This piece is sort of a natural follow-on to yesterday’s post – all the “Deep Thoiughts” about man’s relationship to government, and the different philosophies liberals and conservatives bring to the table on the subject.
But first, a brief digression.
I don’t normally rebroadcast other peoples’ ads – but this one was just too good not to pick up and run with, just a little bit.
It’s a riff on President Obama’s “You didn’t do it” scold to entrepreneurs and, by extension, really anyone outside government:
Nope, nobody paid me to rujn it. Although they sure could.
Of course, this sentiment is pandemic on the left. Yesterday Jim Schowalter, Mark Dayton’s budget director, was at a meeting in Thief River Falls with, among other people, the CEO of Digi-Key. You may not have heard of it – it’s a privately-owned billion-dollar company based out of Thief River Falls that is one of the biggest success stories and major employers in northwestern Minnesota. The company started in the CEO’s apartment forty-odd years ago – guy didn’t even have a garage at the time – and grew into a billion-dollar operation employing thousands (I have family in the area, so I hear things).
And, according to a report from the scene, Schowalter told the CEO that without government, he could never have done it
The theory among lefties is that without all the “infraastructure” government “provides”, entrepreneurs would be huddled in caves, helpless, banging rocks together to try to get fire. It’s only through the nurturing hand of government that any human activity is possible.
But once government – at some level – has dealt with banditry, brigandry, barratry, piracy and piracy, really, you’re into the mundanities of laws, roads and regulations. And when those are the subjects…:
What? Government wants a cookie for doing what it was set up to do, and for which generations of people before the entrepreneur paid taxes – sometimes grossly overpaid in taxes – to get?
By the way, where do people suggest the money to build that “infrastructure” came from? Brought down from heaven on the backs of unicorns? No – people, entrepreneurs and company guys and executives and high school kids working at Tastee Freez and trust fund billionaires alike – had it taken out of their paychecks.
So yeah, government – good job and all, “providing” things that I and millions like me paid you to do. Isn’t that like me going to my boss and saying “thank me for the design I handed off, on top of paying me to do it?”
By the way – try as I may, I can not find a single reference to this episode anywhere in the mainstream media.
Football players aren’t ordinary citizens, [the Governor] said, and compared the game to combat.
”It’s basically slightly civilized war, and then they take that into society, much as solders come back, and they’ve been in combat or the edge of it and then suddenly that adjustment back to civilian life is a real challenge,” Dayton said.
You heard him right. The Governor – who got a draft deferment by staying in college and then working as a substitute teacher until his number went away – says that NFL players, many of whom started on the fast track to stardom in high school, waltzed through college in dumbed-down academic programs and “work” at playing an overgrown sandlot game for millions of dollars a year, misbehave because they’re just like you are after you get home from a tour or two in Afghanistan or Iraq (or Desert Storm or Vietnam).
People like Pedro Chavez, aka Jose Cisneros, or Carlos Santiago, or Antonia Ledesma — four separate Minnesota driver’s licenses.
Detectives say the Albert Lea man was illegally collecting welfare for a decade, using real Minnesota driver’s licenses obtained with phony documents. He was convicted of forgery, and deported.
“Is it a fraudulent birth certificate, is it a fake DL from another state?” Neville said. “Yes in all those cases as well as taking someone else’s documentation and presenting it as their own.”
And who, pray tell,m is on the case? (Emphasis added):
Of these 24,000 driver’s licenses, about 10,000 have been canceled. Beyond that, not much else has been done. Not a single name has been given yet to the Department of Human Services to check for welfare or food stamp fraud, and no names have been given or the Secretary of State to check against the voter rolls.
Make sure you brought quarters for the meter. Mark Ritchie’s office is too busy editing the legislature’s copy.
Leave aside the obvious conspiracy theory – that Ritchie wants to debase the driver’s license as a standard for identification in the run-up to a probable victory for the Voter ID amendment; while the vast majority of the fake IDs were no doubt taken out in the interest of some sort of personal or financial fraud, you can bet that nine out of ten of the criminals who vote, vote DFL.
And that’s the last thing Mark Ritchie wants to upset.
And with all the prelims out of the way, we’re up to the grand finale of this, one of Minnesota Politics’ greatest traditions; the top ten conservatives that Minnesota liberals hate!
And here we go:
10. Laura Brod (2010 Ranking: 14): Brod – a former legislator, and one of the sharpest, most articulate politicians in the state, is lurking in the wings for her shot at something. And when she does, she’s going to rock the place. And when conservative women are about to rock, liberals salute them – with boundless, condescending, sometimes unhinged ire.
9. John Kline (2010 Ranking: 15): Redistricting has cut John Kline’s fortunes back a tad. Instead of winning the 2nd CD by 30 points, he’ll win by 12. It was only 12 years or so ago that the 2nd was Tim Penny’s safe sinecure. And in Minnesota, only Liberals are supposed to have sinecures.
7. Keith Downey: Downey’s a fairly junior legislator – but during the shutdown, he made “Govenor” Dayton look like the gabbling marionette he is. As his nominator, my staff blogger First Ringer, noted, “During the shutdown, the unions called their protests “Downeyville.” Not bad for a 2nd term legislator. Expect his name to rocket up this list if he runs for governor in 2014 as expected”. No argument here.
8. Kurt Zellers: Speaker of the House – what some DFLers call “The Kelliher Seat”. And he’s Conservative. Say no more.
6. Erik Paulsen (2010 Ranking: 21): What do you call someone who took a “purple” district and rode it into one of the safest GOP seats in the state? Hated! But nothing like…
5. Chip Cravaack: …someone who “steals” one of “their” safest sinecures from them. The DFL wants Cravaack defeated more than they want tofu at Festivus. By far the strongest debut in this year’s poll, from nowhere (naturally – when the 2010 poll was going on, nobody had heard of Cravaack, even in the GOP, outside the 8th CD).
4. Jason Lewis (2010 Ranking: 7): Lewis, perhaps more than any other pundit, upset the “great thing” the DFL had going for so many years. He’s the father of modern conservatism in Minnesota – and clearly that’s neither been forgotten nor forgiven.
3. Tom Emmer (2010 Ranking: 3): They had to outspend him 3:1 to beat him by 8,000 votes, even with a dysfunctional GOP behind him. In so doing, they so exposed the incompetence and (likely) massive fraud in the DFL-controlled voting system that it set the wheels in motion to reform the entire toxic mess. And Tom is still kicking their asses. No wonder he’s holding steady at #3.
2. Katherine Kersten (2010 Ranking: 4): Liberals love their women to be the PC equivalent of barefoot, preggers and in the kitchen. Kersten broke the Blue Ceiling at the Strib – the first columnist to be an “Out” conservative, in a bullpen that has always called Dave Durenberger a right-winger. She rankled the establishment at the Strib, and in Twin CIties liberalism at large. They hate being rankled.
