Harassment’s a bad thing.
If I had money and video talent, I’d re-shoot the original “Catcalling” video with a woman wearing a conservtive-themed piece of apparel.
Now that would be interesting.
There is no “think about”.
Although I’ll cross my fingers and hope that he “does”.
My hopes that he “does” are eclipsed only by my crushing ennui about the subject’s entire oeuvre. And the idea that the whole media trial balloon is just a bid to revive the most justly-atrophied show-biz career since Gary Glitter.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
It’s be wonderful if Minnesota would strengthen its Constitutional protection of gun owners, as other states have. I’ve pointed out for years that the level of scrutiny is the key to winning court cases.
As was noted in the comments, adding “and we really mean it” to the Constitution does nothing when the judges are routinely ignoring the law, and the legislature won’t pull their funding to bring them into line. That’s what we need in this state and this nation: a good old-fashioned constitutional crisis. The Congress and the Minnesota legislature need to shut things down. Stop funding the court and the Executive Branch until they come into line with the powers enumerated in the state and federal Constitutions. Yes, we’ll get ripped in the media, but we’re going to get that anyway so we might as well get something for it.
Won’t happen with compromisers like Mitch McConnell in charge, of course; but if we can keep sending Tea Partiers, maybe someday . . . .
Joe Doakes
The hope is what keeps me in the GOP.
I never quite know what to say to veterans.
Hear me out, here.
Saying “thank you for your service” seems trite – almost mawkish. Someone who never served saying “Thanks for going overseas and getting shot at!”?
See what I mean?
In the meantime, what I want to say is “glad you made it home”. But I can see that being taken the wrong way.
So I’ll wing it.
Veterans: thanks for spending the best years of your lives in barracks, troops ships, foxholes, berthing spaces, CVC helmets, cockpits and gun mounts, doing things most of us can’t imagine, to protect the freedoms too many Americans take very much for granted.
It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but it doesn’t have to.
To: New GOP Majorities in the MN House and US Congress
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re: Agenda
All,
Want something to show you’re serious about getting the boot of government off of innocent citizens’ necks?
Reform civil-forfeiture laws. Now.
Including, preferably, eradicating laws that allow corrupt pettifoggers to run rackets with the blessing of “the law”.
Do it now, so we can see who the real enemies are.
That is all.
There’s an old saying; “success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan”.
In the wake of the Democrat party’s nationwide electoral humiliation, the left is looking for things to hang their hopes on.
It’s human nature; the good guys were doing it two years ago, too.
So here’s what the Democrats are hanging their hats on; in a blue state, a 67 year old governor who gets mistaken for his entrepreneur anscestors, a superannuated standup comic, and a couple of congressmen dragged out of mothballs at the Museum of Pettifogging eked out wins in a state where…they were expected to eke out wins.
But remember – whatever success there is has a thousand fathers. Er, parents. And the local left is stepping all over itself to claim their piece of the success less-failure.
“In These Times” is the sort of “progressive” publication you can imagine a room full of Grace Kellys producing. I don’t read it much, because it’s just not a challenge.
But in their post mortem of the MN elections, they made an interesting and, dare I say, surprising claim.
No, it’s not the callow reference to stereotypes. That’s no surprise from any “progressive” publication:
Mike McIntee, who lives in Eagan and is executive producer [Hah! – Ed] of The UpTake, a citizen journalism-driven, online video streaming website, has seen his first-ring suburb change politically. The residents of Eagan’s cul-de-sacs no longer exclusively resemble an episode of The Brady Bunch, but include different ethnicities and low-income housing.
“White People” = “Brady Bunch”.
Huh.
Anyway – here’s the interesting part (emphasis added by me):
McIntee also credits the work of Protect Minnesota, which works to end gun violence by turning it into a political issue in urban and suburban areas. Protect Minnesota sent out mailers this election season attacking candidates who opposed gun control. Its gun-safety champions who won on Tuesday include Ron Erhardt, who represents the suburb of Edina. Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association’s influence may be waning in Minnesota. Three rural DFLers who were endorsed by the NRA all lost.
Protect Minnesota?
The gun grabber group led by Heather Martens known mainly for its comic ineptitude, has done more harm than “good” for the gun grabber movement in the past…couple of decades. They mobilize no significant people (a couple of dozen might turn out for a vital hearing, as opposed to hundreds of Real Americans.
