Gary Gross, writing in the maddeningly inscrutable “Examiner”, recounts a trip to a Stearns County Commission (St. Cloud) meeting last May by Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.

At that meeting, Ritchie handed out an op-ed whose chase was cut to with this money quote:

“Minnesota’s counties currently do an excellent job of administering fair and open elections across a state with significant geographic challenges. The lack of any significant voter irregularity for decades supports this assertion.”

Clearly, the purpose of the piece was to campaign against the Voter ID Amendment.

Which is great – provided that Ritchie was working on his campaign time. Not his SOS time.

But according to a Data Practices request on the subject, the trip was paid for as part of his SOS gig:

A Data Practices Act request was sent to Ritchie’s office asking whether Secretary Ritchie had been reimbursed by taxpayers for the trip. Bert Black gathered the information and responded to the Data Practices Act request. Here’s his response:

 

Thank you for your follow-up message. The staff person in our Fiscal Division who has these records was out yesterday, so I had to wait until today to get the information you requested.

 

Since the trip of May 15, 2012 to Waite Park, Minnesota was part of the Secretary’s official duties, Secretary Ritchie was reimbursed for mileage. The reimbursement was for 148 miles at the standard rate of $0.555 per mile, for a total of $82.14.

 

Best regards,

 

Bert Black

 

Office of the Secretary of State

 

And that is just plain unethical, if not illegal. (And when I say “if not illegal”, I’m really saying “I don’t know that it’s not illegal”).

Apparently in Mexico “disenfranchising voters” is less an issue than “not being seen as a banana republic with an election system taht can be seized and manipulated by those in power”.

You might call our system “Third World,” but that would be an insult to the Third World. As Fund and von Spakovsky note, to register to vote in Mexico a voter must provide a photo, a signature and a thumbprint. The Mexican voter-registration card includes holographic security, a magnetic code and a serial number. Before voting, voters have to show the card and have the thumbprints matched by a scanner.

So – provided all this security works – every Mexican can at least hypothetically be assured their vote isn’t negated by some fraudulent or fictional voter.

But remember – we have the best election system in the world.

Because apparently relentlessly repeating “we have the best election system in the world” is all it takes to make it so.

This morning, the Legislative Subcommittee on Employee Relations rejected the latest state employee contract.

The contract would

• give state employee san average 9% pay raise
• keep the percentage of health care premiums paid by state employees at exactly zero. That’s compared to over 20% in the private sector, and 9% even among government employees in surrounding states.
• The average state employee already earns 23% more than the average private sector Minnesotan.
• If passed, it’ll add $174 million to the amount to be absorbed into the various agency budgets – or taken away from the amount to be paid back to the schools from the budgetary “School Shift”.

That’s what the Dayton Administration is fighting for; to steal from the state’s school children to pay the Minnesota Association of State Employees.

(SCENE:  A press conference on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol.  Gretel Anderson-Rage of the League of Women Voters, Mike Boing of Common Cause MN and Irving Blotnik of the ACLU-MN are hosting a group of speakers, as two reporters, a homeless guy, and Carrie Lucking (of Alliance for a Better Minnesota) look on.

BOING:  We are here to bring the voices of Minnesotans who will be disenfranchised by the Voter ID bill if it’s passed.  We have four speakers for you today.  I’d like to introduce the first; representing the Deceased-Minnesotan community, Elmer Torstengard.

TORSTENGARD:  (Looking a bit pale)  Hello dere.  I just want to make sure the rights of dead people are upheld  We worked long and hard for this country, and our voices deserve to be heard.  Why should the fact that I died in 1992 silence me?  (Shuffles back to seat)

ANDERSON-RAGE:  Thank you, Elmer.  We are here today to bear witness to the voter suppression inherent in this bill, which will disenfranchise 100,000… (LUCKING waves arms, points fingers upward) 200,000 (LUCKING frantically waves, points arms way up as she jumps) 500,000 (LUCKING frantically makes “go big” sign) Five Million Minnesotans.  One of them will be Jacob Hemmerling-Doltz, a student at Macalester and a representative of the Duplicate-American community.

HEMMERLING-DOLTZ:  Dude.  I’ve got candidates I support down at Mac, dude.  And back home in Madison, too, dude.  And in Uptown Minneapolis, where I stayed last summer when I was interning with MPIRG.  I’ve made my contributions in all three places, why should my voice not be heard in all of them, dude.  I mean, dude?  Hello?  And maybe Dinkytown  (Sits down)

BOING:  I regret to announce our third speaker, Ingrid Bloff, representing the Inattentive-American community, seems to have forgetten to attend today’s event.  So we’ll move right along to Mr. Mick Maus, who represents the Fictional-American community.

MAUS:  Yeah, like, who says I can’t be living in a laundromat with nine other characters….er, Minnesotans? Just because we don’t meet your antiquated Eurocentrist notion of “proof we exist” doesn’t mean our voices aren’t perfectly valid!   You can’t prove they’re not!  Where are the convictions, huh?  Where are the convictions?  You got nothing!  Suck it!  SUCK IT!

