Any time anyone tells you that a Harvard degree immunizes the bearer from complete idiocy, make them read this.

Yeah, it’s worse than this.

If I were the President of Harvard University, I might wanna have a word with Matt Yglesias.

Matt – a prominent leftyblogger who’s gone on to write for a bunch of liberal rags – has a BA from Harvard.  Like a lot of leftybloggers, he profited from the leftyblog audience’s hive mentality and got promoted far beyond even his Peter Principle value, to say nothing of his actual perception.

And it’s gotta be undercutting the value of that expensive Harvard sheepskin.  Especially when he’s writing bilge like this, about planning ahead for the new GOP majority in Congress:

But the specific thing I would worry about isn’t gutting of health care legislation or endless investigations. It’s the economy. Anne Kornblut reports that the White House understands the basic political dynamic: “Even more important, senior administration officials said, Obama will need to oversee tangible improvements in the economy.”

So I know that tangible improvements in the economy are key to Obama’s re-election chances. And Douglas Hibbs knows that it’s key. And senior administration officials know that its key. So is it so unreasonable to think that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner may also know that it’s key? That rank and file Republicans know that it’s key? McConnell has clarified that his key goal in the Senate is to cause Barack Obama to lose in 2012 which if McConnell understands the situation correctly means doing everything in his power to reduce economic growth. Boehner has distanced himself from this theory, but many members of his caucus may agree with McConnell.

And Yglesias’ conclusion (emphasis added)?

Which is just to say that specifically the White House needs to be prepared not just for rough political tactics from the opposition (what else is new?) but for a true worst case scenario of deliberate economic sabotage.

Truly, truly dreadful.

The left; not only do they believe their ends justify their means, they believe everyone else believes it too.

Some of my liberal readers have been asking what I think about the Tom Hackbarth story.

My response; I can’t think much, since there’s really not much story. KSTP-TV’s piece reads, pretty much in its entirely:

State Rep. Tom Hackbarth was carrying a pistol when he told St. Paul Police he was jealous and looking for his girlfriend.

Officers took the gun from him calling his behavior “borderline terroristic.”

We’ll come back to what the police said and, more importantly, did.

The House GOP leadership reacted quickly and, under the circumstances, appropriately, suspending Hackbarth from his slated committee chairmanship for the next sessoin pending some sort of resolution.

Now, predictably, the regional leftymedia is in full dudgeon over this story.  As is their wont, they are filling in the blanks with a whoooole lot of innuendo, supposition, and flat-out fantasy.

As PJ O’Rourke once said, “I’m not a liberal, so I’m not an expert at stuff I know nothing about”.   I’m not going to pretend to have answers.  Indeed, all I have are questions.

Everything Is Stalking:  The accusations against Hackbarth aren’t all that clear; he was accused of “stalking-like” behavior by the always-articulate Saint Paul Police Department.  No charges have been filed.

That last bit is rather vital; no charges have been filed.

Remember – in the world of domestic law, including “abuse”, “domestic violence”, “stalking” and the like, men are considered guilty until proven innocent.  If the police had had anything beyond suspicion, they’d have come up with something.

Was Hackbarth doing something inappropriate?  It’s possible.  Very, very possible.  Hackbarth is separated, after 25 years of marriage.  Being “separated” is an emotional Cuisinart set on “mangle”;  a lot of hitherto-buried emotions run very close to the surface; people do things that they’d never normally do in real life (and I’m pleading the Fifth Amendment at this point).

So what did Hackbarth do?  We don’t know; not at all, other than “not enough for the SPPD to charge him with anything at all“, but apparently enough to draw their interest.  We’ll come back to that, too.

That complete lack of known facts hasn’t stopped the regional leftyblog brain trust from jumping to conclusions like a bunch of synchronized Shamu clones at a rhetorical Sea World.

Conservatives – Guilty Until Proven Anything At All:  The City Pages’ Hart Van Denburg gets the “who, what (sort of), when, where, why and how”, in his piece on the incident – and still manages to squeedge in some innuendo to fill in the factual blanks:

Republican state Rep. Tom Hackbarth went looking for a date the other day in a Highland Park alley, with his Smith and Wesson .38 strapped to his waist.

Innuendo; as Ven Denburg himself notes elsewhere in his story, Hackbarth has a carry permit.  Connecting his “stalking” and carrying a gun is convenient, and connecting the two certainly fits the institutional left’s narrative about conservatives, shooters and social interactions.  But it’s an innuendo unsupported by any actual facts – like, say, arrests or charges or any indication of intent that’d link the two factoids.

Which takes us to innuendo number 2:

The Most Important Right Of All:  Van Denburg continued:

He chose an odd place to park his pickup truck, too: The Planned Parenthood clinic lot, where security cameras caught him on tape.

Saint Paul’s pro-abortion community has come to regard all of Ford Parkway as its private property.  While the building itself doesn’t jump out at you, once you do know what you’re looking for, it’s hard to escape the fact that there is more going on in the neighborhood than just a baby-disposal mill.  There are apartments, stores, the Highland Park library, houses…people all over the place.  Ford Parkway is not all about Planned Parenthood.

But you’d never know that from the leftymedia’s reaction.  Was “near the Planned Parenthood Clinic” an “odd” place to park, as Ven Denburg called it?  Or was it a place to park his pickup, that happened to be near Planned Parenthood?

A justifiably skittish guard at the Ford Parkway clinic called the cops to report an unidentified man carrying a gun on the property. No surprise there.

More innuendo.  “Justifiably” skittish?  Planned Parenthood’s “justifiable” skittishness has led to a “justifiable” suspension of large chunks of the First Amendment within eye-and-earshot of the clinics in Saint Paul and elsewhere around the country.  And now, apparently, the Second Amendment as well; being seen with a firearm that is legal and permitted under Minnesota law “justifies” Planned Parenthood’s rent-a-cops calling in the heat?

What other civil liberties does Planned Parenthood get to selectively excise?

Worse, naturally, are the “Feminist” bloggers.  “Red Sonya” from the always-incontinent Shakespeare’s Sister tries Hackbarth and finds him guilty based on…well, you guessed it, more innuendo:

Who the hell decides that, after meeting someone for coffee, you are immediately entitled—nay, obligated—to make sure that she’s not with another man?! Oh, stalkery entitled douchebags with unchecked privilege and no sense of boundaries who believe that women are their property and have no respect for their autonomy, that’s who!

Perhaps.

Or people (male and female – it swings both ways pretty equally) whose senses of boundaries are temporarily (one hopes) warped by their current circumstances.

Or both.  We don’t know – because “Red’s” take is based entirely on filling in the factual blanks with a whole lot of PC filler.

While stalking is frightening enough, the loaded gun makes this even scarier. Hackbarth does have a permit for concealed carry, so his actions weren’t illegal.

Buuuuuuut…

But since he began his controlling behavior immediately after meeting this woman, I’m skeptical of his ability to shrug off this event—and, from his twisted perspective, her “lie”—without having a douchetantrum of massive proportions.

What a wonderful world, where people can issue the binding diagnosis of “douchetantrumitis” (let me check the DSM-IV for that one) while knowing zero facts whatsoever.

When guys like this escalate, altercations easily become fatal with the addition of a loaded gun to the mix.

