As I made clear on the show over the weekend, I was and remain overjoyed that Governor Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate.

It was a huge move, for reasons I expressed in my partly-tongue-in-cheek open letter to Governor Romney last week; it wasn’t the “safe” move, but it was the right move, for the future of this country.

Every talking head in the country spent the weekend solemnly intoning that “this choice changes the conversation”, which proves only that the the barriers for entry into the “Talking Head” business aren’t nearly high enough.  

Democrat talking heads giggle their smug giggles and chortle “this changes the conversation away from the economy – the last four years – and changes it to entitlement reform, the next four years!”.

Let’s forget for a moment that Obama and the Dems have not the faintest hint of a plan for reforming entitlements, much less recovering the economy.   Beyond that – do Democrats think the long-term economy is in any way extricable from reforming entitlements?  They think entitlements can ever be reformed without a vigorous and growing economy?

But the talking heads have a point; this election offers this country a choice.  This election is a battle between Silly America and Serious America.  Silly America believes that if you just demigog issues long and hard enough, and focus obsessively on contraceptives and tax returns, and ignore the real issues facing this society.

And there really are two outcomes.

If Serious America wins, and Romney and Ryan win, and they dig in and engage the economy and face the entitlement cliff, a lot of long, hard, non-sexy work will follow.  The nation will have a chance – provided the people stay serious, and keep serious governments in office – to avoid becoming a cold Greece with a more vapid celebrity class.

If Silly America wins, Obama carries on in office.  This nation runs up to the cliff smiling one of those smug, NPR-audience smiles as we sail off into oblivion.

And America will deserve to fly off that cliff, with all that that entails.

And then we’ll need a new conversation.  It’s hard one to describe; thinik of the one an oncologist has with someone with Stage IV cancer.

…a dumber person in American politics than Debbie Wasserman-Drescher?

It’s further evidence of Berg’s Seventh Law that the party of “Sarah Palin is teh dummy!” elevated “The Nanny” to their ostensibly top position (although it’s also evidence that the Democrat Party nationwide is no more relevant than they are in Minnesota; just as the DFL is nothing but a front for Alida Messinger, the national Dems are basically water-carriers for the Soros-led claque of liberal plutocrats, the government employee unions, and their useful idiots in Hollywood).

Tomorrow morning, three campaigns are going to get together to try to lit-drop Ramsey County.

They are:

• Sue Jeffers, solid conservative and talk show host at a station not nearly as good as mine, who is running for the Ramsey County Commission, and who needs to win
• Mark Fotsch, running for MN House in District 66A against John Lesch
• Tony Hernandez, GOP endorsed candidate for US House in CD4 against Betty McCollum

And they need volunteers to help.

So if you’d like a shot at shocking the world, ping the Hernandez Campaign.  Volunteer to lit-drop tomorrow morning (details are at the post I linked).  It’s great exercise, it’s just lit-dropping (not door-knocking), and you’ll be helping to shock the world!

Please sign on up!

(And if you can’t drop literature, feel free to drop a few bucks in the kitty!)

Flashback to high school:

(Harp arpeggios has hazy scene dissolves to homeroom at a high school):

GIRL: Who’s your boyfriend?

LEFTYBLOGGER:  Oh – he goes to another school!

(Harps return for more arpeggions as scene dissolves, then re-establishes at college)

PROFESSOR:  So what evidence did we have that Reagan was a crook that should have been in jail and who actively promoted the crack and AIDS epidemics?

FUTURE LEFTYBLOGGER: He was a Republican!

PROFESSOR:  Close enough!

(Harps again; scene dissolves, then re-establishes in a basement somewhere in suburbia)

LEFTYBLOGGER:  (Speaking as she types): Of course the the Burkett memos were real!  One of the world’s leading forensic document analysts is in my bowling league, and she says the case that they were forged has absolutely zero merit!  No, I won’t reveal her name, or the name or location of the bowling league, because I don’t want to put her in danger from all you teabagging wingnuts.  But if they gave a Nobel prize for document analysis, she’d have five.  And so if you disagree with me, you’re an idiot!”

(Harps again, as scene dissolves, then re-establishes in Washington DC):

“[The source of Harry Reid’s allegations against Mitt Romney] is an investor in Bain Capital, a Republican also, and somebody … who has been dealing with Romney’s company for a long, long time and he has direct knowledge on this,” [Reid aide Jose Parra] said.