BLOTNIK: Thank you for your attendance.  Just a quick note, you may be breaking campaign finance law by being here, or reading about the event.  Or maybe not.  We haven’t decided.

BOING:  Thank you!

(Group leaves the steps as Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” plays on tinny loudspeaker)

(And SCENE)

One of the Koch Brothers, speaking at a Breitbart meeting at Fox News headquarters while eating Chick-Fil-A and carrying an assault rifle:

“Some critics of voter IDs think the government cannot do this job, but Mexico and most poor countries in the world have been able to register and give IDs to almost all their citizens. Surely the United States can do it, too. Free photo IDs would also empower minorities, who are often charged exorbitant fees for cashing checks because they lack proper identification.”

That racist peckerwood!  Why, you can just feel the contempt for women, whom the Brennan Center said were too stupid to carry IDs with them and were more likely to have had them stolen by their abusive boyfriends and…

…and…

…well, no.  It was one of the men that liberals inexplicably admire the most; Jimmy Carter, back in 2005.  Carter, who up until 2008 was the worst president of my lifetime, finally got one right; recognizes that the virtue of an election system is measured in the integrity and legitimacy of the votes, not  in the amount of wood pulp consumed by making ballots to jam into boxes.

Of course, under pressure from fellow lefties, Carter had to expand on his comments in 2008, noting that it has to be easy and cheap for the poor to obtain IDs.  And the GOP has not only agreed with this, but acted on it.

Democrats who a few months back were praising Chief Justice Roberts for his judicial restraint in respecting the intent of Congress are sniveling like stuck cats that the Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) didn’t find a penumbra emanating from Alida Messinger’s visage forcing them to accept their masters’ complaints without question.

The lawsuits by the ACLU, the League of Women Voters and Alida’s Cause Common Cause  claimed on the one hand that the Voter ID law was just too complicated and not clear enough for public-educated Minnesotans to understand, and on the other than Mark Ritchie had the right to make both measures more complicated and less clear.

I may be a cynic, but I’m frankly amazed the judges disagreed.

And now, the pro-gay-marriage and pro-vote-corruption forces need to do something neither has been able to do:

• The anti-Marriage-Amendment forces need to show the voters a case for changing the definition of traditional marriage a little more convincing than “vote no or you are teh bigot”.
• The pro-fraud forces need to convince Minnesotans that while buying cigarettes or getting a job or buying ammunition or starting a bank account requires that we know someone is exactly who they say they are, exercising our supposedly-precious franchise does not.

It’s a good day.

I’ll await the usual logic-free liberal arguments on both.

UPDATE: Mir. D has an excellent piece on the subject at True North and over at the Neighborhood:

I’ll be honest with you — the Photo ID amendment matters a lot more to me. We’ve been round and round on gay marriage and as I’ve written before, this is a battle that ultimately conservatives are going to lose, mostly because young people are being taught that it is a civil rights issue, especially in the public schools. While I don’t agree with that, the view will prevail and most of the constitutional amendments that are passing in the various states will eventually go away, probably within 10-20 years. At that point we’ll begin the unwitting longitudinal study that will eventually reveal, years after most readers of this feature are pushing up daisies, whether or not gay marriage is a good idea or not. My future grandchildren and great-grandchildren (God willing) will get to suss that one out.

The Photo ID amendment is much more important, because it goes the integrity of elections. Voter suppression is the usual charge you hear, but as a practical matter the real issue is multiple votes and illegal votes. The challenge is getting local election officials and prosecutors, who are partisans, to take such things seriously. Minnesota Majority identified 1,099 cases of felons voting in the Franken/Coleman election and over 200 cases have been either adjudicated or are in the process of being investigated. The rest aren’t going to see the light of day because the local prosecutors can’t be bothered. Franken won the election by on 312 votes…Now the amendments go for a vote. I expect Photo ID to win easily. The marriage amendment will be close. Opponents of both amendments will have ample opportunity to state their case. They just can’t depend on Mark Ritchie to keep his thumb on the scale this time.

And there’s the victory for real justice.

And I never believed the SCOM or Minnesota law had it in ’em.

To:  Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and the ACLU of Minnesota
From: Mitch Berg, mere peasant
Re: SCOM Decision

All,

Suck it.

That is all.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Many hard words have been exchanged about the 2008 election. Conservatives worry that ineligible voters swayed the election. Liberals scoff because there’s little voter fraud. What if they’re not speaking the same language?

Example: President Obama routinely talks about America’s lack of proven oil reserves. He’s a smart man and is careful with words. The phrase “proven oil reserve” doesn’t mean the oil in the ground. It means the oil you can feasibly and legally pump.

If you can’t get a federal permit to pump the oil, you can’t legally pump it, so that oil is not included in the proven reserve. And to save the planet from Global Warming, President Obama won’t give you a permit.

President Obama is technically correct. All that oil sitting under the ground, waiting for a permit to be pumped out, is NOT part of America’s “proven oil reserves.” As a result, we lack “proven oil reserves.”

