KK Takes on Negative Campaign Ads..At Least One Side

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/101681008.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUsZ

"So Mark Dayton has called for an end to negative campaign ads. That's rich.

Dayton's pose as the White Knight of Minnesota Politics is the height of hypocrisy. While he claims the high road, his family is funding the Alliance for a Better Minnesota (ABM) below the radar screen. ABM is a sophisticated attack machine that's conducted a smear campaign against Dayton's Republican opponent, Tom Emmer.

ABM's dirty work has just begun. As of mid-July, the Dayton family had poured $851,000 into two front groups that funnel money to ABM, while Big Labor's hefty contributions to those groups brought the total to over $2 million.

If Dayton doesn't know about ABM's down-and-dirty modus operandi, he's the only Minnesota politician who's clueless on that score. ABM is a communications hub that exists to push out negative messages on behalf of DFL candidates like Dayton, so they can keep their hands clean.

ABM cut its teeth in 2006 and 2008 with blisteringly negative ads aimed at Tim Pawlenty and Norm Coleman. In crafting its battle plans, it had access to well-known national masters of negativity. That's because ABM is the Minnesota branch of ProgressNow, a national activist network with affiliates in 12 states.

ProgressNow is a vital component of a strategy hatched in Colorado in 2004 by a small group of ultrawealthy left-wing political activists. Their goal: to turn America's red states blue by creating a highly coordinated network of lavishly funded nonprofits to promote "progressive" candidates and issues.

ProgressNow's director is Bobby Clark (Howard Dean's online guru); MoveOn.org founder Wes Boyd was an early leader. The group's scorched-earth approach to politics is best summed up by an internal memo -- leaked in 2008 -- that called for defining a Republican candidate "foot on throat."

ProgressNow board member Ted Trimpa says "you have to create an environment of fear and respect" in dealing with opponents. "The only way ... is to get aggressive and go out and actually beat them up [politically]."

A new book, "The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado," tells the story of ProgressNow and the movement that gave rise to it. According to its authors -- Denver journalist Adam Schrager and former Colorado Republican legislator Rob Witwer -- ProgressNow CEO Michael Huttner and his group's affiliates "wake up in the morning with one question on their minds." In Huttner's words: "How do we get earned media to advance our agenda and to criticize our opponents?"

"We'll go after them [Republicans] very starkly and in a way that draws emotion," Huttner told Schrager. "It's too hard-hitting for some politicians to say these things, even if they really want someone else to say them."

The result? In Colorado, where ProgressNow is best-established, "the Democrats have outsourced the politics of personal destruction to a bunch of nonprofits," said Jon Caldara of the state's Independence Institute.

ProgressNow's fingerprints are all over ABM's anti-Emmer attack ads. FactCheck.org -- operated by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center -- labeled "false" ABM's claim that Emmer had voted against a bill to make "corporations and CEO's" pay higher taxes. The ad's claim that Emmer's vote "created" a huge state deficit is "pure nonsense," according to FactCheck.org.

Regarding ABM's "misleading" ad claiming that Emmer sponsored a bill to "reduce penalties for drunk drivers," FactCheck.org had this to say: The bill "actually sought to prevent suspected drunk drivers from losing their licenses and having their vehicles seized ... before they have been given a chance to defend themselves in court."

Thanks in part to Dayton family cash, ABM has blanketed the state with these distorted messages. As of Aug. 10, ABM's anti-Emmer TV ads had appeared 2,400 times, while the one positive pro-Emmer ad that ran had appeared a mere 330 times, according to the Campaign Media Analysis group.

ABM is also using Dayton family money to wage political guerrilla warfare. It has worked to keep the boycott against Target Corp. in the headlines, allegedly on grounds that Emmer -- like Barack Obama -- does not support gay marriage. ABM bought Facebook ads targeting 57,000 Target employees, and launched a poll of Target employees and Target Facebook "fans" to stir up animosity against the giant retailer. Its goal: to bully and intimidate corporations that donate to probusiness candidates.

