The biggest gaffe of the local campaign season? Against stiff competition from Michele Bachmann, it may have been Deborah Hedlund hitting “reply all” as the candidate for the Minnesota Supreme Court responded last month to an email with the provocative title, “Can Muslims Be Good Americans?” from a man named Matt Look in Ramsey. Look’s email stated that Barack Obama is a Muslim who refuses to pledge allegiance to the flag with his hand over his heart and took his oath of office on a Quran. It also claims that Muslims are forbidden “to make friends with Christians or Jews” and cannot be “good Americans.”

“Matt, we speak the same language,” Hedlund wrote in her return post. “And I still need to let voters know they have a choice to ‘Seek Justice, Vote For Experience’ for the Minnesota Supreme Court.” Then she hit “reply all,” sending it to everyone who had received the original post from Look.

In the predictable uproar that followed, Hedlund claimed she was strictly referring to negotiations with Look, the proprietor of Look Signs, over the cost and content of lawn signs she wanted him to do. Certainly the second sentence of her post conforms to that explanation. But what about that first sentence, or, for that matter, the entire context of the exchange?

Even if we accept Hedlund’s version of events, it raises serious questions about her awareness and judgment, obviously crucial components for someone campaigning to become the final arbiter of our state laws as a Minnesota Supreme Court judge. When you claim to “speak the same language” as a post full of religiously bigoted smears (it lied about Obama’s Christian faith and use of a Bible to take his oath), a post whose controversial content was made plain in its title, it is at best a gross lapse in judgment. Then Hedlund compounded it by telling the St. Paul Pioneer Press that she had “no idea” whether or not Obama was a Muslim. “My level of information about the presidential candidates would not fill a thimble,” she added. That’s a pretty wanton proclamation of civic disengagement from someone whose decisions would, if elected, fundamentally affect the fabric of civic life.

Dig a little deeper, however, and Hedlund’s defense becomes even more specious. According to her candidate profile in Minnesota Lawyer, Hedlund has served as an adjunct professor at Northwestern College in St. Paul for the past 11 years. On the Northwestern College website, under the heading Statement of Philosophy, it reads, “Northwestern College endeavors to provide education that is grounded first and foremost in the truth of the Bible and in God as the Ultimate Reality of the universe….When the apparent truths of an academic discipline conflict with the truth of God’s Word, we put our trust in God’s revealed truth in the Bible.”

It seems pretty clear that Northwestern College believes that, even from an academic perspective, the Word of God trumps the rule of law–including, if push comes to shove, the Minnesota State Constitution. But lest anyone be confused, Northwestern spells it out more blatantly under its Foundational Beliefs. “At the core of the College’s educational purpose is the pursuit of truth as revealed in the Bible and through God’s creation….We believe there is consistency between biblical truth and truth discovered through reason and experience; however, we hold that when apparent conflicts occur, all truth claims defer to the truth revealed in the Bible.”

Ironically, in Look’s email there are statements that Muslims cannot be “good Americans” because the U.S. Constitution is “based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.”

In addition to her association with Northwestern College for more than a decade, Hedlund is a longtime member of the Wayzata Free Church. A judge for the past 28 years, she has often told the story about how her occupation was ordained by the biblical connotations of her name. As her profile on the Hennepin County Bar Association district court webpage puts it, “Deborah Hedlund has fulfilled her uncle’s prophesy during her childhood, of a future judicial appointment—‘All Deborahs should be judges because the Deborah in the Bible was a judge. So why don’t you grow up and become a judge?’” Fourteen years ago, Hedlund amplified the anecdote, saying that “between the ages of nine and 11, without even knowing what it was, being a judge was on my mind, and I started to think it was what I was supposed to do.”

Does anyone seriously believe that Hedlund has less than a thimble’s worth of curiosity about the religious affiliation of a presidential candidate named Barack Obama? Or did the lady protest too much about her ignorance regarding Obama and the Muslim email smear?

When Hedlund’s email gaffe splashed over the media last week, the name rang a distant bell. Sure enough, checking through my archives, I unearthed a cover story I wrote for City Pages back on November 2, 1994, entitled “Pollyanna With A Gavel.” It reminded me that Deborah Hedlund is no stranger to controversy. What follows are abridged highlights from the piece.

Beginning late in 1992, Hedlund presided over the murder trial of A.C. Ford, the first of a group of gang members eventually convicted of killing Minneapolis police officer Jerry Haaf.  She ruled that Ford’s jury should be anonymous, the first time that had been done in the entire history of Minnesota jurisprudence. According to Diane Wiley, a founder of the National Jury Project, the ruling sent a clear message to the jury: “It says, ‘[The defendants] are extremely dangerous. So dangerous that we can’t protect you from them.’” Adding to the fear, Hedlund, the presiding judge, told KARE-11 early in the trial, “Minnesota has lost its innocence.”

