I would like to ask the DailyKos community to help me in my effort to get Shirley McKellar's name and message out in her effort to defeat Louie Gohmert.
I cannot tell you that Gohmert can be defeated this year, but i can tell you that Shirley McKellar is the first person that is actually trying to defeat him. Gohmert has had a challenger in each re-election, but none of those challengers were willing to go after him on his record, or even to go after him at all.
Shirley is willing to take on Gohmert on his home turf.
New research
I just finished analyzing Gohmert financial disclosures and he is vulnerable from two areas. His spending pattern shows a lack of regard for the funds his supporters provide him. He actually bills his supporters for small snack and coffee purchases at Starbucks and gas stations. He has spent almost 25% of his funds on his consulting firm. He used his donor funds to lease one vehicle and then purchased a new vehicle with supporter funds. He spent over $2000 on tires in October of 2009. He spends an average of $1600 a month on telephone costs including a monthly charge from his consulting firm and his office line. The records suggest that he is paying for more phones than he can justify. He paid for the registration on three vehicles in 2011 and 12 and two vehicles in 2007 and 08. (It does appear that he changed vehicles on 2008 and 11, but that doesn't account for 4 other registration payments).
People assume that incumbent Republicans are flush with cash, but Gohmert only had $239K on hand at the end of July and his burn rate while is almost $23,000 a month without a viable opponent. That would only leave him with $150K for campaigning.
With all the money going to other candidates in battleground districts, Gohmert isn't getting funds at a high enough rate to cover his expenses. He had only raised $158K in the first 6 months of this year (including $7,500 from 4 donors in excess of the $5,000 limit per cycle) and he spent $126K during the same time period.
Gohmert isn't receiving much help from outside of the district. He only had a single $1,000 out of State individual contribution and $43K in P.A.C. money from out of State this cycle. Those funds are also diminishing since only $16,600 in P.A.C. money came in during the first six months of this year.
Gohmert's mouth
A partial collection of the wisdom of Louie Gohmert.
“So when they want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline,” he informed his colleagues. It’s (trans Alaska pipeline) apparently the equivalent of being wined and dined. And that has resulted in a tenfold caribou population boom, he concluded.
“So my real concern now ...if oil stops running through the pipeline...do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?” he asked.
"Was there nobody that was carrying a gun that could have stopped this guy more quickly?"
~Rep. Louie Gohmert, July 19, 2012, the day 71 people were shot at a movie theater
"The first thing I did as soon as I landed was tell the TSA- we've got to do something about laptops. Specifically those in coach there's no reason someone flying coach needs to use a laptop. Seize the batteries and either make them buy new ones, or check them."
Gohmert raised some eyebrows when, hours after a gunman shot dozens of people in a movie theater early Friday, he suggested to radio show host Ernie Istook that the attack was a result of "ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs." Gohmert also wondered aloud why nobody else in the theater had a gun to take down the shooter.
"You follow me around the world, you see me hugging Muslims around the world, because the ones I hug are our friends," Gohmert told Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano during a House Judiciary Committee meeting. "This administration seems to have a hard time recognizing members of terrorist groups who are allowed into the White House."
Gohmert is in the middle of a firestorm this week after he joined Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and others in claiming that former State Department aide Huma Abedin, the wife of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), may have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Gohmert argued that, far from being broken, the Taliban are feeling powerful enough to demand that members of the Northern Alliance apologize before the United States leaves in 2013. "If you look at the objective facts ... they're not on the run," Gohmert said.
His solution was first to supply more arms to the Northern Alliance. But then, he said, the Afghan border with Pakistan needs to be shored up.
"Let's talk about creating a Balochistan in the southern part of Pakistan," Gohmert told The Huffington Post, referring to a region of Pakistan that constitutes nearly half that vital if troublesome ally.
"They love us. They'll stop the IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and all the weaponry coming into Afghanistan, and we got a shot to win over there," said Gohmert, who accused Obama's national security advisers of giving the president bad intel on Afghanistan.
"His strategy of working from ignorance and thinking we have them on the run is no way to go through life, son," Gohmert said. "I'm about to borrow from an 'Animal House' line, but anyway, that's no way to go through life when you're that ignorant of what's really going on."
Gohmert, speaking at GOP lawmaker event called “Conversations with Conservatives” on Capitol Hill, Gohmert said he has “not endorsed anybody,” then added a bit of a zinger to the party’s presumptive nominee: “But let me just tell ya, if you are not sure about wanting to support Mitt Romney, whether you are liberal, whether you are very conservative, you ought to be excited because he’s been on your side at one time or another.”
Radio Host Lars Larson: My producer is from Ohio. He noticed that John Boehner was apparently using Nancy Pelosi golf balls at a recent fundraiser, and my producer wants to get a whole sleeve of those things. He thinks it might make him hit better.
GOHMERT: [laughs] I’ll bet you it’ll put a little extra oomph in it. No kidding, yeah. Well, I’ll have to check on that. I’ll have to see where we get those.
"We're adding in this bill a new protected class called 'unemployed,'" Gohmert said on the floor of the House Tuesday. "I think this will help trial lawyers who are not having enough work. We heard from our friends across the aisle, 14 million people out of work -- that's 14 million new clients."
The American Jobs Act, submitted by President Obama to Congress this week, has a section that would prohibit employers from not hiring someone just because they are jobless.
You got (Commerce Secretary John) Bryson out in California. It's really unusual to have a seizure to cause you to have one wreck and then cause you to put your car in gear and keep going until you have another wreck. That kind of seizure is really unusual. Yet that's who's in charge of keeping businesses going, a guy that crashes his car from car to car.
Later in the (terror babies) interview, Cooper chastised Gohmert for "going on to the House floor and spreading scare stories...this is a theory you are propagating that you have no evidence for."
The very next evening, the two Republican congressmen (Gohmert and Burton) repeated Beck's baseless charge on the House floor. While criticizing the moratorium on offshore drilling brought on by the Gulf oil spill, Rep. Burton said that "we just sent $2 billion to Brazil so they can do offshore drilling." Moments later, Burton parroted Beck's fantasy version of events: "We don't need to be sending Mr. Soros money in Brazil so he can make more money by doing offshore drilling with our taxpayers' money."
That's per Media Matters' Political Correction, which goes on to point out the big "Duh" here: "The problem -- for Beck and the GOP -- is that none of this is true. Bush appointees at the independent Export-Import Bank approved the loan, not President Obama; and George Soros upped his investment in PetroBras in late 2008, some months before the bank made its preliminary commitment to the company."
Gohmert's opponent,
Shirley McKellar, (
Act Blue) has put a lot of her own money into the race. I won't go into her bio since others have worked on that. Her Facebook page has a lot of info on her and a few of the activities she has engaged in while trying to unseat Gohmert.