What does this have to do with elections? I think there’s a similar language problem. If a convicted felon whose civil rights have not been restored goes to the polling place, signs the register, receives a ballot, marks it properly and deposits the ballot in the voting machine, is that an ineligible ballot? Yes. Is casting that ballot a case of voter fraud? No; he is who he says he was. Was it an illegal ballot? Not necessarily.

It was not illegal for that felon to cast that vote. It’s only illegal if he knowingly did it. If he didn’t know he couldn’t vote, no crime was committed. But the ballot was ineligible and should not have been counted.

When Liberals talk about fraud, convictions and illegal votes, they’re talking about a small subset of all the ineligible ballots. I’m worried about the larger pool of votes that were counted, but should not have been. Nobody seems to have hard numbers. It’s nobody’s job to police the system.

I’m concerned about votes cast by un-restored felons, yes, but also by minors, the mentally disabled who’ve lost their civil rights, and by the dead. But even after extensive conversation with Liberals, I can’t seem to achieve actual communication. We’re talking, but not the same language.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

The Dems have been pretty determined about trying to steer the conversation away from the numbers that actually matter.

Just for a fun Friday diversion, go through this article.

1. Substitute all references to “the coast” to “Minneapolis and Saint Paul”
2. Change all references to “The interior” to “The Iron Range”
3. Change the high-speed rail references to “Minneapolis to Duluth or Rochester” or whatever the current pipe dream is.
4. Change the other California references to Minnesota ones.
5. Save it away in case the DFL winds up with a couple of years of majorities with a sitting DFL governor.

You’ll save some time.  You’ll need it for job-hunting.

There were 321 war crimes committed by the Nazis in World War 2.

“Nonsense”, you say.  “321 would have been a slow week at Dachau, or an off-day at Auschwitz.  That figure is absurd to the point of being a form of Holocaust denial!”

“Nonsense”, one might respond.  “There were a total of 321 convictions for war crimes at the end of the war.  Thus, there were 321 war crimes!”

Absurd, huh?

Counting convictions doesn’t measure the extent of a crime, or any other activity.  At most, a count of convictions measures the number of people suspected, investigated, arrested, indicted, tried and then convicted for one or more activities.

Joe Doakes of Como Park notes the similar absurdity of measuring election issues by counting convictions:

Dog Gone and I have been chatting at Penigma (yes, I know I said I would quit; it was a slip but really, I can quit any time I want).

Hi, Joe.

 She’s convinced voting irregularities are not widespread because convictions are not widespread. There were only 26 felony-level convictions as of 2010 and that’s insignificant in an election with 2.9 million votes cast.

By that standard, rape is rare because there are few convictions. DUI is a minor nuisance because everybody pleads to Reckless Driving so there are few convictions for DUI.

And as some lefties claimed a few years ago, North Dakota was the most corrupt state because it had the highest convictions-per-capita rate for corruption.

And nobody was killed in the Sikh temple in Milwaukee – because nobody has been convicted and with the shooter dead, nobody ever will be. No conviction, no murder. Those six bodies in the Coroner’s Office? They’re just resting (Sikh prefer kipping on their backs).

Except . . . there are six dead bodies lying on slabs. It really happened. Whether or not somebody gets convicted, those six people are still dead.

Counting murder convictions is not the best way to count murders victims. The best way to count murder victims is to count dead bodies left by murderers. Similarly, the best way to count illegal votes is to count votes cast by ineligible persons, not convictions for illegal voting.

The County Attorneys surveyed in 2010 confirmed they investigated 1,531 cases of illegal voting. They know the votes were cast. They suspect the people casting them shouldn’t have, which is why they were investigated. Some cases were false-positives so they aren’t a problem. The rest – whether or not the prosecutor chose to file charges – are votes that everyone agrees should never have been cast. But they were cast and counted into the 321 [!!! – Ed.] vote total that put Franken over the top. And Franken was the 60th vote in the Senate needed to make Obamacare filibuster-proof.

Illegal voting doesn’t have to be widespread to be a problem – a small number of targeted crimes can change a nation. That’s why it’s important.

Seriously, is that so hard to understand?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Because understanding it would negate a narrative that I suspect the DFL has spent years and millions building.

And no, we don’t have a conviction to prove that.

Yet.

No huge surprises in the primaries yesterday – at least not at the polls.

But the big news in my book?  The Strib’s poison-pen endorsements went 1 out of 3, with an asterisk on that “1”.

In the northeast subs, Karin Housley beat Eric Langness despite getting a snide, snotty, insincere little pseudo-endorsement from the Strib that served mostly as a free ad for the DFL candidate, wannabe professional politician Julie Bunn.   Hopefully Housley will go on to earn much tut-tutting from the Strib’s editorial board (or, let’s be honest, Lori Sturdevant, who seems to set the board’s political barometer).

But it was in the western subs that the Strib truly came a’cropper.

In HD33B, Tea Party activists (“community organizer”? Hmmm) Cindy Pugh pummeled career Representative Steve Smith by more than 2:1 – notwithstanding that the Strib gave Smith a glowing endorsement.  Glowing – but hardly surprising; while Smith had a few conservative issues (he was a solid Second Amendment supporter and had a Taxpayers League scorecard not too out of line with many GOP leaders), the DFL could count on him to vex the conservative caucus on some key issues.  That, of course, is why the Strib endorsed him.