One of the key witnesses against Ford was a woman named Wyvonia Williams. After Ford’s conviction, when called to the witness stand in the trials of other gang members accused of killing Haaf, Williams testified under oath that Hedlund had approached her before the Ford trial. “She said to get A.C. Ford, that ‘Once we got him, then the rest of them will be easy to get,’” Williams swore on the Bible. Hedlund denies making the statement. Ford lost his appeal for a new trial. At his sentencing, Ford complained that he was convicted by an all-white jury. “I’m sadder still that you think all this has to do with racism,” Hedlund replied. “I suggest it is time for you to become a member of the human race.” Later, the judge told the Star Tribune that Ford was no more entitled to have minorities on the jury that she would be entitled to a jury of white female judges.

A year later, in June 1994, Hedlund struck down a Minneapolis City Council ordinance that provided health care benefits for domestic partners of unmarried city employees who registered their relationship with the City. Lawyers for the City and its employees argued it as a clear-cut issue of municipal jurisdiction—they believed they had a right to expand upon state law, and that  sexual practices and other lifestyle issues were hot-button sideshows.

In a voluminous, 33-page decision, Hedlund strongly disagreed. “Redefining family relationships is not a proper subject for municipal regulation,” she wrote. “Marriage enjoys a protected and preferred status in society,” and because the city ordinance did not acknowledge the primacy of that marriage relationship, it was “repugnant” to state law. Legal parallels between homosexuality and impermissibly “licentious” behavior were invoked and the state’s criminal penalties for sodomy were cited. After the decision, the lawyer who argued against the ordinance, serving free of charge on loan from the Virginia-based, pro-Christian, Home School Legal Defense Association, crowed that Hedlund “reads the laws the same way I do. Right down the line, she agreed with what I said.”

Two months before her written decision overturning the ordinance, thousands of lawyers from the Hennepin County Bar Association were surveyed about the 17 county judges who were up for reelection in 1994. On the basis of “Fairness and Lack of Bias,” Hedlund finished dead last. On the basis of “Judicial Demeanor,” she finished 16th.

The 1994 story also reveals precedents for Hedlund’s method of proclaiming ignorance and nonpartisanship when she has taken politically controversial positions. Back then, she told me she didn’t know the A.C. Ford trial would be such a big deal because she doesn’t read local or national newspapers. She also said she was “in a fog” and otherwise “pretty much unaware” of the controversial way she had her girlhood dream ratified when then-Gov. Al Quie appointed her to become a judge in 1980.

District court judge Herbert Wolner had already announced he was stepping down, prompting 11 hopefuls to file papers to run for his seat in the fall primary. But because Wolner would turn 70—the state’s official retirement age—four days before the November election, Quie claimed the right to make the appointment. A variety of people I spoke with told me that Hedlund was picked because she was a woman, a strong Christian (like Quie), and a Republican. Hedlund disagreed, saying, “I have never considered myself a Democrat or a Republican,” a nonpartisan stance she continues to voice today. But her attendance at a $1000-a-plate fundraiser for then-Sen. Rudy Boschwitz, featuring then-President Reagan as the guest speaker, probably signaled to others that she might lean Republican.

Since then, Hedlund has run unopposed for reelection every year but 1994, when she was challenged by perpetual judicial candidate Kevin Kolosky, hampered not only by his Stassen-like regularity on the ballot, but a prior arrest for domestic violence. Ironically, in stepping up from the district court to challenge incumbent Supreme Court justice Lorie Gildea (a Pawlenty appointee), Hedlund is citing her vast trial experience. Meanwhile, her original patron Quie headed up a commission arguing for an “impartial judiciary,” that would necessarily deemphasize the role of voters.

Now, however, the choice between Hedlund and Gildea is in the hands of the electorate.

Prominent Minnesota economists gathered at the Humphrey Institute to grade the work of Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, and to look ahead.

This Tuesday, on a day when the federal government announced it will pump a quarter-trillion dollars into our nation’s banks, four of Minnesota’s most prominent economists were by turns caustic and cautionary in their criticism of the federal response to changing financial markets and to the economic crisis that has spread across the globe over the past few weeks. (The 90-minute program, sponsored by the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, can be seen in its entirety here, and there’s a live-blog account of the event too.)