And they much more easily don’t.

Look – it goes without saying that stalking – or even just being excessively clingy after less than a whole lot of dates – is a bad thing.  And it doesn’t excuse any bad behavior to add “don’t discount the weirdness that comes with the whole emtional bumper-car ride that goes along with divorce, because everyone reacts differently, and most everyone does something that they’ll wind up regretting one way or another, whether it’s getting married to the first person you sleep with or blowing all your money on strippers maybe just having a real hard time getting used to the differing expectations people have in the dating world after being off the market for most of three decades”.   Readjusting to single life can be a real bitch.

[Side note to conservative grownups in the audience; watch some idiot leftyblogger take that last sentence and run a post entitled “Berg Excuses Stalking”, ignoring that bit at the front where I said “It doesn’t excuse bad behavior…”.  It’s pretty much inevitable – Ed.]

The Victorian Vapours:  Oh, yeah – Hackbarth had a gun.  After his run-in with the SPPD, it was confiscated.  And then, after all was said and done, he got it back.

But the presence of a firearm – especially in the hands of a conservative, anti-abortion Republican who is engaged in liberal innuendo-fodder – acts on leftybloggers and lefty journalists like a green-and-yellow cape does on a Vikings fan.

The normally sensible David Brauer left a comment in a Facebook thread:

[O]f course, it seems like creepy potentially violent stalking, but then again, these gun dudes carry their pieces around everywhere. it’s like their wallet. and of course, he was in scary, scary Highland. It’s no Cedar, Mn!

Well, doy.  It doesn’t do you any good if you don’t have it with you when you need it.

And check out the leftyblogs (rhetorically, mind you – don’t actually read then) for the number of references to the fact that the revolver was “fully loaded”.   Huh?  You’d carry an empty gun?  To what – butt-whip a robber?  Or a half-loaded one?  For what – impromptu games of Russian Roulette?

Grrr. I’m sorry.  Dumb people bug me.

Oh, yeah – let me reiterate; he got the gun back when the episode was over.  Which may not be any sort of testimony to Hackbarth’s alleged actions or state of mind, but it is a pretty good sign that he did nothing remotely illegal – and that’d be in an area of law where telling a woman that those pants do make her butt look bigger is fifth-degree domestic assault, a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail and a $10K fine.

(The above sentence is intended as satire.  The first idiot leftyblogger – and I’ll stipulate that that isn’t entirely a redundant phrase – that tries to run that into “Berg advocates stalking and makes light of domestic violence” will both incur my disinterested wrath and be lying, anyway.  Just don’t go there).

Berg’s Seventh Law?:  Remember – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.  The leftymedia is romping and playing with the Hackbarth story because somewhere out there there is a video of a DFL legislator standing outside an elementary school in full S&M garb, bellowing expletives at a first-grade teacher that spurned his advances, waving a katana.

No, I can’t prove it.

Any more than any of the innuendoids above can prove any of their stuff.

But it’s a law, after all.

UPDATE: Welcome, “Developers are Crabgrass” readers.

Which is sort of like saying “hey, look at all the leptons”.  Both of them are at present largely hypothetical, abstruse constructs.

Oh, yeah – read my piece above.  Zaetsch is lying, as usual.  The guy wouldn’t know “factual” if “factual” spiked his Metamucil.  Read my actual post – something Zaetsch, or whomever sent him the link, clearly didn’t do – and decide for yourself.

Better yet, leave a comment and engage in the discussion.  If you’re used to the level of conversation over at all the blogs that are part of the “Stillwater Asylum” – “Lloydletta”, “The Dump”, “Crabgrass” and wherever Bremer is ranting and whatever pseudonym Weiner us using these days – you’ll find things are a whooooole lot more rational here; you have to bring some intellectual game, in a way you’re not used to .  Give it a shot!

According to the Strib, Voter ID is just not needed…

…according to a survey of people who’d have to work harder if it were implemented…

…conducted by two groups that benefit from inflated vote counts.

Minnesota does not need a law requiring photo identification at the polls because there have been relatively few cases of ineligible voting, two advocacy groups said Monday.

Citing data collected from county attorneys from the 2008 election, the two groups said that there were 26 convictions statewide of felons voting illegally – a figure representing 0.0009 percent of voters that year.

It’s a figure that also represents investigations in Ramsey, and only Ramsey, County.  The only county for which the Minnesota has done the County Attorneys’ jobs by doing all the investigating for them.

Allegations of felons voting represented 77 percent of voter fraud investigations, the groups said. The other 23 percent of the investigations from the 2008 election – which did not lead to any convictions – involved charges of non-citizens voting, double voting, voting outside of jurisdiction and impersonating a voter, the groups said.

Right.  That’s because under Minnesota law, pleading ignorance of the law is enough to get you acquitted.  Only paroled felons have to sign a form stating they know they’re not supposed to vote.

The study was conducted by Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota and the Minnesota Unitarian Universalist Social Justice Alliance. The groups said the study was based on responses from 71 of the state’s 87 counties.

The “Center for Election Integrity of Minnesota“?  Sure sounds like an important group!

The Strib doesn’t see fit to mention that “CEIMN” is an offshoot of “non-partisan” liberal pressure group “Common Cause MN” (check out CC of MN’s and CEIMN’s addresses), whose motto is “Holding Power Accountable”, and which spent the 2010 election demanding accountability of conservative groups while ignoring the rafts of liberal special interest money.  They favor rationing speech to regular Americans, but exaggerating the influence of unions and liberal special interests.

One wonders if Strib reporter Mike Kaszuba didn’t feel this was relevant, or if he just didn’t know.

Joel Rosenberg – firearms instsructor to the stars – has been involved in an ongoing kerfuffle with the City of Minneapolis.  And when I say “kerfuffle”, I mean “series of intricately interlocking kerfuffles” complex enough to warrant a book of their own (which one might expect Rosenberg, a science fiction writer with a long bibliography, to be working on).

Last month, he got into a kerfuffle – I guess it’d be a “sub-kerfuffle” in this case – with Minneapolis Police Department Sergeant William Palmer when he went to a pre-arranged interview with Palmer at the MPD headquarters.  He was carrying a number of handguns openly.

Here’s the video of the event (most of the action is right up front):

Now, “Erin Carlyle” at the City Pages – former alt-journalism powerhouse, now a glorified small-college newspaper – ht tackles the story in a way that’d do the late Twin Cities Reader’s Margarete Grebe proud in terms of pure incurious superfluity.

Because besides the names of the people involved and the location of the incident, Carlyle gets pretty much everything wrong:

Joel Rosenberg tried to bring a gun into the Minneapolis Police headquarters and the cops wouldn’t let him.

Now Rosenberg is accusing the cop who took his gun of assault.

Er, yeah. We’ll come back to that.

Earlier this month, Rosenberg, who says he is ascience fiction writerand handgun instructor,

…which is something he “says” because he is a sci-fi author of some renown, and one of the state’s leading handgun instructors – including mine.

paid a visit to the MPD chief’s office to pick up some documents he’d requested. Sgt. William Palmer, the public information officer, saw that Rosenberg was packing, and asked him to dump the gun. Rosenberg refused. He insisted he had the right to wear his gun.