In his call to end attack ads, Dayton lamented "the whole attack ad approach where you try to destroy someone personally to defeat them politically." "The antidote," he said, "is for voters to say, 'No.'" Even then, "you're not going to stop some people from operating out of the sewer."

You can say that again. But what if, as in Dayton's case, "some people" includes your own"

KK not around but Slick Nick takes on the political babe gig

This is an excerpt from Nick's column found here:

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/101193564.html?elr=KArksc8P:Pc:Ug8P:Pc:UiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUr

"The summer is coming quickly to an end, but not quickly enough. Summer is the silly season in politics, and Minnesotans are being exposed this month to a clown-car full of silliness that makes us long for Labor Day, the resumption of school, and the more substantive and serious political discussions we need to have before election day.

What can you do, for example, with the frat-boy video posted on the Internet by some of the fun-loving guys in the Minnesota Republican Party that made the claim that Republican women are hot babes while Democratic women are dogs?

The video (which has been removed from the website of the Senate District 56 GOP in Lake Elmo) was denounced by all the usual suspects on all sides of the political divide, repudiated in such muscular terms that it would be understandable now if someone got the mistaken impression that Republicans have abandoned any claim that GOP women are attractive and admit they are just as unappealing as Janet Reno.

Just to be clear, that is not what the Republicans are saying. Ever since Mamie Eisenhower and Barbara Bush, however, the Republicans have seemed a bit defensive about the women in their party. Take Tim Pawlenty: The governor is married to "a red-hot smoking wife," he has said, which is the kind of crack that might get a Democrat a wife who would just be hot under the collar. And Sarah Palin? Her handlers apparently worried so much that she wasn't smokin' hot enough for prime time after McCain picked her as her running mate in 2008 that the first thing they did was take her on a prettification tour of Macy's, to the tune of $150,000.

But there is nothing new about the grating and drooling GOP video, which mimicked a lot of dorm room posters. The 90th anniversary of women's suffrage, Women's Equality Day, will be observed Thursday, but sexists have never stopped barraging women with messages saying they are needed at home too much to vote and they are too gosh darn cute to worry their pretty little heads about politics.

Women in politics have always been stereotyped: Hatchet-faced suffragettes, mannish policy wonks, bra-burning harpies: From Susan B. Anthony to Eleanor Roosevelt to Bella Abzug, Hilary Clinton and Elena Kagan. Many of the history-making women over the past century have been Democrats because, with the great exceptions of slavery and Civil Rights, the Democrats have been at the forefront of social and cultural change. A lot of people don't like that, especially in the ranks of conservatives uncomfortable still with the role of women in the national discussion.

Here is Ann Coulter -- one of the right's favorite hotties, who says she has never met an attractive liberal woman -- on the subject of women and voting:

"It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950 -- except Goldwater in '64 -- the Republican would have won if only the men had voted."

Yes, and if women didn't vote, it would make the United States just like ... Saudi Arabia. Go back to the kitchen, Ms. Coulter, and cover your pretty little head.

Actually, men also voted (by a slim margin) for Barack Obama in 2008, so Coulter's bombast is out of date. But the part that really makes many women ugly to Republicans is that most women usually vote for the other side. In the last presidential election, women split 56-43 for Obama over the GOP candidate, John McCain. And single women -- the unmarried, divorced, separated and widowed -- went overwhelmingly for the Democrat, 70 percent to 29 percent.

That's why radio bully Rush Limbaugh rails against "feminazis" and seems to long for the day when gentlemen smoked cigars after the women retired to the kitchen so the guys could discuss politics and sate their oral fixations.

I almost feel sorry for the Minnesota doofuses -- one of them unfortunately named Randy -- who posted the hot Republican babes video when, in their own words, they are perplexed by the fact that more women vote than men and "the startling fact is that more than 75 percent of them vote Democrat!"

Gosh, fellas, I've got a great idea: In our quest to get more babes to vote for us, let's put up a video that shows that any chick who votes for a Democrat is an ugly man-hater.

The bottom line is that one of our political parties has a problem with women.

But it isn't the Democrats.

They have most of the women, and, for their candidates, that's a beautiful thing.

KK takes on Prop 8 reversal ..