After an interminably long-winded introduction by Humphrey Institute faculty member Robert Kudrle and a rather benign history of how and why the Federal Reserve Bank was created from Arthur Rolnick, the director of research for the Fed’s Minneapolis branch, the program sharpened considerably when U. of M. professor V.V. Chari spoke. Calling the bailout legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Bush a week ago “remarkable, and in my judgment remarkably unwise,” Chari, who is also a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, sarcastically noted that the bill authorizes the Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson “to purchase essentially any kind of paper that the Treasury Secretary deems necessary to save the world. As far as the Fed is concerned,” Chari continued, “the Fed is now lending to anybody who meets one of two conditions: Either you are breathing and alive, or you are not breathing and dead.

“Are we doing the right thing?” Chari asked rhetorically. “That’s impossible to answer. We have done so many things over the course of the last month or so in particular, that I am convinced some of the things have got to be right—the law of large numbers dictates it. [But] the vast bulk of things we have done…will lead to either a substantial increase in the amount of risk that financial institutions will take in the future, or to extreme and punitive regulations that will prevent them from undertaking any reasonable commercial activities.”

Chari then acknowledged that he probably “would have done exactly the same things they have done” because the prevailing narrative is that the capitalist economy “rests on a thin skein of confidence, and if you break that confidence, everything comes crashingly to an end.” He said such a premise is “highly questionable” and leaves onlookers to assume that the Fed knows things it isn’t telling the general public. But that led to another biting commentary about the lack of transparency in the bailout process. “Our policymakers are treating us like children who can’t be told all the bad things that might happen. ‘Just do what we say and everything will be fine. If you don’t, then the end of Western Civilization is nigh,’” he said.

Chari pointed out that some of the Fed’s claims are demonstrably alarmist. For example, a central theme has been that credit is so tight that banks have stopped lending to viable commercial entities, or even to each other. But when he delved into the Fed’s own database, he said, he found that in the week ending October 1, “bank lending — for commercial-industrial loans, securities, mortgages — are all up. Most surprisingly, intrabank lending rose at its fastest rate in three or four years.” He concedes that the cost of such borrowing has skyrocketed and that “prices are an important indicator of where we are going. But quantity [of borrowing] is also important.

“It is entirely possible that policymakers are seeing things that the rest of us poor children are not seeing or don’t have access to,” Chari concluded. “My one plea is, tell us what you are seeing that worries you so much.” Otherwise, it may be that “policymakers are panicking for no good reason.” Either way, Chari says, “If I was in the market, I’d be panicking too.”

In an effort to mitigate Chari’s extraordinary statements, which seemed to debunk the magnitude of the crisis, program moderator Jay Kiedrowski (the former finance commissioner under Gov. Rudy Perpich) said his former colleagues at Wells Fargo told him the markets were so rattled that they weren’t receiving premiums on three-month Treasury notes — indeed, they had to pay more than the guaranteed return. And Minnesota state economist Tom Stinson noted that the market for municipal general obligation bonds has almost completely dried up, with the largest sales offerings being relatively puny issues of $40 million in North Carolina and $35 million in Kansas. The previous week, Stinson said, Kentucky had been forced to pay 6 percent interest on tax-exempt bonds. In other words, credit is indeed tight.

At this point, Kiedrowski turned to Tim Kehoe, who, like Chari, is a U. of M. professor and adviser to the Fed in Minneapolis, and asked him to explain the roots of the crisis. Kehoe cited a lack of adequate safeguards, saying that if various financial institutions were deemed “too big to fail,” then they should have better regulated. He also said that the bond rating agencies were conferring Triple-A ratings “on assets that were fundamentally bets that the housing market could do nothing but go up.” They were rated so highly, he continued, “because they had insurance against them from AIG. We didn’t understand that if something happened to the housing market, AIG would go down…that the bonds being rated Triple-A in effect were riskier than Argentinian government bonds in the 1990s.” This sucked cautious investors who backed only the highest-rated bonds into the crisis.

Kehoe then sought to put the crisis into perspective. He said that in October 1987, the stock market plunged 34 percent in two weeks, considerably more than the 24 percent the market had dropped in the past two weeks before Monday’s 900-point gain. “You all remember the Great Depression of 1987? No you don’t, because we didn’t have one. The stock market was back to where it was [before] in three years.” He said he wouldn’t be surprised if the present market rebounded in a period of three to five years. But he mentioned “one big caveat” that might prevent that from happening — “what the overreaction we are seeing in Washington [now] is going to do in the future.

“In a well-functioning financial system, we should get paid for taking risks” in bailing out these questionable mortgages and securities, Kehoe continued. “It is not clear to me that the people designing the bailout are making sure that the taxpayers are going to get paid for taking this risk.” Furthermore, bailing out these financial institutions creates a horrible precedent. “If somebody tells you to go down to the casino in Shakopee and bet, and if you win take the money home, and if you lose, don’t worry, I’ll cover it — well, then you’re going to do some pretty crazy betting,” he said. “That’s what the government is telling financial institutions in this country.”