Palmer explained that a court order prevented him from carrying the gun. Rosenberg disagreed.

So Palmer physically took the gun away from Rosenberg and unloaded the cartridge. He handed it back when Rosenberg agreed to put the gun in his car.

And if you left it right there, it’d seem like a Catskills comedian’s joke; “A cop and a gun nut walk into the lobby of the cop shop…”

But Ms. Carlyle didn’t apparently see fit to report that Rosenberg’s “accusation” resulted in Rosenberg walking away from the event scot-free, but Palmer looking at potential legal nastiness. 

Ms. Carlyle apparently either didn’t bother to check that out, or think it was important for her smug, cossetted, know-it-all liberal audience to know it.

What’s the rest of the story? 

More tomorrow in Shot In The Dark.

Hasn’t the Twin Cities media – especially the “alternative”, liberal version – been barbering for years about how Rep. Michele Bachmann just doesn’t do “mainstream” media?

Why, yes – they have! 

But – did I hear Michele Bachmann doing an extended interview with Cathy Wurzer on MPR’s Morning Edition this morning?

Why, yes I did!

Someone tell Andy Birkey!

No, don’t.  Rather, tell Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, all of whom I’ve invited onto the Northern Alliance Radio Network in the past two years, none of whom have so much as responded.  (In the interest of completeness, note that Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak appeared, as did “Growth and Justice” majordomo Dane Smith.  We had a great time talking with both of ’em, because – shibboleths about conservative talk radio aside – Ed Morrissey and I will put our cross-aisle interviews up against anything in the commercial or public media today in terms of civility and fairness (while allowing that we are, in fact, conservative).

So whatdya say, Reps Ellison and McCollum?  How about it, Senators Franken and Klobuchar? 

For that matter, we’ve had an invite out to Common Cause Minnesota for six weeks now – submitted on this blog, via email, via a voice mail message, and on Twitter.  Not a word.

How about Denise Cardinal of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”?  Perhaps she could come on the show and discuss the Dayton-family-finance slime campaign she orchestrated?

For that matter, howzabout we get an invite to Mark Dayton?  I’ve heard Tom Emmer do a center-left show; d’ya suppose Dayton’s got the gumption to go across the aisle…

…like Representative Bachmann did?

“Let’s make sure nobody who isn’t supposed to vote, votes”.

Let’s see which leftyblogger is the first to say that I’m “supporting voter intimidation”.

Because it seems they do set the bar that low.

The regional leftybots are a-buzz over…

…some really, really mundane news.

Tom Emmer is  the subject of a legal malpractice lawsuit by a former client.

Given the typical leftyblogger’s understanding of the law, many of them are making a lot of this “story”.

However, the facts are these:

• Legal malpractice suits are far from uncommon.
• The vast majority that are filed are filed against lawyers that have malpractice insurance; while legal malpractice suits are quite difficult to win (because lawyers defend themselves pretty strenuously), most cases that actually are sent to trial involving lawyers that are insured get settled out of court.
• That’s presuming it gets to trial.  Most such cases, being filed over sour grapes over cases gone awry, or even just weak cases, are dismissed on summary judgment without ever seeing a jury.
• Many plaintiffs will use the threat of a malpractice suit to try to induce a quick settlement to avoid a public relations snag for the defendant and his/her firm.  This is especially true with higher-profile lawyers.
• And there is no more high-profile lawyer in Minnesota right now than Tom Emmer, attorney at law and, as the MNGOP’s endorsed candidate for governor in a very tight race, a guy with a lot of skin in the public relations game.

And, gosh golly, look at when the summary judgment hearing is scheduled (emphasis added):

OTHER EVENTS AND HEARINGS

09/17/2010 Summons and Complaint

09/17/2010 Certificate of Representation

09/17/2010 Notice and Acknowledgement of Service

09/17/2010 Notice of Motion and Motion

09/17/2010 Memorandum

09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/17/2010 Affidavit of Mailing

09/21/2010 Notice of Case Filing

09/21/2010 Schedule Pre-Trial

09/24/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/24/2010 Affidavit of Service

11/08/2010 Motion Summary Judgment (10:00 AM) (Judicial Officer Halsey, Stephen M.)

Right after the election.

While there is no reason to believe that this case was filed by a political enemy of Emmer’s (the plaintiff is a businessman; businesspeople don’t care which party their customers are from, as long as the checks cash), it’s not unreasonable, given how legal malpractice cases work, to speculate that the timing makes perfect sense to the plaintiff.

The Uptake is a regional “videoblog”, featuring contributions from left-leaning “Citizen Journalists”.

I’ve written about them before; on the one hand, I know some of the people involved with The Uptake, and they have in the past sworn up and down that they want The Uptake to be a legit news source; they’ve put in some efforts in the past to try to accomplish that.  On the other hand, they’ve had a lot of bobblehead contributors and employees with strange ideas of what journalism is, or who want to use it as a vehicle for grinding personal or social axes.

They’re at it again:

The Uptake is pushing a video that they were denied access into a press event with Newt Gingrich today.

The Uptake “reporter” said to a MNGOP staffer they had spoken to MNGOP Communications Director Mark Drake and were credentialed for the event.  According to sources this is untrue.  The Uptake never contacted the RPM for access and thus were never credentialed for the event.

My own sources confirm; the conversation never happened.

There are some grownups at the Uptake.  Are they going to step up, one of these days?

It’s been a couple of years since elements of the regional left finally copped to the fact that key lefty propaganda institutions like the Center for “Independent” Media and the Minnesota “Independent” are funded by, among others, misery-profiteer George Soros.

It’s  catching; lefty Jewish lobby “J Street” is on the Soros gravy train as well:

J Street has acknowledged substantial donations from billionaire George Soros, reversing years of claims by the group that it had nothing to do with the liberal financier, and apologized for making misleading statements about his role.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the director of the dovish pro-Israel lobby, confirmed to JTA a report that first appeared in The Washington Times that it had received $245,000 from Soros and his children in 2008, and added that it had received another $500,000 in subsequent years — altogether, about 7 percent of the $11 million that J Street says it has taken in since its 2008 founding.

Framing the debate:  priceless.

Common Cause Minnesota is a “non-profit, non-partisan” organization whose every initiative is, mirabile dictu, exactly in sync with the “progressive” wing of the Minnesota DFL.

No huge shock there.

Speech rationing – “campaign finance reform” – has long been one of their main initiatives.  Read for yourself.  They want – so they claim – transparency in politics.

Of course, as Luke Hellier notes at MDE, they are a 501c4 lobbying organization which, in 2008, took in over $665,000 on donations, entirely from anonymous “individual” sources (check it out starting on Page 13 of this very large PDF file).

Sample swiped from MDE

Now, the law doesn’t require them to divulge exactly who their donors are – which is kind of a weaselly out for a group that wants government to limit and regulate your First Amendment right to political speech.

At any rate, yesterday they released word that they were going to file a complaint against a series of Minnesota political action committees (PACs) that were playing a shell game with third-party donations, trying to make accountability difficult.

And given how hard Common Cause has been proclaiming their ecumenicism and non-partisan mission, I thought “Halleluiah!  They’re going to do something about the epic three-card monte game the Dayton campaign has going on!”