This is part of KK's column located here :

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/100657694.html?elr=KArksc8P:Pc:Ug8P:Pc:UiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUr

"Did you know that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are bigots? Ditto for the justices of New York's, Maryland's and Washington's highest state courts. And there are at least 7 million bigots in California alone, along with legions more across the country.

Their strange and aberrant delusion? They believe -- or say it's reasonable to believe -- that traditional marriage is a social good that serves our nation well.

So says federal Judge Vaughn Walker, who recently overturned Proposition 8 -- passed by California voters in 2008 to enshrine one man/one woman marriage in their state's constitution. Walker ruled Prop 8 unconstitutional under the U.S. constitution. Only "prejudice," "fear" and "misinformation," he said, can explain Californians' support for it.

Anyone who wonders why Americans are up in arms over the arrogance of our quasi-totalitarians in black robes -- activist judges who want to rule your life -- should flip through Walker's opinion.

Arrogance and disdain for those who dare to disagree drip from every page:

So what if male/female marriage has been the core institution in virtually every human society? Walker dictates that male/female differences shall henceforth be eradicated from marriage. "Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage," he ruled, rejecting other views as "antiquated" and "discredited."

And the universal belief that kids do best with both a mom and a dad? That one goes in the garbage can, too. It's "beyond any doubt" that "parents' genders are irrelevant to children's developmental outcomes," he instructs us.

Walker's 136-page opinion is rife with contempt for American citizens, who are too ignorant and easily led to have a voice in defining marriage. As a result, the issue of marriage is "beyond the constitutional reach of the voters or their representatives," Walker tells us. In other words, get in line and shut up.

Walker's central finding is that there is no conceivable rational argument for defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Only "a fear or unarticulated dislike of same-sex couples" can account for it, he says.

Yet marriage is rooted in biology -- a fact that Walker can't wish away. Marriage is a male/female institution because only sex between men and women produces children. To survive and flourish, a society must channel male/female erotic desires into responsible procreation. Marriage binds parents -- especially fathers -- to their offspring, assuring that children will have both parents' love, guidance and economic support.

The two sexes also bring different and complementary strengths to parenting. Mothers, for example, are more attuned than fathers to the cries, gestures and language of babies, toddlers and teens -- and so are better at nurturing children physically and emotionally. (The hormone oxytocin may play an important role here.) Fathers, on the other hand, are particularly good at ensuring safety and encouraging children to shoulder challenging tasks. Men's size and strength provide an advantage in discipline, particularly with boys.

Judge Walker assures us that radically redefining marriage would have no adverse social consequences. Yet it would likely erode vital social norms, including the expectation that men should take responsibility for children they beget. America already has a 40 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate, and can ill afford this. Another norm at risk is marital fidelity. A recent groundbreaking study found that "about 50 percent" of gay male couples in the San Francisco Bay Area "have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners," according to the New York Times. "With straight people, it's called affairs or cheating, but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations," researcher Colleen Hoff told the Times.

Despite such facts, Walker insists that benighted, private "moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples."

Morality and religion are deeply intertwined with our ideas of justice. Is Walker suggesting that because the modern civil-rights movement was religiously motivated, we should reject the laws that it inspired?

In fact, Walker may have his own private reasons for overturning Prop 8. He is "openly gay" and "attends bar functions with a companion, a physician," the Los Angeles Times reported last month. If Walker is in a stable gay relationship, he has a personal interest in gay marriage that may legally disqualify him from ruling on Prop 8.

Walker's failure to disclose his relationship requires that his opinion be vacated and a new trial be held before a different judge, Chapman University law professor John Eastman wrote last week.

Walker's attempt to smuggle in his own, self-interested version of morality may be the real reason for his arrogant..."

KK takes on who gets more political contributions

Here's a part of this article:

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/100159624.html?elr=KArks:DCiU1PciUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUU

"

Few American political stereotypes are as durable as the myth that Republicans are the party of fat cats. You know -- the corporate tycoons and investment bankers who puff cigars in dark, paneled rooms as they bankroll elections for Big Business. Democrats, in the myth's telling, are Ordinary Joes -- lunch-bucket types who fight a lopsided, uphill battle against entrenched big-money interests.