1. Michele Bachmann (2010 Ranking: 1): Not even close. More votes than the next two finishers put together. Not only that, but of everyone that voted for her, all but one put her in first place – for a passion index a point and a half higher than the next competitor. Representative Bachmann is the perfect bete noir storm; sharp, articulate (if occasionally a bit shoot-from-the-hip), attractive, female, paleoconservative, charismatic, smarter than they are (whether they admit it or not), and absolute master of all she politically surveys. By holding, Thatcher-like, to rock-solid principle, she was a bright spot in two dark GOP elections; she’s persevered to win her last race by 12 points, and likely win her next one by 20. And if there’s anything a Minnesota liberal hates more than a conservative woman, it’s a conservative woman who walks over them without breaking a sweat at their most depraved attacks. More than that? Their hatred only seems to make her stronger.
And in being so, she teaches all conservatives in this purple miasma a lesson; stake out your principles, explain them clearly, and stand by ’em.
And in that lies the doom of the DFL, if there is any future to be had for this state.
And they do very very much hate that.
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Thanks for voting, and stay tuned; we’ve only two years away from the next episode of “Who Do Minnesota Liberals Hate?”
All right. Yesterday we got through the nominees and the finishers from 21 through 37 in the rankings.
This morning, we’re up to the first half of the Top Twenty!
20. Ed Morrissey (2010 Ranking 10): The Hot Air proprietor, and my long-time radio co-host, slides ten spots since 2010. Liberals’ hate seems to be more closely focused on policymakers than pundits these days.
19. Bob Davis: On the other hand, Bob Davis’ return to Twin Cities radio also marks his debut on the list.
18. Sue Jeffers: Is it because she’s a conservative talk-radio playa? Or because she’s a GOP candidate (for Ramco Commission) and activist? Or because she’s an outspoken female conservative? Why choose! Libs hate her!
17. Chris Fields: If there’s anything a lib hates more than a “Minority” who’s not sitting obediently on the DFL bus, it’s one who, rhetorically, shreds his DFL opponent in every way but fundraising.
16. Mitch Berg (2010 Ranking 8 ): Even though I slide eight spots – what a wonderful country this is! Where a regular schlump working stiff with a blog can be the 16th-most-hated conservative in town!
15. Tea Party (2010 Ranking 24): The libs have spent the past three years flip-flopping between “The Tea Party is Dead!” and “The Tea Party Is Too Powerful!”. Time to flop, apparently.
14. Dan McGrath / MN Majority: The driving force behind the bipartisan Voter ID amendment, MN Majority and Dan McGrath, leapt into the top 20 this year. If Mark Ritchie were doing the counting, he’d have won by thousands, though.
13. Dave Thompson: The former talk host and leader of the Senate’s “I Don’t Give A Rat’s Ass If The Strib Editorial Board Doesn’t Approve” caucus would seem to be at the beginning of a long career as the object of liberal hate.
12. Mary Franson: Female? Check. Conservative? Check. Shred the Dems when they convicted her in rhetorical Kangaroo Court? Check. Representative Franson didn’t have the highest debut, but it was close.
11. Tim Pawlenty (2010 Ranking 2): Falling from 2 to 11, former Governor Pawlenty will no doubt leap to the top of the charts if he’s selected for VP.
Two years ago, we had 30 nominees with a significant number of votes that we could actually rank.
This year, there were 40.
And so in this episode, I’ll give the results from 40 up to 21:
40. Bridget Sutton: The southeast metro activist, Inver Grove Heights school board member, wife of former GOP chair Tony, and potential candidate for many things, Sutton makes her first appearance on the poll.
39. Jen DeJournette: One of the heads of “VOICES of Conservative Women”, DeJournette was one of a big surge in female nominees and vote-getters.
38. Katie Kieffer (2010 Ranking 30): Kieffer, the up-and-coming conservative columnist, actually got about the same number of votes as in 2010. The competition was just that much more intense this year.
37. Alan Quist (2010 Ranking: Nominated): Quist would probably have finished around this point in 1998, if I’d had a blog then…
36. Gretchen Hoffman: The no-nonsense – and, unfortunately, retiring – Senator from northwest Minnesota will be missed, here and especially at the Capitol.
35. Any Corporation that stands up to them: Pretty self-explanatory.
34. Sarah Palin: I did label the poll “Minnesota” conservatives – but I think this is accurate enough.
33. Michael Brodkorb (2010 Ranking 5): The former Senate Commo director, Party deputy and NARN co-host dropped sharply this year. Liberals apparently hate him less because he’s not focusing on, and shredding, them.
32. All Female and Minority Conservatives: This may have been the overriding theme of this poll; it’s the women and the “Minorities”.
31. Scott Walker: You don’t have to be a Minnesotan for Minnesota liberals to hate you.
30. John Hinderaker (2010 Ranking 13): The acerbic Power Line blogger dropped out of the top 20 this year.
26. Tony Sutton (2010 Ranking: Nominated): Sutton’s profile as the target of lefty ire certainly grew in the past two years.
28. Tom Hauser / KSTP TV: Hauser and The Five got some votes this year, from people who noted that Twin Cities liberals have been whining that they are “conservative flaks”. Which is apparently a Twin Cities liberal term for “actually reports facts about Republicans”, even if they’re not unflattering.
27. Twila Brase (2010 Ranking 28): Brase – my neighbor – stays at about the same level of general loathing. This next two years may change that.
26. Sara Anderson: The majordomo of the Republican redistricting plan was certain to be the target of plenty of lefty animus, given the left’s propensity for attacking people when they can’t attack facts.
25. Steve Drazkowski: The Senator from southeast Minnesota certainly spent this past session fielding the brickbats.
24. Pat Garofalo: The Lakeville rep took his share of flak and then some for leading the challenge of Minnesota’s big herd of sacred cattle, Education Minnesota, and raising his hand for Minnesota taxpayers.
23. Kurt Bills: The MN Senate candidate made a strong debut showing.
22. Matt Dean: The House Majority Leader also had a strong debut.
21. Bradlee Dean (2010 Ranking 17): I’m not sure that Dean is actually hated any less; it’s just that with the Minnesota “Independent” out of business, there’s not somebody writing about him eight hours a day, every day.
We’ll have 11 through 20 tomorrow morning, and wrap up the contest with the top ten tomorrow at noon!
Before we get to the ranked results from the poll, I thought I’d run both a quick explanation of the mechanics of the poll, and then a look at the Minnesota conservatives and groups that got nominations, but no votes.
First; I took the list of votes in descending order of hatred. Votes at the top of a list got more weight than votes at the bottom. I entered the votes and weights into a spreadsheet, tallying both number and weight of votes. That’s how all ties were broken; a tie between two nominees with the same vote total was broken by the nominees’ “Passion Index”, or average weight per vote. Someone who got five second-place votes would out-score someone with five tenth-place votes, for a hypothetical example, although someone with six tenth-place votes would beat someone with five first-place votes (hypothetically; it never happened).
The poll is extremely unscientific. and uses a methodology that any statistician with a yen to seek the truth giggle with derision – which means it’s the same as the Star-Tribune “Minnesota Poll” and the Humphrey Institute’s “HHH Poll”. However, my poll is intended for entertainment, not as “journalism” (or, just as likely, an attempt to sway the vote), which gives my poll a bit of a moral and ethical advantage.