As we discussed last June, the Dayton campaign was being supported by a huge ad campaign from a group called “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”.  At that time, ABM’s funding came from a bunch of unions, and a group called “Win Minnesota”, which was largely funded by…the Dayton family; as of last June, the list was…:

• Andrew Dayton $1,000
• David Dayton $50,000
• John cowles $25,000 [former Strib publisher]
• MaryLee Dayton $250,000
• Emily Tuttle (MN) $5,000
• Ronald Sternal (MN) $5,000
• Alida Messinger (NY) $500,000
• James Deal (MN) $50,000
• Roger Hale (MN) $10,000 [Remember him from above?]
• Barbara forster (MN) $25,000
• Democratic Governors Association $250,000 [remember them; they’ll appear later in this story]

Win Minnesota also funded a group which at the time had no name, but which shared an address with Win Minnesota, which has since been named “The 2010 Fund”.   2010 of last June had about $850K in the bank, including money from:

• Alida Messinger (Mpls) $50,000
• Win Minnesota $50,000
• Education MN $250,000
• Laborers District Council $100,000
• MAPE $50,000
• IBEW MN State Council $50,000
• MN Nurses Assc $50,000
• Local 49 Engineers $25,000
• Vance Opperman $50,000 [the “progressive” plutocrat former owner of Thomson/West publishing]
• Afscme Council 5 $50,000
• MN AFL-CIO $25,000
• SEIU MN State Council $50,000
• AFSCME (Wash DC) $50,000;

I’m looking for the updated numbers from all of these funds.

So who does Common Cause go after?

Who would you think? (emphasis added):

Common Cause Minnesota has uncovered a scheme by the Minnesota’s Future political committee and the Republican Governors Association (RGA) to avoid Minnesota’s original source disclosure law by funneling a $428,000 contribution from the RGA to Minnesota’s Future through a shell company. The company, Minnesota Future, LLC was created just days before it received the contribution from the RGA and immediately transferred the funds to the Minnesota’s Future political committee.

Today, three separate complaints were filed with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Disclosure Board against Minnesota’s Future, Minnesota Future, LLC, and the RGA. The complaints allege that the three groups together violated multiple state statutes ranging from circumvention of campaign finance laws, failing to register as a political committee, and failing to report receipts and expenditures. The three entities could face $5.1 million in civil penalties and criminal prosecution.

“This was a brazen attempt to circumvent Minnesota’s disclosure law,” said Mike Dean, Executive Director of Common Cause Minnesota. “The public has a right to know what special interests are behind political ads, especially during a hotly contested election.”

So the public has a “right to know” the money behind “Minnesota’s Future” from the Republican Governors Association…

…but the multiple millions of dollars from the Dayton Family, the unions, and the Democratic Governors Assocication which financed the most vile smear campaign in the history of Minnesota politics (under the cover of a phony grass-roots organization funded by the Dayton family!) isn’t something “the public” needs to know about?

I’ve invited a representative of Common Cause to come on the Northern Alliance tomorrow to discuss what would be brazen hypocrisy from a genuinely “non-partisan” organization.

Any bets?

Last week, DFL bloggers thought they’d caught Tom Emmer “lying”.

The putative “lie”, of course, was that the Emmer Campaign didn’t notify the Campaign Finance Board that Mark Buesgens had left the campaign until a week later, after Buesgens had been accused of Driving While Intoxicated, and the campaign figured “well, no time like the present”.

This, of course, being how most average people handle niggling paperwork.

“Nooooo!”, shrieked the leftybloggers, “failure to change the name, all evidence aside, is proof of a coverup!”

I’d like to think this sort of joyless, nagging, phony punctiliousness is a new, irritating trend of the wonkish left.  Unfortunately, it’s a very old, irritating trend of the wonkish left.

I’ve dug back through history and found several examples of this pathology in action.

———-

April 1912:

LOCATION:  The deck of SS Titanic.

FIRST OFFICER LIGHTOLLER: “OK, everyone form an orderly line for the boats…”

STEVEN MICAH TIMMERMAN (A wobbly and lefty pamphleteer):  “Wait!  Do all those lifeboats have the Coast-Guard-mandated number of certified lifejackets?

LIGHTOLLER: “What?  Look, people have to get into the lifeboats, or we’ll have fifteen hundred dead!”

TIMMERMAN:  “I will have the liability lawyers on your ass so fast you’ll be screaming “uncle”…

LIGHTOLLER: “What the hell do you want us to do?”

TIMMERMAN:  “Look, if you want to send all “the rich” off into these unsafe lifeboats, go for it – but I’m going to send the working class off to search for enough life jackets to fit the letter of the law!  You will not kill the poor with your substandard lifeboats!”

(and scene).

———-

December 7, 1941:

LOCATION:  Opana Radar Station, the northern tip of Oahu, Hawaii.

PRIVATE JONES: “Sir, I have a large radar contact coming in from the north. The report is on your desk”

MAJOR ERIC MICAH PULSEY: Oh, my goddess, Private Jones; what is this?  “We have at this time no idea what a group of planes would be coming from the north for”  What the hell is that?

JONES: Sir?

PULSEY: Ending a sentence with a preposition, Jones?  Go and retype this report.  What the hell are you, some ignorant red-stater?

———-

December 31, 1999:

SCENE: The US-Canadian border crossing at Vancouver.

BORDER PATROLPERSON DAVID MICAH MINDELBERG: “Sir, what are you doing with this huge truck full of fertilizer and diesel fuel?”

ABU HADJ AL-JIHADI:  “Er…I am not coming to build a bomb to desroy a Millenium celebration…”

MINDELBERG: “Well, duh.  The millenium doesn’t begin until 2001!  What kind of stupid wingnut do you think I am?

AL-JIHADI: Heh heh.

MINDELBERG: Don’t insult my intelligence.  Drive on, and don’t be an idiot.

(AL-JIHADI drives on)

MINDELBERG: Sheesh.  Stupid wingnuts.

They never learn.

It’s been a little over two years since Andy Birkey of the Minnesota “Independent” first sniffed that Rep. Michele Bachmann “only does sympathetic media”.

Of course, it makes perfect sense for Bachmann; she represents a conservative district; talking with hostile media (and when it comes to the Twin Cities media, “hostile” is not just a rhetorical term) makes as much sense as a frontrunner looking at a comfortable 30-40 point margin agreeing to debate a non-entity opponent.

Still, let’s accept at face value the proposition that candidates talking with media that oppose them is a good thing.

Two years ago, after Birkey wrote his grand attack on Bachmann, I figured I’d see if the pancake was brown on both sides.  I contacted RT Rybak, Chris Coleman, Dave Thune, Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum, Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, and asked them to come on the Northern Alliance with Ed and I – and wrote about the experience.

Summary:  Except for Rybak – with whom Ed and I had an excellent, civil, respectful, serious-yet-fun discussion focusing on actual issues rather than the “ambush the bad guy” crap that Bachmann can usually expect – none of them did us the courtesy of so much as a brusque brush-off.

The Clark campaign must be getting desperate to make something stick, or at least to get donors in the Twin Cities to pony up; the story’s baaaaaack.  According to Paul Schmelzer at the Mindy, Bachmann snubbed CNN:

“She says God called her to run for Congress, so rushing to the media outlets that transmit her views without question is a priority, but for members of the press who might have some harder questions? Different treatment — because Bachmann thinks some in the media are out to get her,” says Tuchman.

