Nah, opening a business, creating wealth, and employing people is “little people’s” work. This scum sucking piece of shit believes that he is above that kind of thing.
Sadly, thanks to the low information voters, for now he is. Sigh.
Ellison converted from Catholicism to Islam, later giving the following explanation: “I can’t claim that I was the most observant Catholic at the time [of my conversion]. I had begun to really look around and ask myself about the social circumstances of the country, issues of justice, issues of change. When I looked at my spiritual life, and I looked at what might inform social change, justice in society... I found Islam
]During Ellison’s 2006 campaign, Kim Ellison revealed that she had been living with moderate multiple sclerosis for several years. Ellison filed for a legal separation from Kim in 2010, and their divorce was finalized on May 2, 2012
One issue Ellison’s campaign opponents raised was the repeated suspensions of his driver’s license for failure to pay tickets and fines.[25] Ellison had also failed to pay all or part of his income taxes in five separate years between 1992 and 2000, forcing the state and Internal Revenue Service to put liens on his home. He later paid in excess of $18,000.
He also criticized Bush’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives saying, “This is basically the Department of Religious Outreach ... . It’s essentially a public-relations outreach arm for the Bush administration to reach out to the far right of the evangelical Christian movement. That’s really all it is.”
Ellison’s articles “defended Farrakhan against accusations of anti-semitism,” and that Ellison “called affirmative action a ‘sneaky’ form of compensation for slavery, suggesting instead that white Americans pay reparations to blacks.”
In early 2006, the Minnesota State Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board reprimanded Ellison for unreported campaign contributions, discrepancies in cash balances, and misclassified disbursements during his campaigns for the Minnesota House of Representatives. These transgressions occurred in the years 2002–2004. In 2005, the board opened an investigation, and Ellison was subpoenaed and fined.
Ellison was repeatedly fined for late filings was sued twice by the Attorney General of Minnesota, and was warned about absent or incomplete disclosures.
Minnesota congressman
First Muslim elected to the U.S. House of Representatives
Supported Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam
Says that Farrakhan “is a role model for black youth,” “is not an anti-Semite,” and “is a sincere, tireless, and uncompromising advocate of the black community and other oppressed people around the world”
Spoke favorably of the high-profile murderers and leftist icons Mumia Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur, and Geronimo Pratt
Former steering committee member of the National Lawyers Guild’s Minnesota chapter
Publicly defended former Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah
Supported the activities of the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011
As a third-year law student in 1989-90, Ellison penned two columns for the Minnesota Daily under the name “Keith Hakim.” In the first piece, he made respectful reference to “Minister Louis Farrakhan,” defended the incendiary Nation of Islam (NOI) spokesman and black supremacist Khalid Abdul Muhammad, and, as The Weekly Standard reports, spoke “in the voice of a Nation of Islam advocate.” In the second piece, Ellison demanded reparations for slavery and said that African Americans should be offered the option of settling in an all-black, geographically self-contained “homeland” if they wished to do so. In February 1990, Ellison participated in sponsoring Kwame Ture (a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael) to speak at his law school on the subject, “Zionism: Imperialism, White Supremacy, or Both?”—a speech that proved to be deeply anti-Semitic.
During the 1990s, Ellison failed to pay all or part of his income taxes on a number of occasions. Consequently, the IRS filed liens against him and he eventually was forced to pay some $25,000 in back taxes. Ellison also ignored fines that he had incurred for parking tickets and moving violations so numerous that his driver’s license was suspended multiple times.
In October 1992 Ellison publicly came to the defense of Sharif Willis, a convicted murderer and ex-convict who was now the leader of the violent Minneapolis-based Vice Lords gang. The previous month, four Vice Lord members had used Willis’s house as their headquarters for planning the murder of a local police officer named Jerry Haaf. At the trial of one of the killers, two witnesses implicated Willis in the plot. Willis himself was never charged, however, because law-enforcement authorities said they lacked sufficient evidence to convict him. Ellison helped organize a demonstration against Minneapolis police, where he denounced “the campaign of slander the police federation has been waging” against Willis. He also told the crowd that the police union was systematically trying to frighten white people in order to persuade the city to hire more officers and thereby strengthen the police union’s power base. In February 1993, while the trial of Officer Haaf’s killers was in progress, Ellison led a protesting crowd outside the courthouse in the chant: “We don’t get no justice, you don’t get no peace!” In February 1995 Willis was convicted in federal court for several drug and gun-related offenses, for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
In 1995 Ellison worked actively on behalf of the Nation of Islam. At a University of Minnesota rally to promote Louis Farrakhan’s highly anticipated Million Man March, Ellison appeared onstage with Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who delivered a thundering, racist diatribe.
That same year, when Qubilah Shabazz, daughter of the late Malcolm X, was indicted for conspiring to murder Farrakhan, Ellison organized a march on the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minneapolis demanding that Shabazz be released, and alleging that the FBI itself had conspired to try to kill Farrakhan. In a November 6, 1995, column for the Minneapolis periodical Insight News, Ellison wrote under the name “Keith X Ellison” and condemned a Star Tribune editorial cartoon implying that Farrakhan was an anti-Semite. Ellison argued to the contrary, saying that “Minister Farrakhan is a role model for black youth”; “is not an anti-Semite”; “is a sincere, tireless, and uncompromising advocate of the black community and other oppressed people around the world”; and is regarded by “most black people” as “a role model for youth and, increasingly, a central voice for our collective aspirations.”