That race was never really in doubt; Pugh had a huge lead from time the first returns came in.

The nail-biter came in Senate District 33.  Connie Doepke – the former Representative who decided to buck the SD33 Republicans’ endorsement of Dave Osmek – jumped out to an early lead, which became the only real cliff-hanger of the evening.  With every wave of precincts that came in, Osmek whittled away at Doepke’s lead, until close to 11PM, when with three precincts to go Osmek took the lead.  The final margin was 107 votes in favor of Osmek.

As Buckley once said, you should vote for the most conservative candidate who can win.  Both Pugh and Osmek are running in a district that is solidly Republican – something like plus 22, if I recall correctly.  I suspect they’ll both win comfortably.

Housley faces a tougher race; the northeast subs of Saint Paul are just about neutral, and the media will be out to try to re-install Bunn.  Housley will need some help.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Liberals (Dog Gone springs to mind) are fond of citing a 2010 study by the Minnesota County Attorneys saying voter fraud isn’t a problem. Here it is for your reading pleasure.

It wasn’t a study by the County Attorneys. It was a study by two anti-Voter-ID groups who sent a one-page survey to County Attorneys then “summarized” the results.

County Attorneys reported 1,531 investigations of felony-level illegal voting in the Coleman-Franken election. 66% of those investigations resulted in Not Chargeable decisions, so 1,010 cases were dropped. Of those dropped cases, between 50-80% were dropped because the state couldn’t prove the felon knowingly voted illegally. Apparently, felons think they can vote despite the law saying their conviction bars them, so we let them!

Of the remaining 24% of investigations that had been completed and charged (10% remained incomplete at the time of the survey), the survey said:

outcomes were nearly evenly distributed in the following categories: dismissed due to lack of evidence; heard in court; found guilty; and found to commit election fraud

So by my math, that’s 1531 cases x 90% complete = 1377 complete x 66% Not Chargeable = 909 Not Chargeable and 468 Charged -:- 4 = 117 in each category = 117 per category x 2 categories of convictions = about 234 total convictions.

Liberals like to claim that a mere 234 convictions for felony voting out of 2.9 million votes case means there is no real problem with voter fraud. Since there is no real problem, conservatives who push Voter ID must have some hidden agenda. Hey, felons are mostly Blacks, aren’t they? And if felons can’t vote, that law falls disproportionately on Blacks. Conservatives must hate Blacks! That’s it – this whole Voter ID thing is just cover for racisssss laws.

Except . . . we know for certain there were 1,531 illegal votes that should never have been counted . . . but they were. How many felons voted for the Republican instead of the Democrat? Half? Not likely. Far more likely that the disproportionately Black felon population voted like the Black non-felon population. In 2008, with Barak Obama at the top of the Democrat ticket, it’s far more likely that the vast majority of felons voted for Franken.

Counting convictions is the wrong measuring stick. Count illegal votes instead. Take 1/3 of those 1531 felon votes off Coleman’s pile (510) and 2/3 off Franken’s pile (1021) and suddenly, Franken’s 312 win becomes a 199 loss.

Felons for Franken, indeed.

Now, let’s talk about another thing that conservatives worry about but Liberals don’t. In that same election, there were 2,000 votes cast by Dead people, which is plainly impossible and should not have been counted . . . but they were. Whose pile should they come off? Which party historically depends on the “dead vote” to win elections?

Headlines are easy. Math is hard. Democrats know that which is why they incessantly confuse the issue. That’s why this report matters.

Felons for Franken. Stiffs for Stuart Smalley. Fair elections. Pick one.

That’s the big fallacy of the status’ quo’s defenders; it defends on a bit of legal circular logic.  They only count convictions – but convictions are driven down by the fact that “I didn’t know” is a defense in the vast majority of ineligible voter cases.  And they ignore the dead voters, and the thousands of provisional ID cards that are returned to the SOS with “nobody at the address”, and the absurdly false addresses (nine people listed a small town laundromat as “home”) – because there are no convictions.  And there never can be.  Because the system doesn’t find them.  So there can never be any. And the wheel goes ’round.

It’s 8PM as I write this, and I’ll be covering the primary here and over on Twitter.

8:05:  Just waiting for results at the SOS website.  And waiting.

8:07:  And waiting.

8:12:  And waiting.

8:15:  And finally a result.  Sort of.  Lyle Koenen has two votes over Larry Rice in SD17.  That is two, as in 2 votes.  For the privilege of getting clobbered by Joe Gimse this fall.

8:23:  14 vote lead for Connie Doepke in SD33 with about 4% reporting.  Gonna be a long night.

8:30:  With about 10% of the votes in, Cindy Pugh beating Steve Smith 2:1 or more.

8:40:  No votes in from CD8 yet.  CD1 has 4% in, Alan Quist up by about ten.

9:07:  Big surge of votes for Osmek in SD33; he went from a five point deficit to well under a point.  Fingers crossed.   Pugh WAY up.