“Speed-walking in heels through political mud,” Bachmann is shown rushing between interviews with conservative media including KTLK’s Jason Lewis, Christian radio station KKMS and The Patriot.

So they got completely shunned?

CNN is shooed away by Bachmann’s handlers, but later she agrees to an interview, but only two questions.

Ah.  So Bachmann, who leads Taxin’ Tarryl Clark by nine points and will likely win by at least ten, didn’t shut CNN out; she merely didn’t treat them with the deference to which they’re accustomed.

But in the interest of getting the whole story out there: during the run-up to the Minnesota State Fair and our long string of extra weekday broadcasts, I contacted the DFL about getting Mike Hatch Mark Dayton, Yvette Prettner-Solon, Mark Ritchie, Mike Hatch Lorie Swanson, Rebecca Otto, Keith Ellison and Betty McCollum on the show, for the same, exact, respectful-but-pointed interview we gave RT Rybak.

The DFL roundly turned us down at every turn.

So let me get this straight; the GOP is wrong for not facing hostile media, but Democrats are…

…well, still universally just as gutless as the Mindy and CNN want people to think Bachmann is.

Ever since May, the DFL – via their closely-knit band of media and “alternative” media mouthpieces – have been spending time and money trying to paint Tom Horner as “the reasonable Republican”, to try to soak votes away from Tom Emmer.  The conventional wisdom is that, in this year of revulsion with government spending and overreach, there is a huge reservoir of seventies-vintage “Independent Republican” liberal Republican fossils out there pining for the days of Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger.

Of course, the last few polls have shown that Horner is drawing more DFL votes than MNGOP votes.  Considerably more.

So suddenly it’s OK for leftybloggers to bag on Horner.

Couldn’t see that coming.

There’s going to be a public hearing on “saving the Internet” tonight.  It’ll be at the auditorium at South High (3131 19th Avenue South in Minneapolis).

No, that’s really what they’re calling it; here’s the email:

From: Josh Silver, FreePress.net [mailto:info@freepress.net]
Sent: Wednesday, August 18, 2010 11:01 AM
To: [redacted]
Subject: Why you should join me and Al Franken on Thursday

Dear Friend,

I know you’re busy, but I can’t tell you how important it is that you join me and Sen. Al Franken [tonight]at South High School in Minneapolis (yes, Sen. Franken is coming!)

My warnings are no longer speculation. Google, Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are about to turn the Internet into cable TV — where their favored websites and content will move fast, and everyone else will be left without a voice. It’s time for all of us to stand up or get rolled.

President Obama has said that protecting the open Internet was a top priority. But the FCC chairman remains silent. And too many in Congress have been bought by the phone and cable companies.

Our last line of defense is you. We need more than 400 people to show up on Thursday night. If we don’t tell Sen. Franken and Commissioners Copps and Clyburn (both will be there) that people like you are outraged about a corporate takeover of the Internet, we will lose. It’s that simple.

Please come with a friend or two to South High School Thursday night. The event begins at 6 p.m. You can go here to RSVP and learn more.

If you have something to say, we’ll make certain you have time at the microphone. We need to hear you. The commissioners need to hear you.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Josh Silver

President & CEO

Free Press

www.freepress.net

www.SavetheInternet.com

P.S. For more on Thursday’s hearing, read today’s great MinnPost editorial by our allies at the Center for Media Justice and New America Foundation.

Wow.  That sounds important.

Rumors are bopping around that Secretary of State Ritchie is also  going to attend, although there’s some back-and-forth over whether the Senator Franken is supposed to be in town or not.  The group putting on the event, “Free Press“, would seem to need some star power to draw people and attention to the event; last night’s Meet Emmer” event drew more people than either of the two previous attempts.

Negligible as this event seems, though, it’s important for conservatives to try to turn out (I have a prior engagement, unfortunately).  Copps and Clyburn are both activists on the FCC, who are completely on board with Obama’s push to create a kinder, gentler, tamer (for Democrats) media landscape.

“Oh, you’re just being paranoid, Berg”.

Not if you dig into the pedigree of “Free Press”.  Behind the innocuous name is an organization with big, intrusive plans for even more “hope and change” in American society.  Their board is a who’s who of behind-the-scenes media utopians – Josh Silver, Robert McChesney, people from The Nation and the Norman Lear Foundation.

And their track record?

They don’t like capitalism or the free market very much:

“There is no real answer [to the U.S. economic crisis] but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.” (Robert W. McChesney and John Bellamy Foster, “A New New Deal under Obama?,” Monthly Review, 2/2009)

But that doesn’t mean that “Free Press” is about nationalizing the Internet, does it?

Josh Silver on the case for nationalizing the internet:

“The agency needs to shut out the noise machine and do what it must to fulfill its mandate to ‘serve the public interest, convenience and necessity.’ Any other course would be disastrous…. The United States is falling further behind our global competitors in high-speed Internet adoption, speed and price. The birthplace of the Internet now ranks at No. 22 globally in broadband speed and access, in part because the government lets the phone and cable companies dictate telecommunications policy.” (Josh Silver, “Viewpoints: Broadband rules are crucial to expand access and protect users,” Sacramento Bee, 7/18/10)

Ben Scott on the same subject:’

“Increasingly the Internet is no longer a commercial service, its an infrastructure…What we’re witnessing at the FCC now is the logical next step which is we are going to create a regulatory framework for the Internet which recognizes it is an infrastructure now and not a commercial service.” (Ben Scott, C-SPAN: The Communicators, , 9/25/09)

“Infrastructure”.  Like the Interstate system.  Or public toilets.

No, really:

“We have to stop thinking of media as a business pure and simple…The way we should understand journalism is as a public good.” (Robert McChesney, “Journalism should be subsidized by government, professor says,” 2/2/10)

I mean, it’s not that they mind free speech.  Just the right kind of free speech.  McChesney:

“To the extent commercial activities are given First Amendment protection, it makes the rule of capital increasingly off-limits to political debate and government regulation…In my view, progressives need to stake out a democratic interpretation of the First Amendment and do direct battle with the Orwellian implications of the ACLU’s commercialized First Amendment.” (Robert McChesney, “The New Theology of the First Amendment,” Monthly Review, 3/1998)

In fact, “Free Speech’s” McChesney wants the government to pay for more of the right kind of speech:

“When you look at our founders, they did not only condone government subsidies of journalism, they demanded it.” (Robert McChesney, “Journalism should be subsidized by government, professor says,” 2/2/10)

No, not being paranoid:  the government.  With taxpayer dollars!:

$200 Tax Credit Proposal for Newspapers in Free Press Report: “McChesney and Nichols have drawn from this proposal to advocate that taxpayers receive $200 in annual tax credits to spend on daily newspapers, as long as the newspapers publish at least five times per week and maintain a substantial news hole of at least 24 broad pages each day with less than 50 percent advertising.148 Another proposal would allow people to write off their subscriptions to newspapers and magazines as a tax deduction, as they do with their college tuition.” (Victor Pickard, Josh Stearns and Craig Aaron, “Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy,” Free Press, p. 36)

