “the most conservative candidate who can win.”

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Liberal Blog Goes After Obama’s Mysterious Muslim Mega-Donor

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There are only a few dozen Americans who have given at least $1 million to super PACs this election cycle, and Kareem Ahmed is one of them. If you manage to talk to him, he’ll tell you a lot. He’ll tell you all about a class of pharmaceuticals, called compound drugs, which he is in the business of promoting, and which have been the subject of a contentious debate in California, where he lives and works. He’ll tell you to read ProPublica’s reporting about Big Pharma. He’ll tell you House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is his best friend. He’ll tell you about his dream to someday take the proceeds of his business and build the largest non-profit children’s hospital in the world in Southern California’s Inland Empire. He’ll tell you how he fixed Democratic political strategist Paul Begala’s leg. He’ll tell you how much he loves President Barack Obama, whom he has met on a number of occasions.

He told me several times that he thought I’d been hired by Republicans, insurance companies, or his competition to destroy him.

“I really want to educate you, Eric, I really do,” Ahmed said in an interview over the phone in late August. “Because, you know what, because I’m prepared. My law firms are ready to go, and I’ve got PR firms retained already. They’re waiting for your article.”

Why?

“Because the message I got from you, Eric, was, you have been hired by either the Republicans or by the competition, or somebody, just out to destroy me, without even knowing the facts,” he said. “So what would you do if you were in my shoes? So I’ve got the White House on notice. I’ve got everybody on notice. That all right, I can’t wait until this thing comes out, and we’re going to go after your publication, you, and whatever, and if there’s anything that’s defamatory, that’s not factual, oh yeah, I’m ready. We’re waiting. My employees are watching. My law firms are watching. I mean, they are watching you. Like, every move.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Soros-Funded “Trackers” are Digging Up Dirt on GOP Candidates

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A George Soros-funded super PAC is vowing to send operatives to stake out Republican campaigns to hunt for and to record any gaffes or controversial statements the candidates may make.

On Tuesday, American Bridge sent a fundraising plea to supporters asking for money to pay for “trackers,” a term for political operatives who sometimes tail opponents.

The organization, which includes both a super PAC that discloses its donors and a nonprofit group that does not, bragged in its fundraising letter about its flagging the clip of Rep. W. Todd Akin, Missouri Republican, making comments about “legitimate rape” that led top Republicans to call for his exit from that state’s U.S. Senate race.

“When our trackers caught Rep. Todd Akin in an interview talking about ‘legitimate rape,’ his invitation to the Republican Convention in Tampa was revoked,” Rodell Mollineau, president of American Bridge, says in the letter.

He also cited a news report saying that Republicans were hiding from its footage-seekers at the Tampa convention now under way.

Read more from this story HERE.