9:26:  Pugh’s been called the winner in HD33B.  She hammered Steve Smith by better than 2:1.  The west is red!  At the moment,with a little over 20% reporting, Osmek is behind by 35 votes.  He’s been picking up ground all evening (for the last hour and a half, anyway).

9:54: Cliff-hanger time.  Three precincts to go in SD33, Osmek behind by 12 votes.  He’s been gaining a few votes with every precinct all night; will he pull this out?  And will Doepke go for the recount if he does?  Looks like Quist is going to tip Parry.

10:36:  Still waiting on those last three precincts.  Going to bed.  This liveblog is over.  Good luck, Dave!

The Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance has released its candidate scorecard.

Be advised that anyone that didn’t return their scorecard gets an “F*”, based on the assumption that people who don’t return questionnaires are trying to hide their sentiments until after election time.  I think that may have been a fair assumption ten years ago; In the case of many Republican candidates – for instances, District 65’s Senate and both House candidates – I think it’s more a matter of pro-gun libertarians not wanting to hand the DFL another cheap chanting point in a tough area.

And let’s give credit where it’s due; while I’ve railed against Steve Smith’s record in many areas, he’s been a solid Second Amendment vote, although I don’t see Cindy Pugh being any less a supporter.

At any rate, there you go.  Vote accordingly.

We have one in Saint Paul and the Fourth CD.  There’s a primary challenge for the Fourth CD Republican endorsement to run for Congress.

Tony Hernandez is the endorsed GOP candidate.

Tony won the endorsement at the April convention by a 195-5 margin over his challenger, to whose name recognition I will not contribute here.  The other candidate agreed – according to a couple of sources  – that he’d not challenge Tony Hernandez in the primary.  And then he promptly turned around and filed to run in the primary.

Anyway, while the other candidate has not had any sort of presence at all in the race so far – after reportedly promising he could raise DFL-sized money for the general election – I don’t expect that he’ll be much of a challenge for Tony Hernandez.  But it is hypothetically possible that the other guy who is not Tony could spend $30,000 between now and Monday night trying to build instant name recognition over Hernandez.  It’s happened – Arne Carlson did it, more or less.

So I’ll just give you a little reminder, for yourself and your Republican friends, family and neighbors in the Fourth CD:

Vote for Tony Hernandez, not the other guy, on Tuesday.

By the way – Tony is fundraising in a tough district; if you can peel off a few bucks to fight Betty McColllum’s juggernaut, that’d be huge.   And if you’ve got an afternoon to spend lit-dropping, or an evening for phoning, please hit Tony’s volunteer page.

Disclosure:  I am a volunteer for the Hernandez campaign.  As if you couldn’t tell.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The Left’s new chanting point (Angry Clown, Dog Gone) is Republicans would give guns to bad people but stop good people from voting which is wrong because voters aren’t killers.

No, voters aren’t DIRECT killers. They do it by proxy, electing Barak The Fearsome Terrorist Slayer and Al Franken, the 60th vote needed to pass ObamaCare That Will Have No Death Panels. I don’t think the direct-proxy distinction makes a difference.

Conservatives think bad people shouldn’t have guns and bad people shouldn’t vote, either. Liberals agree with less than half of that.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

It’s not so much that libs don’t think bad people should vote.  To put the most positive, pollyannaish possible spin on it as possible, it’s that their unexamined belief is that processing the maxiumum  possible number of ballots on election day is the greatest possible good.  Ensuring that those ballots are from real people, or people legally entitled to vote, or people who have only voted once, falls well below in the priority list.  And that’s if you assume that there isn’t massive fraud, which I do not.

The other day, my friend and moderate alt-media gadfly Marty Owings left a note in the  comment section of my original post on Steve Smith to dispute my notion that Rep. Steve Smith is a “RINO”.  (Similarly, I got a few emails from Republcans – and yes, conservatives – saying that I was unfair to Connie Doepke – or at least about her political record.  I’ve found few defenders of her apparent potemkin endorsement from Erik Paulsen).

As a former boss of mine used to say, “From Salt Lake City, “Way out East” is Denver”.  People bring different perspectives to the table; it’s a fair point that Smith had a Taxpayers League rating similar to Kurt Zellers’ (and it’s ‘fair to point out that an awful lot of fiscal conservatives’ TPL ratings were lower than you’d think they’d be).

Still, I do go with Buckley’s commandment – vote for the most conservative candidate who can win (or do so if you live in SD33 or HD33B, which I do not).

Is there any question that Cindy Pugh is more conservative than Smith?  There was no doubt before – and there’s less doubt after reading the GOP’s release yesterday about Smith:

St. Paul – Earlier this week, the Republican Party of Minnesota asked what Steve Smith was hiding by not submitting his 15th day pre-primary report to the Campaign Finance Board. Republican Party of Minnesota Chairman Pat Shortridge issued the following statement regarding campaign contributions received by Steve Smith:

“There is serious concern about Steve Smith’s priorities and voting record in St. Paul. Instead of fighting for our conservative principles, Smith’s voting record has gained the backing of union bosses. That’s not surprising given that, according to a new non-partisan study, Smith voted in the interest of taxpayers barely half the time.