But what of their claims?
But delusion is Heather Martens’ stock in trade. From the “Protect” MN website:
From the “P”M website. Click on the link to actually see it.
Look, “Progressives”; if it makes you sleep easier at night thinking that…:
…are a “victory” for “gun safety?” Go for it!
It’s Heather Martens’ take, and it’s delusional…
…but I repeat myself.
Note to Mike McIntee and the rest of the “progressive” feed trough; if that’s the best source you can pick, no wonder you guys are getting your asses kicked on Second Amendment issues.
For starters, I think schools today resort to suspension way too quickly; sometimes it seems it’s the only sort of consequence schools offer anymore. There seem to be either no meaningful consequences to an action – or a three day vacation. And don’t kid yourself – that’s what suspension is, to any kid who’s actually getting suspended.
To the extent that black and Hispanic kids were getting suspended more? That’s at least partly the sign of a lazy administration.
But the news that the Minneapolis public schools have officially adopted a “separate but equal” system, where most students can be suspended without further ado, but black and Hispanic students require further review, makes me wonder if these people have ever heard of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.
When it comes to stating and defending their points under fire, American politicians are pansies.
British parliamentarians? They are like the Mike Ditkas of political speech.
And here’s one, courtesy of Margaret Thatcher, that I would love to see some Minnesota Republican, some how, some way, exhume and use in the coming session.
Because it applies to us, here and now.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Obama is sending more troops to Iraq. Ordinarily, I’d use a colorful expression to explain why that’s a dumb idea. Not this time.
If I said “not our circus, not our monkeys,” then Liberals would gibber that I’m comparing Africans to Apes, proving I’m racissss.
And if I said “we don’t have a dog in that fight,” Liberals would howl that dogs are offensive to Muslims, proving I’m an intolerant religious bigot.
If I said “There is no Constitutional authority to deploy US troops to a foreign land without a Congressional declaration of war,” Liberals would solemnly opine that disputing The First Black Constitutional Scholar proves my utter ignorance of law and history.
So I’ll just say “it’s a dumb idea” and let it go at that.
Joe Doakes
If progressivism built the economy like it builds rhetorical gotchas, this country would be humming along right now.
UPDATE: The contest now has a prize.
The winner of this contest gets a $150 gift certificate at the St. Paul Grill. So you can eat – for a night, anyway – like the DFL plutocrats who rule you!
Gift certificate courtesy the sponsorship of…
… Well, I can’t actually say. They want to remain anonymous. I can neither confirm nor deny that it’s the Koch brothers. I can also neither confirm nor deny that is Grover Norquist.
RULES UPDATE: When the prize was nothing but bragging rights, I wasn’t going to fuss too much about duplicate entries.
However, now that there’s an actual prize, I will allow people with duplicate entries to make one change to their submission.
——-
Now, if you’ve followed Minnesota politics this past four years, you know that Mark Dayton has been “Governor” is the same sense that Danny Bonaduce was the “bassist” for the Partridge Family. He’s been a marionette, a flapping jaw revealing the will of the special interests who installed him in office.
And his health is not at all good.
And once he cut the crap and made it official by bringing Tina Flint Smith on as his running mate (putting Yvonne something or other out to pasture), the plan’s been pretty much common knowledge: “Governor” Dayton is going to resign and turn the office over to Tina “The Butcher” Flint Smith.
The only real question is when.
And that calls for a pool.
The Pool: Pick the date that Mark Dayton resigns from office. Whoever is closest wins, and earns – I dunno, a drink from me when we have another get-together.
Closest – before or after the actual retirement, counted in calendar days – wins.
Leave your predictions in the comment section, in the form of a date and year.
Example: July 1, 2015 (that’s my prediction, BTW). I’ll make sure this thread gets saved for the long haul – not that I (obviously) think we’ll need to save it for that long…
The deadline will be the beginning of the next session.
UPDATE: See current selections and standings here.
And, in a sense, why I’m a conservative.
Yesterday was a double-anniversary in Germany; the fall of the Wall, and of Kristallnacnt, the 1938 pogrom that marked the active, public advent of the Holocaust, during which Jews, unarmed by force of law, were beaten, brutalized and murdered, their shops and homes ransacked, and the value of a Jewish life set at “lower than dog”.