Parra’s statement comes after Romney, in an interview with Fox News, challenged Reid to identify his source.

However, after some media attention on Parra’s radio interview, Parra issued a statement taking those remarks back.

“I do not know the party affiliation of the source, how long he invested with Bain, or his relationship to Romney beyond the fact that he was an investor with Bain Capital, as Senator Reid has previously stated,” he said.

The Democrat strategy seems to be to find enough of the stupid, the gullible, the dependant, the depraved and the incurious to eke out a victory.

Experience in Minnesota shows that at least 43% of any given population can be counted on.

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

Tony Hernandez is the endorsed GOP candidate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

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

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

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

Joe Doakes

Como Park

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

Well, if only for this piece here.

With which I agree, yesterday’s commentary notwithstanding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oddly, others can.

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

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

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

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

Joe Doakes

Como Park

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

We know better.  Right?

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

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

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

Governor Romney,

I supported you in the caucuses – as the conservative alternative to John McCain, no less – and I’ll vote for you this November as many times as Mark Ritchie will allow me to.   If I go into the polls smelling like hemp and wearing Birkenstocks, it might be quite a few times.

But I digress.

My friend Hugh Hewitt the other day broke down your VP choices like this:

• If your internal polling shows you comfortably ahead, you’ll go Pawlenty.  He’s safe, he gives you a shot in Minnesota and the upper midwest, and he’s got the technical part of the job down.
• If it shows you ahead but close, go with Rob Portman.  He’ll help you clinch Ohio, and he’s a safe, competent choice.
• If they show you a little behind, you’ll go Ryan.  He’ll cinch up the base and give you some “zing” for the final stretch.
• If you look way behind, you’ll go for the long ball to Chris Christie.

Maybe it’s my Scandinavian roots.  Maybe it’s a lifetime as a Bears and Cubs fan.  But I say always play like you’re behind.  Pick Ryan.

Oh, I know – you’ve got the same people who gave us McCain telling you it’s just too risky.

It’s really not:

Too risky, goes the Beltway chorus. His selection would make Medicare and the House budget the issue, not the economy. The 42-year-old is too young, too wonky, too, you know, serious. Beneath it all you can hear the murmurs of the ultimate Washington insult—that Mr. Ryan is too dangerous because he thinks politics is about things that matter. That dude really believes in something, and we certainly can’t have that.

All of which highly recommend him for the job.

…

The case for Mr. Ryan is that he best exemplifies the nature and stakes of this election. More than any other politician, the House Budget Chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline.

Against the advice of every Beltway bedwetter, he has put entitlement reform at the center of the public agenda—before it becomes a crisis that requires savage cuts.

While jobs and the economy are the killer issues this election (or should be; the media in its role as Obama’s Praetorian Guard is doing its best to avoid that happening), entitlement reform is going to the the issue that decides whether this nation remains viable or not.

And unlike most liberals’ and “moderates'” approach to the issue, Ryan’s all about fixing it the right way; through vigorous growth:

 And he has done so as part of a larger vision that stresses tax reform for faster growth, spending restraint to prevent a Greek-like budget fate, and a Jack Kemp-like belief in opportunity for all. He represents the GOP’s new generation of reformers that includes such Governors as Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and New Jersey’s Chris Christie.

As important, Mr. Ryan can make his case in a reasonable and unthreatening way. He doesn’t get mad, or at least he doesn’t show it. Like Reagan, he has a basic cheerfulness and Midwestern equanimity.

And the fact is that even if Romney doesn’t pick Ryan, the Dems are going to try to use Ryan as a negative anyway:

As for Medicare, the Democrats would make Mr. Ryan’s budget a target, but then they are already doing it anyway. Mr. Romney has already endorsed a modified version of Mr. Ryan’s premium-support Medicare reform, and who better to defend it than the author himself?

In for a penny, in for a dollar.

Republicans are likely to do worse if they merely play defense on Medicare and other entitlements. The way to win on the issue is go on offense and contrast Mr. Romney’s patient-centered reform with President Obama’s policy of government price controls and rationing medical care via a 15-member panel of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.

That, right there, is huge.  It’s a message that can resonate with both conservatives (who are sick of playing prevent defense) and moderates (who will, I suspect, respect a candidate who actually clarifies and personalizes the vague, too-big-to-process jeremiads they’re hearing about the issues facing this country.