“While Smith has ignored the law and refused to file his Campaign Finance Report, which costs him $50 per day in late filing fees and could trigger future civil penalties, GOP voters can gain some understanding of who is funding his campaign by looking at his 24-hour notices.

“He has received $500 from SEIU, $500 from Laborers District Council of Minnesota and North Dakota, and $500 from Minneapolis Municipal Retirement Association, a clear sign that union bosses in St. Paul are trying to buy the Republican primary for their handpicked candidate.

“Smith failed to fight for conservative legislation in St. Paul and thus, failed to secure the Republican endorsement. Now, he is deceiving voters by not releasing his fundraising numbers and allowing the voting public a clear picture of his priorities. He should follow the law, file his report, and let voters evaluate who’s funding his campaign.”

If the GOP’s charges are true – and I do in fact solicit any response from Smith’s campaign or defenders if it’s not – then that answers that “is Pugh more conservative” bit.

And it’s clear if Pugh wins the primary, she’ll win the election.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in re Al Sharpton’s Strib op-ed:

Civil Rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton writes in the Star Tribune to oppose Voter ID because 1 in 4 Blacks, 1 in 5 elderly and 1 in 6 Hispanics don’t have the proper credentials and apparently can’t get them.

Oddly, others can.

The Ramsey County Elections office is next door to the Property Records room where deeds are stored and I spend a fair amount of time working with real estate. I have seen an endless parade of Asian voters the past two weeks. They’re showing up by the van-load. They have guides who speak English directing them to the right office. Older folks are assisted by younger ones. They’re showing up to register and to vote absentee for the primary.

I’ve also seen a few Black immigrants, Somalis or Ethiopians from the way they dress and talk. No “American” Blacks, though. None of the people whose pants are stitched to their underwear, whose caps are on sideways, who have time in the afternoon to prowl the streets looking for 14-year-old girls in Frogtown and who learned to talk from rap videos. Those people can’t seem to make it to the Voter Registration Office.

Plainly, this is not a cultural thing. It’s not a matter of White and Asian people being conscientious and law-abiding while recent illegal immigrant Hispanics (and Blacks whose families have lived in this country for generations) are neither conscientious nor law-abiding.

Plainly, it’s just racissss. And that’s a crying shame.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

And I’ll add that it’s not even a matter of Afro-Americans and Latinos not being conscientious or law-abiding so much as it is the DFL, Sharpton, and their camp-followers in the Media wanting you to believe it; to believe that Black, Latino, elderly and young voters are just too stupid to handle bringing an ID to the polls.

We know better.  Right?

Polling shows that a fairly decisive majority of Minnesotans agree, and support Voter ID.  The left’s response – other than chanting “Disenfranchisement” and “Racism” – is to claim that the process of getting a free ID is juuuust toooo complicated for voters.  And since their strategy does seem to involve trying to win over “low-information” voters – people they can gull into thinking Mitt Romney is a felon who hasn’t filed taxes, that Bain killed a woman, that they’re out of work in 2012 because of what George W. Bush did (or really didn’t) do in 2007), that would be a concern.

As Joe points out, many groups – groups that actually take democracy seriously – are making the logical connection; they’re getting their people registered.    Expect not a few legitimate groups across the political spectrum to extend their ‘Get out the Vote” efforts to getting voters registered as well.

Clearly, for the DFL, it’s easier to manufacture bogus votes than to get their low-information rank-and-file to vote legitimately.

As we’ve discussed earlier, the Star Tribune has two goals in its “Endorsement” process:

1. Promote the DFL.  At the least, an endorsement is free advertising.  Beyond that?   It gulls the gullible.
2. Ensure that whatever GOP does get elected causes the DFL as little trouble as possible.  It’s why all and sundry among their columnists, except Katherine Kersten, constantly harken back to the bad old days, when the GOP was basically the DFL with better suits.

Rep. Steve Smith of the southwest ‘burbs is at best a “moderate” Republican, conservative only only law-and-order issues, and would give “RINOs” a bad name on most other topics – or, as the Strib puts it, “thoughtful and pragmatic”.

And that’s the least of his problems. Talk with any mainstream conservative Republican in the legislature about Smith and you get a lot of head-shaking, eye-rolling and “Oof-da”-ing.  From the partisan to the political to the personal, Representative Smith is reportedly a poster child for the downside of life as a professional politician.

But he’s not even a speed bump for the DFL on most issues. and that means “Strib Heart Smith“:

Or as the Strib – and I have it on fair authority that Lori Sturdevant wrote this one too – puts it:

To function well, the perennially divided Legislature needs mavericks — independent-minded centrists willing to occupy the battle-scarred ground between the two parties and to stretch in both directions to strike deals.

But only so long as they stretch to the left.

Seriously – you’ll look long and in vain for similar praise for DFLers who inch to the right.  Partly because the DFL excises them from the party like they’re tumors (See Norm Coleman, Randy Kelly, Jerry Blakey, John Harrington).  Partly because to the Strib Editorial Board, sticking to one’s guns goes by two names; “populist pugnacity!” on the left, “partisan extremism” on the right.