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The poll – and Minnesota conservatism – have changed a bit in the past two years. Some people who placed on the poll two years ago didn’t show up at all this year: Entrepreneurs, who placed 27; Tracy Eberly, who notched a 25; Brian “Saint Paul” Ward who came in at 2; Rep. and then candidate King Banaian who eked out a 20; Phil Krinkie, who came in at 12; Carol Molnau, who finished at 11, and the biggest dropper, David Strom, who came in at sixth place two years ago.
So with that out of the way, let’s take a look at nominees who received just one vote:
Brad Carlson: The NARN’s newest co-host makes his initial appearance in the list.
John Gilmore: The St. Paul activist makes his first appearance – although the current crowd of St. Paul Republicans may have ranked him higher.
MIchelle Benson: Senator Benson is the first of many female conservatives on this years’ list.
Paul Mirengoff (2010 Ranking 23) and Scott Johnson (2010 Ranking 16): The Power Line colleagues – both of whom ranked in the money last year – fell off a bit this year.
Taxpayers League: And that wasn’t the only surprise.
Jack Tomczak: The former Bachmann aided turned talk show host turned punching bag of the deranged is just getting started in the “Target of Hate” business. He’s had a great start this year.
Joe Soucheray (2010 Ranking 26): The change to sports talk hasn’t helped Souch’s fortunes – misfortunes? – in this poll.
Marianne Stebbins: The head of Minnesota’s Ron Paul movement gets on the board – barely. She might have scored higher among some MN Republicans.
Mary Kiffmeyer (2010 Ranking – nominated): The former secretary of state got one vote both years. This won’t be the last we’ll hear of Voter ID, though.
AM1280 The Patriot (2010 Ranking – nominated): The little station that could…did.
Roger Chamberlain: The Freshman senator from White Bear Lake started what should be a good career as a lefty piñata (that swats back harder)
Tom Hackbarth: Libs considered the Senator guilty until proven innocent last year – but this year, there’s no question that at least one voter thinks MN liberals hate Tom Hackbarth.
Michele Bachmann’s Dog: From a voter who nominated quite a few other members of Bachmann’s household.
Stanley Hubbard: Liberals apparently think that acknowledging conservatives occasionally have a point – as Channel Five did during the 2010 campaign – makes you “just like Fox News”.
Walter Hudson: The Tea Party leader showed up on the tally this year.
Andrew Breitbart: Notwithstanding that he’s not a Minnesotan, Breitbart got a nod.
Pat Anderson (2010 Ranking: Nominated): The former State Auditor can run the numbers if she wants, but she came in the same place she did in 2010.
Michele Bachmann’s Kids: Unless one of them turns out to hate her. Then they’ll love the kid. Til they reconcile.
Norm Coleman (2010 Ranking – 9): From #9 in 2010 to a single vote this year, Coleman is not the mightiest to fall in this edition of the poll.
Tony Hernandez: The Fourth CD Republican got nominated by one voter who concentrated on “minority” and female conservatives.
Kermit (2010 Ranking: Nominated): Kermit holds steady after two years. That’s not bad!
Marcus Bachmann: I’d have put the Representative’s husband higher. But the Bachmann family has plenty of votes, all in all…
Anyone with half a brain: Someone wanted to cut to the chase.
Swiftee (2010 Ranking 29): Swiftee – persona non grata at just about every Twin Cities leftyblog (including MinnPost) actually got more votes this year than in 2010. The competition was just that much harder. But Swiftee was a perennial in these things long before there were blogs…
Give us your top ten Minnesota conservatives that liberals hate, in descending order of hatred.
Results later this week!
UPDATE: Chalk it up to the heat, but it occurred to me; I ran one of the most important contests in the SITD schedule during one of the worst traffic weeks of the year.
So I’m extending voting through 11:59PM, Monday, July 9, with results to be released starting Tuesday, July 10 and the finals on July 11.
So the other day on Twitter, I took the liberty of congratulating Lynn Cheney for “marrying” her partner. I took the liberty of pointing out that Cheney, lesbian though she is, has a rare and glorious ability to shred through lefty chanting points.
A couple of liberals on Twitter, smelling rhetorical trap, tried to turn that into an endorsement of gay marriage and/or a position on the Marriage Amendment this fall.
Naturally, I’m not falling for any of that. The fact is, I’m personally, deeply ambivalent about gay marriage. And about the Marriage Amendment that will be addressing the issue in Minnesota this fall. And about marriage, regardless of the genders of the participants, for that matter. One of the liberals accused me of “moving the goalposts”, as liberals always do when one introduces logical or moral nuance into an argument (remember – they’re the smart ones, and the only ones allowed to have nuance or observe gray area in their world views).
But notwithstanding the lefties’ attempt to back me into a rhetorical box of their making, which I brushed aside with ease and style (as always), it did start me thinking; it’s getting toward November. I mean, it’s four months away.
And I’m still undecided about the Marriage Amendment.
As I’ve written in the past, the Marriage Amendment is…
On the one hand, a bad idea: The libertarian in me bristles at the idea that the government should be telling people what to do in their personal lives. Marriage is a contract; if two people have standing to sign a contract, why not? Animals and children cant’ sign ’em, after all.
On the other hand, the Amendment is a great idea: It should bring out social conservatives to vote. Look, I hate using peoples’ personal lives as grist for the political mill, but it’s the coin of the realm. And the long-term survival of this country does in fact depend on the political extinction of the current version of “progressivism” and its vessel, the Democrat party. If this issue is a milepost on the way to the extinction of the DFL, I’m all for it (although I think the Voter ID Amendment will be much more useful in that regard).
Because on the one hand, I believe government should stay out of peoples’ personal lives.
On the other, I believe “Marriage” is mostly a religious institution.
On the third hand, I find most of the arguments for gay marriage just as illogical as some of its proponents find “because Jesus said so”. A quick sample, off the top of my head:
“Support Gay Marriage or we’ll thow things at you”: This video clips is making the rounds; a young Marriage Amendment opponent tossing glitter at Amendment supporters at a demonstration outside General Mills:
He tosses glitter at old people, toddlers – and then has a hissy when people get mad at him.
And reading the comments to the video are enough to make you truly afraid for this nation’s future. If the next great cultural war is fought on the fields on logic, ethics and fact, we’re screwed blue.
I’m not going to say “this is the best argument that gay marriage supporters can muster” – notwithstanding the fact that it’s the best a lot of Amendment supporters can muster, it’s clearly not a great argument. But much of the Minnesota gay movement has tied itself to the glitter bomb as its primary positive case.
Color me unconvinced.
Still, the better ones have challenges as well.
“Civil Rights aren’t the subject for popularity contests”: Of course they are. The government and media spent years demonizing people who supported the Second Amendment, in order to shave those rights back as far as they could. And ask German-Americans about the popular laws enacted during World War I, or Japanese Americans during World War II.
“But those were mistakes”. Sure. But that’s a separate question. We constantly subject rights, including rights purportedly enshrined in the Constitution, to popularity contests.