Some Second Amendment activists note that Germany had strict gun control. Anti-gunners chirp that guns were legal in Germany. Second Amendment activists who’ve actually read the history respond that yes, Germans could own firearms – but they were closely registered. And when the Nuremberg Laws banned guns in the hands of Jews, the Germans knew exactly where to go to find them.
Just as they do with every community of desired victims around the world:
And that is precisely the point the Real Americans are making; “gun control” doesn’t so much “control” “gun violence” as it redistributes the capacity for lethal force away from unfashionable minorities.
Like black Americans. “Gun safety” efforts in America, since colonial times have served almost entirely to disarm black people.
And law-abiding black people in places like Chicago, Camden and Detroit are largely disarmed. And at the mercy of the criminals among us.
Which is, of course, the goal.
So that’s why, even before I voted Conservative, I voted Second Amendment.
It was 25 years ago yesterday that the Berlin Wall fell.
I was in a not-so-great place in November of 1989. But I watched the news – as I’d been watching the gathering disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, and of the “Second World”.
And seeing the stories of the swirling vortex of history into which Communism was falling…:
…even I, a simple nightclub DJ from northeast Minneapolis, knew something big was going on.
Even today, watching the footage, and watching Germans celebrating, I feel moved. It was one of the most amazing events of my lifetime.
Of course, I had a dog in the fight:
That dog was, of course, freedom. I was on the side that supported it.
For years, though, the mainstream media always seemed torn about the fall of the wall, the fall of communism. I remember in 1992, Tom Brokaw reporting on economic problems in Poland – after three whole years of freedom, after 45 in slavery – and solemnly declaring that Eastern Europe’s experiment with economic freedom was a failure.
I wondered if it was merely myopia. But no – it seems the American media had trouble processing the fall of the Wall because they largely supported the wrong side.
…and registration of all kinds.
Because this is the inevitable result.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I need advice from SITD readers.
For nearly 20 years, I’ve ordered brandy-soaked Monastery Fruitcake from the Cistercian Monks at Holy Cross Abbey in Virginia. My mother served it to her old lady friends and their verdict was “It’s very good for store-bought,” which, coming from those people, is the second-highest possible rating behind “as good as my Mother used to make.”
The monks aren’t selling fruitcake this year. They’ve suspended fruitcake production for 2014 to embark on a spiritual renewal to deepen their commitment to monastic life. Arrrgh! Okay, yes, monks, spiritual, I get it. But where will I get my fruitcake???!!!
Recommendations?
Joe Doakes
They can’t possibly be the only fruitcake making monks in America, can they?
Find Community Solutions here.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!
I’ll be talking with:
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
There will be a major announcement regarding the Dayton Retirement Pool.
And it’s gonna be big.
To: The MNGOP Judicial Elections Committee
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant Who Resents The Time He’s Wasted Listening To You People Over The Years
Re: Monday Morning Quarterbacking
Dear JEC,
Quick – without looking at a ballot, tell us – who was running for the other Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) seat on Tuesday?
We’ll come back to that.
Some of you are giggling like schoolgirls that Michelle MacDonald, after all of the back-and-forth over her endorsement and legal issues, got 46% of the vote for Supreme Court against Darth Lillehaug (who came in at 53%). .
Hold the giggling. Did you remember who was running for the other SCOM seat that was up for grabs?
It was Mimi Wright against John Hancock; Wright won 56/42. And Hancock didn’t have the benefit of five months of media attention to his (non-existent) endorsement fiasco, party wrangling and legal travails.
And perhaps more importantly, he wasn’t running against Darth Lillehaug.
Look at every other judicial race in the state. The challengers in the (very few) races that weren’t opposed generally netted 35-40% of the vote. And why? Because they weren’t incumbents. Random noise.
So 35-40% of Michelle McDonald’s 46% were votes the GOP could have gotten by nominating Sharon Anderson or Leslie Davis or Clu Berg, my golden retriever.
So don’t go claiming any credit for outperforming the GOP as a whole.
Now, this blog has already spent plenty of time castigating the JEC for the sleazy way you got McDonald endorsed – trotting her across the stage as a convention hall full of delegates with numb asses from 20 hours of wrangling over the Senate endorsement were getting ready for another half day of untangling a 5-way Governor race, and – unforgiveably – voting to not disclose to the delegates that Ms. McDonald had a pending court case for driving while intoxicated, rushing her through an acclamation endorsement without bothering to mention that the woman had “Media Poo-Storm” written all over her.