To dramatize how much this way of thinking has already cost taxpayers, Kehoe ran through a financial calculation to determine the actual losses due to bad mortgages in the financial system. He arrived at a figure of $320 billion. “Why are we talking about these huge amounts then?” he asked, such as Rolnick’s earlier estimate that the government had poured close to $3 trillion into the system over the past six months. “We are going to not just bail out the bad mortgages. We are going to bail out lots of the bets on the bad mortgages, which are far bigger,” he emphasized. “The incentives that that gives the financial system to do things wrong in the future are overwhelming.”

Kehoe then held up a book, the result of a project he and a colleague had run for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, joining with 24 other economists to take a look at all the economic depressions that had taken place around the world in the past century. “We find that the causes of these Great Depressions are not financial shocks. Instead they are [caused by] misguided overreactions on the part of government.” He compared the current crisis to what happened in Mexico in 1982 and Japan in 1991. He said that the government reactions guaranteed that Mexico’s finances would not grow over the next 13 years and that Japan would have no significant growth since 1991. “I don’t agree with Chari yet — I don’t think we’ve destroyed this economy to keep the sky from falling down. But the danger is that we might,” Kehoe concluded.

Kiedrowski turned the conversation to Stinson, asking Minnesota’s state economist what the implications of this federal crisis were for Minnesota. Stinson said the short answer is he doesn’t know — too much has happened in terms of the crisis and the federal response to permit reliable conclusions. But he did allow that they look at a number of different forecasting mechanisms, and “uncomfortably they are all very similar. The best guess we have is that the policy actions are unlikely to keep us from a recession.” This is hardly news, as — much to Governor Tim Pawlenty’s chagrin — Stinson claimed a statewide recession was underway months ago. He acknowledged this, held out hope that the bailout measures “may cause the recession to be less deep,” then delivered some very sobering news.

“The quarter we just finished was probably negative… In Minnesota, our sales tax receipts fell from a year ago. It is very likely we are going to have a negative outcome for the fourth quarter and it is also quite likely that we are going to have a negative quarter for the first quarter of 2009.”

However, Stinson added, “The recession is not expected to be particularly deep,” Stinson said. He added that high fuel prices had undercut the federal stimulus package this summer, but that falling fuel prices conversely should mitigate the recession over the next two quarters. Then, more bad news: “Housing is really a disaster. The construction industry is really a disaster. This year we will have had less housing starts than [any year] since World War II. And the forecasts now, looking on out, is that we will have even less housing starts in 2009 than in 2008.”

Finally, unemployment is a huge concern across the U.S.: “Private sector employment started declining last December, total employment started declining in January. It has gone down and down and has a long ways to go probably further. Everybody now is expecting to see unemployment rates in excess of 7 percent, which is a substantial jump from where they are right now.”

The final half hour was taken up with audience questions. This recap is long enough already, so I’ll bullet-point a few highlights and let you go to the videotape for more.

• Kehoe said he thinks Wells Fargo bought out Wachovia because he knew the federal government would bail out Wachovia. “I am going to interpret that what Wells Fargo did is just betting on a government bailout. They are betting that me as a taxpayer is going to pay.”
• Talking about how the political situation of an unpopular President and a looming election plays a role, Chari likened the Bush Administrations behavior on the bailout to what it did with the buildup to the Iraq war. “The consistent message is: ‘We are grownups, we understand the real problems, you don’t.’ What we found out about Iraq was, they did not have the information. In this particular instance, I hope they do have the information. All I am asking is that they disclose it. But there is this nagging feeling: Maybe they are overreacting to weird feelings in their own heads.” Stinson countered that the financial crisis is more tangible and credible than the supposed threat in Iraq. “This isn’t Mr. Chalabi reporting visions of mobile bio-weapons labs running around the streets in Baghdad…We are in a difficult situation with the President and a lot of other political leaders who had never little credibility. But I do believe the threat was credible in this situation.
• There was a general consensus that developing nations are going to be penalized by this global crisis more than economically established countries. “The Mexican peso has depreciated 30 percent. The biggest movement it has had in the last 13 years happened in the last two weeks,” Kehoe said. “It is a phenomenon we call ‘flight to quality.’ The financial problem originated in the United States,” he continued, but when the crisis hit, “when it spread throughout the whole world and makes people nervous, what do they do? Invest in the United States.” Rolnick sees a longer term problem of countries who had pinned their hopes on globalization being cut out of the mix as countries become less confident in the stability of global markets.
• How will we know when the crisis is lessening? Rolnick said it will be when housing prices begin to stabilize. Kehoe fancifully replied that it will be when “Secretary Bernanke and Chairman Paulson stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off, pulling every lever they can get their hands on.”
• Which aspect of the financial system is most in need of re-regulation? Rolnick says all investors have to take a hit whenever a bailout is enacted. Kehoe says it should be Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since they are the institutions most regarded as being safeguarded by government resources. Chari and Stinson agree that it should be the regulation of “credit default swaps,” markets that regulate against bond defaulting. Chari believes it is used by banks and others as a dodge against capital requirements.

