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? 

• McIntee claims “Protect” Minnesota sent out “mailings attacking candidates“:  Now, the Minnesota Human Rights community is pretty good at keeping tabs on what the orcs are doing.  And nobody seems to have seen a “Protect Minnesota” mailer.  None.  Michael Bloomberg and the DFL both hit on guns – but both groups carefully excised the hapless “Protect Minnesota” from their strategy.
• What “Gun Safety Champions?”  Protect MN is a lobbying group, not a PAC.  Did they endorse candidates?  If so ,they broke the law; lobbying groups can’t endorse candidates.
• They’re claiming credit for Ron Erhardt?  If Mike McIntee or Heather Martens wants to make the claim that guns were behind Ron Erhardt’s razor-thin win in Edina, feel perfectly free.  But be ready to be slapped down hard.   It’s an absurd claim. 
• They’re Claiming They Have The Momentum?:  “Three rural DFLers endorsed by the NRA” lost – but then, most rural DFLers lost, whatever their NRA and MNGOPAC endorsement. The election wasn’t about guns! But even so, over 3/4 of MNGOPAC’s endorsed candidates, GOP and DFL, won on election night – and many of the ones that lost in Greater Minnesota lost to other candidates with high GOCRA and MNGOPAC ratings.  Either way, gun owners won.  To claim the Gun Rights movement lost last Tuesday is a Baghdad-Bob-level bit of delusion. 

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…:

• Mark Dayton, who has spent the past two cycles trying to defuse Real American opposition by claiming he has a couple of .357 Magnums at home for self-defense, and
• Al Franken, who touches on guns as obliquely as his caucus will allow him to, and
• Rick Nolan, who ran away from the anti-gun movement (ineptly), and
• Colin Peterson, with an NRA “A” rating, along with…
• 11 new Republicans, all of them pro-gun, mostly MNGOPAC endorsed, all of them Second-Amendment-friendly, and
• a solidly pro-Human Rights MN House, with Michael Paymar’s Metrocrat caucus demoted to the cheap seats…

…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.

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.

 An activist with the Mali Marvin campaign (running against Deb Hillstrom in Brooklyn Center) provided an account on Facebook about the obstruction every Republican activist in a DFL town knows first-hand (included in full below):

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Representative Shannon Savick is a first-term Democrat from House District 27, the Albert Lea area, south of the Metro.  She’s a member of the Democrat Farmer Labor party. She’s blessed with a fairly well-off rural community for whom the consequences of DFL control aren’t yet life-or-death, and the presence of the Albert Lea Tribune, a newspaper that gives the City Pages and Star Tribune a run for their big-city money as mouthpieces for the DFL.   The paper has, of course, endorsed Savick. 

Everything seems hunky-dory for Ms. Savick, who is running for a second term. 

Everything but one; an especially noxious vote against Minnesotans’ human rights and civil liberties during her freshman session in 2013.  It was a bill by Rep. Paymar that would have:

• Banned “Ugly Guns”: The bill would have banned firearms with scary military-looking cosmetic features
• Banned Large-Capacity Magazines: Paymar wanted to force law-abiding homeowners and citizens to be forced to reload 2-3 times as often if they are beset by determined, dissociative or chemically motivated attackers. 
• Private Transfers: While even some Second Amendment people think this – requiring all purchases to go through a federally-licensed firearms dealer (FFL), to close the non-existant “gun show loophole” – doesn’t sound too noxious on the surface, its byproduct -a paper trail for all guns – makes the next step, universal registration, trivially easy.

Savick was one of four outstate DFLers – including John Ward, Erik Simonson and Paul Rosenthal – who voted for this atrocity of a bill. 

At the risk of sounding crass, I’ll tell the truth; the bill was an attempt to kick in the teeth of every law-abiding gun owner in Minnesota. 

Even worse?  During the public hearings on these bills – where pro-Human-Rights activists outnumbered Victim Disarmament activists by close to 30-1 – Savick joined her Metrocrat colleagues in walking out of the hearings when it came time for opponents to testify against the bills.

Despite this deeply misguided vote, and deeply stupid bit of theatrics, the conventional wisdom had Savick as a pretty sure bet for re-election.

The calculus must have changed.  Savick is pulling an Ann Wynia – protesting her history with firearms:

I remember when my dad gave me my first gun when I was 16. It was a Marlin .22 bolt-action rifle. I have many fond memories of carrying that gun as I went hunting with my cousins. Over the next 30 years or so, I acquired another five guns, some for shooting and some for collecting.

I share this because I have recently been asked about how I feel about guns. People are concerned that I might be a gun-hating politician who wants to take away their guns.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I own and shoot guns. I have a permit to carry. A few months ago I hosted a permit to carry class in my basement so others could get their permit. And actually, I am a pretty good shot.

Just thought I should set the record straight.

If you have questions about this, please don’t hesitate to call me.

Oh, I’ll call. 

Because owning guns is easy (thanks to us Second Amendment activists, anyway).  Mark Dayton says he owns guns.  Carl Rowan owned guns.  A rabidly anti-gun Missouri state Senator was arrested with a gun in Ferguson a few weeks back. 

But the Second Amendment isn’t about hunting. 

Representative Savick:  Can you name a single vote you took in the past two years that supported the rights of the law-abiding Minnesotan to keep and bear arms for self-defense? 

Can you find some action on your part to atone for your votes for Paymar’s agenda?

Have your people call my people.  But just in case my people are calling your people anyway.

Savick’s opponent, Peggy Bennett, is having a forum at the Hayfield American Legion tonight at 7PM.

It hasn’t been a good campaign for DFL Secretary of State candidate Steve Simon. 

For starters, he barely got over 40% in the primary – against a perennial candidate and a nobody.  Which might not have been a showstopper for the DFL machine to overcome, except that they were up against Dan Severson, who has statewide name recognition from a 2010 SOS run and a Senate bid (that came up short in the convention in 2012). 

Then, last week, the polls showed that Severson was ahead of Simon; he was the only GOP statewide candidate to lead in the polls at that time.  

At the very least – given the polling that, we are told, shows Mark Dayton supposedly cruising to victory – it’s a sign that the DFL/Big Money Democrat onslaught has a chink in the armor. 

At the most?  It shows that the DFL’s “We’re Inevitable!” vibe may not be entirely factual. 

Severson’s press conference last week – in which he showed smoking guns tying the SOS office to a policy of tossing veterans’ votes, and Rep. Simon’s signature on legislation that exempted the military from absentee voter reforms – went badly for Simon, and worse for the DFL’s Ken Martin, who tried and failed to take a chunk out of Severson in a comical morning of duelling press conferences. 

Simon is apparently desperate; he’s now telling his base that Severson proposes “forcing rape victims to pay for rape kits”. 

It’s BS, of course.  Not just the usual, comical, inept BS the DFL tosses around at this point in campaigns, all juvenile photoshopped heads and racist japes. 

No.  This is a sleazy, toxic, intentional, cowardly lie.  Severson responds (and I’ll add emphasis):

I moved it forward with the understanding that the bill would propose sharing the cost of all expenses associated with sexual assault between the counties of the victim and the perpetrator.

I specifically killed the bill before it EVER got a hearing because of the language specific to victims having to pay for anything.

In a just world, whatever DFL messaging genius that came up with this attack would get some sense groin-kicked into him.

As it stands?  Since a lie will make it around the world before the truth has finished checking Facebook in the morning, it’s back to the long, slow slog of telling people the one central truth of Minnesota politics.

If a DFLer says it, it’s a lie. 

If a DFLer who’s losing says it, it’s probably defamation.

Surgeons do surgery.

Baseball players?  They play baseball.

And Doug Grow?

For four decades and change, generations of Minnesota voters know that Doug Grow is synonymous for flogging and fluffing the DFL narrative.

Yesterday’s MinnPost piece on the Severson press conference (which I wrote about yesterday) is one for the record books.

The DFL and media (ptr) narrative this year, by the way, is “DFL Victory is Inevitable”; keep that in mind as you read Grow’s description of the presser:

Finding the current election cycle a little boring?

The DFL sure hopes to keep it that way!

Unexpected:  Doug Grow leads off with one of those “too good to fact-check” claims:

As it turned out, the back-to-back pressers were actually back to back to back. First Severson. Then Martin. Then Severson again.

Unbeknownst to each other, Republican secretary of state candidate Dan Severson had scheduled a 10 a.m. news conference, while DFL party chair Ken Martin had scheduled his own 11 a.m. newser to talk about the secretary of state race. In the same room.

As it turned out, the back-to-back pressers were actually back to back to back. First Severson. Then Martin. Then Severson again.

It’s about as “unbeknownst” and unpredictable as, say, the MinnPost hiring a staff full of DFL shills.

Sources in the Severson campaign tell me that Severson had the conference room – where both pressers were held – booked from 10AM ’til noon.  When the DFL got wind of the presser, they swooped in and got the 11AM booking.

Initially, Severson had planned to devote his news event to the subject of voter participation among members of the military. Among other things, Severson contends that President Barack Obama’s administration, current secretary of state Mark Ritchie and DFL secretary of state candidate Rep. Steve Simon have all participated in efforts to suppress voting by members of the military.

