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<\/p>\nSo 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”.<\/p>\n
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I’ve busted<\/a> them repeatedly <\/a>stretching the truth <\/a>and\/or lying; Channel Five followed suit earlier this week<\/a>.<\/p>\n But who are these people?\u00a0 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<\/a>?<\/p>\n Because they run through a lot <\/em>of money!<\/p>\n 2006 Campaign <\/strong>– We first heard of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” (A4aBM) during the 2006 campaign.\u00a0 During that outing, A4aBM spent $2,545,162 – about $2.3 million of it in ads against Governor Tim Pawlenty.<\/p>\n Where did that money come from?<\/p>\n Their donor list is as follows:<\/p>\n Unions and Native American gambling interests so far; no big surprises.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And nearly 2\/3 came from two sources – “Alida Messinger”, and a group called “Win Minnesota”.<\/p>\n We’ll come back to both of them.<\/p>\n 2010 Campaign So Far<\/strong> – To date in the gubernatorial campaign, A4aBM has raised $93,386 (as of this past Tuesday).\u00a0 They’d spent $72,383 of it as of Tuesday (on ads that were, as we ascertained earlier this week, wall to wall bullcrap).\u00a0\u00a0 Of that $93,386, 79.636 of it came from the “Win Minnesota PAC”.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Win Minnesota?\u00a0 Seems pretty innocuous, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n Who is “Win Minnesota”, And Who Funds Them?<\/strong> – Here’s the list of major contributors to “Win Minnesota” during the 2006 campaign.\u00a0 I’ll be adding the emphasis for reasons that’ll become fairly obvious:<\/p>\n That was a lot of Daytons, and people linked with the Daytons…wasn’t it?<\/p>\n So how about this year?<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n So of the $1.1 and change million warchest, $851,000 came from Daytons, and Alida Messinger.<\/p>\n But wait!\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n And where did that <\/em>$850,000 come from?<\/p>\n 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?\u00a0 Other than the youngest daughter of John D. Rockefeller III?<\/p>\n The ex-wife of candidate Mark Dayton.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0and ex-wife<\/em>.<\/p>\n They are paying millions of dollars to advertise – and hiding it from casual view behind two layers of astroturf.<\/p>\n Mark Dayton is trying to buy the election, but he’s taking great pains to make sure you don’t know about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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?\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,108,294,63,79],"tags":[115,114],"class_list":["post-12083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-chanting-points-memo","category-favorites-politics","category-lefty-alt-media","category-slander-files","tag-abm","tag-dayton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12083"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47780,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12083\/revisions\/47780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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