It all went awry on the lawn of the Capitol. A group numbering somewhere around 1,000 was expecting to depart on the last sanctioned protest march of the week at 5:00, but members of the liaison group Minnesota Peace Team told organizers at the last minute that they would not be allowed to march after all. Police with tear gas at the ready began arriving at the scene. And then, with no announcement, a contingent of the protesters abruptly began marching south toward 12th Street, and practically everyone else in the crowd followed.

Police on bicycles and horses scrambled to head them off, first herding them westward on 12th Street. When the crowd reached the John Ireland Avenue bridge, it took a left to cross into downtown and was met by a phalanx of police on horseback blocking the south end of the bridge. These were quickly reinforced by a growing number of police in riot gear standing in a formation about eight rows deep. Before long, a path was cleared to let through a pair of buses trapped on the bridge by the sudden turn of events, and then both sides settled down to a roughly hour-long standoff.

What follows is a chronology of the events on the bridge and afterward.

5:12-5:20 As protesters and cops face off on the John Ireland Bridge, there is a palpable feeling—inaccurate, as it turns out—that this can only end in tear gas, billy clubs and mayhem. But neither side is willing to make the provocative first move to set the violent chain in motion, and the protesters even inject some much-needed comic relief into the proceedings. Their chant of “You’re sexy! You’re cute! Take off that riot suit!” was reported here yesterday. But another great moment came earlier, when the protest leaders were first asking those assembled whether they wanted to sit down and hold their ground or disperse as had been instructed. A coterie of skater-punk types who looked to be kindred spirits to Black Flag or Rage Against the Machine instead started chanting, complete with funky hip-sway, “Sit down sit down!” to the “Get down get down” part of Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie.”

5:20 I’m mapping out my don’t-get-maced strategy for when the cops wade forward. Avoid proximity to protesters, and especially media, like Channel 5, who have donned gas masks. Head instead for the most imperially dressed media celebs. I stake out KARE 11’s Rick Kupchella, clad for a J Crew catalog in a sweater, the latest chic sunglasses, and designer jeans.

5:40 There’s an obvious discrepancy about the official timeframe of the protest. According to the people in the Mn Peace Team shirts, the cops believe the rally and march were sanctioned to start at 3 p.m. and be over by 5—that’s one reason they scattered those gathered on the capitol lawn just before 5. But during the standoff on the bridge, Cherrene Horazuk, a volunteer for the Antiwar Committee who has been leading the megaphone chants right at the front line, tells me, “We have always said we rally at 4 and march at 5. We talked to the cops about this when we were getting ready and the lead cop, [Sgt. John] Lazoya, said okay, then later denied he said that. They knew our plans all along. They knew our intentions.”

6:20-6:23 After a parallel scramble to the east, we’re all back at the bridge fronting the intersection of 12^th and Cedar. The crowd is getting antsy to march, the chanting more fervent, the drumbeats louder. The protesters link arms and on command of the megaphone all take one step forward toward the line of cops on horses, now easily within arm’s length. I’m suddenly struck by the incredible cool and calm of the horses in the face of this noise and proximity. The protesters take another step, now almost nose to nose. The cops respond by signaling that they are going to move the horses forward. On signal, they do, one step, and the protesters move back to avoid being stepped on by these enormous animals. The cat-and-mouse game has become a fight for inches, and the Xcel is still more than a quarter-mile away.

6:24-6:30 Right in front of me, a slightly built male protester is suddenly shoved backward three or four steps with a horizontal thrust of the billy club by a riot-geared cop with the helmet #1292. “Get back!” he hollers angrily. It’s the kind of spark that can often set off the whole show and after a split second of surprise, the protester, who looks to be a teenager, says “What the fuck?!” and advances one step forward with the sort of faux menace that comes from someone who really doesn’t want to engage. Meanwhile, the two females on either side of him are telling him to calm down, not let the cops get to him, and the cop who shoved him has quelled his anger and gone back into stoic mode.

But not the cop with helmet #0577, who abruptly surges up from his position on the second line, raising his tear gas gun squarely at the head of the male protester, and screaming, “Shut the FUCK up and get back!” The cop is nearly quivering with rage and he’s got a weapon aimed. Everybody holds their breath, and then the cop abruptly steps back as the male and his two friends move away. For the next five minutes, the angry cop paces in the second line, glaring out at the crowd. Then he huddles with two other cops, and points out into the crowd, presumably pointing out the kid he had just chased away. There were a lot of good cops who wanted a peaceable assembly at yesterday’s protest. The asshole in helmet #0577 wasn’t one of them.

