One of my guilty pleasures is E's first scripted TV series, The Royals. On a recent episode the evil queen Helena demands her p.r. assistant get some sniveling hack from the media on the phone so she could plant a journalistic question to unravel her enemy, Prince Liam's lovely girl friend, Ophelia, even if they had to go all the way up the chain to Rupert Murdoch. When I was president of Reprise, we certainly had "journalists" like this who were so eager to please those with perceived power, that we could get virtually any load of crap out to the public. And, as Benjamin Franklin once said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots." Several weeks ago, a highly placed source within Patrick Murphy's campaign bragged that Chuck Schumer would drive Alan Grayson out of the Florida Senate primary by unleashing a barrage of opposition research about his business dealings. Schumer, easily the sleaziest Democrat in the Senate-- who is desperate to please Wall Street banksters by delivering the open Florida seat to Murphy-- twisted a perfectly innocent SEC filing into a smoking gun of corruption. He then hired Queen Helena's p.r. assistant to find a pathetic "journalist" willing to run it up the flag pole and get the tongues wagging. Schumer did well in planting his bullshit bombshell with lazy would-be muck-raker Adam Smith from the Tampa Bay Times, who was eager to make the story about himself. Schumer's opposition research isn't focusing on Ron DeSantis, Don Gaetz, Carlos Lopez-Cantera, David Jolly, George LeMieux or any other Republican looking to replace Marco Rubio in the Senate. With Patrick Murphy's deputy chief of staff now the Deputy Political Director of the DSCC, Schumer and his irrelevant handmaiden, Jon Tester, are taking aim against progressive icon Alan Grayson. Adam Smith has been unable to contain himself and has spread their poisonous lies far and wide. Smith: "The last time I spoke with him, on Wednesday, Congressman Grayson was shouting at me over the phone. 'Are are you some kind of shitting robot?! You go around shitting on people?!' he shouted. This was after I asked about why he had incorporated hedge funds in the Cayman Islands-- the kind of offshore tax havens he has criticized." Grayson, severely jet-lagged after flying back to Orlando from meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, didn't enjoy being threatened by Smith who accused him of setting up an off-shore account to evade taxes. This is pure Schumer hogwash. No taxes have been evaded and no taxes were ever meant to be evaded. Smith is too stupid and lazy to bother finding out how legitimate money managers set up their accounts. The simple fact, as Grayson undoubtedly tried to explain to Smith, is that whenever an investment fund is set up by any competent law firm, it's set up in two sections: one for investors who are taxed under US law, and one for investors who are not. The domestic fund is set up in the United States, and the international fund is set up somewhere else, like the Cayman Islands. Both the SEC and the IRS have approved this setup, because it prevents foreign investors, charities and others who were never intended to be taxed in the United States from inadvertently getting tangled up in IRS bureaucracy, when they don’t owe any taxes under US law. This is not "tax avoidance," as Smith wrongly claimed. In fact, if an English investor wants to invest in an investment fund, that’s the only legal way to do it, and it doesn’t "avoid" or reduce taxes at all-- not the English investor’s, not Grayson’s, not anybody's. Chuck Schumer certainly understands that; his surrogate just neglected to explain it to the oafish Smith for obvious reasons.But here's the real kicker-- since the domestic and international funds were set up, not a single dollar has been invested in the international fund. In fact, Grayson hasn’t even solicited a single investor into the international fund-- and Grayson didn't just tell me this; he told it to Smith, according to the article. But Smith, who was obviously bent on trying to destroy Grayson’s reputation, went ahead with his hit piece for Murphy and Schumer anyway. BONUS: Adam Smith Hits Alan Grayson For Schumer Again Yesterday, Smith was at it again, trying as best he could to smear Grayson, although many Democrats are apparently not as unhappy by Grayson's penchant for unvarnished truth as Smith and his ilk are.
Grayson, who famously described the GOP health care plan as "die quickly" and referred to a Federal Reserve lobbyist as a "K Street whore," is not one for subtlety: "I have trouble listening to what (Dick Cheney) says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he's talking. ... When he was done speaking, did he just then turn into a bat and fly away?" "I suspect that President Bush might have been passed out drunk the last three or four days, so I'm not sure he made any conscious decision at all." "At this point, the tea party is no more popular than the Klan."
Chuck Schumer will reap what he has sown-- lets hope he doesn't take the Democratic Party down with him. Establishment elites hate it when Democrats dare fight back. Do you? Here's the Draft Alan Grayson ActBlue page.