And this, as I described yesterday, he did.  Mark Richie’s office sent county election officials a “how to” on finding ways to reject military absentee ballots; it’s there, in black and white.  The media was given a copy at the press conference – as they were given a copy of the absentee ballot reform bill co-authored by Simon that specifically exempted the military (who vote overwhelmingly conservative) from the reforms.

Amazingly enough, outside of the ofay mockery in the piece’s title (“Fraud! Suppression! Aspersions! Dueling press conferences wake up a sleepy secretary of state race”), the actual facts Severson brought up, the paper trail he presented supporting both Severson’s key allegations, never got mentioned.

“My Opponent Has Been Caught Masticating!”:  After Severson’s presser – whose actual subject you’d never know from reading Grow’s piece – Ken Martin took the stage.

I’ll say it again; “Ken Martin took the stage”.  We’ll come back to that.

But at 11 a.m., Severson moved to the back of the room in the state office building in St. Paul as the DFL’s Martin moved to the front…Martin said that at a Tea Party event in June, Severson claimed that Sen. Al Franken had won his 2008 election as a result of voter fraud. At that same meeting, Martin said, Severson claimed the DFL had re-captured control of the Legislature also because of fraudulent votes.

“The last thing we need is a conspiracy theorist as secretary of state,’’ Martin said. “I call on [GOP gubernatorial candidate] Jeff Johnson and [Republican Party Chair] Keith Downey to refute Severson’s unfounded and irresponsible allegations. I question Severson’s ability to be secretary of state when he makes dangerous allegations of crimes that don’t exist.’’

It was cheap theatrics.   And Severson answered them with the kind of burst of full metal rhetorical jacket that I wish a lot more Republicans were throwing back at the Media-Progressive Complex this year:

“I’m not casting aspersions,’’ Severson said. “I’m saying let’s solve the problem.’’

Now that’s a novel approach.

Cast This:  Of course, mentioning the problem is the problem, to the DFL and the media that works for it:  

But suggesting that DFLers win races because they cheat sounds a bit like an aspersion…But Severson said it’s not just his observations at campaign rallies that cause him to have doubts about the integrity of the system. He cited the “study” of an organization called Minnesota Majority that claimed there were more than 6,000 fraudulent voters in the 2008 Senate race in which, after a recount, Al Franken defeated incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman by just over 300 votes…Martin pointed out that in the recounts of the Coleman-Franken race and the Tom Emmer-Mark Dayton race of 2010, both parties “spent millions of dollars” as ballots across the state were recounted.

“Not a single instance of voter fraud was found,’’ Martin said.

Martin is lying, and Grow is just fine with that.

Doug Explains It All:  Anyway – charge met countercharge.  But here’s the interesting part; Grow elects to speculate:

Did Severson schedule his as a desperate bid to tie himself to the military and to inflame those in his GOP base convinced DFLers only win because they cheat?

The base is pretty inflamed already.

No – here’s the interesting part.  Here’s the part that undercuts Grow’s entire, snarky, dismissive premise:

Did Martin schedule his because the DFL is concerned that Simon needs to raise the profile of a down-ticket race?

Did who schedule it?

Steve Simon?

No.  Ken Martin, chair of the DFL.

Not Steve Simon, SOS candidate.

In fact, Steve Simon wasn’t present for the press conference.  About his own race. 

Martinized: Ken Martin did the whole thing.  Steve Simon was nowhere to be found.

Ken Martin, State DFL Chair, apparently feels the need to intervene directly in what is, in a normal election cycle, a boring, humdrum race that tracks, or sometimes lags, the top of the ticket.

Why would he do that?

I can think of a couple of reasons, by no means mutually exclusive:

• Martin knows where Richie buried the bodies.  Corruption is as rampant in the SOS office as the GOP claims, and they need to do their best to keep a lid on the pot.
• It’s Not A Humdrum, Sleepy Race At All:  I’ve heard two rumors from well-placed sources; first, that GOP internal polling shows Severson ahead.  Second, that Martin’s behavior in the past week shows that the DFL knows it.
• That Air Of Inevitability?  Check It:  If Severson’s race is defying the “DFL is Inevitable” narrative, maybe other races are, too?  And if word gets out that the GOP has in fact defied the DFL’s “inevitable” victory, all electoral hell could break loose next month for the DFL.

Where was Steve Simon?

Why is Ken Martin intervening personally in this race, rather than sending some 22 year old communications minion, the way he normally would for the SOS race?

Stay tuned.

DFL Secretary of State candidate Steve Simon hasn’t had the easiest time of it.

First, he barely squeaked through his own DFL primary – getting 42% against a longtime perennial candidate and a future perennial candidate, in a primary race that should have been a coronation. 

Of course, he’s up against Dan Severson, a candidate with – alone among the MNGOP’s state office candidates – high name recognition, from a previous SecState and Senate run.  Severson is also the single prominent Republican who’s made a significant priority of reaching out to Latino, H’Mong, Somali and other immigrants. 

Rumors – and that’s all I have to go by so far, but they’re from fairly reliable sources – indicate that internal polling in both parties show that Severson is the only statewide GOP candidate to lead in the polls a month before the election.

The DFL reaction was predictable; the facts against them, they went for the sleaze.  The “progressive” alt-media’s attempt to paint Severson as a confederate sympathizer because of the color scheme on his lawn signs was not only idiotic, but transparently desperate. 

It’s only getting worse for Simon.

Vote Suppression! – This morning, Severson held a press conference in which he pointed out the known fact that 5% of Minnesota’s servicepeople and their families serving overseas get their votes counted – a travesty – and that…:

• Mark Richie’s state department sent out a memo advising county election authorities on ways to legally reject military absentee ballots (active-duty military votes around 3/4 conservative Republican), and…
• Simon – whose campaign lit says he wants to emulate Richie – co-authored a bill that exempted the military from an attempt to smooth out the absentee voting process.  In other words, a bill that made absentee voting easier for college students and other itinerant but reliable Democrat voters specifically left out the military. 

And unlike most press conferences for constitutional office races, the media actually showed up.

Perhaps because of one of the other attendees.

Captain Smith Leaves The Bridge:  MNDFL chair Ken Martin attended the press conference. 

Let’s let that roll around your head a little bit. 

The chair of the DFL party, who is working hard to find a way to keep the DFL from losing the House, but whose state office slate is purportedly already measuring the drapes in the Governor, State Auditor and Attorney General races, is taking time out to pimp for a candidate that should be a shoo-in. 

Why is that?  Because Simon is losing?  And because if Severson wins, we can finally get answers about the rot and corruption in the state’s election system?

We’ll find out soon enough. 

Oh, Martin’s whole line was claiming Severson is a “conspiracy theorist.  Of course, the numbers are real, as was the fact that Steve Simon is listed in black and white, as co-author of a bill that exempts the military from absentee vote reforms. 

And the media (!) actually pushed back on Martin, asking him if the DFL had erred in exempting the military from the reforms, which means the conspiracy is apparently on the DFL side of the aisle…

Anyway – more tomorrow.

Why were the DFL’s array of sock-puppets out in such force writing about the GOP convention?

To draw attention away from their own, up in Duluth.

First came reports that the DFL were denying media credentials to reporters from newspapers that had criticized Dayton.

Which is one way of silencing dissent.

Another way to silence dissent?  Agree not to talk about the inconvenient truth – that the DFL is intensely split on  mining.

That’s what the DFL did at their convention in Duluth over the weekend; looked at the upcoming bloodletting between their ultra-liberal, metro-area base – which is as dogmatic a pack of environmentalists as you will find in Democrat politics – and the Iron Range.

The Range, of course, is Minnesota’s red-headed economic stepchild; an area of the state whose economy has been draggy since the demise of the US steel industry forty years ago.

Of course, there is an immense wealth of minerals under the ground in Northern Minnesota, putting thousands of underemployed miners back to work, and creating jobs for many, many thousands more in the many areas that support mining – everything from mine equipment maintenance to truck driving to convenience stores catering to people going to and from work.

But currently – thanks to DFL-authored environmental rules and business regulations – it is literally better business to load ore-rich rock into trains and ship it to North Dakota than to build a processing plant in Minnesota.

So while the DFL had only one significant endorsement battle – to pick a Secretary of State candidate – the battle lines were in fact forming to duke out the battle between blue-collar Rangers and the businesses what want to hire them on the one side, and plutocrat Metro-area environmentalists (including Alita Messinger, who bankrolls Minnesota’s environmentalist messaging as completely as she controls the DFL’s).

And the DFL responded the same way Brave Sir Robin did:

In the end, activists on both sides came to the microphones to urge hundreds of feisty dele­gates to delay the vote indefinitely, a remarkable showing for a party that has seen conventions erupt into damaging fights with political scars that can last decades.

“I think people on both sides understand that we can have respectful differences, but we need to make sure we don’t do anything that is going to take away from our candidates’ ability to win this fall,” said Ken Martin, DFL Party chairman. “So there was a lot of discipline here. People understand the ramifications of the issue.”

Well, we certainly hope they do.

Because those ramifications were:

• To shut everyone up so that…
• …the same pack of Metro-DFL hamsters that have been working to keep Rangers unemployed and on the dole can get re-elected in what should be a tough year for them.