And Romney needs to cement the base behind him.  Ryan would whip up the mass of Tea Party and western-conservatives that have been, to say the least, tepid on Romney so far.

If there’s anything that’d disturb the narrative on this election, it’s people getting “whipped up” by Romney.

Personalities aside, the larger strategic point is that Mr. Romney’s best chance for victory is to make this a big election over big issues. Mr. Obama and the Democrats want to make this a small election over small things—Mitt’s taxes, his wealth, Bain Capital. As the last two months have shown, Mr. Romney will lose that kind of election.

To win, Mr. Romney and the Republicans have to rise above those smaller issues and cast the choice as one about the overall direction and future of the country.

Americans have shown they will come together for the good of the country.  Pearl Harbor, 9/11, hatred of the Dallas Cowboys  – all have brought this fractured nation together.

Our very existence as an economy and a society?  That should count, too.

If we, as a party and a ticket, have the guts to make it an issue.

And if we don’t, then why bother trying to run for President, anyway?

So Gov. Romney – please pick Ryan.

Thanks.  And that is all.

Obamacare won’t raise taxes on the middle class!

Just on big bad businesses, usually owned by “the 1%”!

And they’ll just eat those taxes, right?

Well, no – in a number of senses, you will.

It’s been my contention for a while now that in most places – certainly anyplace that isn’t steeped in lefty koolaid – Barack Obama is going to have coat-tails like one of those women’s beach volleyball uniforms.

It’s been a contention.

Evidence?

It’s the DFL booth at the Dakota County Fair.

Where’s the Obama sign?

Note to self:  When updating my WordPress theme, always check the actual blog before leaving for the office.

My header image – which I’ve run on this blog since 2003 – got eaten by the update.  I didn’t notice it until I got to work, where I can’t actually blog (this update is being written from a smart phone, btw).

I’ll fix things – or maybe gin together a new banner, who knows? – later on today.  Just in case anyone was wondering, I mean.

The rumor’s been bouncing around for the better part of a decade; “someone’s doing a remake of Red Dawn“.

And some people seem almost surprised that it’s supposed to be awful:

North Korean paratroopers descend on an American small town. U.S. military resistance collapses. Korean armored vehicles roll down the streets unopposed except for a band of heavily armed bros in hoodies.

No, these are not images from some teenage gamer’s fever dream. They’re scenes from the movie Red Dawn, a remake of the 1984 cult classic about a joint Cuban-Soviet invasion of the U.S. and the attractive young American insurgents — the Wolverines — who help defeat it. The revamped Red Dawn, starring Chris Hemsworth, a.k.a. Thor, blasts into theaters in November.

But don’t expect it to linger very long.

Well, no kidding.  The world’s changed a bit since 1984; on the one hand, we simultaneously have little fear of nuclear armageddon, even as the idea of being attacked on our soil is no longer novel.

But the article, in Wired, does hit on one key point.  We’ll come back to it.

Where the 1984 original successfully played upon widespread public fears over a supposedly rising and belligerent Soviet Union, the remake expects viewers to take North Korea seriously as an existential threat.

It’s a stretch.  Although let’s be clear; the Soviet Union wasn’t “supposedly” belligerent in 1984.  They made a pretty good show of it.   In much the same way as Putin does today, only with thousands of missiles and tanks and hundreds of submarines and lots and lots of soldiers, and no, I’m not going to get into an argument about whether the Soviets were or were not a threat, since history and Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, JP Deuce and Lech Wałęsa already settled that for us.

We’re guessing the flick is going to get a lot of unintended laughs.

You see, the actual North Korea is a country of 24 million people with a GDP roughly equal to North Dakota’s. It’s an impoverished, even starving, prison state that lacks modern weaponry and any ability to deploy forces globally.

Which, if you think about it, is kinda like the USSR in a lot of ways.  And yes, I know, the remake sounds dumb…

…which shouldn’t obscure the fact that the original was dumb too.

How dumb?  I’m Norwegian and Scottish; I squeeze 15 cents out of a dime.  And I never go to movies I think I’m going to walk out of.  And I darn near walked out of Red Dawn the first time I saw it.  It was the scene where the “student council president” tries to call for a vote over going back to town after the invasion; my “dumb” meter pegged so hard it bent the needle.  I had my butt up out of the seat…

…but stayed.  Partly because in those days, I didn’t waste $3 lightly.