In February 1997 Ellison served as a local NOI spokesman (with the surname “Muhammad”) at a public hearing in connection with a controversy involving Joanne Jackson of the Minnesota Initiative Against Racism. Jackson, a supporter of Louis Farrakhan, was alleged to have said that “Jews are among the most racist white people I know.” Declared Ellison:
“We stand by the truth contained in the remarks attributed to [Ms. Jackson], and by her right to express her views without sanction. Here is why we support Ms. Jackson: She is correct about Minister Farrakhan. He is not a racist. He is also not an anti-Semite. Minister Farrakhan is a tireless public servant of Black people, who constantly teaches self-reliance and self-examination to the Black community.”
In February 2000 Ellison gave a speech at a fundraising event sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, on whose steering committee he previously had served. Also in attendance was the former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn. The event was a fundraiser for onetime Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah after her apprehension in St. Paul for the attempted murder of Los Angeles police officers in 1975. Calling for Soliah’s release, Ellison referred to her as “basically … a black gang member” (though she is white) because she was purportedly a victim of government persecution. He also described Soliah as a woman who had been “fighting for freedom in the ‘60s and ‘70s.” (Soliah subsequently pled guilty to charges in Los Angeles and to an additional murder charge in Sacramento.) Further, Ellison spoke favorably of the high-profile murderers and leftist icons Mumia Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur, and Geronimo Pratt.
In 2002 Ellison, having dropped “Muhammad” from his name, was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives; two years later he was re-elected.
In 2006 Ellison ran (as a Democrat) for Minnesota’s Fifth District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Early that year, the Minnesota State Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board reprimanded Ellison’s campaign for unreported contributions, misclassified disbursements, and inaccurate cash balances. Ellison himself was fined for willful violation of Minnesota’s campaign-finance-reporting law and was sued twice by the state attorney general.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) executive director, Nihad Awad (a self-identified supporter of Hamas), spoke at an August 25, 2006 fundraiser for Ellison, who accepted thousands of dollars in campaign donations raised by Awad.
Soon after joining the House of Representatives, Ellison became a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus.
On February 20, 2007, Ellison endorsed the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, praising the latter’s “unifying spirit” as well as his “message of an open and fair economy, a balanced prosperity and clear opposition to the war in Iraq.”
In a July 2007 speech, Ellison likened America’s military response to the 9/11 attacks to the manner in which the Nazis had exploited the 1933 burning of the Reichstag in Berlin: “It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”
In 2008 Ellison spoke at CAIR-Tampa’s sixth annual banquet, where he urged his listeners to support Sami al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor who had confessed two years earlier to conspiring to supply goods and services to the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In May 2008 in St. Louis, Ellison was a panelist at a town hall meeting held at the 37th International Convention of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, which was founded by the Communist Party USA.
Also in 2008, Ellison accepted $13,350 from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to finance his pilgrimage to Mecca.
In 2009, after the FBI had cut off its contacts with CAIR because of the organization’s ties to Hamas, Ellison spoke at three CAIR fundraising dinners, gave videotaped statements at a number of others, and appeared with CAIR officials at meetings on healthcare reform and at Muslim religious festivals.
In October 2009 Ellison denounced four Congressional Republicans who had called for an investigation of CAIR’s possible infiltration of government committees. Said Ellison: “The idea that we should investigate Muslim interns as spies is a blow to the very principle of religious freedom that our Founding Fathers cherished so dearly.”
Soon thereafter, Ellison attended a CAIR fundraising event in Washington and urged his organization’s supporters to apply for jobs with the incoming Obama administration.
On January 27, 2010, Ellison and Rep. Jim McDermott led a coalition of 54 Democratic members of Congress in signing a letter addressed to Barack Obama, exhorting the President to use diplomatic pressure to end Israel’s “blockade” of Gaza, which was causing “de facto collective punishment of the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip.”
During his 2010 congressional re-election bid, Ellison accepted campaign contributions from such notables as Jamal Barzinji and Hisham Al-Talib, both of whom had previously served as vice presidents of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and both of whom had been identified by the FBI as U.S. leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ellison also received donations from former Muslim American Society president Esam Omeish; Turkish Islamist Merve Kavakci; and former American Muslim Council officials Aly Abuzaakouk, Mohammed Cheema, and Yayha Basha. Further, CAIR executive director Nihad Awad helped organize a fundraiser on Ellison’s behalf.
When Ellison debated Republican challenger Chris Fields on October 18, 2012, the latter accused Ellison of having paid a law firm $240,000 to dig up embarrassing details of Fields’ divorce; of having shorted his own (Ellison’s) ex-wife on child-support payments; and of having enriched himself to the tune of some $2 million via funds from pharmaceuticals and other companies. In response, Ellison called Fields “stupid,” a “lowlife scumbag,” and a “gutter dweller.” Notably, however, the congressman did not deny the $2 million enrichment charge.
In a February 2013 interview with Fox News’ Stuart Varney, Ellison expressed his belief that it is “fair” for the wealthy to be taxed at whatever rate is necessary to raise money for the provision of services to lower-income Americans. When asked if a 65% or 75% income tax rate would be fair, he stuck to his principle.
On October 8, 2013, Ellison was one of eight members of Congress (all Democrats) who were arrested when they sat in the middle of Independence Avenue and blocked rush-hour traffic during an immigration rally on Washington’s National Mall. Though the Mall was, at that time, legally closed due to a so-called “government shutdown” that had gone into effect a week earlier, the National Parks Service allowed the demonstration to take place because of First Amendment protections. Consisting of more than 15,000 participants, the rally was intended to persuade Congress to pass legislation allowing illegal immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship. Also arrested were U.S. Representatives Joseph Crowley, Al Green, Raul Grijalva, Luis Gutierrez, John Lewis, Charles Rangel, and Jan Schakowsky.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2158