In other words, “Just two more years, Rangers, and we’ll think about it.  Or four.  Or eight.  We’ll get back to you…”

And hopefully it’ll get tougher for the DFL.  Stewart Mills has a genuine shot at sending Rick Nolan packing over this very issue.  More than that?

Think about it, Iron Range.  This isn’t your grandfather’s DFL.  The DFL is controlled by Metro-area poshes who haven’t dug for anything but grad-school grants in their lives.  They hate your guns and hunting and outdoor life.  They hate your largely pro-life beliefs.  And above all, they hate what you and the generations before you try to do for a living.  You, Ranger, are to the Metro DFL what the black or Latino family, or women, are; reliable votes in exchange for cheap lip service.

Money – jobs, in this case – talks.

Iron Rangers should know what walks.

Let’s see; we have a state majority installed largely through money coordinated by the Governor’s ex-wife and paid for by the her and his buddies from the country club.

When Governor Messinger Dayton speaks, his lips are controlled by his chief of staff Bob Hume, who is very credibly rumored to be “romantically involved” – evidence indicates dating or married to, but the principals keep it under wraps – with Carrie Lucking, “executive director” of the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota (Of course, we don’t know anything official; merely that during the Governor’s last budget speech, Lucking was tweeting picayune details of the budget that seem unlikely to have come from someone who hadn’t had an advance look at the proposal.  Some say it’s because Hume must have given Lucking an advance look at the Governor’s budget.  I’d suspect it was more like Lucking let Hume look at it.  But I digress).

And of course, the director of Minnesota’s flailing “MNSure” program spent two weeks during the catastrophic rollout of her website playing little spoon in Costa Rica to the state Medicaid director’s big spoon.

So I suppose the real question about Governor Messinger Dayton’s hiring of Minnesota DFL Executive Director Ken Martin’s wife as his deputy chief of staff isn’t “why all the nepotism”.  It’s “why isn’t the spouse of every powerful DFL functionary making six figures on the public teat”.

Because clearly someone reliable needs to be able to spell Bob Hume in making sure Governor Messinger Dayton doesn’t deviate from the chanting points.  Bob’s gotta be exhausted.

It’s party time, Dems!

(PS: Love the headline.  Governor Messinger Dayton hires a “well-connected” deputy?  No!  He hired his party chair’s wife.  Nope.  No media bias whatsoever in the Twin Cities).

Two weeks ago, when Representative Ryan Winkler shocked the parts of the world that can still be shocked by referring to SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas as an “Uncle Tom” – something even junior-high kids in North Dakota thirty-something years ago knew was a racist slap – the Twin Cities media did what it always does.

Cover for the Democrat. 

(And the Twin Cities leftyblogosphere?  To them, Clarence Thomas, a phenomenally accomplished man, is no different than Michelle Malkin or Star Parker or Alan West; a target for endemic bigotry first, human last, maybe.  When will Eric Pusey condem the racism on his “blog?”). 

Speaking of accomplished people, Chris Fields – a very talented politician who gave Keith Ellison as good a run as any Democrat’s had in the 5th CD lately, and is now the Secretary of the Republican Party of Minnesota and who is a businessman, a retired US Marine and, as it happens, black – wrote an editorial about how very, very objectionable the Winkler flap was.

Now, it’s the mushy institutional left, people like the Star/Tribune editorial board, that constantly remind us we need a “dialogue about race”.  Of course, when they say “dialogue”, they really mean “monologue, with our side doing all the talking and your icky conservatives doing the listening”

But in re the Winkler incident, it’s seem the Strib wants no monologue, much less “dialogue”.  Chris FIelds wrote an excellent op-ed about the subject of Winkler and his ignorant racist jape.  It was picked up by other papers – the Pioneer Press and the Mankato Times both ran it (it’s below the fold here). 

But the Strib?  Not so much as an impolite “F Off”. 

Winkler, who represents the lily-white, mushy-left heard of the Strib’s prime demographic, has gotten an unqualified pass from the entire Twin Cities media, which focused on his instant contrition in a way that’d would have seemed less jarring if it were something the Strib, the City Pages or MPR ever did for, say, Todd Akin’s verbal japes or Tom Hackbarth’s post-divorce wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time awkwardness or anything Ann Coulter has ever said, in or out of context. 

But it wasn’t. 

So why didn’t the Strib run Fields’ op-ed?  Is Fields not a compelling commentator on the issue?  Is his perspective not important?  Was his op-ed not well-written and excellent food for thought?  Yes, yes and yes.

Does it afflict someone the Strib’s editorial board and their friends very much want to see remain politically comfortable?  A thousand times yes. 

And so down the memory hole it, and the entire incident, will be shoved. They have their priorities.

Fields op-ed is below the jump.

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I’m of several minds about MNGOP Chair Keith Downey’s broadside at the MNDFL and the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” in the Pioneer Press last Thursday. 

On the one hand, acknowledging it is a sign that the Minnesota Left’s campaign – relying as it does on relentless name-calling and smearing – works. 

On the other hand – it does work.  You don’t need to be a pollster to know that the “Emmer Had Two DUIs” jape likely cost Tom Emmer the 2010 gubernatorial election all by itself. 

And on the third hand, not acknowledging it won’t make it go away. 

And there’s a fourth hand.  We’ll come back to that. 

Downey:

Demonizing personal insults flow far too easily from Minnesota Democrats these days. The latest: Rep. Ryan Winkler calling Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “Uncle Thomas.” Offensive enough on its own, worse, Winkler’s attack is but a symptom.

DFL Party Chair Ken Martin and Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s Executive Director Carrie Lucking have perfected a systematic program in Minnesota that takes political name calling to a new level.

This strategy is straight out of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” Alinsky’s Rule #5 states: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Rule #12 says: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Ken Martin at a meeting with Alida Messinger

And the two – Martin, who’s spent a career as Alida Messinger’s cringing lapdog and bag man, and Lucking, a woman who gives off that “my life peaked in high school” vibe, a former junioir high social studies teacher who was a spectacular two-time failure as a campaign manager (oh, crapt, now I’m doing it.  I’m sorry) – have certainly raised name-calling to a low, profane art.

The Democrats’ implementation in Minnesota is intentional and well-developed:

Step one: Attach a negative personal label to an opponent that appeals to emotion and has nothing to do with governing.

Step two: Spend a few million dollars to make the label stick.

Step three: Have your candidates pretend to take the high road.

Although Ryan Winkler never got that memo.

Representative Winkler

DAMMIT!  I’m doing it again!  The slope of civility sure is slippery!

Of course, neither Lucking nor Martin can do anything else; Conservatives on Twitter know that neither of them has the brains or the information to debate at a level higher than name-calling…

…sorry.  I slipped again. 

Downey:

Unfortunately, this formula has proven effective for Democrats. It is now a rapid-response machine. As any Republican candidate steps forward to run for public office in 2014, within hours, usually minutes, Martin and Lucking flood the online and traditional media. Here is a recent sampling: “just another rich guy who likes to fire people”; “just another hypocritical, Gingrich politician”; “vulture capitalist and Minnesota Romney wannabe #2”; “anti-government government official”; “isn’t quite ready for the bright lights”; “failed businessman, failed gubernatorial candidate and right-wing talker”; “a voice for the hard-core right-wing, not hard-working families”; “an extreme choice for Minnesota.”

As I noted a few weeks back, it’s having a noxious effect on politics in Minnesota; I know personally of one potential candidate for significant office for which the specter of the ABM smear machine is a serious consideration; they seriously wonder if it’s worth the damage their families will take at the hands of the droogs that take ABM’s lies seriously. 

Minnesota voters deserve better, and even in politics the truth matters. Public officials and candidates put their lives and careers on hold to step forward and serve the people of Minnesota. Attack their ideas, fair enough; but build a messaging machine to insult them personally?

Now, let’s depart for a moment from Lucking and Martin who, let’s be honest, are just sled dogs pulling the way their musher tells them to. 

Who lets them get away with it?

The media brahmins in the editorial suites at 425 Porland, 5th and Cedar and 7th and Cedar like to wax rhapsodic about the need for civility, an informed electorate, and a better brand of politics – usually intoned while looking down their aquiline noses at (conservative) talk radio. 

And conservatives – most of talk radio and their alternative media included – almost invariably take the high road.  And the closer you get to the seats of conservative power, the less likely you are to see anyone getting their hands dirty. 

Ken Martin, Carrie Lucking and “Governor” Dayton getting ready for a meeting with Alida Messinger.

But ABM’s toxic sleaze campaign is paid for by Mark Dayton’s ex-wife and the group lavishly funded by his biggest supporters –  the unions and liberal plutocrats – and run by the significant other (girlfriend or wife – Lucking is cagey on her domestic specifics) of “Governor” Dayton’s Chief of Staff. 

And you will find not a f****ng word about it in the Twin Cities media. 

Not one word.

Rachel Stassen-Berger at the Strib, Bill Salisbury at the PiPress, the entire “Capitol Stenography Press Corps”, everyone is hands-off ABM.  TheMinnPost?  Hell, that’s turned into another DFL PR firm.

