Your Tuesday Night Crackpot: Jim Ryun

The Madison Project is another Republican Party far-right extremist organization. It was founded in Virginia about a decade ago to help fanatic anti-Choice Republicans raise money and develop strategies. They are generally considered crackpots and the candidates they support tend to be crackpots as well, few of whom ever get elected. Two exceptions-- not as a crackpots, but as electoral success-- were homophobic bigot Marilyn Musgrave (CO) who served 3 terms-- and was voted the most conservative member of the House by the American Conservative Union-- before the voters dumped her by a wide margin, and New Jersey/Wall Street corruptionist Scott Garrett currently serving his 6th term. Their board of directors includes well-known sociopaths like Paul Weyrich and Tim LaHaye and their President is Jim Ryun, a neo-Nazi type from Kansas who was a congressman for about a decade before beiing defeated by Democrat Nancy Boyda in 2006, partially because his secret relationship with child predator Mark Foley (R-FL) was exposed. When he tried running again, a mainstream conservative ran against him and... well, it wasn't a good year for neo-Nazi types; he lost. Angry, he finally found a job-- for him and his son, Drew, at the crackpot Madison Project where they sit around bitching about how Ann Coulter isn't far enough right and how Republicans should "take her endorsements with a grain of salt after she peddled the ultimate shyster and con-man-- Chris Christie-- on her readers."

Since inception, they've managed to raise just $551,401 and most of the money they've spent has been on losers like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. Last cycle, their biggest "investments" were for radical right losers Chad Mathis ($64,756), a KKK freak who came in a very distant 4th in a GOP primary in Alabama, Chris McDaniel ($21,400), another KKK guy, this one who lost to a walking corpse in Mississippi, and Igor Birman ($10,450), a Russian fascist who came in a distant third in a primary in California, but not before poisoning the well for the Republican victor, who then went on to lose to a weak and feeble Democrat.

In 2014 their PAC, the Madison Action Fund, spent $350,555, much of it from 2 big right-wing donors, Cary Katz ($105,000), founder and chairman of the College Loan Corporation, whose business model is ripping off students, and Richard Uihlein ($75,000), a Scott Walker million dollar donor and the unaccomplished son of the founder of Uline Corporation. They wasted most of their money attacking mainstream conservatives like Thad Cochran and Mike Simpson on behalf of neo-Nazi types in the Ryun image.

So this morning, wasn't I surprised when I was the recipient of some spam from Ryun attacking more conservatives for not being conservative enough and then asking for money. He was all worked up because-- last year I think-- Mitch McConnell called right-wing lunatics like Ryun "profoundly stupid" and "traitors." Ryun wrote "He thinks we should be 'punched in the nose.' Instead of listening to conservatives, our leaders call us derogatory names and ignore the will of the American people" and then insisted his pathetic and serially failed little operation is "the nation’s premier PAC dedicated to electing the next generation of true conservative leadership." He claims his dinky purism PAC is responsible for the elections of Ted Cruz, Matt Bevin and Mark Meadows, all demonstrably false.

Most Republicans in Congress hate Ted Cruz; Iowa lunatic Rod Blum isn't among them

This year, Ryun is backing two crackpots against Blue America candidates, Pat Murphy (D-IA) and Alan Grayson (D-FL). In Iowa their candidate is Rod Blum, a multimillionaire member of the so-called Freedom Caucus. "His first vote on the floor of the House of Representatives," wrote Ryun, "was to vote against John Boehner for Speaker. Since he's in a hard blue district, he needs our help to win his first re-election campaign." And his Florida candidate is freshman teabagger Ron DeSantis, who hopes to be the GOP nominee to take on Grayson for the seat lazy Marco Rubio is giving up for a vanity run for president. DeSantis, Ryun said, "has stood with his constituents against GOP leadership for the hardest votes, and we know he'll continue to do that in the Senate." He then babbled on about how they only support candidates that take a proven and unwavering stand on the conservative principles we hold most dear, including:

++    Limited government;
++    Free Market solutions;
++    Freedom and liberty;
++    Reduction on government bureaucracy;
++    A deep respect for the sanctity of life; and
++    Commitment to our right to keep-and-bear arms.

In other words, we DO NOT support politicians like simply because they have an “R” next to their name.

Spineless Republican politicians are just as much to blame for the state of our country as the liberal Democrats.

Organizations like the Madison Project and lunatic fringe nuts like Jim Ryun make it easier for progressives to win seats. If you'd like to help, you can beat Blum by supporting Pat Murphy on this page and beat DeSantis by supporting Alan Grayson on this page.

