minnesota – Page 4

MN Democratic party attacks Catholics to get to Protestant.

The Protestant being Dan Hall, who is a candidate for Minnesota State Senate – and as far as I can tell, an Evangelical pastor. Which is not the same as a Roman Catholic priest. This is kind of important, as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota apparently thinks that all Christian clergy look alike to them. The short version is that the below ad was mailed out to attack Hall, and in a fashion that completely misrepresents both Dan Hall and the Roman Catholic Church. the National Catholic Register calls this “The Most Anti-Catholic Political Ad You’ll Ever See,” and it’s hard to argue with that:

Continue reading MN Democratic party attacks Catholics to get to Protestant.

Meet Joel Demos (R CAND, MN-05).

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: Joel Demos has, by his own admission, a monster of a job ahead of him with regard to MN-05 (Keith Ellison’s district). We talked about his race today.

Joel’s site is here: and let me talk a bit tactically for a moment. The peculiarity of the MN-05 seat is that while Keith Ellison gets a lot of money for it, he also passes out that money to other Democrats as quickly as it comes in. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don’t want to even imply that there would be anything wrong with that; but Ellison had only 209K CoH at the end of the 2nd quarter of this year. He’s that low because he doesn’t expect to have to spend more than that; and Joel getting to even a significant portion of that kind of money will throw Ellison’s campaign off stride. That’s why I personally threw in twenty bucks from my own discretionary income, which is something that I never do idly. Sometimes you have to pony up, and this is I think one of those times.

So go for it.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Pawlenty skips SRLC for MN NG troop return.

Well, this is gratifyingly not 2012-related:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty will miss a major Republican gathering next month of possible 2012 GOP presidential contenders and instead will attend a welcome home ceremony for troops returning from Iraq, a Pawlenty spokesman tells CNN.

The two-term Minnesota governor, who is considering a bid for his party’s presidential nomination in the next election, was scheduled to attend the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans.

[snip]

Instead of going to New Orleans, Pawlenty will appear at the April 10 welcome home ceremony for the Minnesota National Guard’s 34th Red Bull Infantry Division. The approximate 1,200 troops are finishing a long deployment to Iraq. Pawlenty was also at the unit’s sendoff.

I was contemplating going to SRLC myself, but my excuse for not going is much more prosaic: I can’t afford to. Which is life.

Anyway, as you may remember, I had a chance to utterly ignore time limits and ask him a couple of questions at CPAC; he’s stereotypically Minnesota Nice. It’s also gratifying for this story about him picking greeting his state’s troops over a political meet-and-greeting to be not put out as a partisan political issue.

After all, that’s my job.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

CPAC 2010: Three minutes with T-Paw.

Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota was swinging through Bloggers’ Row there, so of course we had to chat. Nice guy; very centered.

I was trying to think of some way of saying that I’m sorry that my little bit of extra monopolization of the Governor’s time was an inconvenience to a couple of staffers (I know some of those people, after all) without saying I’m sorry for the monopolization itself (because I’m, well, not); but then I realized that all I had to do was just write that out. As a writing strategy, it seems… remarkably straightforward. I should try it more often.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Al Franken bravely goes after GOP staffers…

So much for ‘Minnesota Nice.’

…apparently, the negative fallout from going after actual Republican Senators was a bit much for the man, and of course he can’t just act like a mature federal legislator. Al Franken, remember?

Anyway, via Drudge here’s the latest loss-of-control:

Franken invited [Sen. Bob] Corker to his office to discuss an op-ed that Corker penned in a Tennessee newspaper opposing an amendment Franken offered to a defense bill. The measure gave the employees of defense contractors who suffer rape or sexual assault at the workplace the right to sue in court.

The meeting quickly deteriorated when Franken began berating one of Corker’s aides, according to GOP aides familiar with the incident. Franken’s sally was so harsh that Corker told Franken to lay off his aide and direct the comments at him instead.

Franken’s tough approach came as a surprise because Corker scheduled the meeting to mend fences after Franken confronted him about the op-ed during an angry exchange on the Senate floor.