Nobody prodded the coziness of the relationship – one might call it “chain of command” – between Dayton’s office and the attack-PR firm his ex-wife pays his chief of staff’s girlfriend/wife/whatever to run. 

It’s another example of the media abdicating what some used to call its “responsibility”.

SCENE:  At the DFL headquarters, on Plato Boulevard in Saint Paul.  Chairman Ken MARTIN is sitting in his office.

(Carrie LUCKING of the Alliance for a Better Minnesota walks in.  MARTIN springs to attention, salutes).

LUCKING:  As you were.    (MARTIN sits as LUCKING settles into an overstuffed leather recliner)

LUCKING:  So what’s going on?

MARTIN:  Well, we’re hitting the GOP over their War on Womym, we’re telling Minnesotans that taxing the 1% will make them taller and smarter, and…

LUCKING:  That’s not what I mean, and you know it.

MARTIN: Beg pardon?

LUCKING:  Beavis is at it again.

MARTIN:  Beavis?  You mean Represntative Winkler?

LUCKING:  Yes.  His tweet yesterday embarassed the party.  Summon Bakk and Thissen.

MARTIN:  Summon Bakk and Thissen!

(Tom BAKK and Paul THISSEN enter the room.  They stand attention and salute LUCKING, who returns the salute.  They remain standing).

LUCKING:  Explain!

(BAKK smirks at THISSEN with a look of badly-concealed contempt).

THISSEN:  I don’t know, your highness.

LUCKING:  Doesn’t he know he must clear all utterances with me before making them?

THISSEN:  Yes, your highness.  Normally calling black conservatives racist names is perfectly acceptable.

LUCKING:  Right.  But not this time.  How about the media?

BAKK:  Only Rupar has written about it so far.

LUCKING:  Who gave him permission?

THISSEN:  Nobody that I know of.  But it’s mostly been damage control so far, so it should be OK.

BAKK:  And Michelle Malkin and Dana Loesch.

LUCKING: Who?

BAKK:  The Filipina Pole-Dancer and some chick who probably boffed Grover Norquist to get a job.

LUCKING:  Ah.

(Through the window, we see Ryan WINKLER walking toward the door.  He’s singing Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back”).

LUCKING:  Let’s get his explanation.

(WINKLER walks into room, salutes LUCKING – who doesn’t return salute. He awkwardly releases salute…)

WINKLER:  Your highness?

LUCKING:  Explain yourself.   You tweeted this yesterday:

WINKLER:  Well, in my defense, I didn’t know “Uncle Tom” was racist.

BAKK:  What?  It’s up there with the “N”-bomb! A white guy using a term to refer to a black guy as a cringing, servile piece of chattel?

WINKLER:  Well, there’s some debate about that.

BAKK:  Not in like 150 years.

WINKLER:  Well, my bad.  And since when is it bad to bag on oreos who vote Republican?

LUCKING:  That’s immaterial.  What the hell else have you been writing? (Takes out pearl-encrusted iPhone, starts flipping through WINKLER’s twitter account) Oh, what the hell…:

And if Virginia wants a battle flag back from their war to defend slavery, they can march to Minnesota and take it.

— Ryan Winkler (@RepRyanWinkler) June 25, 2013

WINKLER: What?

LUCKING: The Civil War’s been over for nearly fifty years.

THISSEN:  At least!  And the ACLU won!

LUCKING:  Look – give me your Blackberry.  I need to see what else you’ve got in your Drafts.  (WINKLER hands over phone).

LUCKING (Flips through phone):  Wait – calling Representative Hillstrom “Screechy McMenstrual?”

WINKLER:  Is that bad?

LUCKING:  Yes!

WINKLER: But she was derailing Representative Martens’ gun bill!

LUCKING:  Thanks be to Alida that never went out.

THISSEN (quietly):  Still, you save that sort of thing for Republican lawmakers.  Like Tara Mack or Mary Franson.

WINKLER:  Ah.  Point taken.

LUCKING:  Didn’t you learn anything at Harvard Law School?   I mean, the school that great minds like Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz teach at?

WINKLER:  Dershowitz?  Ah!  Good ol’ Schlomo the Money-Grubbing Skinflint!

(LUCKING, BAKK and THISSEN glare at WINKLER)

WINKLER:  What?   Wait – that, too?  You gotta be kidding…

(And SCENE)

I’ve been a little nervous about this for weeks.

Let me explain:

The Minnesota GOP is a shambles – but this state is full of conservative people.  And while conservatives are not the kind to stand around waving signs for any old thing, when you get us riled up, we turn out in droves, and we punch way above our weight.  One conservative out on the street speaking out is worth four or five figures of Alida Messinger’s money.

And the DFL knows this; they know that while they’ll get inundated with hard-working, well-informed, taxpaying folks when they propose radical and stupid legislation, that – unlike the people who turn out (and, often, are paid to turn out) for their events, they work for a living, don’t have unions giving them time off, can’t leave their lives on hold while they play politics for an extended time.

And so they’ve been proposing an avalanche of radical and stupid legislation:

• As I’ve noted (and will be noting today and tomorrow), a raft of gun laws almost bizarre in their absurdity.
• A rules change in the House seemingly designed to poke Republicans in the eye.
• A flip-flop on the “school shift” so seemingly clumsy it could come from a Betty McCollum speech.
• A groaningly extreme sales tax plan that only the Iranians would stick us with, one that not just tax experts and economists but even Democrats who work in the private sector think is stupid.

On the one hand, it’s the DFL getting control of the wheels and levers of power after ten years of incomplete control, which has to be a little like an ex-con looking for a hooker after ten years in jail.

Still, it’s made me a little nervous.  And I can’t be all wrong, because it makes Dave Thul nervous too.

There is only so much in the conservative activist excitement bank. You can get our people out once, twice, maybe three times in droves during a session, and after that fatigue as well as lack of vacation time come in to play. I can’t say with complete confidence, but it sure looks like the DFL is ramping up the outrage on issues they really don’t intend to make a full court press for-gun bans, tax hikes on the poor, tax hikes on businesses, ect. They are getting us to waste our ammo on targets that don’t matter, so we will be low on ammo when the real battle starts.

If there’s anything more insidious than overestimating your opponent, it’s underestimating them.

The DFL has to know that even in the best of times the GOP runs on volunteers (2000 and 2004) or the passion of activists who somehow scrape up the time and energy to move mountains (2002, 2010).

If you were Ken Martin Mark Dayton Alida Messinger, it wouldn’t be rocket science to see that the weakest link remaining in the GOP is the energy and passion level of the volunteers and activists that are, really, the party’s only real resource at the moment.

I listened to a news item on the radio the other night.  In the middle of a couple of DFLers talking about their primary contest today, the radio reporter inserted a clip of Minnesota GOP chairman Pat Shortridge commenting on the state of the DFL.

“It doesn’t matter who they run”, Shortridge said, “It’s a contest between Extremer and Extreme-est”.

And I thought – “is this really news?  Taking time out from a story about a DFL primary for a GOP official to bag on the DFL?  That’s not news.  That’s not Man Bites Dog.  That’s not even Dog Bites Man.  Party chairs bagging on the opposition is Dog Sniffs Dog”.

Thats’ what I thought.

Or I would have – had it happened.

But there was no radio story about Pat Shortridge bagging on the DFL, dropped incongruously into the middle of a story about a couple of primary races.

That’d be weird, wouldn’t it?

Naturally, it doesn’t end there.  I said there was no story including an incongruous quote of Pat Shortridge bagging on the DFL in the middle of a story about a DFL primary.

But for some reason, Tim Pugmire, of Minnesota Public Radio News – whose putative motto is “No Rant, No Slant” – in the middle of a story about the GOP primaries in the west Metro, opted to drop in a quote from MInnesota DFL chair Ken Martin about the nature of the GOP races:

Democrats offer a much different theory.

“What you’re seeing on the Republican side right now is truly a civil war, where you have an already pretty far right Republican party being challenged by people even more to the right who feels those Republicans haven’t done a good enough job being conservative up at the Capitol,” said Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota DFL Party.

So why is the opinion of Ken Martin – who was imposed on the DFL by Alida Messinger to cut out the intellectual middleman – of any news value in the middle of a story about a GOP primary race?  Is he offering any opinion that would surprise one about a GOP primary?  Does his insight – “Republicans are teh extreem!” – surprse anyone?  Again – it’s not news.  It’s dog licks dog.

Now, had Martin had said “I believe this race in face defines the Minnesota mainstream”, that would have been news.  Along with the next week’s story, “Ken Martin found dead in ditch with Alida Messinger’s stiletto marks on his throat and electrical burns on his genitals.”

But as it is, what Pugmire gave us was a freebie DFL mention which was of no news value, but certainly made for a nifty little free ad.

Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – is going to be one of the dominant themes of the both the Presidential and the Minnesota Legislative campaigns.

We’ve been subjected to a solid year of caterwauling about the Flying Koch Brothers – who donate a fraction of what George Soros has pumped into liberal politics over the years – and “ALEC“, which “donates” ideas and the model legislation, which is pretty much what the Teachers Union does (except the Teachers donate lots of money too).   And above all, we’ve been subjected to years of liberal do-gooder fronts like “Common Cause” telling us that money in politics is baaaaaad.