Mitch McConnell Is Paralyzed By Fear

McConnell doesn't get a lot of good news lately. But he did yesterday. The progressive Kentucky Democrat running for his seat dropped out of the Democratic Party primary against centrist Alison Lundergan Grimes and declared his intention to run as an independent.

Marksberry says Grimes is a good Democrat, but she has given up the most important fights against McConnell to pander to special interests.

"I want to give empowerment back to those that are impoverished, back to those who understand what the environment is experiencing right now and back to those who created the middle-class," says Marksberry. "And the only way to do that is to speak about the issues. And I hope that Alison Lundergan Grimes one day will open up and talk about the issues."

Marksberry had been suing the state party, alleging it has favored Grimes's campaign despite bylaws requiring it to stay neutral in primaries.

If only the DSCC and the Kentucky Democratic Party hadn't interfered in the primary, Grimes would have probably won and Marksberry would have probably campaigned for her in the general. Now he may take enough votes away from her to give the highly unpopular McConnell the margin he needs to beat her. If McConnell even wins his own primary. This week, the National Review's website posted an incendiary story about McConnell's woes with his right flank, Gunning for McConnell. The far right Madison Project is backing Matt Bevin, McConnell's very outspoken opponent.

“The problem in Washington, D.C., right now is the current GOP leadership and their unwillingness to fight the big-government policies that are coming down the pike,” says Drew Ryun, the group’s political director and a former deputy director at the Republican National Committee. “That is encapsulated in Mitch McConnell.”

While other top conservative groups, such as the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks, have remained on the sidelines so far in the Kentucky primary, the Madison Project has enthusiastically jumped in, endorsing Bevin and making a $27,000 radio buy in August for an ad attacking McConnell.

It’s a repeat of the group’s strategy in Texas in 2012, when they were the first national conservative organization to endorse Ted Cruz. “The importance of their endorsement in the early days was significant,” says John Drogin, who served as Cruz’s campaign manager and is now the senator’s state director. “When Senator Cruz was still a long-shot, far behind in the polls, Madison Project stood with him because they knew he would stand for conservative principles.”

“That gave Ted some early credibility,” says Ken Emmanuelson, a tea-party activist from Dallas. “That kind of thing can put a guy on the radar, so I’ve always given them props for that.”

But while Cruz wasn’t the establishment candidate in the GOP primary, his establishment-backed rival-- Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst-- wasn’t an incumbent, much less the top Senate Republican. McConnell is known for his ruthless campaigning, and he has a long track record of victories in Kentucky. His campaign has already vehemently pushed back on attacks claiming that he’s not conservative enough by noting that he has a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union. And Rand Paul, a tea-party favorite and Kentucky’s other senator, has already endorsed McConnell.

Drew Ryun is confident, however, that Bevin is the little engine that can, despite a McConnell-campaign poll released last month that showed Bevin trailing McConnell 21 percent to 68 percent. “He’s slightly behind [where Marco Rubio was] at this stage of the campaign, and he’s slightly ahead of Ted [Cruz],” says Ryun. “Where he is right now I actually feel pretty comfortable with it, given the fact that his name recognition is not what it could be in Kentucky.”



For the Madison Project, Bevin’s candidacy is a perfect fit for their twofold mission of transforming Republican leadership and making sure the most conservative candidate possible represents comfortably Republican districts. Republicans, says Daniel Horowitz, the group’s policy director, are “underutilizing” solidly red districts. “You look at the Democrat side, you won’t find any inner city where you have a blue-dog Democrat,” he comments. The group has launched the Madison Performance Index, which compares Republican House members’ voting records, as analyzed by Heritage Action and Club for Growth, with how Republican their district is.

As a result, don’t expect to see the Madison Project playing in purple states or swing districts, although the group won’t definitively rule that out.

The group’s passion for defeating McConnell is grounded in a worry that even conservative stalwarts can’t flourish under the current Republican leadership. Horowitz says activists have asked him what happened to certain conservative politicians, such as Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), after they went to Washington.

“The problem is leadership,” Horowitz argues. “You throw them into a situation where leadership fundamentally doesn’t want to change the status quo... we’re never going to get anywhere.”

“The same old people are going to be put into tough situations,” he continues. “We feel if we change leadership, we’ll change the direction of the party, both in the House and the Senate.”