Because “the market” is allowing dissenting opinions waaaaay too much sway:

“The ultimate irony of Beck, Dobbs and Limbaugh is that they couch in populist rhetoric a message that, in its very essence, is anti-populist – designed to protect the swindle at the core of our media system’s failure. And that is why the media’s old guard is targeting the idea that this system needs to change.” (Tim Karr, “What Beck, Dobbs and Limbaugh are really afraid of,” Huffington Post,9/16/09)

…and those dissenters have not only scary opinions, but sometimes (says Josh Silver) disrupt the chosen and preferred narrative!:

“Fox News continues to amaze us and propagandize many, labeling as fringe-left anyone who disagrees with the president, takes issue with tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, says that Iraq is a quagmire, or dares to declare that all Americans deserve a living wage and guaranteed health care. The narrow, corporate-driven rhetoric that passes as reasonable political debate on Fox and most of the mainstream American media has become a laughing stock – if only to keep us from crying.” (Josh Silver, “The decline of US media: Fox News leads race to the bottom,” Huffington Post,  2/22/07)

And those “right wing” peasants must be suppressed!  For the good of The People!

“No wonder our political system can’t solve big problems. Ruthless opposition and dingbat delusions are the currency of right-wing success, and sand in the gears of democracy. Whether they’re cynical postures or sincere beliefs doesn’t matter. The grand national conversation that was intended to enable citizens and their representatives to find common ground for conflicting values has become a grand national midway of carny-barkers and rodeo clowns.” (Marty Kaplan, former Air America rodeo clown, “How would the Right know it’s wrong?” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Huffington Post,10/5/09)

Because to McChesney, it all ties together:

“…any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” (Robert McChesney, “The U.S. Media Reform Movement,” Monthly Review,, 9/2008)

And when I say “ties together”, I mean “to his real, larger goal“:

“Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism..” (Robert W. McChesney, “Journalism, Democracy…and Class Struggle,” Monthly Review, 11/2000).

So this is who we’re dealing with.

These are their goals.

These are the people that Al Franken and Mark Ritchie, apparently, are going to be shilling for tonight.

And I honestly wish I could attend.  And if someone does – if one of you liveblogs or streams it – let me know.  I’ll link it and push it in any way I can.

To hear the local left and media – pardon the redundancy – you’d think Target came out advocating killing puppies.  In fact, for the left and media (ptr), it may have been even worse – committing apostasy.

But is the “news”  bad for Emmer, the “MNForward” PAC, or even for Target?

There are a couple of reasons I’m going to suggest “no”.

Dayton’s Already Won The Base: A friend of this blog once suggested to Tom Emmer that he needs to quit trying to win the conservative base.  There may be a point to that.  But this issue – especially the “Emmer is Anti-Gay” slur, about which more below – is the same thing in reverse; it’s the left’s attempt to inflame the lefty base over some of their big code words; “anti-gay” and “corporate money”.  It’s possible that people who haven’t been converted to one side or the other might pay attention to this story – but for a variety of reasons, I think that at the very very worst this story has short legs.

That Sweet Stench of Desperation: But there is a reason to try to get the lefty base all riled up – because they are in the midst of a lethargy that reminds me of Republicans in 2008 or 1996.  The widespread, outside-the-party-meeting passion is all on the right these days.  The DFL knows it – and has do to something to get their base to give a damn, especially given the spectre of having to go out and get people excited about Mark Dayton in less than a week.  And so the left needs to create a boogeyman.

Now granted it’s a purely negative campaign – “Vote for Dayton or…um…there’ll be a conservative in office!”.  But consider the alternative; “Vote for Mark Dayton; he’ll tax people who work hard enough to earn over $250K, and probably the rest of us too.  And then…um…”

And a negative campaign is better than no campaign at all.

Emmer Is Not Anti-Gay: There are probably a thick dollop of DFLers and not-that-smart independents who hear “supports traditional marriage” and think “hates gays”.  But people in the real world, the world of the intelligent, do in fact know that the vast majority of people, regardless of their politics, both accept gays as equals and, judging by the voting on gay-marriage referenda nationwide, do not accept the idea of gay marriage.  It’s a bit of cognitive dissonance; smart people see cynical people saying “that means he’s rabidly anti-gay” to dumb people, and shake their heads in disgust.  And, jokes about “Governor Ventura” aside, most people are smarter than that.

Although perhaps the Emmer campaign needs to send the sound bite from his appearance on the NARN at last year’s State Fair to those who believe A4aBM’s slur:

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What do you think about gay marriage?

EMMER:  I don’t care!  [Audience laughs]  No, seriously – I believe marriage is about procreation – but this next election is all about jobs.

I suspect that’s not too far afield from what the vast majority of Minnesotans – regardless of their politics  – believe.

It’s Not A Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay World:  Look – in any population, you’re going to find 1-2% of the people are actively gay, and probably 1-2% of the population who genuinely hate gays.  In between you have the rest of us; people who would fight for a gay person’s right to political and legal equality (to say nothing of their right not to get beaten up), but need to be convinced about gay marriage.  And among that 96% are not a few people who either care enough about politics to ask “er, how is this “anti-gay?”, and not a few more who say “someone hates gays?  Sack up, fellas, I got plenty of people who hate me for being a Korean grocer/white Christian/Lebanese mortgage broker/Armenian professor/Jew.  Life’s tough; have a falafel and join the freakin’ club”.   Either way, playing the victim card only gets you so much traction when times are as tough as they are.

Especially because…:

MNForward Is Right: MNForward’s agenda has nothing, bupkes, to do with social policy.  It’s about trying to make sure we get a responsible government – one whose policies will not actively trash this state’s already dicey business environment.  Jobs are hard to find these days; the last thing we need is to make it harder to create, get and hold (private sector) jobs.

James Carville said it; “it’s the economy, stupid”.  And deep in their conference room down on Plato Boulevard, you just know the DFL has to admit to itself that this is a lousy year to be selling dime-store socialism – but it’s the only card in their hand.  And so they have to draw attention away from it, which leads to…well, see the “Sweet Stench of Desperation” section, above…

I think that when the dust settles on this that, even if the media manages to hush up the genuine discussion about A4aBM’s funding and the speciousness of the “anti-gay” claims, that Tom Emmer and, most likely, Target will both come out ahead.  The whole flap reeks of last-ditch desperation.

And even Minnesota voters don’t get that silly.

Nick Coleman, longtime bete noir/kicktoy of regional conservative bloggers,  is back on the beach:

The message was eloquently written, but crystal clear. For one year now, Coleman had been a senior fellow at the school’s Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement. He’d tacked his title onto his opinion columns in the Star Tribune each Sunday. Now the school wanted him gone.

Budget challenges had caused the school to reconsider the fellows program, wrote Joe DesJardins, the school’s vice provost. But the real reason for Coleman’s ouster was spelled out in DesJardins’s carefully chosen next words.

“Unfortunately, many of our alumni and friends interpreted your by-line as a Senior Fellow of the McCarthy Center as an implicit SJU endorsement of the opinions you express,” DesJardins wrote. “This has brought St. John’s into the political sphere in ways that we had not anticipated and think is not in St. John’s best long-term interest.”