Why?

To draw attention away from the extent to which the Democrats are controlled – not “supported”, “controlled” – by plutocrats.

Here in Minnesota, the DFL has basically handed its entire message operation over to “Alliance for a Better Minnesota“, the PR arm of a network of fundraising groups, unions and, especially, wealthy liberals.  They’ve even put Ken Martin, former administrator of part of that network, in charge of the DFL – which is, really, a measure of how much the DFL has become the instrument of the will of a small pack of liberal moneybags.

More on that later.

With Obama’s support among the middle class, small business and blue-collar whites in free fall, and enthusiasm among Latinos, women with kids and the unemployed young stagnant, Obama really has only one important constituency locked up:   the extremely wealthy, and Hollywood.  And since the regular “big-money” donors – people who donate between $500 and $2,500 to the campaign – are bailing on Obama…

…well, you see the conundrum, here, right?  Where’s Obama going to go for money other than the people who still support him completely, and lavishly?

And with that said, who is he going to listen to when it comes time to try to enact policy?

Obama has seen enough Architectural Digest-type interiors in Park Avenue triplexes and Beverly Hills mansions, and on the block in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, where every house is owned by a billionaire, to develop an expertise in Louis XV walnut commodes and Brunschwig & Fils fabrics.

He’s also had plenty of chances to absorb the advice of the kind of rich liberals who like to give money to Democratic presidents. And the evidence that he has taken some of that advice is his initiatives on three controversial issues, each of which involves serious political risk.

Barone spells out how plutocrat money drove Obama’s positions on gay marriage, government-paid contraception and abortion (and the jamming the bill for both down on churches that oppose them on religious grounds), and…

The third issue is the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil produced from tar sands in Canada to United States refineries and create thousands of jobs in the process.

Earlier this year, Susie Buell Tompkins, John Kerry’s fourth-biggest money-raiser in 2004, picketed outside an Obama fundraiser at San Francisco’s W Hotel to protest the pipeline. She wanted Obama’s State Department to block it because she thinks tar sands production hurts the environment and the planet.

Our neighbors the Canadians, who are not unconcerned about the environment themselves, disagree. The pipeline’s promoters say it would produce 20,000 American jobs and would tend to lower U.S. gas prices.

Obama came out on Tompkins’ side and blocked the pipeline.

And enacting non-fiscal, mostly-social policy pushed by plutocrats is great politics, because plutocrats represent real people -right?

If the same-sex marriage reversal seems somewhat risky politically and the contraception mandate considerably riskier, the Keystone pipeline decision seems downright foolish politically. Voters tend to favor it by two-to-one margins — and if they’re not aware of it, the Republicans (and maybe the pro-pipeline unions) will make sure they are.

The priorities of the well-connected, donation-happy and frighteningly well-off will continue to drive Obama’s policy.

And when your liberal friends – and the DFL’s trained chimps like “Common Cause’s” Mike Dean – plump about the evils of money in politics, ask them to clarify who’s money they’re talking about.

When I saw that Eric Black – formerly of the Strib, now at the Minnpost – had written a piece entitled “Redistricting maps give DFL advantage in legislative races, but …”, I went “uh oh”.

I mean, Eric Black is no leftyblogging bobblehead.  He’s one of the Deans Of Minnesota Political Journalism (although to be fair Minnesota Political Journalism has more deans than the MNSCU system).

And while I don’t want to frame the redistricting in especially partisan terms, the fact is that the maps didn’t really adequately reflect Minnesota’s most important current demographic trend – people fleeing the failed DFL-controlled Twin Cities and Duluth, and moving to areas that actually work, which are universally and without exception GOP-controlled.   They bent over backwards to maintain the Twin Cities’ control over Minnesota politics, especially at the Congressional level.

Now – before I get into Black’s actual piece, here – let’s go over a tiny little bit of the theory of journalism.

Print journos know that the number of people who actually read any given point in a story drops, almost geometrically, the further into the story you get.  If 1000 eyeballs scan the headline, 100 might read the opening paragraph or two.  Of those 100, 10 might plod through the middle.  If there’s a jump, or if it takes longer than a few minutes to plod through, barring some immediate personal interest, 1 might get to the end of the piece (the numbers are made-up, but they’re neither gratuitously far-off nor conceptually wrong).

So copy editors write headlines that try to lure as many eyeballs as possible into the story – and generations of editors have groused at reporters “don’t bury the lede” – because in print news (and its red-headed stepchild, online journalism), the first impression may be the only impression you get.

And with that headline and its key message- DFL ADVANTAGE!!!! – ringing in my mind, I tucked into the rest of the story:

When the new decennial map of Minnesota’s legislative districts was unveiled in late February, most neutral observers said the DFL had won the battle for a favorable map. But the degree of the DFL victory may have been understated. If the map is destiny (which it isn’t, but it can change the odds), the DFL may have a decent shot at taking back control of both houses of the Minnesota Legislature in the 2012 election.

The degree of DFL victory “may have been understated”.

That’s the lede.  And ledes are important for that portion of Minnesota’s population that reads past the headline – which, as we established in the headline, says the maps were a big win for the DFL (“but…”).

And who – other than those “neutral sources” – is behind this claim (and I’ll add emphasis):

DFL State Chair Ken Martin recently told me that the way his party scores the partisan lean of the new districts, the DFL has at least a slight advantage in 73 House districts and 34 Senate districts. If (a big “if” unless and until it happens) the DFL candidates were to prevail in those districts, it would give the party a substantial (73-61) majority in the House and a bare (34-33) single vote majority in the Senate.

So after a headline and a lede that proclaim that the DFL was the big winner, we get the source – Ken Martin.  The Chair of the DFL, after coming from “Win Minnesoita“, which is part of the DFL money shell-game that pays for all the DFL’s attack ads (and thus, all of its messaging, period).

That’s it.

So to the reader’s perception, the story really says THE DFL HAS A HUGE ADVANTAGE (according to the head of the DFL).

And we know this…

To be precise for the total political wonks in the audience, the DFL has developed a methodology that looks – precinct by precinct – at DFL votes across the last many elections. (As you can imagine, the partisan breakdown of a precinct can vary from year to year and from race to race within a given year.) The DFL method massages the numbers into what it called the DPI (Democratic Performance Index) of each precinct. And now that they know which precincts go with which state House and Senate districts, they can calculate which districts have a DPI of greater than 50 percent, which means that the DFL should have an advantage in winning and hold that seat.

…because the DFL did a bunch of math…

Before you get too excited (or upset, depending on your partisan preference) you should know that:

a) Martin didn’t release the map of the DFL-leaning districts nor the numbers on which the calculation is based, so skeptics cannot check his statement;

b) The Pioneer Press, which published a similar calculation, reached a significantly less favorable DFL number on the Senate map. (The Pi-Press analysis did indicate that the DFL has the map potential to take back control of the House and gain ground – but enough for control – in the Senate); and

c) Everyone that I interviewed for this post assured me that, while the map is important, it is neither the only nor even the most important thing.

…which was likely b*llsh*t, and even the media knows it.

But it’s worth, apparently, putting as an unvarnished headline and lede.

Why?

Because it’s one of the narratives the DFL wants spread far and wide; their success is inevitable.  Don’t ask why – they won’t tell you.  Just keep repeating it, Dems.  Just interenalize it, conservatives!

The DFL’s main hope this election is to drive down conservative enthusiasm – which slaughtered them two years ago – and try to create some sort of bandwagon effect on the left.

Prediction:  An upcoming Minnesota Poll or Humphrey Institute survey will show that A MAJORITY OF MINNESOTANS (from a sample that over-counts DFLers 3:2) APPROVE OF DAYTON’S JOB AS GOVERNOR.

After the Franson “story” broke the week before last, the DFL thought it was onto a Don Imus moment. And they needed one – their somnolent legislative caucus

They were disappointed when the story started to fade – even most DFLers can tell when context is being waterboarded.  It was dropping off the radar last week when the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” stepped in to demand an apology and try to fan the flames among their droogs.

It didn’t work. The protests planned for Rep.Franson’s lawn drew, according to one report, three droogs.

But the droogs on the street are afterthoughts to the DFL. They have them in higher places.

Jon Tevlin – aka “Nick Coleman 2.0” – seems to have gotten his marching orders, “file an indignant piece about Franson”, in by deadline,which was apparently back when the DFL was still flogging the story.

And Tevlin’s piece hits all the points Alita Messinger and Ken Martin desperately want to be hit:.

 When Rep. Mary Franson compared people who get food stamps to animals in the wild, beholden to humans who feed them,

Huh?

I wonder if Tevlin even knows how bizarre that is.

she was being blissfully ignorant of a growing number of people who live in a certain region in Minnesota.

Namely, her neighbors.

Really, Jon Tevlin, ace reporter?

And how do you know what Mary Franson is “ignorant” about?  She lives there, works in daycare, campaigns there every two years.

I’m going to suggest she’s less “blissfully ignorant” than Jon Tevlin is invincibly arrogant-enough to write columns in first-person omniscient.

Before she made jokes about people on food stamps, or SNAP, she might have asked around, or just looked at the website for Todd County, which is in her district. There, she would have seen a recent report that both food stamps and medical assistance are up dramatically in Todd County.