Jim Ryun, chairman of the Madison Project and a former Kansas congressman, recalls vividly the pressure he faced when he opposed GOP House leadership. He voted against Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind, and today he remembers “some calls from the president where somehow we got disconnected when he didn’t agree with what I was going to do.”

The Madison Project isn’t as much of a fundraising powerhouse as some other conservative groups; it raised just under $2 million in the 2012 cycle. But the group is looking to expand their influence significantly in this cycle. “Will we be an 800-pound gorilla this election cycle? No,” Drew Ryun remarks. “But maybe a 400-pound gorilla.”

For the Madison Project, however, there’s less of an interest in pricey TV buys and more of a fascination with how a well-executed ground game can change the outcome of an election. “You have to do such a massive amount of television to even move the political dial incrementally,” says Drew Ryun, whereas “if you put the time and effort into the ground game, you can actually move a political dial, 3, 4, 5 percent in a precinct versus these television buys that are moving it half a percentage point.” Emmanuelson, the tea-party activist from Dallas, says that Ryun is known for helping inexperienced campaign teams with ground-game politics.

Drew Ryun is cautiously optimistic that the GOP could take back the Senate in 2014, but “a Republican majority that is led by Mitch McConnell, frankly, is not that appealing to me.”

Nonetheless, he thinks that 2014 could be a crucial year for conservatives. “2014 has the potential to be like 2010, except on steroids,” Ryun enthuses. And perhaps even more important, “what we do and the races that we win in 2014 will dictate how 2016 unfolds.”

With Grimes leading McConnell in the polls-- and his negative ratings with Kentucky Republicans soaring-- McConnell is, basically, hiding in his closet and refusing to come out. (No, not the gay closet, the leadership closet.) He must be hoping no one in Kentucky reads the NY Times:

At the climax of each of the fiscal crises that have paralyzed the nation’s capital since the Republican landslide of 2010, Senator Mitch McConnell, the wily Kentuckian who leads the Senate Republicans, has stepped in to untangle the seemingly hopeless knots threatening the economy.

But as Congress trudges toward its next budget showdown, the Mr. Fix-It of Washington is looking more like its Invisible Man as he balances his leadership imperatives with his re-election ones.

...Democrats and, increasingly, Republicans are complaining that the minority leader’s absence from many of this year’s most intense and consequential negotiations-- from immigration overhaul to the budget to a fight over internal rule changes that almost paralyzed the Senate-- has created a power vacuum and left Democrats without a bargaining partner.

They worry that Mr. McConnell is too hamstrung by political concerns in the Capitol and back home in Kentucky. In Washington, a rebellious crop of new Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, has adamantly rejected his compromising brand of politics. Mr. Cruz has almost single-handedly led the charge to tie any further government financing to gutting President Obama’s health care law, a movement that has angered many veteran Republicans but has also brought the federal government to the brink of a shutdown. The junior senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, has largely set the agenda for a Tea Party-infused Republican Party in his home state.

And in that home state, Mr. McConnell is dealing with an unwanted primary challenge from a well-financed Tea Party candidate who keeps telling Kentucky voters the senator is an establishment pawn.

How Could Any Self-Respecting Conservative In Kentucky Still Back McConnell?

McConnell is an ugly example of the American ruling elites who have perverted democracy for the advancement of their own careers. At this point, it almost doesn't matter if McConnell is a conservative or a liberal; all that matters is that he represents Mitch McConnell in the U.S. Senate, not the working families of Kentucky. His three opponents, Tea Party candidate Matt Bevin, in the primary, and Democrats Alison Lundergan Grimes and Ed Marksberry, all recognize his core vulnerability, which is making one of the Beltway's most influential and powerful players the most vulnerable Republican incumbent going into 2014. Watch Bevin's 30 second TV spot above. This is devastating for McConnell because it has the potential to make Kentucky voters think beyond the party identification model that our DC elites routinely use to pull the wool of their constituents' eyes.

Jim Ryun, one of Congress' most extreme right fanatics in living memory, was a radical Kansas Republican before he was defeated in a Senate run by a slightly (very slightly) more mainstream conservative. This week, Ryun penned an OpEd for USAToday about why McConnell-- and Beltway figures like him-- should not be reelected. Forget for a moment that Ryun is far outside the thought of anything resembling the mainstream in his specific policy agenda. And forget also that he's talking about Republicans in general and McConnell in particular. His arguments should also be heeded by out-of-touch Beltway Democratic powerbrokers like Steny Hoyer and Steve Israel, who are-- minus a few policy goals-- exactly the same kind of trash as McConnell.