We apparently didn’t need to know that.
She spent the next five months, camera diliigently thrust in front of her, roaming the state, trashing the GOP, getting headlines from a media whose mission is also trashing the GOP, mostly winning her legal case…
A camera. Michelle MacDonald is standing behind it.
…and making people who follow these sorts of things wonder what was going on in there?
So let’s recap:
This tells us a couple of things:
So – how could things have gone differently?
What if you, the JEC, had tried just a skosh of honesty? What would have happened?
Maybe you’d have lost the nomination. And then again, maybe a straightforward minority report, coupled with an honest explanation of the exigencies from Ms. McDonald, would have won the delegates over.
Of course, the media would have have bellowed “GOP ENDORSES ACCUSED DRUNK DRIVER”.
Which they did anyway! Only this time the GOP would have been at her back (although that would have taken some cojones). And then it would have been off to the general election, Where 30-40% would have voted for her or Sharon Anderson or Paula Overby or Clu Berg.
And 4-6% would have voted for her because they’d heard of her.
And then Minnesota’s Second Amendment lobby, convinced they were backing a viable candidate instead of a skittery liabililty, could have called in the tribes and fired off some of their carefully-hoarded political capital against David Lillehaug, their sworn enemy. If there’s anyone who wants Lillehaug to go into retirement, it’s Minnesota’s shooters. Most of their races won; their support turned out the tribes in support of not just a few longshots. To take down Darth Lillehaug?
It could have been a match made in heaven.
Instead, you – the JEC – tried to manipulate the convention, and did it very badly.
And I haven’t the words to express my contempt for what you all did.
That is all.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A nearby office has a student intern. She describes herself as a social liberal but fiscal conservative. She also believes women should have the right to abortion up to the point of viability because prior to that, the fetus is not a child and therefore is not entitled to the protection of law.
Even after all these years, I am continually astonished at how glibly supposedly educated people say ridiculous things.
If you’re socially liberal, you can’t be fiscally conservative. Food is a basic human right (socially liberal) but some people can’t afford to buy food. So what, we stick to being fiscally conservative and let them starve? No, we buy them food. Her social liberality trumps her fiscal conservatism and she ends up being a plain liberal, she just doesn’t have the courage to admit it to herself.
If we call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg. And calling a child a fetus doesn’t make it something other than what it is – a child. All liberals agree women should be allowed to kill their children, the question is when to stop: at quickening, twinning, trimester, viability, partial-birth, or any time up until its second birthday? But no liberal is willing to say that aloud in plain English. They don’t have the courage to admit to themselves the plain truth of their desires.
Liberal is a synonym for willfully self-deluded. How can we save a society that refuses to admit the most basic, simple truths?
Joe Doakes
True.
But it’s also human nature to jump into pools feet first.
Especially when one lives in a place where calling oneself “conservative” is so socially dangerous.
It was a chilly evening – as I recall, snow was falling in Jamestown. Or threatening to, anyway.
I walked from my “home” at the time – Watson Hall at Jamestown College – to the polling station. I turned the decision over and over and over again in my head.
On the one hand, I didn’t see myself as one of “those” people; “fatcats”, “fundamentalists”, “warmongers”, any of the labels I’d been painstakingly trained to believe applied to conservatives. Truth be told, I still saw Republicans – or at least a lot of other Republicans – that way. And I believed that government – a rational, “good” government, the kind that a lot of Good People, like me, would elect, if we got the chance – did have a place in making peoples’ lives better. Four years ago the previous summer, at North Dakota Boys State – a mock state government put on by the American Legion – I’d become the state Federalist Party chairman. I wrote a party platform, all full of “redistribute” this and “regulate” that, the kind of thing that Paul Wellstone would have just loved. And we won.
And the press – which was even then liberal, especially the parts of it I paid attention to, “Rolling Stone” magazine and the like, had left me terrified four years earlier at the thought that Ronald Reagan was going to re-institute the draft and send us all overseas to fight for Exxon.
On the other hand, some of my adolescent certainty in my adolescent beliefs was decaying. I’d felt the first twinges years earlier, reading “The Black Book” – the B’nai B’rith accounting of Nazi war atrocities – and realizing that a disarmed society was ripe for the picking. And I remembered listening to Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech, and thinking “What – you got yours, and now you’re telling me I have to settle for less?”.
