In Praise of Alida Messinger's Millions

The bored dilettante ex-wife of bored dilettante Gov. Mark Dayton recently wrote a $500,000 personal check to a political pac supporting democratic women in elected office, the usual litmus tests applying, of course. Much was made of this by those on the right, given the endless hypocrisy of the progressive left when it comes to money in politics. Mostly the local left was silent on Twitter and MC saw no blogging about what would otherwise appear to the sanctimonious set as an egregious example of why suffocating government regulation of speech is essential to what they conceive of as a fair and open political system. It remains an astonishing truth that the left never learns from experience or mistake; how else to explain their continued support for the failed Obama presidency?

At any rate, Alida Rockefeller Dayton Messinger's contribution is to be praised, not clucked about or worried over. The professional left,  to quote Robert Gibbs, will faint when MC claims that money in politics is not a problem. Post-Watergate the group think was that money indeed was very much a corrosive element in politics and the First Amendment could be compromised because of good intentions. It's ever thus on the left. And yet there is no empirical evidence that the cloying web of regulations (Minnesota, typically, is ridiculous in its micro-managing of political speech) has had any positive effect on our political discourse or system. Of course, Obama declined to accept public funding in 2008 and the usual do-gooders were of a piece in their silence. The right consistently critiques itself far more than the left, another indication of the strength of its ideas.

Liberalism is profoundly simple: a few axioms and off you go. Trim and adjust as needed but never actually modify your thinking. This brings to mind what Talleyrand is said to have remarked of the Bourbon restoration: "they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

Money in politics is, after abortion, the best example of this. Without intentionally trying to do much violence to their positions, liberals mindlessly believe that more money in politics is very bad (please ignore the lack of evidence on this point) and hence they are on the side of the good, the true and the beautiful in trying to limit it. Except they are not.

Money does not buy political office. Ask Governor Whitman or Senator Fiorina. Or does it? Someone check with Gov. Dayton. MC jests.

Those on the right, generally speaking, do not share the low opinion of the voter that, generally speaking, those on the left hold. They are not robots or idiots, swayed like so many consumers of products advertized on television. Again, speaking generally, people value their vote and make the best decision possible. Sometimes this works for republicans, other times for democrats. But kindly spare us the insufferable meddlers who insist they know best how to fashion the type of system in which the rest of us should exercise our political freedoms.  Alarmingly, and all too often unrealized by them, their approaches resemble an incumbent protection racket. Ranked choice voting, which allowed the loathsome Dave Thune to remain on the St. Paul City Council, is but one example of their misguided foolishness.

Naturally, a distinction has to be made: contributions to candidates are still limited in ways that donations to causes are not. Messinger could not have given half a million dollars to Mark Dayton's campaign outright. That's fine; unlimited campaign donations raise questions in ways that funding issue based causes simply do not.

MC, however, wants to hear nothing more from its friends on the left about ALEC, the Koch brothers or Citizens United.

The disclosure canard is another failed response to the mistaken idea that money in politics is a problem. People have a right to donate to the causes of their choice without forced disclosure designed to do nothing more than inhibit that right in the first instance. Who funds the deeply unrespected Common Cause Minnesota? No one knows because it does not have to disclose. Nor should it. Nor should any other group if it does not wish to if allowed by law. Those laws should not be changed by those who wish to silence others under the rubric of transparency.

The left has long since lost its moral bearing from years past. Not so long ago it would be repulsed at judging people by race. Now it insists on such as a matter of getting past race. It would support the defenseless; now it insists the humanity of such is but a personal choice. Not so long ago it would see government dependence as bondage, a form of prison. Now it sees such as the very role of government and is annoyed with the backlash from such indentured servitude. They know better, you see.

In 1958 the state of Alabama attempted to force the NAACP to disclose its members and donors. Is there any question where the left would have been then? Now, however, it would appear that they would take a different approach. Not out of principle but out of expediency. Expeditious but unprincipled is a handy summary of the current day left.

Senator Mitch McConnell recently wrote in the Washington Post about such matters. Click here to read it.

Alida Messinger's right to write a check of any amount to any cause she pleases should be supported by those in both parties who understand both the constitutional rights in play and the stakes involved. The reaction of silence and embarrassment on the left shows just how much work remains to be done.




Hat tip to Tony Sutton for having created, circa 2010, the eternal phrase "bored dilettante."

Agenda 21: Because There's More Room For Crazy

Thought hemp, raw milk and ending the Fed was the sum of craziness currently infiltrating the Republican Party of Minnesota? Think again. Agenda 21 is the next big thing in making a political party entirely irrelevant in Minnesota. Why can't it ever be the DFL, though?

Wikipedia defines Agenda 21 as follows: "Agenda 21 is an action plan of the United Nations related to sustainable development and was an outcome of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. It is a comprehensive blueprint of action to be taken globally, nationally, and locally by organizations of the UN, governments, and major groups in every area in which humans directly affect the environment."

In other words, another meaningless gesture by the most useless organization known to man in its long history. Think of the Club of Rome & how we were all supposed to be dead now because of starvation due to overpopulation. Think of the tiresome climate alarmists who, in the 1970's, said we'd be dead because of another ice age. Yet some are now taking laughable liberal panic premises seriously?

