Two corporations gave to DFL leaning Win Minnesota
Posted at 8:59 AM on October 26, 2010 by Tom Scheck (0 Comments)
Filed under: Campaign 2010, Campaign 2010: Minnesota Governor
A lot of attention has been given to the corporations that have been giving to groups supporting Republican Tom Emmer's campaign for governor. But two companies gave money to Win Minnesota, a group working to elect Democrat Mark Dayton. Kwik-Trip gave $25,000 to Win Minnesota. Anheuser Busch gave $10,000 to the group.Filed under: Campaign 2010, Campaign 2010: Minnesota Governor
Source - Minnesota Public Radio
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"Kwik Trip is supposedly owned by WELS members who have donated a lot of money to various WELS ministries. (In case you don't know, Kwik Trip owns and operates a ton of gas station/convenient stores in WI/MN.)
As you may also know, a recent Supreme Court ruling now allows corporate support for political candidates.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, supposedly WELS Kwik Trip has donated to Win Minnesota, a group focused on electing radical pro-abortionist Democrat Mark Dayton as Minnesota's next governor. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/polinaut/archive/2010/10/two_corporation.shtml
Maybe Kwik Trip has a corporate board that decided to do this over the supposedly WELS owners' objections. I suppose that would be the most charitable possibility to assume. But I can no longer support Kwik Trip with my business, even though the owners support WELS ministries, when they use their profits to support pro-abortionists."
WELS Member
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Campaign Crawlers
Blundering Toward the Governorship
By his own admission, Mark Dayton wasn't much of a senator. Minnesota Democrats have decided to give him a chance to prove he'd better a better governor, as he is the party's choice to run against Republican Tom Emmer in the race to succeed outgoing Gov. Tim Pawlenty.Dayton won Tuesday's primary in a tight race with state representative Margaret Anderson Kelliher. While none of the Democrats on the ballot seemed like a good choice to pull Minnesota through the Great Recession, on a scale of one to ten in terms of liberalism, Dayton comes in at 11.
In a recent editorial for the Star Tribune, Dayton laid out his glorious plan for lucky would-be constituents: Tax the rich -- even more. He opined, with pride: "My first objective in offsetting an estimated $6 billion deficit for the next biennium would be to make the richest Minnesotans pay at least that same share of their incomes in Minnesota taxes."
While Minnesotans tend to elect liberals, the occasional conservative slips through. Pawlenty, the departing governor was one. Under his tenure, Minnesota slipped from one of the most heavily taxed states.
Dayton's biography differs considerably. He was a legislative aide for Walter Mondale, another liberal Minnesota gem, and then served as U.S. Senator from 2001-07. He earned a reputation, albeit a poor one, during his tenure in Congress. Dayton told a group of high school students in 2006 if he were to grade himself on his accomplishments as a U.S. Senator, he'd give himself an "F." That same year Time magazine named Dayton one of the country's five worst Senators (they called him "The Blunderer") because he "exhibited erratic behavior" and at one point closed his office for a month because of an "unspecified terrorist threat."
Unfortunately his political philosophy is even worse. He's as progressive as President Barack Obama, siding with him on policy issues from advocating universal health care, to opposing privatization of Social Security and raising taxes on the wealthy. He opposes the Iraq war, supports same-sex marriage, and is pro-choice. Hardly any of those positions would be as harmful to Minnesotans -- or more in line with the President's playbook -- as an increase in taxes on the rich. On his web page he unabashedly declares:
Read my lips, "Tax the rich." Minnesota's wealthiest citizens pay only two-thirds of their fair share of state and local taxes. That's wrong. As Governor, I will raise taxes on the rich of Minnesota, NOT on the rest of Minnesota.Dayton actually supports as many as three new income tax brackets including persons/couples earning between $130,000 and $150,000, those who earn over $500,000, and those who rake in $1 million. He says he would also tax million dollar homes and eliminate tax loopholes which allow "snowbirds" -- Minnesotans who bear its frigid winters in warm climate for six months plus one day -- to evade paying personal income taxes. The plan is based on data from the Minnesota Department of Revenue's Tax Incidence Study. From it he derives that if "the richest 10% of Minnesota households paid the same percentage of their incomes in state and local taxes as the rest of taxpayers, they would provide $3.8 billion in additional revenues for the current biennium and, by extrapolation, over $4 billion in the next biennium."
His logic is faulty, though certainly consistent with liberal thinking. He concludes this would erase the future deficit and balance the budget (and though he fails to mention it, throw some wealthy folks into irascible rage). What he of course neglects to realize, or at least acknowledge, is that a tax on the rich does the opposite because it compels them to relocate, affecting the economy and the deficit. Rich States, Poor States authors Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore argued in the Wall Street Journal last year, "Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states."
The real irony about Dayton's soapbox regarding money is how much of it he has. Dayton is the heir to the Dayton-Hudson fortune of Dayton department store -- now Macy's -- fame. The Dayton Company started Target Corporations and financed his 2000 run for Senate with related funds.