Smith, naturally, “stretches” obligingly and solely to the left:

For 22 years, state Rep. Steve Smith, 62, a family law attorney [we’ll come back to that] from Mound, has played that difficult and increasingly lonely role. He gets our nod on that basis over Southwest Metro Tea Party founder Cindy Pugh of Chanhassen, who has party endorsement.

Not just party endorsement – like Dave Osmek, she had overwhelming party endorsement.

Which is yet another reason the Strib is endorsing Smith – to do its bit to undercut the GOP – a goal at which Smith is a reliable ally:

Unlike most Republicans, Smith is allied with organized labor — eight unions had endorsed him as of late last week. He opposes the same-sex-marriage ban that most Republican legislators voted to put before the voters this year. He voted for the stadium bill; Pugh says she would have voted no.

On vote after vote after vote, Smith tossed the caucus, and a Republican mainstream that has moved to the right over his decades of incumbency, under the bus – to the point where the caucus finally had to do something:

Speaker Kurt Zellers broke with customary practice two weeks ago by endorsing Pugh over his caucusmate Smith. After the 2011 session, amid rumors about Smith’s relationship with a female staffer (he is divorced), Zellers stripped Smith of the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Policy and Finance Committee. (The woman in question no longer works for the House.)

Want double standards?  The Strib’s got ’em!:

By comparison, Pugh, 55, a former general manager of Dayton’s in St. Paul, is an energetic, personable apostle of free-market conservatism….By her own admission, if District 33B voters send Pugh to the Capitol next January, she’ll have a lot to learn.

Pugh is a successful businesswoman, and a key organizer of a political movement, the Southwest Metro Tea Party, that has been turning the formerly “purple” Third CD redder and redder by the year for for the past three years.  She is a dynamo.  Like many of the recent conservative “Tea Party” class of current legislators, she’s got a lifetime of real accomplishments outside of politics.  While the Strib may well prefer someone who’s spent an adult lifetime growing roots in the Capitol, one suspects the voters are getting smarter.

And I did mention double standards, right?  You’ll scour the Strib in vain for any patronizing references to the inexperience of, say, Carly Melin, a 25 year old DFL drone-ette whom the DFL trucked straight from Hamline Law School in Saint Paul to the Iron Range just in time to meet the residency requirements, for an insta-endorsement and perfunctory election to the House, notwithstanding the fact that she had no useful experience at anything, much less politics.

If they send Smith, he’ll have a different set of challenges.

He’ll have the kind of challenges that, were he a conservative like Tom Hackbarth, would have gotten obsessive coverage in the Strib.

We hope voters give him a chance to overcome them. Legislative mavericks are in grievously short supply.

No, we’ve got mavericks; a majority of them in both chambers.  They broke from the Strib’s orthodoxy.

As to Smith?  He’s a RINO.  That is forgiveable, personally if not politically.  He’s a throwback to an earlier, more useless era in the Minnesota GOP; the Carlson/Durenberger years, when the “Indendent Republican” party went along to get along.  May those days be soon forgotten.

What is unforgiveable is that Smith has been one of the leading forces against custody reform in Minnesota.  It’s a system that intentionally exacerbates divorces, by enshrining a “winner takes all” custody and support system that inflames divorces (and racks up billable hours for Smith’s fellow “Family Court” lawyers) and, make no mistake, operates in the precise worst interest of children in the vast majority of cases.  Minnesota’s current child custody system is a barbaric monstrosity that should be rooted out and killed.  

For his decades of supporting this inexcusable barbarism, there is no circle in hell hot or dark enough for Smith (rhetorically and morally speaking, at any rate).  He deserves to be pelted with rocks and garbage, mocked and exiled from polite civilization.

But I, and nearly 90% of his district’s Republicans, would be happy to settle for simply retiring from politics, starting Wednesday morning.

Friday night Brad Carlson and I did a  special NARN broadcast at the Washington County Fair in Lake Elmo.

I took a bunch of pictures – so to help keep the blog loading fast, I’m going to put the story below the jump.

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Last week, we reported that Congressman Erik Paulsen (CD3) has endorsed Dave Osmek for the MInnesota State Senate in District 33.

Connie Doepke – endorsed yesterday by Lori Sturdevant the Strib, apparetly doesn’t think the people in her district need to know that.

Over the weekend, Doepke’s campaign apparently sent out a lit piece, with a picture of Doepke with Paulsen – and, most troublingly, a quote from Paulsen, and the Congressman’s signature.

This is a fairly clear implication, to those who aren’t paying attention, that Congressman Paulsen – who is on his way to what might be a three-digit victory over the hapless Brian Barnes this fall – endorses Connie Doepke.

Siources tell me none of this was authorized or written by Paulsen’s campaign.  And now Congressman Paulsen’s office has released a statement:

Statement from Congressman Paulsen regarding the Republican Primary in Senate District 33

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT: John-Paul Yates (952) [phone number redacted]

“It has come to my attention that the Doepke campaign recently sent a mailing with a quote attributed to me. I want to make it clear I did not approve this mailing or quote and I support the endorsed Republican candidate, Dave Osmek, in Senate District 33.”