I’ll give Mr. DesJardins the benefit of a doubt; perhaps he was one of the monks, and he’d swore a vow of never reading the Strib, just like most otherwise independent-thinking and well-informed Minnesotans.  Perhaps he had no idea about Coleman’s decades-long career as a DFL cheerleader, his “Air America Minnesota” talk show, and his history.

And it’s not like he had any road to Damascus moments while working for “Big Mac”; he pretty much romped and played in familiar territory, cheerleading the DFL establishment and catcalling the usurpers.

We’re not done with far-fetched:

“I do think something is out of whack when he’s a part of it and a liberal columnist can’t be,” Coleman says of Kennedy.

“I do think something is out of whack when he’s a part of it and a liberal columnist can’t be,” Coleman says of Kennedy.

It makes it sound like the termination was political.  Which might make more sense if Amy Klobuchar weren’t giving the center’s next lecture, and the center blog didn’t have a subtle but distinct patina of Obama worship.

What Coleman didn’t know was that efforts to unseat him from St. John’s had been brewing for months.

Bob Labat, a 1959 St. John’s grad who has donated to the school every year since, noticed Coleman’s columns right away. Labat found Coleman grating—a quality he considered inappropriate for someone associated with the Catholic school.

“He has every right to be as caustic and as strong in his opinion as he wants to be, but when you’re also writing on the masthead of an academic institution, that’s a problem,” Labat says.

He wasn’t alone. In September, Len Busch, who has given $20,000 to the St. John’s theology department each of the last three years, authored a handwritten message about Coleman.

“As long as St. John’s has this man on the payroll, I will no longer give my money to St. John’s,” Busch wrote. “I will not support lies and false statements and half truths about anyone.”

A lot of us former Strib subscribers know the feeling.

But I don’t whistle past graveyards.  I hope Coleman lands a gig soon.  While there’s no shortage of material, one must neither take things for granted nor wish ill on people; I don’t believe in Karma, but I do think what goes around comes around.

So best of luck, Nick.

 In going through the Daily Caller’s yeoman work in releasing the Journolist archives, I’m struck by nothing so much as what a bunch of intellectual lightweights the “elite” media are.

I read all fifteen pages of the list’s exchange regarding Sarah Palin and the birth of Trig – right at the beginning of the Trigger conspiracy theory – and was appalled by:

• How very very bad at analysis – as in, mathematical and statistical analysis – these people are.
• How very, very hard the women in the discussion – especially the few older ones who’d managed to justify having children – had to work to try to convince the rest of the participants that they were being hypocritical in attacking Palin’s (ostensible?) choice to fly back to Alaska for Trig’s birth
• How very, very difficult it seemed for some of the participants to square their “feminism” and “pro-choice” rhetoric with the idea that Sarah Palin was qualified to choose when and where to have the baby
• What a very, very trite group of people they are.  Bob Mackey on who, and why, McCain should have chosen someone else for Vice President: “Libermann [sic] would have been a better choice from that perspective. At least he has experience and can find Eastern Market for Sunday brunch.”   That’s right; because the VP is only one omelet away from the presidency?  Knowing DC’s social circles is the dispositive criterion for a potential President?

On the one hand, it’s depressing.  On the other – the idea that the level of “intellect” among the left’s “elites” is so very, very…er, intellectually attainable is a bit of a kick.

Mark your calendars for a year from this past weekend; “Netroots Nation” is coming to Minneapolis.

Twin Cities’ center-right bloggers; if we can’t three days worth of classic comedy gold, we should all just pack up shop.

I just got this video from this past weekends’ “Netroots Nation” festivities:

As we Republicans look at yet another year of selective reporting and overt bias in action (who needs Journolist in a media hive like the Twin Cities?), it’s important to remember that that are those who believe the media is conservative.

It’s Eric Pusey from MN “Progressive” Project:

I found it interesting that the editors of the Star Tribune thought that the employment statuses of the MN-02 DFL candidates running against Rep. John Kline were newsworthy while a national story about Rep. Michele Bachmann wasn’t.

Let’s look at the allegations:

The essence of the story is that Dan Powers (DFL-endorsed) was a contractor and collected unemployment while Shelley Madore’s contract wasn’t renewed.  Eric Roper and the editors of the Strib think something is fishy.  They consider this more newsworthy than Bachmann stating “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another” if Republicans regain the House and “we don’t have to fund any of these programs and that’s exactly what we need to do – defund all of this nonsense and then unwind it.”

So let’s look at this from the perspective of an editor:

News: Two congressional candidates have financial irregularities (provided that they’re not Obama cabinet nominees).

Not News: Michele Bachmann says something that gets liberals exercised, but is really no different from a zillion other such incidents.

What is also interesting about the Strib’s political coverage is that they very rarely (verging on never) cover Kline.  The latest news (1 week old) is that Kline opposed funding child nutritional programs with the following hypocritical excuse:

“The debt crisis is the greatest national security threat we face,” ranking Republican John Kline of Minnesota said. “The cost of this legislation cannot be ignored.”

If the Strib did cover this story about Kline’s vote, what do you think the chances are the someone like Roper would note that Kline supported the Bush agenda of tax cuts and borrowing to pay for two wars?

News: Er, Kline voted against a bill?   No, the only news here is that the word “hypocritical” has been devalued to the point of meaninglessness; hypocrisy is holding someone to a moral standard to which you yourself are not willing to adhere.   Think John Kline is inconsistent on deficit spending?

Not News: Kline voted with the Bush Administration – while the Bush administration was in office.  Two to eight years ago.

…and, by coincidence of course, of the entire DFL establishment, media and Sorosphere:  “Hey, no fair that corporations can donate money to politics the exact same way that unions and liberal plutocrats do and have always done, even under McCain/Feingold!”

Target is getting a lot of crap from the usual pack of The Very Challenged, who are appalled that corporations can now donate money to campaigns that best support policies they (their boards, really) deem to be in their shareholders’ fiduciary interest (in the same way that unions have always been able to).

Expect a lot of  really ugly, stupid invective against Target – and expect it to get worse before it gets better (at least rhetorically; what are these shining lights of liberal “ethics” gonna do, switch to WalMart?)

However, one good turn deserves another; this advertisement is provided to Target free of charge.

Now, if your grocery section can actually stock some tabouli mix, we’ll be cooking with gas.

Of course, it’s not just Target that donated to Minnesota Forward; Polaris, racked by the DFL’s taxes, is holding on by the skin of its teeth.

Hope it drives some business to you guys:

Davisco Foods, based in LeSeuer?  A plucky little outstate company that’s fighting in the international market, and could use all the help (or at least the least possible amount of interference) it can get?

Hubbard Broadcasting – owner of Channel 5, KS95, Chicktalk107 and AM1500 The Sports Megilla?  Well, they do compete with my show and with Salem, which owns my show.  And they did pass on the chance to hire me as KSTP’s program director back in 1991, not that I hold a grudge.

So I’ll stick with a simple “attaboy” for HBI.

And I’ll draw the reader’s attention to the fact that these four corporations have spent about half as much on this race as the Dayton family alone, and a small fraction of what AFSCME, the SEIU, the MFT, Education Minnesota, the AFL-CIO, the UFCW and the Teamsters will end up spending.