Soaring, under her watch.

And here, the ethical reader has a dilemma: does the Strib employ a columnist who is stupid enough to believe a state legislator’s “watch” has direct impact on poverty in her county?  Or do they employ one who’s so cynical and in the bag for the DFL propaganda machine that he writes garbage like this in hopes that the readers are too stupid to know any better?

To my mind, it’s a toss-up.

The assumption behind Franson’s logic is that people who get assistance do so because, like animals used to being fed, they get lazy.

No.  They get dependent.  “Lazy” is when columnists crib their chanting points from “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” .  “Dependent” is when you honestly don’t know another way than being on the dole.

Compare and contrast:  “Jon Tevlin is too lazy to dig beneath his own arrogant, smug, entitled, DFL-pimping preconceptisons”, versus “Jon Tevlin is dependent on DFL / ABM chanting points for his material on this issue, to the point where he has no idea how to find the real facts about the issue”.  See the difference?

OK.  Maybe not in Teviln’s case.   Because as we see, he’s both:

But the report from Todd County Social Services shows quite the opposite. The unemployment rate is relatively low, 5.8 percent.

Now, I get confused – is that “on Mary Franson’s watch”, too?

People are working, and working hard, but the fact is they just don’t get paid very much.

Right.  There’s a recession going on.  Perhaps Jon Tevlin has heard?

Need, Rep. Franson. Your constituents, about 8 percent of them, need help because the businesses in your district can’t or won’t pay them enough to live on, and can’t or won’t provide them with health care.

And here’s where both dependence and laziness rear their slothful, indolent heads.  Franson was talking a general principle; Tevlin is talking details – the temporary needs of people having hard times.  Which, I’m sure Tevlin would find if he weren’t dependent on ABM for his chanting points, the GOP broadly supports.

Franson probably thinks these people are slackers, too, no-goods leeching off the public.

And Jon Tevlin “probably” wrote about a third of this column.

Except for this next bit:

Franson might not know these people — her neighbors — very well, but I do.

I lived in Todd County and graduated from high school there. Yes, some of the people who took assistance were lazy or drunks. But mostly they were people like the old woman across the street, whose husband had died many years ago, or like the people who toiled on poor dirt farms, or waited tables at the local restaurant.

Yes, they were even people like my dad, who after working for 40 years at Honeywell had a brain aneurism and had to rely on Social Security, pension, and food stamps for a while.

My dad accepted food stamps because he believed in responsibility, responsibility to feed his kids even though he couldn’t work.

In other words, “my story about real, genuine, acute need – and, more accurately, the emotions it churns up – trump your statement of high-level principle”.

It’s a logical fallacy.  It’s an argument based purely on emotion – which, to be fair, is the only kind of argument Tevlin’s DFL masters can make.   You can’t top it, the logic goes, so you have to just shut up, or appear cold and heartless.

It’s crap, of course; nobody, least of all conservatives, denies that human circumstance and human frailty creates need.  Nobody, least of all Franson, has said anything about changing that.  But the larger point – that welfare does create dependence, and it does – gets obscured by the inflammatory emotion, both of the “can you top this” story and, behyond that, the defamatory slander of the DFL/ABM’s chanting point.

Yes, I said “Tevlin’s DFL masters”:

The war on women apparently now joins the war on the poor.

Two narratives for the price of one.  He’s lazy and dependent, but he’s thorough.

Keep going, Strib.  Has anyone thought about what happens when your paper becomes nothing but a DFL news release ‘bot?

A lot of you Strib employees will be on food stamps, for starters.

We’re getting close to election season.

And Minnesota’s left-“leaning” “grassroots” astroturf organizations – Common Cause, Take Action Minnesota, Alliance For A Better Minnesota, and the various unions are following suit with doing what their various funders are paying them to do; trying to spin news, facts and info to get people to vote DFL in the upcoming elections.

Now, as we noted during the 2010 election cycle, these groups – especially Alliance for a Better Minnesota – are lavishly funded by liberal plutocrats, and always have been…

…even back before Citizens United started evening the playing field and allowing conservatives the same access to soft money that the Dems have always gotten from their union and 527 supporters.

Which is like complaining about plate tectonics; what are you going to do about it, one would be right to ask.  Political money is speech; we conservatives live by that ideal, and we’ll have to learn to prevail by it.

It’s not that the money buys so much messaging that is so very very irritating – indeed, depressing, if one cares for the future of this society, beyond narrow partisan politics.

It’s that the messaging it buys is so often not merely devoid of fact or defining context, but so cynically so that one can only think their only motivation for the entire campaign is “to repeat enough complete bullshit often enough to fool enough of the stupid and gullible to keep us in power”.

We saw this in 2010 in Minnesota, when these groups and their “useful idiots” (Lenin’s term, not mine) in the Twin Cities media and lefty “alternative” media, pounded a couple of non-factual or almost criminally-context-deprived points home with almost experimental-psych-class-material mania; the idea that “Tom Emmer had two DUIs” (he hadn’t; he’d been arrested and pled down to “Careless Driving”, 20 and 30 years earlier) and that he’d (campaigned for lax punishment for drunk drivers” (also a lie; Emmer was proposing a change in the implied consent law that is supported by a broad, and bipartisan, range of figures, at least in part because current law discriminates so completely against people who can’t afford lawyers.  Emmer would have changed that).  The campaign helped convinced, I’m going to guess, just a shade over 8,000 of our stupidest, most incurious, lemming-like neighbors to vote for a superannuated playboy with drinking, drug and depression problems and a record as America’s worst senator instead.

In other words, slathering Minnesota’s dimmest, least-curious citizens with b*llsh*t worked.

And they’re going long on the tactic this year.

Under the dual rubrics of my “Minnesota’s Ministry of Truth” and “Chanting Points Memo” categories, I’m going to start cataloging the broad, rich, lavishly-funded vein of pure fiction (at best) that the DFL is banking on to try to stem GOP fortunes in Minnesota this fall.

“Most Minnesotans oppose Voter ID” – This one came from Greta Bergstrom, a spokes-bot for “Take Action Minnesota”, an activist non-profit that claims a Wellstone-ian pedigree, but whose inner workings (say an acquaintance with knowledge of their front office) would fit in better in Pyongyang; “Nobody wants photo ID”, she tweeted not too long ago.  That was about the time – go figure – that Survey USA was showing Voter ID with 3:1 support (71-29) among Minnesotans, even among self-identified liberals.  Which was, by the way, the poll with the best news for Voter ID opponents.   Ms. Bergstrom apparently believes that if she and her group repeat it often enough, just enough of the addled will buy in.  It’s worked before, after all; it’s why we have a Governor Dayton!

“The Stand Your Ground Bill” would allow citizens to shoot people because they felt like it” – It’s bad enough that pathetically addled leftybloggers grind their way through this bit of nonsense; they have no power even among lefty media types.  But when you have Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom – words fail me – misrepresenting the law in re Stand Your Ground, to try to draw out a wedge (to try to counter all the various wedges that the GOP have identified for this coming season), you know that the idiocy moves depressingly high on the food chain.  Backstrom may or may not be taking orders from Alliance For A Better Minnesota (and thence, likely as not, Media Matters) like the likes of Bergstrom, Carrie Lucking, Ken Martin and Denise Cardinal – but he’s basically playing from their one-note sheet music.

“Right To Work States Have Lower Per-Capita Incomes Than Union States!” – This, you hear from any number of different lefty-bots, is a great reason to oppose the “Right To Work” Amendment, which (says Survey USA) Minnesotans favor by a 55-24 margin.  Of course, they never mention that non-Right-to-Work states are, inevitably, coastal “Blue” states with – it’s true – higher standards of living, but much higher costs of living as well.  Of course wages are higher in New York City!  But do you think a carpenter in New York buys himself a better quality of life for his money in NYC than does one in, say, Dallas?   A carpenter in Texas will actually be working, as opposed to the New Yorker – but I’m on a tangent now.  The fact is, unions don’t make overall wages across an entire geographical region bigger or better than the same wages in the same jobs elsewhere (beyond the obvious job-by-job wage comparisons).  They do, however, contribute to the higher cost of living.

It’s a stupid argument – but since it’s aimed at stupid people, it works.  Depressingly enough.

“Republicans Are Waging A War Against Women!” – Notwithstanding the fact that no significant Republican has said word-boo about the subject on any sort of policy level.  Apparently it’s one of those things where Republicans want to ban contraception even if they don’t even know it.

Just as we do – we’re told this by our betters at Minnesota Public Radio – with race!  Because…

“Republicans speak in racist code words!” – And those words are so coded that we apparently haven’t the foggiest we’re saying about them.  This one got on Minnesota Public Radio on Thurday morning, on the Keri Miller show.  Miller – who is becoming the Lori Sturdevant of MPR – ran for an hour with the premise that the GOP’s racist message is so very tightly wound into the very language that Republicans (but not Democrats, natch) use that we don’t even realize we’re doing it!.  Because when Democrats talk about “urban” problems, they mean problems that occur to collections of buildings, apparently, but when Republicans talk about pizza, it’s because Italians in New York used to hate blacks, and white people use “pizza” as a code for that sort of hatred.  Or something.