“You antis are hung up on a word”. Well, sure – the idea that “marriage” is a religious institution, while “civil unions” are not.
But let’s be honest – everyone is hung up on a word. Try this exercise with your favorite local gay marriage proponent – and by this, I mean the reasonable one, the one that can hold a civil argument (we’ll get to the others later):
YOU: Allowing for the fact that no major faith group (outside some dissenting congregations here and there around the US) sanctions gay marriage, and none of them do so on theological grounds, what are your reasons for wanting gays to marry?
GAY MARRIAGE SUPPORTER (GMS): So that gays have rights to visitation, so they can visit each other in the hospital and have power of attorney, inheritance, the various tax benefits, the ability to transfer custody of children in cases of death or disability, those sorts of things.
YOU: OK. So it’s a legal thing.
GMS: “Yep”.
YOU: OK. So I propose that we adopt Civil Unions. It’s a contract between two adults of majority, conferring every single one of the rights you mentioned and a few others you (well, OK, I) forgot, just like marriage. Only it’s called a “Civil Union”.
GMS: That’s not OK. People would view that as a second class institution.
YOU: But you yourself said this was about rights. You’ll get every single right that a married mixed-gender couple gets. Exactly the same resolution to every single situation under the law. What’s the difference?
GMS: People will think Civil Unions have a lower status.
YOU: Hm. So a parallel institution that is exactly legally equal to straight marriage is not acceptable because…
GMS: Because you are hung up on a word.
YOU: Gotcha.
“Because Marriage is about love!”: I have to clamp off my own personal cynicism about marriage to answer this one. But even being idealistic for a moment? No, it’s not. Ask anyone who got married for “love”. “Love’ carries you through about the first two years, if you’re lucky. After that it’s about a lot more than “love”.
Which is not to say that gay couples don’t have whatever that is. Just that the “Marriage is love” chant is a stupid one even for straights.
Still, it’s better than this one:
“A Gay couple would be better than so many of the straight couples out there!”: Have you noticed how every gay couple that anyone ever refers to is Ozzie and Harriet these days? And those Ozzy and, er, Ozzy couples always get compared to straight couples that are like Joan Crawford and whoever she was married to?
Gay marriage supporters have painted not so much gay marriage, but gays who want to marry, as just plain better human beings that all us nasty, angry…human straights. It’s becoming a bit of a stereotype – the doting, impeccable, perfect gay couple, always a better option than…whatever the option was.
“Marriage is a right, and we don’t restrict rights”: There are really two responses buried in there.
Of course we restrict rights. My right to keep and bear arms, to pick one example – which is important enough to be spelled out in the Constitution, and incorporated onto the states by the McDonald decision – is restricted in all sorts of ways; I have to show ID to buy ammo, much less a gun; felons can’t buy ’em, and on on, and so on.
And marriage? Yep, restricted all over the place. You can’t marry your first cousin – not even “for love”. You can’t have several spouses – not “for love”, or even because your religion, Mormon or Muslim or Hefnerian, allows it. Not even if first cousins or multiple spouses make better parents than your uptight old straight parents did.
But beyond that – is marriage a “right?”
The US Constitution doesn’t say anything – except by omission, in the Tenth Amendment, which reserves everything not covered in the Constitution (and thousands of tons of case law, naturally) to the States and People, unless the Supreme Court can find a penumbra enanating something else (see: “right” to murder the unborn – which should not be viewed as a right, btw; one persons rights can not infringe another person’s rights; abortion not only infringes the “Fetus'” right to life, in many cases it destroys whatever rights may be scattered in and among the father’s many, many legal obligations). And the state of Minnesota defines marriage as a guy and a gal. Which is fine – laws were made to be changed, if you have the political muscle to do it. Go for it.
For most of human history, “marriage” has been about making, raising, securing the safety and maintenance of, and protection of children. Which, at various times, meant that the infertile, the old and the otherwise child-“free” weren’t elegible. In some parts of the world, “marriage” doesn’t happen until there was a baby on the way (including, until not that long ago, some parts of rural Holland).
Of course, that’s not how we’ve observed things for quite some time, with senior citizens and the “child-free” marrying, and with many, many more having children without bothering with marriage (or knowing each others’ names, in some cases) at all.
And so while “…because we’ve always done it this way” isn’t an especially satisfying answer for supporting the Marriage Amendment in and of itself, either are any of the arguments I’ve heard against it.
It wasn’t a huge shock that Michele Bachmann won, naturally. But I wonder – with two years passed, how have things changed?
And so it’s time for the second stab at a tradition unlike any other: the 2012 edition of “Who Do Minnesota Liberals Hate?”
Here’s the rules, such as they are:
Put together a list of who Minnesota liberals hate the most, this year.
Put it in descending order of hate: in other words, “1” is highest, “10” is lowest.
Theoretically, you can put as many as you want on your list – but since the list is in descending order, adding more than 10 or 15 will mean that the “passion index” of some of the lower members of your list will get shorted. So while you <i>can</i> add many, many to your list, it’s best to keep it to 5, 10 or at the outside 15-20 names.
Leave ’em in the comment section of this post (or send them to “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”, with “POLL” in the subject line).
If you don’t put in a specific order, I’ll just take them in descending priority from whatever list you DO provide.
I’ll run the flights starting Thursday, with the top ten on Friday. Nominations will be taken until 11:59PM on Wednesday.
In all seriousness, here; this poll is a serious academic attempt to measure the intellectual id of the liberals in Minnesota.
So start arfing up those lists! This post will be periodically moved to the top of the blog’s post list.
Congresswoman Betty McCollum – my “repreentative” – put out a press release after yesterday’s SCOTUS decision:.
“Two years ago, I was proud to vote in support of the Affordable Care Act. Today’s historic Supreme Court decision affirms President Obama’s leadership to extend healthcare coverage to millions of Americans.
…and destroying the healthcare system and Americans’ sovereign rights to make key life decisions for themselves, rather than having them mandated by the government.
It is now time for Republicans in Congress to end their vitriolic repeal campaign and work on effectively implementing this law to the benefit of the American people.”
And there you go,. “Vitriolic”.
Dissent is hate!
We need to repeal Obamacare. And we need to repeal Betty McCollum’s job as Congresswoman.
If you can spare a buck or two – or an hour or two – please donate or volunteer for the Tony Hernandez campaign.
A federal judge ruled yesterday – the affrontery of it all is almost breathtaking – that federal law doesn’t preclude states from making sure its voters are actually eligible:
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle ruled there was nothing in federal voting laws that prevent the state from identifying ineligible voters even if it is close to the upcoming Aug. 14 election.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit earlier this month to halt the purge, saying federal voting laws barred the effort since it was within 90 days of a federal election. U.S. officials also said the list used by Florida had “critical imperfections, which lead to errors that harm and confuse voters.”
I’d say “it’s amazing what a very low opinion Democrats have of voters”, but then I think about the people who vote for the likes of Mark Dayton and Betty McCollum, and I shut right up.
Hinkle in ruling from the bench said federal laws are designed to block states from removing eligible voters close to an election. He said they are not designed to block voters who should have never been allowed to cast ballots in the first place.