And the rest of us – the Minnesotans who actually pay taxes – don’t have the option of boycotting any of them.

UPDATE: As I noted this morning, Minnesota’s big corporations, being in Rome, have to do as the Romans do; in addition to a decades-long tradition of being good corporate citizens, they also have been exceedingly friendly to liberal causes; as a commenter below noted, Target lets their GLBT group use the Target logo; most of your major Minnesota corporations (and I’ve worked with many of them) are very aggressive about promoting women and minorities, donating to non-profits, sending staff out to work on Habitat projects, helping subsidize mass transit, and on and on.

Careful what you wish for, lefties.  You geniuses, you.

Charlie Quimby’s main headline today:” Doing the Tip Credit Shuffle”

Charlie Quimby’s main headline tomorrow:  “I don’t think Dewey really won…”

Just saying.

So far in this campaign, as the DFL hammers its way toward its primary next month, most of the attacks against Tom Emmer have come from a shadowy group, “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”.

I’ve busted them repeatedly stretching the truth and/or lying; Channel Five followed suit earlier this week.

But who are these people?  And where did they get the money to run all these slick (if utterly truth-free) ads, and all these posh (but amateurishly-designed) websites?

Because they run through a lot of money!

2006 Campaign – We first heard of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” (A4aBM) during the 2006 campaign.  During that outing, A4aBM spent $2,545,162 – about $2.3 million of it in ads against Governor Tim Pawlenty.

Where did that money come from?

Their donor list is as follows:

• CWA COPE $5,000
• MAPE $5,000
• Midwest Values PAC (Franken) $5,000
• MN AFL-CIO $5,000
• United Food Comml Workers $7,500
• Ma Mah Wi No Min Fund1 (Mille Lacs Tribe) $7,000

Unions and Native American gambling interests so far; no big surprises.

• Tom Kayser (MN) $7,500  [One of Mike Ciresi’s cronies]
• Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux $15,000
• MN Nurses $15,000
• United Steelworkers $22,000
• Afscme Council 5 – $25,000
• Lks and Plains Carpenters $25,000
• IBEW MN State Council $25,000
• Intl Union of Operating Engineers $25,000
• America Votes MN $30,040 [aka “ACORN 2.0“]
• Coalition for Progress $50,000 (Mich)
• Laborers Dist Cncl $60,000
• Pat Stryker (CO) $100,000
• SEIU MN State Cncl $100,000
• Educ. MN $135,000
• Tim Gill (CO) $300,000
• Alida Messinger (NY) $746,000
• Win Minnesota $778,500;

So – out of two and a half million dollars spent, about 20% – about $449,000 – came from those whom I thought were the most likely suspects, the unions.

And nearly 2/3 came from two sources – “Alida Messinger”, and a group called “Win Minnesota”.

We’ll come back to both of them.

2010 Campaign So Far – To date in the gubernatorial campaign, A4aBM has raised $93,386 (as of this past Tuesday).  They’d spent $72,383 of it as of Tuesday (on ads that were, as we ascertained earlier this week, wall to wall bullcrap).   Of that $93,386, 79.636 of it came from the “Win Minnesota PAC”.

So that’s two election cycles in a row (so far) where “Win Minnesota” has been the leading funder of scabrous hit pieces against Republican candidates.

Win Minnesota?  Seems pretty innocuous, doesn’t it?

Who is “Win Minnesota”, And Who Funds Them? – Here’s the list of major contributors to “Win Minnesota” during the 2006 campaign.  I’ll be adding the emphasis for reasons that’ll become fairly obvious:

• Anne Bartley (San Fran) $25,000 [Linked via the Rockefeller foundation to Alida Messinger – whose maiden name was “Rockefeller” and who…well, we’ll get back to that.  She’s also linked to Hillary Clinton’s “Women’s Leadership Council” and former Clinton administration figure]
• Shayna Berkowitz (Mpls) $100,000; ]
• John Cowles (Mpls) $20,000; [Why yes, the former Strib publisher!  But don’t you dare say the Strib is biased!]
• Andrew Dayton (Mpls) $1,000;
• David Dayton (Mpls) $5,000;
• Eric Dayton (Mpls) $1,000;
• Mark Dayton (Mpls) $25,000;
• Mary Lee Dayon (Mpls) $100,000;
• Vanessa Dayton $1,000;
• Sandra Ferry (NY) $50,000; [Yet another Rockefeller – sister of Alida Messinger]
• Barbara Forster (Mpls) $25,000; [generic liberal with deep pockets]
• Roger Hale (Mpls) $100,000; [Former Daytons’ executive]
• John Harris (PA)$20,000;
• Myron Kunin $5,000; [Hair care tycoon]
• Kim Lund (Mpls) $25,000
• Darlene Luther 47A Committee $10,000 ;
• alida Messinger (NY) $165,000;
• Midwest Values PAC (Franken) $20,000;
• Linda Pritzker (TX) $30,000; [Scionette of the Hyatt fortune, big-time liberal with deep pockets; major donor to MoveOn.org]
• Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux $10,000;
• Tina Smith (Mpls) $10,000;
• Linde Uihlein (WI)$100,000; [Schlitz heiress, long-time political plutocrat]
• Julie Zelle (MN) $5,000

That was a lot of Daytons, and people linked with the Daytons…wasn’t it?

So how about this year?

So far in 2010, “Win Minnesota” lists the following donors to “Win Minnesota”‘s current warchest (currently worth $1,173,500), again with emphasis added by me:

• Andrew Dayton $1,000
• David Dayton $50,000
• John cowles $25,000 [Remember him from 2006?]
• MaryLee Dayton $250,000
• Emily Tuttle (MN) $5,000
• Ronald Sternal (MN) $5,000
• Alida Messinger (NY) $500,000
• James Deal (MN) $50,000
• Roger Hale (MN) $10,000 [Remember him from above?]
• Barbara forster (MN) $25,000
• Democratic Governors Association $250,000;

So of the $1.1 and change million warchest, $851,000 came from Daytons, and Alida Messinger.

But wait!  There is another fund registered with the state, with a different account number but with the same email and street addresses, that has $850,000 socked away but has spent no money.

And where did that $850,000 come from?

• Alida Messinger (Mpls) $50,000
• Win Minnesota $50,000
• Education MN $250,000
• Laborers District Council $100,000
• MAPE $50,000
• IBEW MN State Council $50,000
• MN Nurses Assc $50,000
• Local 49 Engineers $25,000
• Vance Opperman $50,000
• Afscme Council 5 $50,000
• MN AFL-CIO $25,000
• SEIU MN State Council $50,000
• AFSCME (Wash DC) $50,000;

And who is this Alida Messinger who has contributed so mightily – over $1.46 million over the past four years! – to the cause of disinforming Minnesotans about Republicans?  Other than the youngest daughter of John D. Rockefeller III?

The ex-wife of candidate Mark Dayton.

So “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” is essentially a front for a group of unions and, to the tune of millions over the past four years, Mark Dayton’s family, friends and ex-wife.

They are paying millions of dollars to advertise – and hiding it from casual view behind two layers of astroturf.

Mark Dayton is trying to buy the election, but he’s taking great pains to make sure you don’t know about it.