And I saw what had happened in Vietnam, where a liberal majority in Congress had rendered the sacrifice of 56,000 American soldiers utterly vain, and the national humiliation of the Iran Hostage Crisis. And I read Alas Babylon by Pat Frank, and wondered if, indeed, national weakness and self-abnegation would indeed keep all those missiles that the goverment had planted around me in North Dakota from firing after all.
My high school pal and unwitting political mentor, Dwight Rexin – a real-life Alex P. Keaton in his own way, a fire-breathing radical libertarian-conservative – grabbed me (rhetorically) by the scruff of my neck through 11th and 12th grades and explained to me – very, very patiently – how the stagflation that still wracked North Dakota was a product of wanton government intervention in the economy – the kind of thing I’d been brought up to think was a good thing that benefited real people.
And a year before, a family of Polish refugees, the Krzameks, had moved to town. And hearing their side of the Cold War – the oppressed “citizens” of the Second World – gave me a perspective on the time that I’d never had.
And at college, at the behest of my English major advisor, Dr. James Blake – who, after a few months of talking with me about politics, current events, faith, life and the world around us, told me in his New York accent “You’re no liberal, Mitch. Seriously”. He had me read “The Gulag”, and “1984” to learn current events, and “Crime and Punishment” and “War and Peace” and “The Possessed” to learn the philosophical cases for and against the big, “progressive” state, and about Jack Kemp’s free-market reform proposals, and P.J. O’Rourke’s “Republican Party Reptile” to see just how conservatism could resonate with a guitar-playing, grunge-before-it-was-cool fish out of North Dakota water.
And all of this tumbled around in my head as I signed in, and got my ballot.
On the one hand? I was angry. I knew what I really was! A thoughtful, “Moderate”, “good government”…something.
And on the other hand? None of that seemed to add up anymore. “Good Government”, the world around us seemed to show, really was the one that governed least, and left the most to the people themselves.
The lady at the desk gave me my ballot – a “butterfly” ballot – and pointed me to a voting “booth”, a little plastic carel.
And I opened the ballot up to “President of the United States”. Because of North Dakota’s ballot-access laws, there were something like two dozen candidates on the ballot. And because of a court case that had been filed and won by a Jamestown man, Harley McClain, after the 1980 election, (he’d protested the fact that the GOP and Democrat candidates were at the top of the ballot, and the SCOTUS agreed, and so ballots were thereever-after either alphabetical or random), I had to dig down through the choices.
I got to “M”. “Harley McClain – Chemical Farming Banned Party” was right above Walter Mondale.
I thought about Mondale – spawn of Carter. The needle hovered over the chad…
…and I stopped to think. I came close to punching McClain’s chad as a protest against the conundrum I was in.
And then, in a mental flash of “do it before I regret it”, I punched Ronald Reagan.
I dashed through the rest of the choices. I think I split my ticket, likely voting for Byron Dorgan for US House as a sort of emotional contrition for voting Reagan. I turned in my ballot.
I walked up First Street South, then down Main Street to “Fred’s Den”, a bar which had open stage night on Tuesdays. There was a set of drums and some amps and guitars on stage, but the evening hadn’t started yet. I ordered a Stroh’s at the bar and had a seat. The TV in the corner was tuned in to the local cable access station, and they were showing election results from around the US and around town.
As I sat, in came a small group of men, including none other than Presidential candidate Harley McClain himself; a hippie and musician, he was a regular at open stage night. At Open Stage the previous week, I’d promised him I’d vote for him.
Not only had I not voted for him, I’d pretty much voted diametrically against him; one of the songs he sang constantly at open-stage night, a 12-bar blues song he sang while accompanying himself on the guitar, made his politics pretty clear:
Gonna sing a song about Ronald Reagan
That man is a pagan.
Gonna sing a song about Ronald Reagan,
yeah, that man is a pagan…
“Hey, Mitch!”, he yelled, “Didja vote?”
“Yep! Voted for ya!”, I lied.
As open stage started up, the result started coming in. I’d voted in my parents ward, Ward 2, where my driver’s license was still addressed.
Cable Access ran the vote totals by the precinct. Harley Clain got 0 votes in Ward 2.
In fact, he got exactly three votes in all of Jamestown.
“Hey!”, McClain yelled at the screen. “Don’t you vote in Ward 2? There’s voter suppression going on here!”