And there’s the key. Republicans favor making sure all voters are actually eligible. Democrats would allow everyone to the polls, as many times as they want to go, to avoid the faintest shred of appearance that they’ve excluded anyone, whether they should be voting or not.
Most Minnesotans get this, of course – which is why the Voter ID amendment is polling close to 20 points above the opposition.
Although he said “questioning someone’s citizenship” is not a trivial matter, Hinkle also said that non-citizens should not be allowed to vote.
That’s just good common sense. Also the law.
But the Democrats are hoping, as in all elections, that a plurality of the ill-informed, the lazy and the entitled will sway this question, too.
I’m doing a little campaign volunteering these days, for the Herndandez for Congress campaign.
There’s a ton of work to do – but if there was ever a year when a Republican could upset Betty McCollum, this is one of them. Tony needs plenty of help, by the way – financial and volunteers.
But for tonight? Tony’s going to be appearing at “Ignite the Right”, at the Blue Fox in Shoreview. Tony’ll be on the bill with US Representative Michele Bachmann and GOP Senate candidate Kurt Bills.
The event, sponsored by the North Metro Tea Party, will take place at the Blue Fox, in Maplewood. Social hour starts at 5:30, with the program kicking off at 6:30.
Last night, the paid flaks at “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – the astroturf PR group financed by the Dayton family, Mark Dayton’s ex-wife Alita Messinger, a bunch of their liberal plutocrat friends, and the unions that own Mark Dayton, put out a tweet:
Now, as always – when ABM says, writes or posts anything, one is best to do…
…what?
I don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here. What does one do?
Distrust, then verify. Then, almost inevitably, distrust some more.
So let’s look at the study and, as ABM would have the ill-informed voter believe, this wave of fresh murder begat by “Stand Your Ground”. The study was cited in a WSJ Law Blog post:
In April, more than a month after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, we looked the incidence of justifiable homicides in states with “stand your ground” or “castle doctrine” laws like Florida’s.
In general, such laws grant people more leeway to use lethal force on an attacker. More than 20 were passed after Florida’s in 2005. They typically do at least one of the following:
• Remove a person’s duty to retreat in places outside the home
• Add the presumption that the person who killed in self defense had a reasonable fear of death or harm [subject, in ever case I’m aware of, to a hearing establishing that that fear was reasonable]
• Grant people who killed in self-defense immunity from civil lawsuits [provided, of course, they are found to have acted in legal self-defense; currently, a woman killing a stalking rapist is only as safe from being sued back to the stone-age by her rapist’s family as the least bobble headed jury that can be empaneled]
So let’s look at the study’s conclusions (and I’ll add emphasis):
Justifiable homicides nearly doubled from 2000 to 2010, according to the most recent data available, when 326 were reported. The data, provided by federal and state law enforcement agencies, showed a sharp increase in justifiable homicides occurred after 2005, when Florida and 16 other states passed the laws.
While the overall homicide rates in those states stayed relatively flat, the average number of justifiable cases per year increased by more than 50% in the decade’s latter half.
Now, let’s put that number into two bits of context.
First; the “doubling” – 160 or so killings up to 320 and change – amounts to less than 1% of the people killed in unjustifiable homicides every year.
And every single one of them involves someone who was ruled to have had a legitimate fear of being killed or maimed, killing an attacker first.
These “homicides”, every one of them, occurred in lieu of a rape, murder, kidnapping or aggravated assault. In every case, the alternative to those 320-odd justified homicides would have been an innocent person dead; a woman raped; a child kidnapped, a person beaten into a vegetative state.
The study – and ABM – would have you think that’s a bad thing. Or at least have you not think about it very hard.
Speaking of the study – what about it?
The answer, [Texas A&M Professors Mark Hoekstra and Cheng Cheng] conclude, is [that “Stand Your Ground” does not deter crime]. In fact, the evidence suggests the laws have led to an increase in homicides.
From the study:
Results indicate that the prospect of facing additional self-defense does not deter crime. Specifically, we find no evidence of deterrence effects on burglary, robbery, or aggravated assault. Moreover, our estimates are sufficiently precise as to rule out meaningful deterrence effects.
The blog post doesn’t go into details about the study – but this paragraph is nonsense on several levels.
So was the study “sufficiently precise” to account for other factors in changing murder rates?
Did it account for the deterrent effect that John Lott proved that the concealed carry laws that usually accompany “Stand Your Ground” provide? Because if those laws are already deterring violent crime, there’s a smaller pool of violent crimes to deter. Right?
Which leads them to concludes…:
In contrast, we find significant evidence that the laws increase homicides.
But what kind of “homicides?”
Suggestive but inconclusive evidence indicates that castle doctrine laws increase the narrowly defined category of justifiable homicides by private citizens by 17 to 50 percent, which translates into as many as 50 additional justifiable homicides per year nationally due to castle doctrine.
But if they’re justifiable – a response to a lethal threat – then why is this a problem?
Is the death of a rapist the same as the death of his victim?
More significantly, we find the laws increase murder and manslaughter by a statistically significant 7 to 9 percent, which translates into an additional 500 to 700 homicides per year nationally across the states that adopted castle doctrine.
And there, the researchers find causation in a correlation.
Which came first – the rise in violent crime, or the rise in killings in self-defense?
Thus, by lowering the expected costs associated with using lethal force, castle doctrine laws induce more of it.
This is patent nonsense.
The study seems to make several key errors of logic:
Considering “justifiable homicides” a bad thing. And they are, in a very real way; they’re the second-worst possible outcome of a lethal-force situation. But giving the same moral weight to the death of someone who was killed for providing a deliberate and grave threat to another person, who responded by shooting? That’s madness.
Not providing full context for the numbers – the researchers ascribe a hike in all homicides to the “lowered cost” of self-defense. But we don’t know which murders are attributable to which motive. Also, we don’t know how many of the un-justifiable homicides were justifiable, but hung up on one technicality or another in court (see George Zimmerman).
Back to the study:
This increase in homicides could be due either to the increased use of lethal force in self-defense situations, or to the escalation of violence in otherwise non-lethal conflicts. We suspect that self-defense situations are unlikely to explain all of the increase, as we also find that murder alone is increased by a statistically significant 6 to 11 percent.
I find that number intensely suspect, and will be looking into it. My sniff-sensor tells me that number is BS – murder rates in general are dropping, nationwide, and given the number of states with stand your ground laws, it seems unlikely that there’s any link.
As the authors note, the increase in homicides may not be viewed by everyone as “unambiguously bad.” It could be driven by individuals protecting themselves from imminent harm by using lethal force. But it could also be driven by an escalation in violence that, absent the “castle doctrine,” wouldn’t have ended in serious injury for either party, they say.
Or it could – no, it would – be substituting deaths of criminals for deaths of the innocent.
In a year when about 20 percent of the Minnesota Legislature plans to retire, there are also 20 former state lawmakers working hard to get back to the Capitol.
The list of former legislators attempting political comebacks is dominated by Democrats. Some are trying to win open House and Senate seats created by redistricting. Others are taking on incumbents to try win back the seats they lost.