“Voter ID would disenfranchise masses of voters” – I hate paperwork as much as much more than the next guy – government paperwork more than most.   And this really is a tangent, but isn’t it reasonable for society to expect someone to exercise the most absolutely de minimis requirement for personal administration – the precise paperwork one needs to have to cash a check, pick up a prescription, get a drivers license, hold a job legally, set up a bank account, buy Sudafed, get a cell phone, get into a bar before you “look over 21” – to exercise a right for which over a million Americans have died?

But that is a tangent, because many states do require voter ID, and they vote just fine.

Anyway – it’s a lie.

“Voter ID is like Jim Crow” – That predictable little apertif is from my new “representative”, Rena Moran.  Moran may or may not be a perfectly fine person, but she’s oblivious (or has not be told to be blivious, or she just flat-out knows she benefits from ongoing fraud) to the Democrat party’s history of election rigging – but she is in fact exactly wrong. Voter ID – along with a vigilant electorate – helps prevent the sort of sham elections that characterized Jim Crow.

“Governor Dayton has a Jerbs Bill!  The Republicans don’t! They must not want to put people to work!” – Because as everyone knows, jobs come from government!  If Tim Pawlenty and George W. Bush had just pushed laws requiring companies to hire people, there’d have been no recession!

Of course, even many Democrats know better than that.  They believe that a bonding bill that’ll pay for a few billion in construction work – or Obama’s “Shovel Ready” jobs, as if even a sizeable minority of Americans still work with shovels, or even in construction – is the answer!

Of course, the GOP is pushing legislation to cut business taxes and regulations and make Minnesota’s business climate healthier for business, especially small business, which is battered and bleeding from Obama’s regulatory orgy

And Onward!  – What else have you heard?

One of the things I predicted on election night back in 2010 was that, out of power, the DFL would revert to whatever forms of power it actually had with more passive-aggressive vigor.

One of those forms of power was the “bureaucratic complaint”.

The DFL has created a small industry of bureaucratic complainants.  Groups like “Common Cause” essentially exist, at least in part, to complain about non-DFL politicians and politics.  Of course, “filing complaints” is one of the few areas where the DFL allows do-it-yourself-ism in politics.

The reason, of course, is to create a buzz in the compliant media; the goal is to create the possibility that a voter – inevitably poorly-read, ill-informed, one who still believes anything the mainstream media says, especially about politics – will hear “corruption” and “Republican” and think “Hey, Republicans shore must be KerrRUPT!” and cease thinking right then and there.

That the complaints are pretty much inevitably dismissed?  Even if the mainstream media were to hypothetically report it as aggressively as they did the original complaint – and they never, ever do – the DFL knows that with at least a few voters, the damage is done.

And so the “Ethics Complaint” against Senator Dave Thompson of Lakeville got big play in the media – but the fact that there was no there there?

The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board has dismissed the Complaint filed by DFL Chairman Ken Martin against Senator Dave Thompson. In a letter dated January 26, 2012, the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board stated there is no basis for a claim against Senator Thompson. In the letter, Executive Director Gary Goldsmith stated, “Under the authority delegated to me by the Board, I have reviewed the complaint and concluded that it does not provide a sufficient basis for the commencement of a Board Investigation.”

(Echo)

On Monday, January 23, 2012, DFL Chairman Ken Martin filed a Complaint against Senator Dave Thompson (R-Lakeville) with the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board regarding an alleged failure to disclose payments made by the Republican Party of Minnesota.

Weasels chew things.  Ken Martin files spurious complaints about Republicans.  The circle of life.

Senator Thompson said, “I complied with all disclosure requirements. Therefore, I am not surprised by the Board’s decision. Still, it is gratifying to see a clear statement from Mr. Goldsmith concluding that the Complaint does not even provide a basis for an investigation.”

And yet for Ken Martin -the former executive from “Win Minnesota”, which collected contributions from plutocrats and unions to run an attack PR campaign against Tom Emmer – it’s “mission accomplished”.

Because somewhere out there, in a trailer park in New Prague, a gas station attendant with a DUI and a couple of misdemeanor domestics pled down to “disorderly conduct” but whose vote counts just as much as yours does is now thinking “G’huck – Dave Thompson and the GOP sure must be corrupt!”

And that’s a form of power you can’t take away from the DFL no matter how many elections you win.

For all of the talk about the GOP’s debt, Tom Scheck at MPR notes that the DFL is also the red:

There has been a lot of attention given to the finances of the Republican Party. It should be noted, however, that the DFL Party is also facing a debt.

DFL Party Chair Ken Martin said the party has a debt of roughly $210 thousand heading into 2012. Martin said the party had a debt of $750 thousand at the start of 2011.

Not huge news – this blog reported on the $750K debt years ago.

The funny part is reading the comments in the MPR piece.   You get the impression that a lot of DFLers are shocked that the press would bother with the DFL.  Further proof, I think, that Democrats expect the media to be on their side, when push comes to shove.

It’s part of the reason Twin Cities DFLers seem to be unable to meet conservatives in a ratoinal debate, ever; their entire worldview is formed by schools, colleges and a media that barely recognizes alternatives to the left exist.

Brian Lambert wants someone to do the reporting for him, in re my piece last week on the Koch flap:

Mitch says he’s friends with the two names involved in the incident. So call them up and have them, you know, emphatically, explicitly deny on the record what everyone is tittering about.

Heh.  Brian’s a kidder. He kids.

Nobody’s denying anything to me – partly because I’m not calling anyone to ask anything.  At this point, I don’t much care, because:

• All I care about is the way forward for the GOP.  There’s a much bigger story in this flap than a bunch of high-level canoodling – and the MNGOP needs to focus on its future – not on feeding the Media’s agenda. Speaking of which…
• Any digging I do do, will not be for the benefit of the mainstream media.  Any of them.  The Twin Cities’ mainstream media is nothing but the PR arm of the DFL.  Don’t believe it?  Compare the “rectal exams” the mainstream media gives to GOP candidates compared to the gauzy, soft-focus fluff jobs that Barack Obama and Mark Dayton got and continue to get.   Major, serious quesitons about Mark Dayton’s alcoholism and mental health were “covered” by one single Strib piece run eleven months before the election – which is about ten and a half months before anyone outside the wonk class was paying attention.  This is the template for all Twin Cities media political coverage.  Pass on details about GOP rhubarbs to the media?  Why not call them in to Ken Martin while I’m at it?
• Mr. Lambert? If you can’t show me some evidence that you never, not even once, said about Clinton and Lewinski “It’s just about sex!  Moooooove on!”, then really, we have nothing to talk about.

Minnesota’s redistricting process – mandated by constitutions all up and down the governmental food chain to reallocate our congressional and legislative representation after accounting for changing populations – usually goes a little something like this:

1. The party in the power in the legislature draws maps that favor their desired outcome, more or less.
2. The opposing party draws maps that favor their desired outcome, more or less.
3. Either neither of them wins legislative approval, or the sitting governor (generally) vetoes the legislature’s final product.
4. The process goes to the courts, which draws its own map, imposes it on the state, and leaves behind some legal precedents and pseudo-legal guidelines (“preserve communities of interest”, “keep districts compact and contiguous”, etc, etc) for the next time through the process.
5. Lather, rinse and repeat.

And we’ve followed that basic process this time.  The GOP-controlled legislature, led by Rep. Sarah Anderson, drew up a congressional and a legislative map.  According to Kent Kaiser of the “Draw The Line Minnesota” (henceforth DTLM) “Citizen’s Commission on Redistricting” (which I”ve written about at some length in the past – about the commission’s sham nature, Kaiser’s protestations about the commission’s process and DTLM’s opacity, and in the end about the joke they played on us all), the Legislature’s map hewed pretty closely to the precedents set over the past forty years or so of court decisions on the subject.  It did seemingly create a map with four safe-ish conservative seats, three safe DFL seats, and a fairly swing-y district.  The DFL association of various non-profits checkbook advocacy groups that does all the ground work for the DFL cried foul, of course.

Wrongly, I suggest.  The parts of this state that lean DFL – Duluth, the Twin Cities, the Range – have shrunk, at least partly due to people moving away from them and to the parts that actually work.  Which are largely GOP-leaning; the exurban Metro from the third tier of ‘burbs on out, the Rochester area, the drive-through land between Maple Grove and Saint Cloud.  Places with responsible, frugal, in-their-limits municipal government and good schools.

“Draw The Line Minnesota” (DTLM) submitted its congressional and legislative maps next.

And then, finally, last week, with much ado, the DFL’s current caretaker, Ken Martin, released the DFL’s official submissions (congressional and  legislative), to a chorus of catcalls…

…from the DFL.  The plan lumped Betty McCollum and Michele Bachmann into one large (and conveniently DFL-dominated) east-metro district – without telling McCollum:

The Minnesota DFL Party submitted a congressional redistricting plan Friday that would place Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum into a district with GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann…The plan has prompted McCollum’s chief of staff to send an e-mail criticizing the proposal.