That's not all. The group "Alliance For a Better Minnesota" has been pummeling his opponent, Republican Tom Emmer with negative ads for a while. One of their biggest contributors is "Win Minnesota" which operates via the generous donations from members of Dayton's own family, including his ex-wife (the eldest daughter of John D. Rockefeller III). His mantra: If you can't convince them; buy them. Dayton might succeed at both. In a mid-June KSTP/Survey USA poll of likely voters, in a three-way race Dayton would win a plurality.
Minnesotans have already elected one embarrassment, whose blunders never cease. They don't need two in the nation's limelight.
Nicole Russell writes from Northern Virginia.
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Voted NO on banning partial birth abortions except for maternal life.
S. 3 As Amended; Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Vote to pass a bill banning a medical procedure, which is commonly known as "partial-birth" abortion. Those who performed this procedure would then face fines and up to two years in prison, the women to whom this procedure is performed on are not held criminally liable. This bill would make the exception for cases in which a women's life is in danger, not for cases where a women's health is in danger. Rated 100% by NARAL, indicating a pro-choice voting record.
Dayton scores 100% by NARAL on pro-choice voting record For over thirty years, NARAL Pro-Choice America has been the political arm of the pro-choice movement and a strong advocate of reproductive freedom and choice. NARAL Pro-Choice America's mission is to protect and preserve the right to choose while promoting policies and programs that improve women's health and make abortion less necessary. NARAL Pro-Choice America works to educate Americans and officeholders about reproductive rights and health issues and elect pro-choice candidates at all levels of government. The NARAL ratings are based on the votes the organization considered most important; the numbers reflect the percentage of time the representative voted the organization's preferred position. ---
On 05.29.10 by Darcy G. Richardson
The seemingly remarkable comeback of former Senator Mark B. Dayton in Minnesota’s gubernatorial campaign has apparently confounded DFL activists and pundits alike. While most political observers had written off the 63-year-old former lawmaker four years ago when he called Washington a “cesspool” and refused to run for reelection, Dayton suddenly finds himself with a double-digit lead in the DFL’s August primary.
While Dayton, whose last political comeback involved spending $12 million of his own money to win a seat in the U.S. Senate a decade ago, is mounting his third political comeback, he’s also remembered for thwarting a similar comeback attempt by one of the most famous political figures in Minnesota history.
This is a look at that long-forgotten — and lopsided — primary campaign.
An heir to the Dayton-Hudson department store chain who just happened to be married to a Rockefeller, the 35-year-old Dayton made his political debut as a candidate when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1982, a period in which the U.S. Senate was quickly becoming a “millionaire’s club,” largely as a result of Federal Election Act of 1974. Enacted in the wake of the Watergate scandal, that law enabled affluent candidates like Dayton to spend an almost unlimited amount of their own money on federal campaigns while limiting non-wealthy candidates to maximum individual contributions of $1,000.
Dayton, a graduate of Yale, enjoyed the enthusiastic support of almost the entire DFL leadership, including former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, during that campaign. That wasn’t surprising given the fact that Dayton was a close personal friend and longtime financial supporter of the ex-Vice President.
But there was another candidate eyeing that seat, arguably a far better-qualified individual who actually once held that very seat in the U.S. Senate. He was also one of the most fascinating political figures ever produced by a state that had given the nation more than its share of political talent. Sadly, the DFL never gave him the time of day — largely because of Dayton’s immense personal wealth.
That candidate was Eugene J. McCarthy, the former two-term Senator who risked his political career in 1968 to arouse the nation’s conscience and help bring an end to the Vietnam War.
Encouraged by old friends and supporters in Minnesota, McCarthy
announced that he would seek his old seat in the U.S. Senate. Hoping to restore the Senate to its historic role as a kind of counterbalance to adventuresome presidents, the avuncular poet-politician had been living in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in rustic Woodville, Virginia, in the years following his last foray in national politics — a forlorn independent campaign for the presidency against Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in 1976.Some folks thought he was jesting when be buzzed through Minneapolis in the summer of 1981 hinting that he wanted his old Senate seat back. But McCarthy was serious. Returning to Minnesota, the 66-year-old blast from the past officially declared his candidacy the following March.
An original thinker, McCarthy had continued putting out weighty, if largely ignored, policy ideas long after leaving the Senate in 1971. It mattered little to him that his influence as a national political figure had lessened considerably. Ideas were important. As such, he had a pretty interesting platform that year.
Calling for “absolute political confrontation” similar to the kind which finally ended the war in Vietnam as a way of curtailing the nuclear arms race, the white-haired McCarthy once again found himself as the peace candidate. He also called for the creation of an International Agriculture Agency, patterned after the highly successful Canadian Wheat Board, to promote agricultural exports — a huge issue in Minnesota. To combat foreign competition, the former Senator proposed a “defense import tax” on goods imported from countries receiving military protection under treaty with the United States.
McCarthy, who proposed that the appointment of the Federal Reserve chairman should run concurrently with the president’s term, also sharply criticized the deregulation of the savings and loan industry — several years before the Savings & Loan crisis that ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers some $160 billion — and advocated a revision in the home interest tax deduction policy to create a larger pools of savings for home mortgages.
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