Yadda yadda. That’s fine – they want that pension. A DFLer’s gonna look for taxpayer money to use up. It’s understandable.
Less understandable was this statement:
[Former Eagan rep Jim] Carlson said he thinks many of the DFL candidates share a common motivation.
“I think a lot of us think the voters made a mistake in 2010, and we probably can reverse that mistake,” he said.
“You voters sure are stupid! But via relentless repetition, even a moron like you, simple voter, can get it right eventually”.
I really do hope that that Carlson’s opponent – maybe it’s Doug Wardlow, but I’m not sure – prints that statement up on T-shirts. It may just be a contender for a 2012 Shootie Award.
One of the key lessons – giving unions carte blanche neither bolsters middle-class wages nor general prosperity:
One lesson to learn from Detroit is that investing unions with coercive powers does not ensure future private-sector employment or the preservation of private-sector wages, despite liberal fairy tales to the contrary, nor do protectionist measures strengthen the long-term prospects of domestic firms competing in highly integrated global markets. We cannot legislate away comparative advantage or other facts of life. But the problem of unions’ coercing distortions in the private sector is at this point a relatively small one, given the decline of unionization outside of government. Organized labor being a fundamentally predatory enterprise, its attention has turned to the public sector, where there are fatter and more stable rents to be collected.
Also – taxing ones’ way to prosperity is merely the road to madness:
The second important lesson to be learned from Detroit is that there are hard limits on real tax increases, a fact that will be of more immediate significance in the national debate as our deficit and debt problems reach crisis stage. Even those of us who are relatively open to tax increases as a component of a long-term debt-reduction strategy must keep in mind that our current spending trend is putting us on an unsustainable course in which our outlays will far outpace our ability to collect taxes to pay for them, no matter where we set our theoretical tax rates.
Detroit was a cold Greece long, long ago.
But tax rates are not the only incentive: Google is not going to set up shop in Somalia. Healthy governments create conditions that make it worth paying the taxes — which is to say, governments are a lot like participants in any other competitive market (with some obvious and important exceptions).
And one of the keys to that is that creating a “healthy government” isn’t much different than creating a “healthy teenager”, in health doesn’t’ mean “giving them everything they think they need”.
The benefits of being in Detroit used to be worth the costs, but in recent decades millions of people and thousands of enterprises large and small have decided that is no longer the case. It is not as though one cannot profitably manufacture automobiles in the United States — Toyota does — you just can’t do it very well in Detroit. No one with eyes in his head could honestly think that the services provided by the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan are worth the costs.
The lesson there: while government is necessary to create the legal stability needed to do business of any kind, when government’s main mission becomes sustaining itself, it defeats that purpose.
The third lesson is moral. Detroit’s institutions have long been marked by corruption, venality, and self-serving. Healthy societies have high levels of trust. Who trusts Detroit?
Without some other overarching reason to stay there? And in Detroit – without the location and markets of a New York (I’m thinking in the Dinkins era, of course) or the resources of a New Orleans or the weather of a Miami? There’d be no reason.
What is true of Detroit is true of the country. Our national public sector not only is bloated and parasitic, it is less effective, less responsible, and less honest than that of many other developed countries, including New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and Germany. I am not an unreserved admirer of Transparency International’s global corruption-perceptions index, but I believe that it is in broad outline accurate. Liberals are inclined to learn the wrong lessons from the relative success of countries such as Canada or New Zealand, concluding that what we need is a bigger welfare state, government-run health care, etc.
And as it’s true for the nation, it’s true for Minnesota.
Who has spent the last year trying to expand the coercive power of Minnesota unions, by trying to unionize home daycare providers and expending boundless political capital on stopping the Right to Work amendment?
Whose entire substantive platform (other than “create chanting points for the Alliance for a Better Minnesota”) is “raise taxes?”
Whose administration is focused on obstructing efforts to curb corruption and safeguard the state voting system?
I’m not saying Mark Dayton is trying to be a Detroit-style governor.
I’m just saying that if he were, I can’t think of anything he’d be doing differently.
Maybe “get indicted for something”. Other than that, I got nothing.
The IP continues its independence from political relevance.
Since “shocking the world” in 1998, the Independence/Reform Party of Minnesota has increasingly moved into, at best, spoiler candidacy territory. And with the close of registration for 2012 candidates in Minnesota, the spoiler party looks more than ever to be officially spoiled.
From the party’s high-water mark of 47 candidates for statewide and legislative office in 2002 (an election that included the IP’s only other election victory with St. Sen. Sheila Kiscaden), the Independence Party has seen a slow drip both in terms of quantity and quality of their candidates. From 23 total candidates in 2006, to 13 in 2008 (not exactly fair to compare since fewer offices were up for election), the IP looked barren. An uptick in 2010 saw 25 candidates – but the IP couldn’t even field a full slate of statewide candidates and most of the increase came from quixotic congressional bids.
With both chambers of the legislature up for re-election and a U.S. Senate seat on the line, what did the Independence Party field for 2012? 15 candidates total (actually 16, but two are competing in a US Senate primary). Considering the number of offices on the ballot, it’s the worst recruitment class for the IP since obtaining majority party status. It’s even smaller than their 20 candidate class of 1998 – when James Janos was considered a novelty act, not the leader of a political party.
It’s not hard to understand why the IP is increasingly unable to recruit candidates. In the now nearly 14 years since Jesse Ventura’s upset victory, the party not only has no other significant victory but adamantly remains a political rorschach. The IP’s solutions on most of the pressing issues remain vague as the party’s organizing principle continues to be “we’re not the other guys.”
In fairness, though, it’s typically not the party infrastructure’s responsibility to define issues – that’s the job of activists and candidates. But at its core, the IP has become a warming house for policy wonks – thinkers who want to tinker with state government. A think tank that caucuses is noble in spirit but completely impractical in execution, or in ability to win elections.
For 14 years, the IP/Reform Party has refused to do the necessary grassroots work of basic party building. Instead of recruiting city councilmen, school board officials or county commissioners to run, the IP has tried (and tried and tried) to recapture lightning in a bottle. Armed with little infrastructure but state subsidies, it’s not hard to see the IP’s future.
If the Ron Paul Brigades could over-run the GOP, it wouldn’t be hard for the same faction (or a similar one) to do the same to the Independence Party. In fact, it could have happened two years ago had Joe Repya stayed in his IP campaign for governor. Depending on what internal blood-letting may occur in the Grand Old Party post November as the Paul legions either dissipate or make camp, a libertarian or conservative take-over of the IP may be merely two years in the waiting.
To the victor will go the spoils – or in this case, a $348,000 check from the State of Minnesota to the party’s gubernatorial candidate.
Connie Doepke filed to challenge Dave Osmek in the primary for the SD33 Senate race.
At the SD33 convention two weeks ago Osmek, a conservative with 11 years’ experience on the Mound city council – beat Doepke, a GOP representative who left an extremely safe House seat to campaign for Gen Olson’s old Senate seat, after voting for the stadium and the New Generation Energy Act, to say nothing of supporting light rail. Osmek won with over 80% of the delegate vote, after Bonn Clayton committed his delegates to Osmek on the fourth ballot (the battle had been between him and Osmek – Doepke never got out of the twenties).