At the MN GOP state convention in May there were several individuals handing out flyers (chaos is in the eye of the beholder, apparently) warning about Agenda 21. This is the type of detritus that accompanies the fringe Ron Paul movement. MC awaits the rush of scared party officers, spineless elected officials and unprincipled future candidates to pander to the Agenda 21 lunatics. After Ron Paul, the bottom's the limit!

Readers can Google Agenda 21 themselves and digest the information available before coming to their own views. What concerns MC is that the topic increasingly crops up in various Tea Party gatherings to which republican officials are asked to attend. Not clapping in the face of a crowd of trained seals is hard to do, even for those few Minnesota republicans with principles. MC isn't optimistic that they will call out this group for the bat guano crazy types they manifestly are. Not only has MC seen this movie before, it's like some malevolent deity has put it on loop tape.

But don't take MC's word for it. For the first time ever, MC links to The Blaze. Yes. An entry just this day was posted there that can explain so much. Click here to see, not stop, the insanity.

A lack of courage, awareness & what the Republican Party does and does not stand for has brought us to this sorry state. What the "get over it" accommodationists fail to realize is that by standing idly by, mutely observing what the new feral political cats have dragged in, we cease to be a party capable of winning elected office and, instead, become hostage to the denizens of the Star Wars bar.

Five Months Out Race Called For Klobuchar

Oh dear, this won't do, will it? Blois Olson's Morning Take newsletter yesterday reported a story by Minnesota Public Radio which quoted two nationally known & respected political pundits as saying the race by Rep. Kurt Bills (15 years a high school teacher of economics ya know!) against Senator Amy "Mom" Klobuchar was all but over before it even started. Edamame republicans were gracious in their utter vindication although the Ron Paul cult members who hijacked the party in order to give this sock puppet the endorsement insisted they were somehow to blame for this unavoidable blast of honesty. Yes, that is, apparently, the color of the sky within their borg. Of course, had they any association with honesty none of them could support crack pot and friend of David Duke Ron Paul. But liberty! Or something.

Saner minds knew full well that pundits Larry Sabato & Jennifer Duffy were only stating the most obvious of facts: the weakest candidate the MN GOP could run against Klobuchar got the endorsement. Not the cheesy ripped-off-from-the-late-Sen. Wellstone bus (cults have zero imagination) nor the moronic Econ 101 slogan will do anything to avoid the electoral abattoir.

Besting the always to be regretted scolding to "get over it," real republican activists have done something better: they have moved on. None of them will work on the senate race and for good reasons. Senator Mom™ has already locked up all the corporate money in Minnesota. And as MPR reported: "Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report says while Bills' association with Paul is helping him now, it will cost him support in the long run. 'I mean it almost guarantees that Bills will not get a single independent vote and will not get any moderate Republican support,' Duffy says." Moderate? Try rank and file Jennifer.

But the soon to be announced "Team Minnesota" will give all real republican activists around the state an easy and helpful way to assist in retaining the MN GOP majorities in the Minnesota Senate & House. The state party is not only useless and broke, its become the leading edge of Vichy republicans. Elephants are said to have long memories and karma is said to be a bitch. More, no reasonable person expects the party to have anything to do with keeping the majorities. Certainly the Senate & House caucuses do not.

Team Minnesota will attempt to augment efforts around the state where needed in particular races. Team Minnesota isn't particularly interested in the internecine warfare currently in progress in both chambers. It only cares about returning a majority of republicans to each of them; to one of them in a worst case scenario to stop the brain dead liberal take over of the state. The lesson of the last legislative session is black and white: republicans don't deserve to win but democrats don't deserve to govern. Minnesota could only hope to be as politically vibrant as next door Wisconsin but instead is merely constipated. Yet much mocked Minnesota continues to think itself superior to its neighbor. Quite the reverse.

More will be said about Team Minnesota in the coming weeks. In the meantime, one can hear Kurt Bills on the Late Debate by clicking here. He appeared Sunday last, June 3rd and his performance gives no comfort even to those inclined to magic thinking. Remarkably, he admitted that the much promised Ron Paul money spigot had not yet opened. Funny, that. The Paul zombies, he explained, are busy trying to get Mr. Hemp & Raw Milk a speaking slot at the national republican convention in Tampa this August. And then what? They'll donate all their drug money to Bills? Hardly. Ron Paul will not endorse Mitt Romney either. Or if he does, it will only be the most grudging possible in order to speak his dogma one last time: a swan song of lunacy, anti-semitism and paranoia. The money still will not flow to Kurt Bills; his puppet masters already know the race is lost (someone should really tell teach). That money best belongs in a PAC controlled by pere et fil Paul. Like the Kims of North Korea, the Pauls are in for the long haul. Long Haul Pauls.™

The insufferable wave of new comers to the MN GOP, who pretend they alone know something about liberty and the constitution, will fall flat on their cultish faces. The senate campaign will limp along but only as something to be put out of its misery. Others, of course, will be blamed for the political incompetence but that dog won't hunt.

Like a mother unable to part with her stillborn child, the Minnesota cult of Ron Paul will continue to hover around the Bills campaign for the next five long months, an advertisement for what happens when closed minds hold sway. Like those who know when to bury their dead, however, regular republican activists will flee to the races around the state that will keep the legislature safe from that party which has not had a new political idea in more than five decades. The contrast between the two could hardly be greater or of more importance.