North Dakota Governor John Hoeven will join Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann this evening for a bit of right-wing teabaggery.  The Fargo For'em has an editorial "welcoming" Bachmann to North Dakota, but apparently didn't know Grover Norquist is in town, too.  Here's a summary of what the For'em likes about Bachmann:

• Bachmann favors privatization of Social Security, which would mean handing over billions of Social Security dollars to Wall Street. Had that happened when President George W. Bush proposed it, thousands of North Dakotans would have seen their Social Security accounts take big losses or dry up altogether.

• She wants to eliminate Social Security and Medicare, which was actually proposed by House Republicans last week.

• She wants investigations into members of Congress she believes are anti-American, who just happen to be Democrats. Would that McCarthy-like net scoop up North Dakota Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad? Rep. Earl Pomeroy? Minnesota 7th District Congressman Collin Peterson?

• Bachmann voted five times against the 2008 farm bill (Congressional Record), legislation Hoeven favored; he traveled several times to Washington to help the state’s congressional delegation get the bill passed. And how about this: Bachmann received $251,973 in federal subsidies for her family’s farm from 1995 to 2006.

 Fargo For'em

She's somethin' special, that Michele Bachmann. She'd fit right in with Hoeven and company.  She's against the Farm Bill; just like Hoeven's appointment for Ag Commissioner.  And she's pretty much right in line with Hoeven on everything else.

And Grover Norquist is gonna be "in da house."  Here are a few quick Norquist quot's:

“A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum.” (People's Weekly World Newspaper, 7/5/03)

“We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals – and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship.” (Denver Post, 5-26-03)

“Bipartisanship is another name for date rape.” (Blueprint Magazine, 6-30-03)

How's that for North Dakota GOP classy?  This guy must be exactly who our politicians should hang around with.

Here's another little morsel for you. One of the organizers of the NDGOP/Teabagger event (featuring right-wing crackpots Grover Norquist and Michele Bachmann) is a George W. Bush administration official, Mark Pfeifle.  Pfeifle was a Bush communications insider, who was once considered a potential replacement for White House press secretary, Scott McClellan (until something scandalous must have crept out of his past and Tony Snow was picked).  Pfeifle is originally from Wishek, North Dakota, and has been a Republican Party operative for 10 or 15 years.

So -- to recap -- the Bismarck Teabagger event this weekend is sponsored by insurance companies', the tobacco industry, the oil industry, and right-wing Christian fundamentalists whose anti-choice legislation was sooo crazy even the Catholic Bishops were against it.   AND on top of that, the event is being organized by a George W. Bush Administration White House insider and the state's Republican Party, and will have one of the Bush Agenda's top commanders on site along with all the usual Republican top-siders from North Dakota.

Can someone please remind me how "Grassrootsy" this teabagger movement is?

North Dakota Governor John Hoeven has a problem.  His problem is his record.  His problem is his history.  His problem has gotten him in deep trouble with the right wing fringe of the North Dakota Republican Party, and with the national Republican corporate establishment. 

What's a cowering empty suit to do?

Hoeven's handlers have apparently told him he needs to charge HARD to the right.  That's what we're watching him do right now.  He seems to be following their advice so far.

And, conveniently, the right wing nuttery is giving Hoeven all the opportunities in the world to surrender the middle, manufacturing an image of real, true, hard conservatism in a guy who professed his love for the Democratic Party not all that long ago.  The fringe is giving Hoeven lots of opportunities right now.  

Last week, Hoeven made an appearance at the Teabagging event in Harvey, North Dakota, where tens of people showed up to protest our public infrastructure, complain that we need to take back our government from that black president, and to hoist their various misspelling-laden placards and signs.  As we've previously mentioned, this coming weekend the establishment Republican corporatists are giving John Hoeven an opportunity to share the stage with the Queen of Teabagging, Michele Bachmann.  He has not publicly declared whether he intends to attend.

So what are the establishment Republican corporatists to do?!?  How can they make sure Hoeven -- desperate to prove his conservative street cred -- shows up?

Double down.

That's what they've done.