If you live in SD33, and want the GOP majority to be something other than a lapdog for Lori Sturdevant and Zygi Wilf, you need to turn out to help Dave.
For that matter, if you live in the western subs – usually safe territory for the GOP – you need to find the time to help Dave. IF you live in:
SD20 (Wright County)
SD34 (the Maple Grove/Rogers area)
Carver County/SD47 (assuming Senator Ortmann doesn’t get a challenge in the primary),
And even SD44 (Plymouth/Minnetonka)
Your district is probably safe enough to peel off a few bucks and some shoe leather for Dave. He needs volunteers – and of course, money. While Dave will get support from the party, Doepke can count on plenty of help from the likes of the TwinWest Chamber of Commerce, which like most Chambers of Commerce is perfectly happy to throw aside sound principle to get someone else to pay for their trans and stadiums and other goodies.
So the choice is yours, Mound/Minnetrista/Lake Minnetonka; does your party reflect you, the activists? Or does it reflect those who’d suck up to Zygi Wilf and the Strib?
Dallas Pierson – who, his roving camera and excellent vid-blog “MNCD4 Conservative” may be one of the better journalists in the Twin Cities alternative media – happened by the DFL convention in Rochester over the weekend.
And what he saw boggled the mind.
The DFL was proposing a rule change allowing absentee balloting for presidential straw polls.
Rick Varco – a DFL activist from Highland Park and part of St. Paul’s DFL machine – objected:
Varco:
I’m against this for three reasons. One, I don’t believe the Central Committee can come up with any mechanism that will genuinely prevent anyone from printing up a stack of absentee ballots, submitting, them, and submitting them for a presidential candidate.
Got that? The sanctity of the DFL’s straw polls – the meaningless non-binding votes for President held on precinct caucus night – demands the sort of scrutiny…
…that are racist and exclusionary for general elections?
Chuck Repke – the fellow who in 2007 demanded that Tim Pawlenty be tried for intentional homicide for the 35W bridge collapse – followed up:
Your are opening yourself up for absolute insanityy = the potential exists for someone from Citizens United to pack our caucuses with bought and paid for ballots! There is no way to protect that, because we allow anyone to attend a caucus! We would then have to allow any ballot at the caucus, no matter which Koch brother paid for it!
But, apparently, not ACORN or George Soros.
It’s touching, the concern the DFL has for the sanctity of their internal elections leading to their meaningless endorsement. Now, if only they had the same care for the state’s electoral system.
Listen. You might be tempted to laugh – until you realize that they are trying to prevent precisely what their party does to our general elections.
It wasn’t just the price tag that compelled me to vote against sending the bill to the governor. It has a structurally unsound funding mechanism and it ignores and belittles the expressed will of hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans.
Not just belittled us, but insulted our intelligence. I’m not someone who’s built a lot of “cherished family memories” around our underachieving football franchise – and I feel sorry for those that have.
Beyond that, though? The Vikes’ strategy – ratchet up the sentiment, and then threaten to pull all of that out and go to LA (without threatening it directly, since it’d be a stupid idea for the NFL, and anyone who isn’t blinded by sentiment knows it) – was a masterpiece of cynical PR arm-twisting. Also loathsome.
Nienow repeats some of the fiscal cautionary notes that many of us have been sounding for months:
In order to pay for the stadium, charitable gaming will need to more than double. To raise enough revenue, charitable gambling will have to increase about 130 percent over current levels. That increased level of charitable gambling will then have to be maintained for 30 years. Put that into the context of reality: Charitable gambling decreased 31 percent over 10 years.
You can see we are bucking a negative trend with hopes that we will reverse the trend, increase gambling by much more than double and then keep up that level of gambling for three decades. When this mechanism proves unsustainable and short on revenue, you the taxpayer will be on the hook to pay the stadium bills.
When that happens, it will be money taken directly from education, health care and other services we provide, to pay for the stadium.
Oddly, the governor and mainstream media were very, very quiet about this “feature” of the stadium “deal”.
Another provision in the law is not even for the Vikings stadium-refurbishing Target Center. Minneapolis residents recently added a requirement to their city charter requiring a public vote before the city spends more than $10 million fixing a sports arena. This law eliminates that expressed will of the people.
If today we can ignore their will, tomorrow it can be yours. That’s a dangerous precedent.
And it’s just a matter of time before the next major league franchise will be wanting new digs.
XCel is over fifteen and pushing twenty, after all; Target Center is twenty and change; “renovations” aside, both of those clubs will be demanding new stadiums before too long.
And their idiot fans will put on their jerseys and their wolf masks and mob the capitol and demand that the next bunch of gullible weak-kneed “moderate” saps do the will of the team and the Strib.
My question was always “If we don’t stop this organized larceny of the public largesse, who will? If not us, who?”
Nienow, and most of the freshman class of Republicans, voted to let the 1% pay for their own real estate upgrade, and this blog thanks them.
Read the whole thing.
And get ready. Because I figure we’re less than a decade away from the next such campaign.
(NOTE: Kudos to Mr. D, who – to the best of my knowledge – coined the term “Helga Braid Nation”).
Of course, only in a place like Saint Paul could Senator and former police chief John Harrington be considered a “moderate”. The guy’s got the ABM chanting points down as pat as he ever had the Miranda statement:
“Show me one example of where somebody had fraudulently voted here. Oh, you don’t have one. You have no evidence.
Other than tens of thousands of provisional voting cards – the cards filled out when their vote is questionable, and their ballot is already in the hopper – being returned because the listed person didn’t live at the address? Other than people listing laundromats as residences? Dozens of felons convicted? Hundreds of other cases found, but tossed because, under Minnesota law, “I didn’t know” is an excuse?
Nope. No evidence at all.
Harrington said he was similarly disheartened during debate this year on the “castle doctrine” self-defense bill, which would have given Minnesotans greater freedom to defend their homes with deadly force. Law enforcement objected to the proposal, saying it could endanger officers, and Dayton ultimately vetoed it.
Of course, there, there’s no evidence.
But while Senator Harrington would be considered, by the vast majority of the US between the Hudson and the Sierra Mare, a “flaming liberal”, he was just tooooo moderate for the whackdoodles of the eastside DFL:
Harrington faced two challengers — Tom Dimond and Foung Hawj — for the party’s endorsement. After four ballots, Harrington had a slight lead over Dimond, a carpenter and former city council member. Delegates decided on no endorsement because it was clear neither candidate could capture the 60 percent needed for the party’s backing. Harrington had 46 percent, Dimond 40 percent, and Hawj had no votes on the last ballot.
Dimond seemed to resonate with delegates who thought Harrington was too conservative for his district and has done little to reach out to Democratic-Farmer-Labor activists since his election. Harrington, however, insisted he was politically attuned to his constituents.
