Who, you might ask, is Jorge Bonilla?  He’s a veteran of the US Navy, and his family originally comes from Puerto Rico.  He is also a conservative blogger at The Shark Tank with my friend Javier Manjarres (a fellow recipient of CPAC’s Blogger of the Year award), and a two-time contributor to Hot Air’s Green Room as well.  The 42-year-old activist gets an early start on the 2014 cycle with this announcement in the district that just returned Alan Grayson to Congress:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EV3qM8istRs

Hello, my name is Jorge Bonilla and I am proud to announce that I am running to represent you in Florida’s 9th Congressional District.

I’m running because as a new father, I am deeply concerned about the direction that our country is headed in. Our current leadership is projecting weakness to our enemies abroad, and overt hostility to our most cherished allies.

At home we are beset by scandal, after scandal, after scandal, all of which arise out of a government that has run out of control and is seemingly unaccountable to ‘we the people.’

The central question of the 2014 election is this, are we the people still capable of self-rule, or do we abandon the American revolution and concede that a small connected elite from Washington, D.C. and New York, is better capable of running are lives than we are ourselves.

This is America guys. We can do better. We must do better, and we will do better.

I know the road ahead is tough, but if you join me I know that we can work hard to restore America’s promise, and secure America’s future.

I thank you for your support. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

Javier follows up with his own post this morning:

During the 2012 Republican primary election, Grayson and the Democratic Party’s House Majority PAC, pumped in a combined $1.2 million to defeat the Republican frontrunner in the race, John Quinones. Quinones, a Puerto Rican, was positioning himself to cause Grayson a substantial headache in the general election. That is why he and the House Majority PAC decided to attack him, in hopes that it would make it easier for Grayson to face the weaker Todd Long in the general election.

Their dirty trick worked, but this isn’t the first time Grayson tried underhanded tricks to win an election. During his campaign against Congressman Webster, Grayson was said to have put up a phony ‘Tea Party’ candidate in an effort to take votes away from Webster. Grayson failed.

Here is what I expect will happen. Grayson will not be able to hold himself back from attacking Bonilla, whether personally or through proxies. In addition, Grayson will probably try to plant a couple candidates in the Republican primary in an effort to siphon votes away from Bonilla, and/or team up with Democratic PAC’s to funnel money into the race to defeat Bonilla.

I wouldn’t put it past him to try to get another Republican Hispanic or a Caucasian man or woman to run against Bonilla, or at the very least recruit some NPA’s that could take away from Bonilla in the general election. As luck would have it, not one, but two Hispanic NPA candidates dropped out and endorsed Grayson the second that Quiñones was blown out of the 2012 GOP primary.

It’s worth keeping an eye on this race.  The district has a D+4 Cook Report rating, but 42% of the electorate has Puerto Rican heritage, too.  Grayson’s nastiness and extreme politics may not succeed well if positioned against a Republican veteran of Puerto Rican heritage. Best of luck to Jorge, because this will be a tough fight in a district that Democrats will want to hold in a very rocky midterm cycle.

Update: I’ve corrected the first paragraph; Jorge’s parents met and married in Brooklyn.