The right wingers, today, announced another special guest will be at this weekends establishment Republican corporatist Teabagger rally will be none other than the man who's been described as "the Field Marshall of the Bush Plan," Grover Norquist.  Remember him?  Two short years ago, Norquist critiziced Hoeven, comparing him to "Mr. Wimpy."  Here's what Norquist brought his Washington, D.C., special interest group to North Dakota to say this about Hoeven:

Gov. Hoeven's claim that North Dakota voters should reject Measure 2 if they want property tax relief next year is reminiscent of J. Wellington Wimpy."

Americans remember Mr. Wimpy, 1930's cartoon character and friend of Popeye, for famously proclaiming "I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." The Tuesday payment never would come.

"Just like the wily Mr. Wimpy, Gov. Hoeven is requesting a favor from North Dakotans today in exchange for a payoff in the future," added Norquist. "Does anyone in North Dakota, or the world, believe Hoeven's true motive is to cut property taxes? If the governor was serious about cutting property taxes he would have already done so. Hoeven has made clear that his desire for as many taxpayer dollars as he can get his hands on trumps any concern for the well-being of his constituents.

PRNewsWire.com

Measure 2, you'll recall, was soundly defeated by the people of North Dakota.  So the NDGOP is going to bring him back, again.  Norquist is the same guy who hates America so much that he's said -- out loud -- that he wants to drown our government in a bathtub.

The North Dakota Republican Party has apparently decided that what North Dakota wants, more than anything else, is four more years of "the Bush Plan."

So now Mr. Wimpy gets to decide if he's going to join the Queen of Teabaggers and the Field Marshall of the Bush Plan on a stage built by big tobacco, big oil, the insurance industry, anti-school-lunch-program advocates and the rest of right wing fringe.  If Hoeven shows up, he'll be showing moderates, centrists and independents that he doesn't have spine to stand up to the establishment Republican corporatists.  If he chickens out, refusing to face down the right-wing's svengali who called him a coward and the Teabaggers' TV spokesmodel, he'll risk losing the Teabaggers who make up the Republican base. 

What to do?  What to do?

Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) is coming to North Dakota later this week.  It's being described by one local right-wing-crackpot blogger as being so important, the importance cannot be overstated.  Michelle Bachmann coming to North Dakota is like the second coming of Christ for these establishment Republicans.

You likely know that Bachmann is a member of the United States House of Representatives and that she's made a name for herself as a "purist" leader in the teabagger movement in America.  She's coming to North Dakota, and her "purism" and the "grassrootsiness" cannot be overstated.  Or can it.

The Michelle Bachmann event this weekend has quite a few sponsors.  Here are the sponsor logos from the event's website.

How's that for "grassrootsy"?  Let's walk through these sponsors one at a time.

(1)  C4RG.  (Citizens for Responsible Government).  [Note to self:  Be for "responsible" government instead of the "irresponsible" government I used to be for.]  This group is run by a tobacco and oil industry lobbyist.  Ironically, the lobbyist of this anti-government group works for a firm that draws about $9,000 per month in checks from the State of North Dakota and they've been asking for even more.  (More on this later.)

(2)  NDGOP.  This is the organization that's proud to tell you they've helped put five U.S. Supreme Court justices on the court, and they've given corporations the unlimited right to spend money to influence elections.  

(3)  North Dakota Family Alliance.  The NDFA board of directors used to be run by Steve Cates, and now includes Commerce Department director Shane Goetle.  Cates is still on the group's board, but is also renowned for unapologetically publishing former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer's plagiarism and spreading it around the state.  Goettle, as John Hoeven's chief hander-outer-of-state-dollars, ironically represents exactly what the Teabaggers pretend to be against.  The NDFA was also behind the ridiculous "personhood" bill that was so stupid it got shot down by the Catholic Bishops during the last legislative session.

(4)  Concerned Women for America.   A few words from CWA's founder: "Christian values should dominate our government. The test of those values is the Bible. Politicians who do not use the Bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office."  (click here)

(5)  National Rifle Organization.  This is probably the closest thing to a "rational" organization on the sponsors list for this event.  As Jon Stewart would say, "It's like being the thinnest kid at fat camp."

(6)  North Dakota Taxpayers Association. Single-issue, right-wing fringe group run by former state director for Americans for Prosperity.

(7)   North Dakota Farm Bureau.  These are the folks who want to eliminate school lunch programs and federal crop insurance.  They're also funded, in part, by an insurance company.