Partly because while the story didn’t get a whole lot better, it got a whole lot more fun.  Dumb, escapist, adrenaline-pumping fun.

And in an age where “video games” were geometric shapes that floated on black screens and beeped and borked and shot little pips of electrons at other geometric shapes, Red Dawn was an “immersive experience” that went ever-so-slightly beyond “escapist” to “fantastic”, with the emphasis on “fantas”.  Once I turned my English major’s critique-o-matic off, and just started enjoying it for what it was – a movie about a bunch of guys in the woods with machine guns blasting bad guys and saving the free world and rescuing Jennifer Gray and knocking off a little Lea Thompson in the bargain – I settled down in my seat and took my jacket back off.

Now that kids can immerse themselves in games that serve as stories much more involving and immersive, I can’t imagine hordes of twentysomethings doing the same thing these days.  Not without Robert Pattinson in it.

Indeed, a movie about the making of the remake sounds like it’d make a better movie:

The new Red Dawn has been sitting on the shelf for a couple years owing to financing troubles and at least one major revamp by screenwriters Carl Elsworth and Jeremy Passmore. As originally written, the relaunched Red Dawn was only slightly less silly. The bad guys were Chinese. And while China has no discernible intention of invading anyone [tell that to the Taiwanese – Ed.], much less the U.S., Beijing at least commands a $7.3-trillion economy and an increasingly modern, two-million-man army. But it’s bad business to portray one of the world’s fastest growing film markets as brutal world conquerors, so the producers swapped in North Korea, a country no one counts on for ticket sales.

And given how Hollywood supports Obama, it’d be bad politics to piss off the one country that can still pay for all his plans.

Remember ten and fifteen years ago?  When people were wondering if Microsoft would eventually control the entire online world?

Back when the left was pondering siccing the government’s anti-trust machinery onto them (even more than they did)?  And the conservative among us urged caution, because the market would inexorably level the field if it were allowed to?

We, as usual, seem to have been proven right again.

It may be the only consistent line of substantive defense of his record that Barack Obama has come up with in almost four years; “it’s Bush’s fault!”.

And according to a Fed economist, it may not be true.

Is the WaPo’s “Politifact” biased toward the left?

Why, what would ever give you that idea?

…and this is it.

Expect a surge in building French restaurants in Switzerland.

Oh, yeah. And expect the French to recoup a fraction of the money they expect to recoup from it.

This is from the Tony Hernandez campaign website:

Want to make a splash in the Fourth CD?

Come out to wave signs for Tony in Saint Paul this afternoon!

• When: Tuesday August 7th, 2012 4:00-5:30pm
• Where: Meet at Mackubin & Concordia at 4:00pm
• What: Hernandez for U.S. Congress Flash Rally

It’s sort of during the work day, but I may just try to be there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But only so long as they stretch to the left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Doakes wrote to alert me to Saint Paul’s city government springing into action:

I realize [St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman is] a busy guy, too busy to personally visit every Mom and Pop operation he’s putting out of business; still, you’d think he could have found his way down there before this. It’s been two years.

I wonder if he’ll take the bus?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Joe linked to h this piece in the PiPress:

Business owners along Central Corridor Light Rail construction on University Avenue will have a chance to voice their opinions and concerns to St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman this afternoon.

The Asian Economic Development Association is hosting the Little Mekong Walking Tour at 2 p.m., Aug. 6, starting in front of 88 Oriental at 291 University Ave.

Topics of discussion include the impact of construction on current and future businesses in the area. A number of businesses have expressed their concerns with dramatic drops in business as the light rail construction has tied up traffic and limited access to their shops.

The tour will visit businesses in Little Mekong, an Asian culture and business district on University Avenue.

How many of those same businesspeople do you suppose attended the Met Council’s rounds of perfunctory “public meetings”, held over the past decade to gather public “feedback” about the project, to be recorded and shelved while the Met Council went ahead and built the same precise misconceived project they’d always intended to?

And I wonder how many of them even thought about voting for someone other than a DFLer – the party that regards them as interchangeable reliable votes, and their businesses as chattel – at the time?

Time to think about it, guys.

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

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

(more…)

This one pretty much explains it all:

That may be Paul Krugman sitting on the lead cart, bellowing “You really aren’t working as hard as we are!”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

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

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

Erik Paulsen

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

If you live in the 33, please vote accordingly.