I looked in panic at the screen. There as a “McClain” vote in the ward containing the College.
“I voted at school”, I answered. Mollified, McClain relented, and we watched as he racked up exactly 4 votes in Jamestown.
Reagan carried Jamestown decisively, except for the precincts by the College, where he carried Jamestown merely convincingly. He won North Dakota with just shy of 100% of the vote, as I recall, and won all but two of the states – the greatest landslide in history.
I was happy about my vote.
Not happy enough to tell my parents, of course.
Oh, yeah – open stage night. Tim Cross, Scott Massine and me (drums, bass and guitar) did a couple of songs. “Summertime Blues”, “I Will Follow” and something else, I think. And we each got a free beer.
That was fun, too.
So that’s what I was doing thirty years ago tonight.
One of the brighter spots in Tuesday’s proceedings was the crushing victory of Peggy Bennett over Shannon Savick in Albert Lea.
It was an old-fashioned whooping – 53-40. Not even close. And that was with an Indyparty candidate who took 6% out of the race, likely mostly from Bennett.
I’m still doing the end-zone happy dance in my head.
Shannon Savick was one of the DFLers from Greater Minnesota who supported Michael Paymar and Alice “The Phantom” Hausman’s gun grab bills in the 2013 legislature.
And she was one of the DFLers who joined Hausman and Paymar in getting up and theatrically walking out of the hearing room when the Real Americans of the Second Amendment movement started their testimony against their proposals. Indeed, the DFL made a shameful spetacle of ignoring their opponents’ testimony.
Watching their bills – and all of their support from Michael Bloomberg – go down to whining, piddling defeat – was sweet. And it was what mattered most.
But seeing Shannon Savick tossed out of office with all the ceremony of a day old egg salad sandwich is right up there.
OK, Ms. Savick. NOW you may get up and leave the room.
UPDATE: It wasn’t just Savick – and it wasn’t just in Minnesota. Gun grabbers were crushed nationwide. It was lopsided in the Senate, of course – but the most astounding progress was among governors.
To sum it all up? The NRA-endorsed candidate won in Maryland.
Perhaps bigger, but definitely more subtle? The flip of the Senate will at least slow down President Obama’s ongoing campaign to pack the Federal Appelate courts with gun-grabbing activists.
It was a good Tuesday for Pro-Second-Amendment Real Americans from coast to coast.
So the GOP has won, and won big.
That’s great. And it’s still worth taking a moment to savor the win.
But the time is coming soon – tomorrow? Monday? – when it’ll be time to ask the GOP “OK. Now – what have you done for us lately?”
And the answer is, outside the realm of the Tea Party, it’s been pretty mixed. The Karl Rove “Slick Consultant” wing of the GOP – which is less allied to conservative/libertarian principle than it is to at least theoretically putting numbers up on boards – still wields way too much control over the GOP.
This piece from Politico is clearly dated; it was written last week, before the election results blew away some of its statements…:
It doesn’t seem to matter much that the political track record of this GOP consultancy-industrial complex is execrable. Targeted Victory, LLC—which was co-founded by Michael Beach, the “national victory director” for the Republican Party during the 2008 campaign—played a key role in the development of “Project ORCA,” the now infamous Romney technology effort to win in 2012. It failed spectacularly. The manager of that effort for Targeted Victory was Tony Feather, who is now the “F” in FLS Connect, a powerhouse Republican consulting firm that handles much of the GOP’s voter contact. The “L” in FLS is Jeff Larson, who had been chief of staff for the Republican National Committee. FLS Connect also, at one time, employed Rich Beeson, who also worked at the RNC and went on to become Mitt Romney’s political director.
Understanding the incestuous ties between Republican consultants—the unending referrals of business between these friendly and insular consultant cliques—and the group think they promote is vital to comprehending the Republican predicament in 2014. Many of the groups that profited from Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 are now helping Republicans in 2014. Ron Bonjean, who worked for former establishment Republican leaders like Dennis Hastert and Trent Lott and is also a partner at a bipartisan firm, Singer Bonjean Strategies, in September took up an independent position with the NRSC. (The “Singer” in that firm, by the way, would be one Phil Singer, who worked for Chuck Schumer and served as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s communications director in 2006.)
The coveting of power for the sake of power and consultant-led group think have misdirected the GOP to strategic blunder after blunder.
