The Future of Minnesota's Republican Party

Republicans lost their majorities in both the Minnesota House & Senate a mere two years after taking control of both chambers for the first time since the early nineteen seventies. Put another way, so great was the incompetence of leaders in the house & senate that they failed entirely in the shortest time possible. Thanks for that although I'm feeling unsatisfied without at least one ritual political Japanese-style suicide. Now there's a foreign tradition this conservative would support adopting here at home. Not surprisingly, no one takes responsibility for Tuesday's disastrous election outcome. Yet why should we expect a display of responsibility when none had been demonstrated in the prior two years?

Neither the senate nor the house caucus seemed to have figured out a message with which to convince voters to send them back in the same strength as in 2010, let alone avoid the wipeout they experienced. But for so long they avoided the obvious problems of running on their record: Obama may have gotten away with it (barely, it kills me to say) but they never could. Their incompetence was on a par with the Pete Hegseth campaign who only figured out it was over when they saw the Kurt Bills bus parked inside the convention hall last May. Funny thing, reality.

The caucuses, though, when not infighting, are hothouses of small bore political intrigue. Brodkorb's dominion. Monkeys, greasy poles. Tedium and immaturity. Thanks to both of them costing us the legislature. We're just bloggers, a friend of Ian's once told me, in the eyes of staff caucus. I think I had pride of place in the list of bloggers house caucus staff thought the most deranged. Now how was I to understand myself? It was an interesting temperature take of the hothouse. Clearly, nothing improved there and our losses this election must be owned by them, to sound like a progressive. We call it responsibility, don't we on our side? Can we avoid applying it to ourselves? So thanks Ian Marsh, Tom Freeman, Greg Peppin & Kurt Daudt. Oh: P2B products/services suck, I'm told. How about another less self-interested vender? Wait: for competent I'll take self-interested.

Then there's the matter of the ballot measures: how does voter photo ID fail? When you have losers promoting it as a partisan issue thereby making the Dayton/Carlson tee vee ad effective. This is akin to throwing yourself on the floor and missing.

Traditional marriage also failed because mailing it in doesn't cut it for advocacy. My friend Andy Parrish pretty much mailed it in; he failed to recognize the power of 300,000 door knocks.

This is not to say we should be lectured to by those who themselves contributed in an oh so personal way to republican destruction in Minnesota. Local media love such types, especially if that type is desperate for a PR comeback. What media petting zoo? I love my friends very much. I'm the definition of loyal. But I'm also honest, coming from South Dakota, where such wasn't a big deal, it was the norm. Must be the prairies and their sheltering sky.

Minnesota appears to be a land of agreed upon deceptions.™

To be fair, this is no better than the milquetoasts in my party who stood by while Ron Paul supporters swept the republican party of minnesota in order to undermine it. Were this warfare, you would be humanely shot for treason. Hyperbole is not my style but there you have it, my last sentence.

We have no one, currently, to run credibly against Sen. Franken nor anyone against Gov. Dayton. Our chances are better with the former than the latter and I think early bird nerds may agree with me. But I know nothing: I predicted President Romney on October 18th.

I do know that the future of the republican party is almost beside the point. Every activist I know has taken, well, my advice and moved forward on those structures and legal entities that our friends on the left have done so well to create.

We need to do the same because the Republican Party of Minnesota is now beside the point. To stay with that structure is to die.

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.

Rep. Kurt Bills Is A Ron Paul Republican

Hand picked by Ron Paul's lead representative in Minnesota to run for senate against incumbent Amy Klobuchar, Rep. Kurt Bills was always dishonest in denying his ideological association with this fringe, unserious crackpot. Pushed at one point in the endorsement battle to describe his kind of republicanism, Bills bleated that he was a Kurt Bills republican, a heretofore unknown sort of republican, notable, apparently, for its shape shifting capabilities and breathtaking insincerity. Ciphers now had their own kind of republican.

Bills handily won the endorsement of a Paul dominated MN GOP state convention on the second ballot. Both challengers--Dan Severson & Pete Hegseth--declined to appear with him on stage as he accepted the endorsement. Even for the slow of thought in the Minnesota republican party (and various sundry elected officials who endorsed him) this refusal to be tainted by a Ron Paul sock puppet should have served as a profound and disturbing warning.

But no.

In the ten days or so since Hennepin County Commissioner & RNC man Jeff Johnson grossly misjudged the current state of affairs and lectured those at the convention who reject Paulism to "get over it," (the phrase has taken on a mocking life of its own on Twitter) a few things have become increasingly clear. Far from this simply being another endorsement battle with differing wings of the party needing to come together, the 35% of the delegates who were not members of the cult (or their enablers: well known republicans who fawned to get their picture taken with Paul and lost the respect others had for them) saw clearly this development was different in kind, not degree. That people as bright as Johnson could otherwise be so comprehensively obtuse in their assessment only added to the general discouragement.