Franken also went out after another GOP staffer – female, of course – for the supposed crimes of Republican Senators. You almost have to feel bad for the decidedly junior Senator from Minnesota: after all, it’s been an entire year since the election, and he’s still just Al Franken. And he’s starting to subconsciously grasp that putting the title ‘Senator’ in front of his name won’t change that.

Moe Lane

PS: In the unlikely chance that he ever reads this: make me respect you, Senator Smalley.

Crossposted to RedState.

Three new races to look at.

Drawing on and expanding from Jim Geraghty’s summary:

IA-03. D+1. Leonard Boswell is the incumbent (first elected 1997); Cook currently does not list the district as in play (Likely Democratic). Former wrestler Jim Gibbons (no campaign website yet) has just announced; he’ll be facing former National Guard chopper pilot Dave Funk in the primary.
MN-01. R+1. Tim Walz is the incumbent (first elected in 2006); Cook currently does not list the district as in play (probably because the Congressman won handily in 2008). Former state legislator (and lightning rod) Allen Quist has declared; he’ll be hammering Walz on the latter’s support of the ‘stimulus,’ cap-and-trade, and health care rationing.
CT-04. D+5. Jim Hines is the incumbent (freshman); Cook currently lists the district as in play (Likely Democratic). Rick Torres (no campaign website yet) joins Rob Russo, Dan Debicella, Rob Merkle, & Will Gregory as competing for the Republican nomination.

Yup, the 2010 campaign season’s started. Time to start paying attention to your own, local races…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Pawlenty not running for third term.

Via NTCNews:

Sources: No 3rd Governor Term For Pawlenty

Two sources have confirmed that Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty will announce that he will not seek re-election in 2010.

The sources confirmed to WCCO-TV political reporter Pat Kessler that the announcement about Pawlenty’s future plans will include an announcement that he will not seek a third term.

The general assumption seems to be that this means that he’ll be running for President in 2012. All I know is that, at the rate things are going, he may be out of office before the 2008 Senate race gets resolved…

Crossposted to RedState.

Gov. Pawlenty Mousetraps the DFL.

Made it look pretty easy, too.

See, this is how you do it.

Governor Pawlenty has been stuck with a Democratic-controlled legislature that in more or less stereotypical fashion has been ignoring the fact that we’re in the middle of a very nasty recession; they’ve been trying to boost both taxes and spending, and Pawlenty kept telling them ‘no.’ So, the state legislature attempted to, as Kimberly Strassell put it, ‘run out the clock’ and put the governor in a position where he’d have to call a special session to get a spending bill that he wouldn’t be able to veto.

Alas for the Democrats: live by legislative maneuverings, die by them.

Upon receiving the last spending bill, [Pawlenty] announced that he would exercise the power of “unallotment,” which has been on the books since 1939 and which has been used four times. Under it, the governor is allowed to “unallot” (take away) any state spending for which there is no money to pay. Panicked, the DFL passed tax legislation to cover its blowout spending bills, 10 minutes before the session’s end. Too late. The governor said he’d veto the bill and would not be calling back the legislature to do any more mischief.

Mr. Pawlenty is now free to strip $2.7 billion from state spending to balance the budget. Tax hikes are dead.

(See also Hot Air.)

The Democrats are making the usual fake-populist sounds about blaming the governor for any cuts in spending – which would be a lot more impressive a threat if it wasn’t as inevitable as the sunrise – and the governor is remarkably and pleasantly uninterested in worrying about whether the Other Side is whining about him. What’s more important from Pawlenty’s point of view is that he now has the ability to not only halt spending in Minnesota, but reverse it. And he’s apparently willing to let the voters in Minnesota decide whether doing so was the right call.

Works for me. Good job, Governor Pawlenty.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

So, why Reid’s unseemly haste in Franken retreat?

Background here, here, and here. It’s odd, particularly since the time frame that Reid’s talking about is almost certainly going to be less time than it would take to actually resolve the election. Call me nuts, but it’s almost as if Senator Reid had been tipped the wink that somebody in Franken’s employ was about to find himself in trouble. Potentially campaign-ending trouble.

But I couldn’t possibly begin to speculate what that trouble could be.

Crossposted at RedState.