(8)  Campaign for Responsible Health Reform (CRHP).  Remember the story a few weeks ago about how the insurance industry was laundering money through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to attack legislators working on health reform?  Well, the CRHP is one of those astroturf organizations set up by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with insurance industry money.

Does that sound "grass-rootsy" enough for you? 

No, it doesn't.

But would you believe me if I told you it's even more corporate Republican establishment than that?  

I can hear you shouting, "Impossible!!!"  

But it is possible. 

[To be continued.]

It's that time again!

Its time to hold the district conventions.  All of them(so far) are going to be held in the month of February.  If you want a guaranteed spot on the convention floor come to your district convention.  If you come to the State convention expecting a seat your district may have filled up already. 

So I've done a few things to help y'all out...

Behold:

View Dem-NPL Convention Map in a larger map

Here is a map of all of the conventions around the state so far.  I will keep this list up to date as the last conventions come in.  There are 10 districts that are yet to report: 4, 6, 9, 10, 14, 24, 28, 36, 37, 39.  These are all rural districts, except for 37, which is Dickinson.  

If you don't know what your district is, you can locate it here on the Legislature's interactive district map.  

A number of these conventions start friday, so check out the Dem-NPL website, or this Google calendar I set up to find when yours is.

So now you have the who, the what, the where, the when, the why, and the how. Go.

Former North Dakota Lieutenant Governor Lloyd Omdahl (Dem-NPL) reminds folks what the Boston Tea Party was about:

North Dakota's Tea Partiers have decided to make life miserable for Gov. John Hoeven as he seeks to replace U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan in the November election. Even though taxes have been cut significantly in North Dakota, the Tea Party people feel that Hoeven should be supporting more reductions and more refunds. They're mobilizing this month to determine a course of action.

Using a "tea party" label for an anti-tax crusade, even though catchy, misrepresents the historical facts. The Boston tea party was not about taxes; it was about representation. Most of us learned in grade school that the complaint of the revolutionaries was taxation without representation. (Apparently, we aren't satisfied with taxation with representation, either.)

Bismarck Tribune

I don't often find myself thinking Professor Omdahl -- I took a couple classes from him in college -- missed something important in one of his columns, but this time I do.  What did Prof. Omdahl miss?

The Boston Tea Party wasn't just about taxation without representation.  It was about people being mad about the special treatment -- favors -- the Crown was giving to a huge corporation.  It was the British East India Tea Company.  This might not seem important, but it is hugely important.

See, at the time of the Boston Tea Party, people thought of corporations -- and specifically the East India Company -- differently from how we think of corporations today...

Trade-dominance by the East India Company aroused the greatest passions of America's Founders - every schoolboy knows how they dumped the Company's tea into Boston harbour. At the time in Britain virtually all members of parliament were stockholders, a tenth had made their fortunes through the Company, and the Company funded parliamentary elections generously. Parallels with US political life today are hard to miss and the Founders must be weeping in their graves.

After independence, corporations received their charters from states and the charters were for a limited period, like 20 or 30 years, not in perpetuity. They were only allowed to deal in one commodity, they could not hold stock in other corporations, their property holdings were limited to what was necessary for their business, their headquarters had to be located in the state of their principle business, monopolies had their charges regulated by the state, and all corporate documents were open to the legislature. Any political contribution by a corporation was treated as a criminal offence. Corporations could, and often did, have their charters removed if the state considered that their activities harmed its people.

Feasta.org (emphasis added)

[Today's so-called "originalist" judges ought to put that in their collective pipe and smoke it.]

Think about the irony of today's Teabaggers in that context; today's Teabaggers coddle  Republicans, and the corporatist Republican establishment is clearly coddling the Teabaggers.  By voting for Republicans, the Teabaggers are getting themselves more politicians who give them judges like the U.S. Supreme Court justices who recently gave corporations unlimited power to financially influence elections.

So... to recap... the original Tea Party participants were fighting a corporatist government; and today's Teabaggers are fighting to get more corporatists in government.  Omdahl's column completely misses this.

Do you think any of the Teabaggers see the irony?

I don't. 