Perhaps this could get their attention:

"If there’s one thing that the 2012 campaign has taught us about Ron Paul, it’s that he is a bald-faced liar. Not just a run-of-the-mill liar like most politicians, but a liar so shameless that only the most slavish of devotees could maintain respect for him."

Well yes and some of us were unfortunate enough to see the slavishness up close and personal for two days which, Inception-like, felt like a month.

The quote is from James Kirchik who has written extensively on the liar Ron Paul. Could any of our so called leaders in and out of the party be bothered to read his work? MC has already provided many links to his work at The New Republic (which Paul zombie Terry McCall emailed was a washed out and discredited magazine).  The quote above comes from a review by Kirchik of a recently published fatuous and myopic book on the so called Ron Paul revolution (the very definition of preposterous). MC understands why dullards like McCall can't be bothered with the truth but what's the excuse for so many others? Political malpractice? Kirchik is deadly in his assessment:

"The lies [the author] can’t bring himself to acknowledge, let alone criticize, concern the notorious newsletters that the libertarian guru Paul published from the late 1970s through 1996, the bulk of which I uncovered and exposed in a 2008 article for The New Republic. The full contents of these “bigot-grams,” as the Dallas Morning News referred to them, need not be fully rehearsed here, but needless to say they are replete with ugly statements about gays, blacks, and Jews, not to mention endorsements of a variety of quack scientific claims, support for the right-wing militia movement, and defenses of such loathsome individuals as David Duke, Marge Schott, and Bobby Fischer.

Paul’s acknowledgment of his involvement, or lack thereof, in the newsletters, evolved from a defense of their contents in 1996 to telling CNN in December of last year, “I’ve never read that stuff.” A former secretary of Paul’s told The Washington Post, however, that Paul “would proof” the newsletters, a claim seconded by another erstwhile aide. It is frankly inconceivable that Paul was unaware of what was being produced in his own name and to his massive personal enrichment."

The entire review can be read by clicking here.  But why re-raise what MC has raised previously?

Because in recent days the mask has slipped and what those with a functioning cerebral cortex knew all along was revealed for all to see: Kurt Bills is a Ron Paul republican. In fact, MC isn't sure Ron Paul himself is a republican; he's more of a cult-based cottage industry preying upon the paranoid and the conspiracy minded. He suggested his followers could well vote for Cynthia McKinney for president in 2008 although ultimately he himself endorsed the Constitution Party candidate. Only by the most dishonest--that word again--use of republican could one claim Paul to be.

Bills has endorsed son of the great leader Rand Paul's budget blue print. Really? Not the respected and deeply serious Paul Ryan's? Of course not: you're dealing with a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ron Paul movement. Bills won't have an original idea of his own this election because the borg will not let him. This is so banal, so underwhelming and tawdry that calling it a Faustian bargain would be an upgrade. Kabuki doesn't deserve to be denigrated by employing it as a metaphor either. Don't bother to raise the obvious creepy nepotism: all is well within the cult. The secret knowledge possessed of the laughable "liberty" types is by nature not available to the masses and so passage of it from father to son is in the order of things if Americans are eventually to take the red pill and see the matrix for what it is. MC does not exaggerate.

Bills also announced, in a tip-credit sort of dis-associative moment, that foreign aid should be capped and four federal agencies should be eliminated altogether. Who can doubt this is what Minnesotans have been clamoring for? Who can doubt that these positions have radically changed the senate race in Minnesota and has Amy Klobuchar on the run? Pretty much everyone outside the Bills Borg.™ But no matter.

Rather than ascertain what an underfunded candidate can do to maximize his appeal to the voters of Minnesota, and raise desperately needed money, Kurt Bills has mocked even his supporters of last resort by clearly signaling he's a willing tool in the programmatic Paul movement. Winning is not of the slightest concern to them. When both parties are the same, how could winning matter in any fundamental sense? Bills will be told to run, and consequently will run, a campaign to highlight the many ludicrous positions espoused by Ron Paul. Think of it as the largest state based infomercial in the history of modern politics.

Don't think of it as anything that can help Minnesota republicans keep either of their majorities in the House or Senate. Something new to help in that effort is being born currently and will be announced in greater detail soon. But it's in spite of Bills, not because of him.

The usual suspects on Twitter are trying to fall in behind Bills, to castigate in a friendly manner those who see what's truly going on and to pretend they've seen this movie and how, with a bit of extra effort, the ending can be the same as before. But they haven't seen it and the ending won't be as hoped.

The only real question is whether Bills will lose to Klobuchar by less or more than twenty points and how much damage to what's left of the party is done by those who hold it in contempt.

When Republicans See John Marty As Their Own

What do you call it when Minnesota republicans and democrats together sell out their respective parties' core principles?

The Vikings stadium.

In an astonishing public display of craven opportunism, toadying and corruption the Minnesota House of Representatives and then Senate bucked every opportunity to stand for that which they claim. Democrats, naturally, believe there is too much corporate welfare and "giving" away to the rich. There is much not to be believed in this. Republicans, equally naturally, believe in market forces and reduced government spending. Here too there is much not to be believed in.

