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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Tired old GOP divisive hacks, redux. Jeff Davis, Mary Kiffmeyer and crew - vengeful toward peoples' choice, Mark Ritchie.

Is half a pie less attractive if you find out the missing half had a rat baked in?

That's a hypothetical question many might see as unconnected to the remainder of this post.

Strib online today, telling its story, (which is arguably half a story if you feel that the entire story reads more discernibly when given background identities of the players' and historical roles):

Group alleging voter irregularities seeks a probe
Minnesota Majority says the secretary of state didn't verify registrations. Mark Ritchie's office says that's not true.

By KEVIN DUCHSCHERE, Star Tribune Update: Nov. 17, 2008 - 9:43 PM


A Minnesota watchdog group that advocates for what it calls traditional values called Monday for an investigation into alleged voting irregularities that it says can be remedied by eliminating same-day voter registration and requiring citizens to show photo IDs before voting.

At a news conference, Minnesota Majority president Jeff Davis said the group is filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice contending that Secretary of State Mark Ritchie had failed to verify voter registrations as required by federal law.

The group is also seeking records from the Secretary of State's Office and county officials under the state's Data Practices Act [...] Ritchie spokesman John Aiken said the Secretary of State's Office will forward the information sought by Minnesota Majority. As for charges that the office failed to properly verify voters, Aiken said that officials "just don't think that's true."

Everyone legally eligible to vote should be allowed to do so, [Davis] said, but eligibility for everyone should be checked at least 30 days before they vote and verified on Election Day.

Volunteers with Minnesota Majority have found what the group deems voting irregularities after going through registration lists supplied by the state, Davis said. Those irregularities include duplicate records, vacant voting addresses, incomplete registration forms and voters who may have voted more than once.

Last month, Ritchie charged the group with intimidating voters by making phone calls seeking information. Davis called that baseless.


As if this Minnesota Majority is an entity in a vacuum, untied to anyone, or anything overtly and politically committed, beyond being represented by the mentioned "Jeff Davis" for whom Strib apparently sees no need for backgrounding.


There is this from Minnesota Monitor:

Kiffmeyer was an extremely controversial figure as secretary of state, drawing criticism from Democrats, independents and, occasionally, Republicans.

Kiffmeyer came under fire for her statements regarding the separation of church and state. At a National Day of Prayer event in 2004, Kiffmeyer said that the "five words" that are "probably most destructive" in America today are "separation of church and state."

Many of her decisions as secretary of state were overturned by the courts. In 2002, when Sen. Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash, she prevented the distribution of replacement absentee ballots to those who requested them, a decision overruled by the Minnesota Supreme Court.

In 2004, she attempted to remove the Independence Party from the ballot, a move that was overruled by the Minnesota Supreme Court. She tried to prevent the use of IDs issued by tribal governments for voter registration, a move that was overruled by the courts.

During the 2004 elections, Kiffmeyer made national headlines when she decided to post terrorist warning signs at polling places throughout Minnesota urging voters to be wary of people appearing at precincts with "shaved head[s] or short hair" who "smell of unusual herbal/flower water or perfume," wear baggy clothing or appear to be whispering to themselves.

The Kiffmeyer clan made waves on the political scene even before Mary Kiffmeyer's tenure as secretary of state. Her husband, Ralph Kiffmeyer, served one term in the Minnesota House, and he made it a controversial one with a bill to outlaw "sex toys and live sex performances."

Kiffmeyer and her husband are evangelical Christians, and are part owners in a "Christ-centered" bank. In fact, Kiffmeyer was the director of the bank's parent holding company. Two paintings at Riverview Community Bank in Otsego hang on the wall of the office where the bank president prays with bank customers. One painting shows "two businessmen in an office; one is shaking hands with Christ, as though closing a deal," and the other "is a scene of what appears to be Eden. Tucked into the background of that painting is a small representation of Riverview," according to the Pioneer Press in 2004.

Since Kiffmeyer was voted out of office in 2006, she has joined up with an organization called Minnesota Majority as its executive director. Minnesota Majority is made up of Jeff Davis, founder of Minnesota Citizens in Defense of Marriage, a group dedicated to preventing legal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Minnesotans, and Drew Emmer, uncle of Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Delano.

Minnesota Majority is an advocacy group that engages in a hodgepodge of wedge issue and culture war rhetoric. Its Web site decries taxes, abortion, GLBT rights, embryonic stem cell research and illegal immigration. It advocates for military intervention in Iraq, abstinence-only sex ed, a free market health care fix and intelligent design taught in the classrooms. There's barely a religious right or ultra-conservative topic left untouched.

The group came under criticism for racially charged text on its blog earlier this year. "It is not surprising that Sweden has a lower infant mortality rate, or that Japan has a longer life expectancy than the United States does," read an article on the site. "They are nearly racially pure; we are not." Kiffmeyer defended the text saying that its mention of racial purity must be understood in context, that it "is simply descriptive."

"That's a genetic term," Kiffmeyer told the Pioneer Press' Rachel Stassen-Berger. "It does matter when you are doing medical studies."


Bless those Swedes, especially when closing a bank deal in Otsego with some Japanese, on a handshake, presumably with some accompanying paperwork not apparent in the bank wall hanging. Bless pure reasoning without slant or suggestion, pure crystal-clear reasoning. It stuns and stupefies. One immediate question, what about Norwegians or Koreans? What's their track record, on quality of life factors or on genetic diversity? Icelanders? Finns? Kiffmeyers?

See Minnesota Independent, here and here; see also Davis' uniter-not-igniter role, here and here; see MPR here; see also the "Majority's" website here, and for an indication you can be disruptive on a small budget, here.

There also are these two screen shots, respectively from here and here:







Can you say fundamentalist; as in "mistaken, tired, sorry, Swedes-are-racially-pure, Japanese too, trouble-making fundamentalist?"

I can.

Can you say Strib at least should have mentioned that Jeff Davis website cutover linking the new "majority" with the old marriage defenders, per the second screen shot? Or that Strib should have noted the fact of Jeff Davis being not only political regarding current voter registration, but being politically theocratic and tied in that to a past theocratic Secretary of State while contesting things concerning the current more secular Secretary of State, all of that is part of how we can assess credibility vs. partisanship, and it should not be written out of a statewide daily's reporting of news events and backgrounds?

I can say all that. You can agree or disagree.