 

“The DFL Chair and his high-paid lawyers have proposed a congressional map to the redistricting panel that is hyper-partisan and bizarre,” McCollum’s chief of staff Bill Harper said in the email. “Their plan ignores the judge’s redistricting criteria and it insults established communities of interest, particularly in the Twin Cities East Metro. Congresswoman McCollum has faith in the judges on the panel to draw fair political boundaries that will serve the best interests of all Minnesotans.”

That answers the question “is Bettymac capable of thinking a thought that isn’t blessed by her party’s higher-ups, anyway.

Dave Mindeman of mnpACT wonders:

I can’t decide for sure what the DFL strategy was here. Obviously, the elimination of Bachmann from a safe district was the main goal, but alienating your solid incumbents is an unnecesary side bar. As far as numbers go, a tweak to shore up Walz and another tweak to make Cravaack a little more vulnerable would have accomplished pretty much the same split guaranteed….a 5-3 DFL majority. The DFL lines work to that 5-3 with eliminating Bachmann….the tweaking of current lines would have been a 5-3 without Cravaack.

Mindeman, like a lot of DFL pundits, accepts it as a matter of faith that they’ll beat Cravaack next fall, in much the same way that they accepted that he’d get 30% of the ballot in 2010.  But that’s not really the subject of this post.

No, it’s that I, too, wonder what the DFL’s strategy is.

And to explain the strategy, I think I’m going to refer to the newly-minted “Berg’s Twelfth Law of Hyperbolic Empiricism”.

To wit:  “The humorous or hyperbolic explanation of “progressive” behavior is likely, in direct proportion to the recklessness, extralegality, deviance or confrontiveness of the “progressive” actions being analyzed, to be the correct explanation“.

And knowing that, the hyperbolic reason – “they are trying to release something so far removed to the left that the courts, applying their traditional Scandinavian conflict-aversion to the issue, in trying to split the difference between the DFL and Legislative plans, will find “the middle” is about as far to the left as the DFL really wanted in the first place”.

I’d put money on it.

Every once in a while, when I drop some factoid or another into a “debate” with a lib, I’ll wrap it with a bit of a verbal end-zone happy dance; “Sometimes”, I’ll say, “reality is just plain conservative”.

With that in mind – the five-member Judicial Redistricting Panel has ruled on the rules to be used in redistricting…

…and it’s generally good news for those who support following the rules as they’ve sprung up over the past forty years or so:

For the first time, the panel said the metropolitan area should be regarded as 11 counties, not seven. As a result more exurban counties could be tied into districts in suburban and urban areas.

That was an approach Republicans favored, said Elizabeth Brama who represents the Republican party on redistricting. She said it’s unclear what effect the change will have.

“I don’t think it’s a question of one party or the other benefiting,” Brama said. “I think it’s more a question of just fairly representing where the people in the state of Minnesota live and how they organize themselves.”

Which, to be honest, is what the GOP has been shooting for all along; as Dr. Kent Kaiser has pointed out in numerous forums, the plan passed by the Legislature – really the GOP majority – did a good job of sticking to the letter and spirit of the body of law that this state has developed in its decades of sending these questions to the courts to decide.

It was the DFL that’s gone partisan; Mark Dayton vetoed the Legislature’s plan for purely partisan grounds.  (Actually, I suspect it was less “partisan” than that the unions, Alliance for a Better Minnesota and other groups that control the DFL didn’t give him permission to pass it).  And a group of groups that, by any rational measure, call at least some of the DFL’s shots – the groups behind “Draw The Line MN” – took their shot at skewing the system to favor “communities of interest” which, inevitably, are DFL constituencies.

Now, I’m going to do just a bit of place-keeping her for future debates.  I’ll add emphasis to this next bit, from Ken Martin, former head of “Win Minnesota”, one of the groups that funneled money from unions and liberals with deep pockets into the DFL’s campaign coffers, especially for their sleazy, toxic campaign against Tom Emmer last year.  He is the current chair of the DFL.

DFL party chair Ken Martin wasn’t surprised by those changes.

“I think it’s pretty pro forma and certainly establishes a lot of the same principles that were in place ten years ago,” Martin said. “Again, without discussing this further with my team and being able to look at it more in detail, I can’t comment any more than that. But on the surface I think it’s fine. I don’t think it give any party an advantage over another.”

I’m emphasizing those passages now, for later.  Because you just know that if the Judicial Panel draws the lines based on these rules, the DFL and the groups that call its shots – the public employee unions, Alliance For A Better Minnesota, the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits, the League of Women Voters, Take Action Minnesota and Common Cause – will be screeching exactly the opposite, and demanding that you forget history in the bargain.

Because it’s a fairly simple thing – if you follow the rules set down in the past several court-decided apportionment decisions, the GOP should benefit; the parts of the state that support the GOP have grown, while the DFL parts have shrunk.  This represents many things – but we can not discount the fact that one of the key “communities of interest” are “people who moved to get the hell away from the cesspools the DFL has created” in the Twin Cities and Duluth.

The judical panel’s deadline to produce a redistricting map is February 21.

Just curious: how is last Saturday’s column by Lori Sturdevant anything but a campaign donation to the DFL?

I’m not going to fisk the whole thing.  Fisking Sturdevant has become a bit like fisking Nick Coleman; after a few years, you start to feel like you’re writing the same bit over and over again.

It’s got all her usual hallmarks; the gauzy, soft-focus mash note to some DFLer or another (Taryll Clark, in this case), the hook-line-and-sinker swallowing of some progressive group or another’s “non-partisan” line (Common Cause and Draw the Line, in this case)…

…and of course, the double standard.  Always, always the yawning double standard.

We meet our old friends “Draw The Line Minnesota”:

But the court’s final authority hasn’t kept Draw the Line Minnesota’s 15-member, multipartisan commission from behaving as if it had the power to draw the lines (hence its name).

In short, it’s showing what an independent redistricting commission would do, if Minnesota had been wise enough to create one — as 12 other states have.

And later

Draw the Line is a project of the Midwest Democracy Network, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and the Minnesota Council of Non-profits, and is funded by the Joyce Foundation and the Bush Foundation. Its commission includes a mix of known devotees of each of Minnesota’s major parties, plus a handful of that rare breed — true independents.

Why doesn’t Sturdevant favor the reader with any numbers?

Because they show how disingenuous she’s being.  The “multipartisan”  commission includes 2 Republicans, 1 “Independence Party” member and 12 who are either DFL activists, activists for groups that are closely aligned with the DFL, or people who work at institutions that are little but feeders for the DFL.

So to Sturdevant, “Draw The Line Minnesota” – which is bankrolled by four “progressive” pressure groups – and its “multipartisan” yet almost completely liberal-dominated commission – is “independent”, while…

…well, you could see this coming, couldn’t you?

More telling: Top GOP operatives and money-raisers have formed Minnesotans for Fair Redistricting. It’s a sway-the-court group that’s hired top legal talent — including former state Chief Justice Eric Magnuson — to argue for a GOP design.

Got that?  Draw The Line, the multi-state non-profit group funded by liberals with deep pockets, is suddenly a plucky underdog, while Big Bad GOP is riding into town on a steamroller powered by stacks of Jacksons.

Apparently Sturdevant thinks that David Lillehaug and the rest of the DFL Lawyers Koffee Klatsch are working pro bono?

Draw the Line Minnesota is a buck-a-plate beanfeed compared with the GOP’s steak-and-lobster operation.

Does Sturdevant have any numbers to back up the comparison?

Of course not.  Nobody does.  Other than an audible from Mike Dean on “The Late Debate” the other night, none of the players have disclosed their funding, and we have precious little basis for fact-checking any of them at this point.

We only know one thing; whatever Sturdevant writes will be calibrated to serve the DFL’s interests.

And, despite insinuations by conservative bloggers, it is not a DFL front group.

Ah.  Well, that settles it then.  Lori says so.

I mean, sure; it’s literally a fact (as far as we can tell) that none of these groups are literally part of the DFL.

And John Wilkes Booth was not a Confederate soldier, but they shared enough goals where it didn’t really make a difference in the end.

And Lori Sturdevant isn’t literally a flak for the DFL, in the sense that “Ken Martin signs her paychecks”; their purposes just happen to be 100% congruent.

Minnesota is heading for a battle over redistricting that may just make the just-passed budget battle look like a stroll in the park.

And, just like with every such battle lately in Minnesota, there is at least one “non-partisan” non-profit claiming to have the interests of average, non-affiliated Minnesotans at heart.  There are a couple of reasons for this; for starters, the Minnesota DFL is a largely impotent organization;

In the 2010 elections, of course, it was “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and a small circle of other groups – “The 2010 Fund”  – a group that funnelled millions of dollars from unions, the Dayton family, and their cronies to try to win the election for Mark Dayton (largely by running a toxic sleaze campaign).  Their power in “progressive” circles is remarkable; Governor Dayton has brought a fair number of ABM’s staffers to work in his office; the former head of the “2010 Fund”, Ken Martin, now runs the DFL.

And for the redistricting battle?  The new astroturf group is “Draw The Line”, an organization that spans several states where the Democrats are fighting for their organizational lives, including Minnesota.

So who’s behind “Draw the Line?”  And what are they after – and by “they”, I don’t mean “Draw The Line”, so much as the people behind them?

More next week here on Shot In The Dark.