Welcome to the real world, Minnesotans.

In the 2010 governor's race, it's Republican Tom Emmer -- an Ordinary Joe with seven kids to feed -- who's pounding the pavement for every $1,000 check he brings in. He and his team spend lots of time focusing on small donors -- the source, despite the myth, of a disproportionate amount of the Republican Party's cash.

But isn't Big Business pulling the strings for Emmer behind the scenes? Hardly. We saw that recently, when Target Corp. gave $150,000 to MN Forward -- a business-friendly PAC that supports Emmer against his three Democratic rivals, who have all vowed to raise taxes. Liberals and the media went berserk. As they tarred and feathered Target, their message was clear: Companies that support Republican efforts risk paying a big public-relations price.

Meanwhile, the three DFL candidates for governor have raised a cool $9 million for their campaigns -- a sum that dwarfs Emmer's $910,000. Two of those candidates, gazillionaires Matt Entenza and Mark Dayton, are financing their races from their own capacious pockets. Unlike Emmer, they don't have to eat rubber-chicken dinners at rinky-dink fundraisers. They just write gold-plated checks to themselves.

Entenza has loaned his campaign $4.7 million heading into Tuesday's DFL primary. The money comes courtesy of his wife's fortune, made in the health care industry.

But the 800-pound gorilla in the governor's race is Mark Dayton, department store heir and current front-runner. Dayton's wealth has enabled him to make running for public office a hobby for 30 years.

In 1982 he dropped $6.7 million on a failed U.S. Senate campaign. In 1998, the figure was $2.1 million for an unsuccessful governor's bid. In 2000, he spent a whopping $12 million to become a U.S. senator. In the current campaign, so far, the sum is $3.3 million. All told, that's a jaw-dropping $24 million of Dayton dough.

Dayton's own resources are augmented by donations to DFL interests from his megarich family. In this election cycle, the family -- his son, aunt, cousin and ex-wife-- have poured $851,000 into two DFL political action committees: Win Minnesota and the 2010 Fund. That's almost as much as Emmer has raised in his entire campaign.

The biggest family donor is Alida Messinger, Dayton's ex-wife. (Must have been a friendly breakup!) She's contributed an eye-popping $550,000 to the two PACS.

The source of Messinger's money? She's the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller -- founder of Standard Oil -- who nearly monopolized the American oil business in the late 1800s and died with a fortune valued at $670 billion in current dollars.

Wait. Isn't it Republicans who are supposed to be in the pocket of Big Oil?

The DFL's bottomless well of cash has another source: Big Labor. Since 2009, Minnesota's three largest public-employee labor unions have spent $750,000 on the DFL agenda -- five times as much as the Target gift to MN Forward that so incensed liberals.

What does this flood of money make possible? Among other things, an endless barrage of anti-Emmer TV ads. They're being underwritten -- to the tune of $685,000 so far -- by a PAC called Alliance for a Better Minnesota. Where does its money come from? Win Minnesota and the 2010 Fund -- the Dayton family piggybanks -- are major sources, having funneled it $1.6 million in this election cycle.

This clever arrangement is handy for Mark Dayton. It means his own campaign can claim the high ground, with feel-good TV ads about Dayton's concern for little folks. Meanwhile, Dayton's family helps fund a second-track, below-the-radar blitz of anti-Emmer attack ads.

For years, liberals and the media have fulminated about "too much money" in politics, and have called loudly for campaign finance reform. This year, however, they're happy to watch as superrich DFLers bulldoze their way through Minnesota's political landscape. If the situation were reversed -- if Emmer were the free-spending millionaire -- I suspect we'd see indignant headlines every week.

The Democratic money machine may succeed in buying the governor's mansion for Dayton -- whom Time magazine named as one of the five worst senators in 2005.

Then again, maybe not. In 2009, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey -- a fiscal conservative and scourge of public-employee unions -- surged to victory after being outspent three to one by his multimillionaire Democratic opponent."