Erik Paulsen

No word yet whether the Star/Tribune’s editorial board thinks this is one of those “thoughtful, pragmatic” moves they crowed about in their endorsement over the weekend.

If you live in the 33, please vote accordingly.

I’m a volunteer for the Tony Hernandez for Congress campaign.  I’m doing some communications work for the GOP-endorsed candidate in CD4 – the usual, nitty-gritty stuff that are the blocking and tackling of the communication effort behind any local grassroots campaign.

As part of the “job” (no, I don’t get paid), I’ll be writing about Betty McCollum.

Long-time readers of this blog know that that is something I do plenty of anyway.  There won’t be much change.

So to sum up:  I’ll be doing what I normally do for free on my own, for free for the Hernandez campaign.  While I don’t get paid, I still find it deeply unethical for bloggers to blog on behalf of campaigns and not disclose the fact.

Consider yourselves disclosed.

DFLers are whining because Kurt Bills – GOP-endrosed US Senate candidate – released an ad that paid homage to an ad that Paul Wellstone ran during his first campaign.

Here’s Bills:

Here’s Wellstone’s ad:

Pretty much a shot-by-shot remake, if you leave out the whole “liberty versus onerous socialism” bit, huh?

Many liberals are outraged to the point of losing bodily functions and popping blood vessels in their brains over this campaign.

They are wrong.

Let’s address some of their arguments:

“You shouldn’t parody Wellstone”: Why?  For starters, it wasn’t a “parody” – it was a completely respectful homage, coming from a candidate with different political beliefs than Wellstone (thank God) but  a very similar political challenge; upset an incumbent who is an overwhelming favorite with boundless resources (Bills has one additional challenge – a media that was in the bag for Wellstone, but will work even more tirelessly as Klobuchar’s Praetorian Guard than for most DFLers; she’s the daughter of one of their own, long-time Strib columnist Jim Klobuchar).

“What would you think if the left mistreated the memories of your heroes?”:  Right, because the left never parodied Reagan and every other conservative that ever got into a position to change things for the better.  Sometimes with intense, gratuitous cruelty, especially in Reagan’s case (don’t make me break out the list of libs who cracked Alzheimers jokes) unlike Bills’ treatment of Wellstone.

Objections overruled.

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I met my old friend “Lucky” Carroll, long-time DFL political operative and currently head meme-buffer for Alliance for a Better MInnesota, for a drink the other day.  As usual, she’d started before I got there.  Long before.

ME: (to waitress): Bring me a vodka sour. (to Carroll)  So whatcha been up to?

CARROLL:  (four empty cocktail glasses in front of her) I’ve been working to defeat the Voter Suppression Amendment.

ME:  Ah, the Voter ID Amendment.  Right.  So why would you want to defeat an amendment that would ensure that the integrity of our election system isn’t eroded by systematic fraud?

CARROLL:  Because we have the best election system in the world! (Finishes gin and tonic)

ME: OK well, currently the amendment is running about 2:1 in favor.  So what if a solid majority of Minnesota voters say that they want Voter ID?

CARROLL:  Then we’ll sue until the law gets thrown out anyway!

ME:  Wait – so you’ll disenfranchise a solid majority of Minnesota voters….

CARROLL:  The best voting system in the universe!

By the way, lefty organizations with deep pockets are pouring money into advertising against the Voter ID amendment.

The Minnesota Majority – and their “ProtectMyVote” organization – have been doing most of the work,and they are not with deep pockets; if you can peel off a buck or two to help, it’d be much appreciated.

More results from the Survey USA poll from yesterday.

I gotta confess, this one surprised me.  Conventional wisdom has it that the Left’s suffocating blanket of spending and publicity, as well as the purported apathy of many voters to the issue, would scupper the Marriage Amendment.

According to this poll – which, remember, oversampled Democrats, 38 to 32% – it’s just not so:

An amendment to the Minnesota Constitution on the ballot defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Will you vote FOR the amendment? Against the amendment? Or not vote on the measure?

52% Vote For

37% Vote Against

5% Not Vote

6% Not Sure

Remember, “No answer” counts as a “no” on Constitutional votes in Minnesota.  So let’s say these results hold up ’til election day, and that every single “Not Sure” response in this poll ends up voting “no” or not voting (which won’t happen); the measure passes 52-48.

This, I did not expect.

And I’m a tad gratified to see that the poll shows people seem to be resisting, broadly, the DFL’s torrent of lies and innuendo about the Voter ID Amendment:

An amendment to the Minnesota Constitution on the ballot would require voters to show photo I.D.’s in order to vote on Election Day. Will you vote FOR the amendment? Against the amendment? Or not vote on the measure?

65% Vote For

28% Vote Against

2% Not Vote

4% Not Sure

If the “Fors” stay put, and every single “Not Sure” votes against it (again, not gonna happen), the measure passes by almost 2:1.

While gay marriage isn’t an issue I care much about – I support civil unions – I’m glad to see that on at least a couple of issues, according to one mildly-DFL-leaning and slightly DFL-oversampled poll, the DFL’s huge, expensive, and slimy propaganda war seems at this moment to be crapping out.