What'd I Say

Circa 1963

(Crossposted from the PrairieBlog )

A couple of my friends are in the news this morning, both regarding their careers. And there’s a third guy in the news that could just be a possibility. Here’s this morning’s news.

Purdon
Tim Purdon, it appears, is going be the United States Attorney for North Dakota. We’ll be in good hands. I’ve watched Tim since he first came to Bismarck as a young attorney. He’s good. He’s one of the two best criminal defense lawyers in town, maybe in the state (I’ll let each lawyer reading this decide if you’re the other one).

This will be a new role for Tim. He’s been defending people who were (just ask him--he’ll tell you) wrongfully charged with a crime (or charged for the wrong crime, based on the number of plea agreements he’s gotten). Now he’s going to be putting them away. Lucky for him, I say, that he won’t be taking on Tim Purdon in court.

Potter
My other friend in the news today is North Dakota State Senator Tracy Potter. Tracy and I have been friends for a long, long time. We’ve beengood friends since that first round of golf we played together back in the spring of 1981 at Lincoln Park Golf Course in Grand Forks. We were both unemployed at the time, the victims of the Reagan landslide which knocked the Art Link Administration out of office in 1980. Tracy and I had been young public servants, he in the North Dakota Insurance Department, I in the North Dakota Department of Agriculture, and the newly elected Republican bosses of those departments decided they did not need our services for the next four years. So we went golfing, and then found new jobs, hung around, did some more public service in the George Sinner Administration, and then got old and moved onto careers in the private sector. We’re still golf mates. After about 600 rounds or so, I think I’m up two strokes on him.

Tracy, I guess, is going to run for the United States Senate this year, abandoning his State Senate seat in Bismarck. I say “I guess” because I haven’t talked to him for a week or so—I think he was afraid to call me for fear I’d talk him out of this. I wouldn’t have, of course. When we did talk about it two weeks ago, I said “Tracy, it’s a bad idea, but sometimes you’ve got to just say ‘What the f**k?’ Why not?”

I mean, lightning can strike. If your name is not on the ballot, you are not going to get the job. So I say, today, Tracy, “Good for you.” I want to be on the team. If you win, I do not want to go to Washington to work for you, but I promise I’ll keep an eye on things back here and let you know what is going on. And I’ll make the tee times (although I would like to play Congressional Country Club some time).

For the record, Tracy will be a good candidate, and a better Senator. Based on life experience, he’s at least as qualified for the job as Gov. Hoeven, maybe even better qualified. I hope he ends up being the candidate. I hope he wins.

Possibility?
I noticed in the paper yesterday there is a fourth Republican candidate to challenge Earl Pomeroy for the U.S. House seat. His name is J.D. Donaghe, and there’s nothing really remarkable about him, except for this: According to the Minot Daily News, he holds an “honorary degree in bible theology.” Huh?

Oh, and his position on health care. Here’s part of his platform (excerpts):

The National Health Care Act
• Effective January 15th 2011, all Medicare, Medicaid and Veteran Administration health care benefits shall be replaced by The National Health Care Program.

• All citizens of the United States of America shall be afforded full and complete unfettered access to The National Health Care Program.

• All legal temporary guest workers shall have the same access to the National Health Care Program as naturalized citizens.

• Temporary visitors to the United States of America shall not be denied emergency or preventive care by any medical facility but shall be fully responsible for payment of services rendered.

• All National Health Care Program recipients shall have the full and exclusive “Right to Choose” the health care service provider or facility that will best fulfill the needs of the individual without regard to location.

• The National Health Care Program shall provide the following list of health care benefits to any and all citizens of the United States of America without regard to age, sex, race, religion, color, creed, origin, location or medical condition:
• Primary Care
• Prenatal Care
• Preventative Care
• Testing and Diagnostics
• Non Elective Surgeries
• Emergency Services
• Hospital Stay
• In Home Health Care
• Hospice Care

• Effective January 15th 2011, any and all health care providers operating within the United States of America shall submit any and all invoices for services rendered to the Social Security Administration office located within their respective county of operation.

• Effective January 15th 2011, any and all invoices submitted to the Social Security Administration county offices for health care services rendered shall be paid in full within 15 days of receipt.

Huh, again. It’s on his website. Check it out.

I think I’m for him. We could even be friends. I can live with the honorary degree.