6:36 The cops order the crowd to disperse, saying they will be arrested. A couple dozen protesters, who sat down on 12^th street a few minutes earlier, don’t budge. A small, initial volley of tear gas is fired, hastening the dispersal and creating a cacophony of coughing, as the horse-mounted police take up positions on all four sides of the intersection, isolating the seated protesters in the middle, who are being arrested. Chants of “Let them go! Let them go!” are suddenly redirected outside this enclosed box of cops, as two young males are hauled into the crowd by the lawn near the bridge and unceremoniously dumped. It turns out they are Jeff Shaw and Andy Mannix from City Pages, who had stayed with the seated protesters inside.

7:23 The standoff has lengthened into lethargy, and slowly but very surely, the ranks of the protesters are thinning. Someone comes on the megaphone and exhorts, “Don’t anybody leave! Show your support for our brothers and sisters who were arrested!” It is the first time, in nearly two and half hours since the march began, that the voice on the megaphone hasn’t been female.

7:33 Another brief dust-up, as the cops suddenly move into the crowd and arrest one of the protesters, perhaps on suspicion of some previous action. Nobody knows. The chant of “Let him go!” begins anew. A few minutes later, about half the remaining crowd, maybe 200-300 people, start moving away from the block.

7:56 Lots of action erupts simultaneously. A phalanx of police cars race down the streets in front of the Capitol; ditto groups of cops on horses and bikes. Rounds of tear gas and percussion grenades thunder from the directions of both I-94 and University Avenue. The parking lot by Sears is full of police officers, and plumes of tear gas and smoke from the grenades rises over University Avenue. By the time I arrive, protesters are scattering, variously pissed, crying, jogging, limping, wiping their eyes. They talk about the cops firing tear gas to disperse the crowd, and then the percussion grenades, right into the crowd. “One landed right beside me,” says Martin Goff. “The kids weren’t being aggressive at all. One picked up a piece of concrete but put it down when I told him to.”

8:20 A medic and some members of the Mn Peace Team surround a young protester writhing and screaming on the ground, clawing at his eyes. “We need someone to come and take this young man to a hospital,” says a Peace Team member into a phone. The protester is Misael Ivan Lopez, age 20, who grew up in East St. Paul and now lives in Uptown Minneapolis. In between gasps for air and rolling around waiting for his eyes to clear, he related what happened.

“I went to the wrong circle up there,” he said, motioning toward University Avenue, “and I got closed in. They weren’t trying to close me in, but it was just like how everything was happening. Everyone was riding around and I ended up being by myself with another guy on a bike in a fucking square full of guys who were like—they tackled me as I was trying to put myself on the ground. I was already face down when a guy threw my camera and pulled my stuff off me and turned my head [toward him] and sprayed me. They grabbed my face and sprayed me after I had already dropped down and fetal-ed.” A medic put another dose of water into his eyes. “I saw him coming so I hit the ground because I didn’t want to get hit—I fetal-ed,” he repeated. “They stretched me out and turned me so I was on my back and another guy pulled my goggles off and he sprayed me. My goggles were already tilted a little bit”—he pointed to a space between his eye and his left ear—“and the guy ripped them off the rest of the way and sprayed me. Aaargh!” he yelled, in pain and frustration, and flipped back on his side. Fetal-ed.

Here’s a slideshow of pictures taken before and during the events described here by MnIndy’s Steve Perry, who was there too. Martin Goff, who’s quoted above, is the last photo in the set. The chicken, incidentally, was not busted in conjunction with the march. The chicken was busted by a History Theatre security guard for hawking CDs to people waiting in line for the Daily Show taping.

Ron Paul listens at yesterday's Rally for the Republic at Target Center (Photo: DavidAll06/Flickr)

Over the course of some eight hours of speechifying, videos and music at yesterday’s Rally For the Republic at the Target Center, I didn’t hear a single laudatory word uttered by Ron Paul or his supporters regarding the current state of the Republican Party. Considering that Paul garnered more votes than supposed party stalwarts (and fleeting presidential flavors of the moment) like Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson in the Republican primaries, the apparent loss of this constituency by John McCain and company would seem to be big news. Yet it has received scant attention in the perpetual horse race handicapping that frequently passes for political reportage in this country.