As a former conservative member of Congress, I learned that legislative battles are won or lost long before the votes are cast in Congress. If we want to win legislative battles, we have to win electoral wars first. Many of those start in primaries against establishment Republicans who have either become complicit in the endless expansion of the federal government or feckless in stopping its aggressive champions.

Over the past year, my political action committee, The Madison Project has had the opportunity to help recruit a number of conservatives who understand the gravity of our public policy problems and are willing to fight for solutions that will fundamentally restore our constitutional republic. They are committed to promoting a new standard in Washington-- one in which principled leaders actually fight and win battles for conservatives. They will do whatever it takes to shrink the size of government-- including filibusters against harmful legislation in the Senate or voting against rules to consider bad legislation backed by GOP leadership in the House.

Next year we will have a number of opportunities to elect these new principled Republicans-- all in conservative-leaning red states. There are opportunities in Democrat-held seats in Louisiana, Arkansas, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, Alaska, and North Carolina. And yes, there are Republican seats in Kentucky, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Wyoming and others currently being wasted on Republicans of yesteryear.

We are proud to have already made some bold endorsements this year. We backed Coast Guard veteran Art Halvorson against Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster in Pennsylvania. This is a clear race between a status quo Republican committed to the policies of meddlesome federal control versus a principled outsider committed to shrinking the size of government.

And there's Louisville businessman Matt Bevin who's challenging the sitting Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell. McConnell's quiet support for backroom deals and lack of leadership to fight the legislative battles needed to move our country in the right direction, has undercut conservatives in the Senate for years. We are proud to be the first national organization to support this historic conservative insurgency to empower the grassroots over the party establishment.

Some Washington insiders are questioning our motives and wondering why we are "moving the goal posts," while asking so much more from elected Republicans then we have in the past. These skeptics are failing to learn from the mistakes of the past.

We must learn from the successes and failures of the past generation of conservatives. They rose to the moment and fought the battles of their era. But we now know that, despite their best efforts, we failed to stop what is becoming an inescapable slide into socialism. We have almost $17 trillion in debt, the monstrosity that is Obamacare, 48 million peopleon food stamps, 72 million on Medicaid, and government subsidies and mandates governing every aspect of our economy and private lives. It's no longer enough to elect mild-mannered pale-pastel types who will merely slow the inexorable growth of government when they control Congress, following years of massive growth during Democrat control. We must elect fighters who are willing to use pressure points such as the debt ceiling or budget bills to force transformational change.

Despite his successes in slowing the growth of government, even President Reagan felt that more was needed to hold back the tide of a meddlesome federal government. It's for this reason President Reagan proposed America's Economic Bill of Rights in 1987, a set of sweeping constitutional amendments mandating a balanced budget and banning wage and price control. Reagan reportedly told a young Newt Gingrich, "Well, some things you're just going to have to do after I'm gone."

Unfortunately, instead of building on Reagan's successes, the GOP went backwards with the Bush Republicans, saddling us with Obama and the calamity that has ensued as a result of his presidency.

If we want more Republicans who won't blink during battle-- who will learn from past mistakes and do whatever it takes to change the current pathway to peril-- we must be willing to do battle with the Republican Party of the past during the upcoming primary season. It's time to change the way the game is played.

Last cycle, Ryun's PAC donated $96,000 to candidates and put another another $8,917 into independent expenditures. The great bulk of that money was wasted on right-wing extremists-- and losers-- Todd Akin (MO), Clark Durant (MI), Josh Mandel (OH), Joe Miller (AK), Richard Mourdock (IN), Mark Neumann (WI), Don Stenberg (NE), Carl Wimmer (UT), Joe Walsh (IL), Don Manzullo (IL), Scott Keadle (NC), Jack Hoogendyk (MI), Ron Gould (AZ), Evan Feinberg (PA) and, of course, Mitt Romney.

One followup throught-- Steve Israel's DCCC hasn't bothered to recruit a Democrat to run in PA-09... just in case Ryun and his band of extremists manage to defeat Shuster in the primary and replace him with someone so radical and with such anti-American ideas that a viable Democrat could actually win that deeply red seat. Steve Israel, like Shuster and McConnell, is a Beltway careerist. If the right can take on party elders like McConnell and Shuster, a vibrant left should be taking on hacks like Israel, Wasserman Schultz, Emanuel and Hoyer. But there's hardly any vibrant left at all, is there, just Wall Street zombies and profiteers like Cory Booker.