And it’s pretty likely he was. The East Side is a largely run-down area, hard-hit by the recession, perpetually in transition. It’s been a destination for new Americans since, well, it existed; wave after wave of immigrants, from German to Irish to Swedish to Italian to Black to Latino to Vietnamese to H’mong to Somali, have coursed through the area, learned to do the American thing, and then moved – first north of Maryland, then out to the ‘burbs. Most of them are conservatives – they just don’t know that means “republican” in this country.
The DFL “activists”, on the other hand, are vastly more radically left-leaning than their constituents – and farther left than the GOP is to the right. Harrington – pragmatic local fixer that he is – didn’t pass the progressive purity test.
Last night I drove out to Wayzata to give a seconding speech for Dave Osmek and his candidacy for the MN Senate.
For starters, I love driving from Saint Paul and its stifling, smug DFL rule to the parts of the state that actually work – and thus are governed by the GOP. Places built by hard work, merit, frugality – conservatism. I love the smell of an R+20 district; it smells like…
…freedom. Freedom and liberty and prosperity and everything that makes America great.
The inclement weather offered an opportunity…
…as I’d hoped there’d be a huge crash of thunder when I hit my big applause line.
That was not to be. But the rest of the evening went pretty well.
My first clue I wasn’t in CD4 anymore?
There were nearly 300 voting delegates. In a Senate district. That’s more than we had in all of CD4.
It's a full house - almost 300 delegates That's retiring Senator Gen Olson speaking.
Dave’s a long-time friend of the NARN, so it was absolutely my pleasure. He was running against Connie Doepke, as well as longtime conservative activist Bonn Clayton (who, I did not know, is the father of Tea Party majordomo Mara Souvannasoth. You learn something new every day!).
It took four ballots – which was the maximum according to the convention rules – but Osmek pulled out to an early lead, and was within two votes of the 60% threshold at the third ballot. Clayton withdrew and threw his delegates to Osmek after the third, which led to an 81-19% endorsement.
Then the district split into two rooms. I walked to the cafeteria to cover the House District 33B contest between incumbent Steve Smith and challengers Pam Langseth and Cindy Pugh.
I got a sense of the tenor of the event; Smith, a moderate (who’s earned my personal ire by opposing Joint Physical Custody legislation for years) seems to have been districted out of much relevance, at least within the party. He had a small clutch of supporters wedged between a large group for Langseth, and an even bigger group for Tea Party organizer Pugh.
I had no idea how much bigger, of course; when the first ballot came back, Pugh had about 68% of the vote, blowing past the margin for endorsement. Langseth netted about 20 points, meaning that the incumbent Smith netted around 10% of the vote. I was sitting next to his delegation; he did not look happy, and it did sound as if he was ready to go to a primary against Pugh.
As, scuttlebutt had it, Doepke was going to do too, against Osmek; Twitter traffic painted her as still thinking about it.
As to the A side? That race – former Senate candidate Joe Arwood and another challenger – are going to the primary too. They came, literally, to a tie; 75 votes each, 35 shy of endorsement. So to the primary we go!
But that’s all for August. For last night?
It’s a great sign when a Republican CD votes conservative. While both Doepke and Smith made reassuringly conservative-sounding speeches, both seemingly got hung up by positions they’d taken in Saint Paul that weren’t so much; Doepke voted for the New Generation Energy Act and the Stadium, and against Stand your Ground; Smith voted with the Real Americans on Stand your Ground, but has caved on more than a few other issues. The district didn’t buy it, clearly.
And it’s gratifying to see a district that doesn’t give a crap what Lori Sturdevant’s going to say about it.
If you live in the Fourth Congressional District and are anything but a teachers union member, a transit zealot, a peace creep, a radical supporter of the civil sacrament of abortion or an environmentalist weenie, you get used to not really being represented at all. Some of us have taken to adopting John Kline and/or Michele Bachmann as our representative in Congress.
Because Betty McCollum is an out-and-out disaster. If she were representing any district other than Saint Paul (which, up until this past redistricting, really was the Fourth CD), she’d have never gotten endorsed for soil and water commission.
And in normal times, she’d be the punch line for a thousand jokes starting “Everything else in the USA must be fixed, because look what Betty McCollum is babbling about…”; read her website: her big mission is cutting off military advertising…with NASCAR, “ultimate fighting” and professional fishing.
Seriously – watch the woman speak. It’s like she memorizes chanting points from her staff, mentally tosses them up in the air, and randomly re-orders them before speaking, without really understanding any of it. She is not, as they say, in line for a MacArthur Fellowship.
Redistricting is a potential game-changer.
Not as in a “flip the chessboard over” kind of game-changer; it turned the Fourth CD from a 70-30 district to a 60-40, probably. But some of those 60 have reason to be upset; McCollum voted with her environweenie string-pullers in Saint Paul to keep her new constituents in Stillwater driving across a bridge built in 1452, or so it seems when you drive across it. And some of those “60” were people who may have voted DFL most of their lives – but fled Saint Paul and Minneapolis to get away from all the results of having voted for people like Betty McCollum all their lives.
But politics is a little like dating; a lot of money can make a dim Congresswoman just as formidable as a homely guy. And McCollum has the bottomless pockets of the unions backing her up and, seemingly, doing all her thinking for her.
I’m not sure if he qualifies for the same sort of state match that the legislative candidates we talked about earlier this week do – but that’s even more reason to see if you can dig down and pony up a buck or two for Tony’s campaign. Tony’s gotta fundraise like a madman to even have a shot at this – but every little bit helps.
So if you can spare a few bucks – well, you know the drill. Now’s the time.
There hasn’t been a chance like this in the 4th CD in a long, long time. You gotta try to run with these things.
With all of the billionaire-pork-bill signing and job-creation-bill-vetoing of the last week of the legislative session, there is one curious omission,.
It’s HF 322, the bill to change Minnesota’s family court laws to provide a rebuttable presumption of joint physical custody in divorce cases.
That means that unless there is a clear, compelling reason not to – substance abuse, criminal record, gross inability to raise kids, record of abuse and so on – that the parents will be presumed competent to share custody of the children.
That is as opposed to the current system, where the presumption is that full custody will be awarded to the parent that ticks off the greatest number of evaluation criteria from a list of about a dozen that judges use; whichever parent “wins” the most of those criteria “wins” physical custody, and child support, and the whole nine yards.
If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ll know it’s been a hot button topic of mine forever. Raising kids is hard enough with a functional family. The number of social ills that trace back to the huge number of single-parent households is absolutely overwhelming.
Of course, two key DFL constituencies – radical feminists and lawyers – oppose the bill. The feminists dislike the loss of child support money and the fact that joint custody puts a legal hurdle over women taking “their” children and going anywhere they want to go regardless of the kids’ relationship to a father they deem unnecessary and seemingly (to look at their rhetoric on the issue) presume to be a drunk abuser anyway.
The lawyers’ line is “if a couple can’t agree on enough to stay married, how are they going to agree on raising kids together”. But the current system deliberately introduces the stress of a winner-takes-all system into the dissolution of the relationship – the prospect of “losing” ones’ children – which heaps piles of emotional stress (and the billable hours they bring!) onto an already awful situation. Lawyers oppose the presumption of joint physical custody because it trims down the cash cow of divorce.