Anyone who assumes a majority of Paul supporters will pull the lever for McCain and other mainstream Republican candidates on election day obviously wasn’t around for yesterday’s rally. Their disaffection with the current state of governance as practiced by both Republicans and Democrats was rife was palpable emotion and elaborate policy prescriptions. Paul’s Libertarian-oriented philosophy of less government has always been to the right of the Republicans. But the umbrage he and his supporters have taken to the Bush Administration’s assault on the Constitution and assumption of greater executive power over the last eight years have also increasingly cast the Paul movement to the left of the Democrats, who have either enabled or offered feeble resistance to those power grabs.

No single day at the Democratic Convention in Denver focused on issues such as torture, illegal wiretapping, and preemptive war as much as the speakers at yesterday’s rally. No Democrat in Denver laid out the case for Bush’s impeachment as starkly and thoroughly as Bruce Fein, who served in the Justice Department under President Reagan. The scorn directed at any footage or mention of Republican media organ Fox News was loud and prolonged. It was matched by the scorn exhibited by upper level Paul supporters as they talked of their man being snubbed by RNC at the convention across the river in St. Paul.

Lest there be any doubt, Ron Paul himself explicitly ruled out endorsement or compromised accommodation with the Republicans in the evening address that climaxed the rally. “This is much bigger than the Republican Party,” he declared. “A true revolution isn’t reflected by one political party.”

Let there be no illusions about the darker side of the Paul movement. Fifteen of the 16 speaking slots listed in yesterday’s program contained the name of the person who would be appearing in front of the microphone. In the middle of the day, when the program noted that a “Special Guest” would speak, the person who strode to the podium was John McManus, current President of the John Birch Society. There is a reason why even the Paul campaign was abashed enough not to tip off McManus’s identity in advance. The JBS is a fringe-right organization founded by a dozen men in 1958—one of whom went on to co-found the Hitler-glorifying National Alliance. Birchers worked vociferously against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and earlier accused President Dwight Eisenhower of being a communist. Ignoring this shameful history, Ron Paul instead lauds the JBS for its anti-government stance, and, as McManus announced from the podium, has agreed to speak at the John Birch Society’s 50^th anniversary convention next month.

Beyond this despicable bedfellow, Paul would essentially bankrupt government’s social safety network. Last night he declared that even “a one-cent income tax is morally wrong because it sews the seeds of destruction” by allowing government influence into our lives. Yet when it comes to the mixing of church and state, or the right to choose whether or not to end a pregnancy, Paul’s unvarnished desire for freedom and liberty often take a back seat to his own staunchly conservative religious beliefs.

Both at the Target Center yesterday and across the nation during this political season, the broadening of Paul’s appeal came in large part due to his anti-war views and his defense of the Constitution against encroachments by the Bush Administration. A remarkable amount of time and care in Paul’s speech yesterday was devoted to peace issues. He asked why American history seems to confer greatness only on presidents who served during times of war instead of those who emphasized peace. “We have the threat of terrorism, but that is the consequence of a seriously flawed foreign policy,” he said.

To an arena of people who cherish the second amendment and fantasize about physically defending their constitutional liberties, he asked, “What if someone who looked different than us, with different values and culture invaded our country and set up an air base?”—an obvious reference to the experience of a variety of Muslim countries in the Middle East where the U.S. military is situated. Toward the end of the speech, Paul talked about how the lust for combat by leaders of both parties would inevitably lead to the reinstitution of the draft. Explicitly citing Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he said, “there is a time and a place for civil disobedience,” adding, “if there is a draft, there will be some very tough decisions.”

Eight years ago, the presence of Ralph Nader on the ballot damaged the candidacy of Al Gore in his razor-thin race with George Bush. While Ron Paul abandoned his own presidential run back in June, his lambasting of the Republican Party leadership yesterday will not be helpful to McCain. “Our message is growing,” Paul reminded his loyal audience. “It seems like even if they tried, they can’t stop us.”

More details to follow…

The Target Center is between a third and a half full. One of the volunteers asked another if any more tickets were needed because she still had 15 left. The guy with her smirked and slowly shook his head no.

Grover Norquist (pictured) gave a speech which he crystallized his position as “Taxes bad. Guns good.”

Fox News in general and Sean Hannity in particular are subjected to enormous boos and catcalls whenever they appear on the screen during the various Ron Paul bio bits and campaign highlights that occur between speakers.

President George W. Bush is also getting royally roasted. Author Lew Rockwell, who used to be Paul’s chief of staff, said of Bush, “He hasn’t done a single decent thing for the country,” that he “tricked the people into voting for him twice.” As for the price of gas, Rockwell thundered, in reference to Bush, “your wars, your regulation, your failure to open up the market to anyone but your cronies have resulted in the quadrupling of energy prices.”

MnIndy: Obvious first question, who are you voting for?

TC: Oh I don’t know. I don’t have any clue. I’m not much of a voter anyway.