Yet at their fundamentals, this is indeed what both parties are and then some. The natural tension between the two defines our local, state and national politics. How was it then that we saw those members in each party who, apparently, are foolish enough to want to act on such principles, easily pushed aside and a toxic stadium bill passed in each chamber with room to spare?

A Twitter account gave one a ringside seat to the brawl. MC could be mistaken but has there ever been this high a profile legislative issue in Minnesota history that was given such intimate scrutiny by the public, the media and the members in real time? Amendments to the bills were an adventure in policy discourse alone. Humor abounded, as did barbs and snipes. Local media, in MC's view, did an exceptional job in tweeting the facts, the corrections, the ups and downs in the process.

Perhaps what was most fascinating about this sordid process was how the low rent politicians prevailed over the principled ones in both parties. It puts one in mind of that (relatively) famous Nora Ephron quote: "No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up."

Time and again the implausible case was made that a many-times-over millionaire needed the taxpayer money of Minnesota. Concerns about the funding source of the state's share of the project were more or less dismissed out of hand. Gambling, that hideous thing, made numerous appearances in numerous Faustian guises. The DFL's Eddie Haskell, Rep. Ryan Weiner, er, Winkler flipped when his masters told him. MC gives him credit, though, for advancing the truly bogus notion that the give away of taxpayer's money to the already wealthy was for Minnesota's "quality of life" and not because of the economics of the deal. This must be akin to what liberals think of the Constitution's commerce clause: either a nuisance to be ignored or a concept stretched past the point of recognition. Either way no credibility is left. The creepy rent a mob known as the Welfare Rights Committee protests against Rep. Mary Franson but not this? Mark must have told Alida (or Carrie? has anyone seen those two together?) to keep them in check.

The House debate was a debacle. Chaotic, venal and at times pathetic, those watching could only marvel. Interestingly, the pro-stadium types let only a few of their supporters talk, for which MC could be forgiven for thinking they'll be amply rewarded. The others were grinding the sausage.

What was left of real conservative republicans in the House did their level best. So too did liberal democrats. At one point Sen. John Marty gave an impassioned, reasoned argument against the bill so sounding in GOP principles that those listening had to check to make sure the identity of the speaker. This is the political equivalent of an out of body experience.

Particularly painful were the tweets of House caucus staff. MC understands they have to bleat out the leadership line but must they pretend to superiority while doing so? It only makes them look worse than they are, which takes some doing. MC also understands that "activists" are looked on by them with indifference at best and with scorn usually. That's ok; it would be cruel to wake them up. Oh, and can someone tell Chas Anderson that that Kurt Zellers rocket she was going to ride to the governorship? It ain't happening.

Having been passed by the House, a similar but different bill was then take up by the Senate. It's no exaggeration to say that the Senate debate over the bill stunned even the most jaded, thereby exonerating by excess the heretofore thought of low point in Minnesota politics (or was that when Jesse Ventura was elected governor?).

At any rate the discourse was so egregious MC suggested in a tweet that Sen. Geoff Michel be waterboarded. No apology will be forthcoming. Actually, others should be added to the list.

In due course the mandate of Heaven was passed by a wholly owned senate that represented no one except those who had bought them off. When RINO's, liberal democrats, Ron Paul supporters and other flavors of both parties are in agreement, something genuine is occurring. That occurrence is the selling out of principles; real, genuine principles. Not every vote, not every issue, invokes those principles in the way the vote on the Vikings stadium did. But that vote did. We have been tested and we have been found wanting.

Perversely for republicans, a majority of the vote in both the House & Senate were democrats. As Sen. Dave Thompson (who has taken a few whacks from MC) tweeted: Who is the majority party? Indeed, Senator.  Credit where due though he had the support of others who are well known if you have been following the battle. He was hardly alone. Pro-tip Dave? Don't give media interviews as if you were.

Enter Nick Coleman, who weighed in with an exceptional J'accuse. It can be read by clicking here. If you're reading this post, you must read it as well. MC doesn't agree with all of it but that's not the point. The point is that MC and many, many other republicans do in point of fact agree with it. To his credit, Coleman on Twitter heaped praise upon those republicans who stood true to their principles. As MC does to the John Marty's of Nick's party. Coleman & MC are now following each other on Twitter.

Passing strange.

Sen. Gretchen Hoffman, who gives hope to those of us who believe in leadership, tweeted that the Senate debate was so much "bread and circuses." That was enough for Sen. Julie Rosen, our Medea when it comes to republican principles. Photos show her in victory as buffoonish as the buffoons with whom she poses.

DFL Eddie Haskell's manufactured quote that this is about Minnesota's quality of life ("Robin Hood in reverse" as Ralph Nader called it), is endlessly telling. Don't look to him to understand it though. Robots only know their programs.

Instead, those who thought this would improve the state in which we live are deluded. What the supporters of this stadium bill have delivered unto us is not Minnesota but Illinois.

The worst of it is that they don't even know it.

But we do and for now that must suffice.



This post is dedicated to Susan Closmore.