…that are dated in terms of specific facts but still accurate. Indeed, that may be the big downside of Tuesday; the consulting class is going to claim the victory, notwithstanding the fact that it was more a vote against Obama, his policies and his malaise than for the GOP.
Republicans in Washington who declared war on their very base are now shocked that conservative voters have little interest or motivation in helping Pat Roberts, Thom Tillis, David Perdue, or a host of other candidates. A Republican establishment that has spent several years badmouthing Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and outside groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund now find themselves openly begging the Senate Conservatives Fund to engage in races while they fly Ted Cruz around the country to motivate the base.
And so the base was motivated.
But are the GOP’s problems fixed?
Not by a long shot.
It’s still the party that went with the flow with George W Bush on his deficit spending. It’s still the party that caved in to a bunch of neanderthals in purple Viking outfits and yellow wigs to give public money (appropriately laundered) to Zygi Wilf, to try to avoid losing political points.
Ask Jeff Johnson how many political points that saved us.
And I get it – compromises are going to have to happen, and no politician who actually gets into a position to to change things escapes without some compromise to their ideological purity (unless they turn themselves into self-satirizing caricatures like Paul Wellstone and Ron Paul, always voting pure unadulterated principle and rarely actually affecting policy). But it would be just great if the GOP would provide a consistent, sharp contrast to the Democrat Party and the DFL.
Republicans who are congratulating themselves this week had best keep it short and tasteful. The GOP has a lot of problems, and even some of us in the party are questioning the party’s commitment to being different from the Democrats in Washington and the DFL in Saint Paul.
Which GOP is going to show up at the capitols in DC and Saint Paul next January? The real one that is an actual meaningful alternative – the Tea Party – or the chuckleheads in the suits and the binders and binders full of excuses?
… where it’s hard to tell if this is satire or not.
My big takeaway from last night? Greater Minnesota gets it; The Metro really doesn’t.
The DFL-dominated Metro has been bringing the goodies home for the DFL-dominated Metro.
In Greater Minnesota? Not so much.
For the past two years, the Metro got the nickel mine. Greater Minnesota got the shaft.
And the results showed it. Roz Peterson in Burnsville was the only flip to the GOP in the Metro (although it was a sweet victory indeed). The rest of them? Jim Knoblach winning back King Banaian’s seat by a recount-proof (barely) majoirity. Jeff Backer trouncing Jay McNamar. Josh Heintzeman and Dave Lueck flipping Crosby/Baxter corner of the Iron Range in style. Jason Rarick tipping Tim Faust in Kanabec County. Tim Miller beat Andrew Falk, Brian Daniels over Fritz, and Hancock taking Bemidji back from Roger Erickson.
One big winner last night – Minnesota gun owners. DFLers from greater Minnesota largely deserted the Metrocrats during Michael Paymar and Alice Hausman’s gun-grab spree in 2013. Shannon Savick, however, stuck with the Metrocrats.
And Peggy Bennett beat her like John Bonham pounding on a floor tom.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Republicans take Minnesota House, Democrats retain Governorship, fundamental disagreement over amount and direction of spending. Another state government shut-down coming this Summer?
Republicans should start battle-space preparation in the media today. They can start by finding the list of all the “essential” services from the last shut-down, re-frame the debate by declaring all other spending has been judicially determined to be non-essential, and set the tone of the debate by demanding the Governor join them in refusing to waste taxpayer’s hard-earned money on “frivolous” spending. Every time he wants to justify the spending, claim he’s trying to overthrow the rightful powers of the judicial branch, which is Un-American.
Set up dozens of websites aimed at DFL legislators in purple districts: “Sen. Johnson’s Follies” to list all the stupid spending he voted for, with a big flashing total in alarming red letters saying “He wasted more money in three months than you’ll make in your LIFETIME. Tell him to STOP. Call him at this number.” Purely for educational purposes, of course, to inform the voters of his record.
And find somebody to start a series of Internet ads and bus shelter posters attacking Robber Barons Buying Minnesota Elections. Why should the Koch brothers be the only boogymen? Why not the Rockefellers?
And find somebody to start a Twitter hashtag proclaiming Extortion Elected Klobachar, to raise public awareness that unions are the biggest donors in Minnesota elections by far.
To run it, we need somebody really smart and also a little crazy. I’m thinking John Gilmore.
Joe Doakes
The possibilities abound.
Will the GOP – or, more importantly, Minnesota business – bite?
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