MnIndy: Are you here in support of the candidate, Ron Paul?

TC: Not the candidate, but the man. His ideas. Not all of his ideas, I disagree with him on a couple of significant things but on most things I agree with his ideas and I think—I’ve covered a ton of politicians and he’s probably the only one I’ve ever met who didn’t have any interest in winning, or in controlling other people, building power.

MnIndy: Probably his most controversial statement during the campaign was during the Republican primary debates, when he said 9/11 was the chickens coming home to roost.

TC: Right.

MnIndy: That seemed to get the Republicans very upset. What was your take on that?

TC: Well I’ve talked to him about this. I think it is completely unfair to blame the United States for 9/11. And so if he was doing that I reject it completely and aggressively. But if he was making a point, as he said he was, that our interventionist foreign policy has consequences, that’s obviously true. Do you see what I mean? I mean blaming the United States for 911 is outrageous. I have certainly interviewed a lot of people, especially in other countries, who think, “You got what you deserved.” And I think that’s a repulsive idea. But that’s not where he was coming from.

Jesse Ventura, who is a featured speaker at Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic today, just held an impromptu press conference of sorts with half a dozen people, myself included, who gathered round him in the hallway at Target Center. Here’s the transcript.

Q: Tell me what you think about the people who are fired up about this movement.

JV: Well, it is an underlying movement that has been going on since Perot. How do you think Ross Perot in the early ’90s got the power he got? He was an alternative, and when the media doesn’t distort it, we take advantage it of it. I’m an example. I was polling at 10 percent and we needed to be allowed into the debates. I was polling at 10 percent in the primary and won. Why do you think they won’t let us into the debates? Because I proved they can be beaten. I have never lost to the Democrats or the Republicans. You’ll hear me today: I’m the most dangerous man in America.

Q: Governor, who are you going to vote for in November?

JV: Not for Obama and not for McCain, that’s for sure. I’ve got to look at the ballot and see who’s running.

Q: What’s wrong with McCain?

JV: What’s wrong with McCain? He’s a Republican. How’s that for an answer?

Q: What’s wrong with Obama?

JV: He’s a Democrat. They make decisions based on their parties, not based on the Republic. That great HBO movie we just saw on John Adams, with Paul Giamatti starring. The big message of that movie was what? That the downfall of America would not come from an external sources; it would come from within. And George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams agreed, they said the downfall of this country will be when the political parties control the government.

Q: Do either of those parties represent any people?

JV: Sure they do. Of course they do.

Q: A lot of people argue that Obama is very much a part of the grassroots, people-oriented movement.

JV: Well they’re going to be sorely disappointed. Because when he is all done—I hope I’m wrong—but in my opinion he’ll be just another democrat. You know the only change that will happen? My taxes will go up. That’s the only change I am going to see. Change, change, they will be reaching into my wallet. Fifty percent is not enough.

Q: [inaudible; question about living in Baja much of the year]

JV: I go down there to escape the media, to escape the United States life and to escape everything that I have known. I have a lifestyle down there that is completely different. Down there I wake up every morning with nothing to do and when I go to bed I am half done.

Mocking Katherine Kersten has become such a lazy person’s game that you need an extraordinarily silly, high-concept premise to indulge the itch. But today’s column, “New black leaders replacing tired Old Guard and its legacy of failure,” certainly qualifies.

Read the headline again. Now consider that Kersten doesn’t name a single “new black leader.” Not one. To buttress her comment that “A new generation of African American leadership is on the rise,” Kersten cites a 2004 speech by 71-year old television star Bill Cosby and a 2006 book by 54-year-old Fox News commentator Juan Williams.

The only local name Kersten could come up with to validate her view is Peter Bell, a literal graybeard who was named an “ABC Evening News Person of the Week” back in 1989. Currently head of the Metropolitan Council, he has been the Black Republican du jour for decades now, and served with Kersten on the board of the directors for the conservative think tank Center of the American Experiment back in the late 1990s. Back in 1995 — 13 years ago — Bell co-founded and served as vice chair of a nonprofit organization known as The Center For The New Black Leadership.” Its website is now defunct and its phone disconnected.

Could the headline of Kersten’s column be any more ironic?

The package has been in the works for weeks, and is in direct response to reports and recommendations contained in two independent studies on bridge safety that have been concluded in response to the I-35 bridge collapse last August — by the Office of the Legislative Auditor in February and the law firm of Gray Plant Mooty in May. But the harrowing incident over the weekend — in which a six-foot-by-nine-foot slab of concrete tore away from the underside of Maryland Avenue and fell into Highway 35E, damaging two vehicles and snarling traffic for eight hours — added urgency and gravitas to the legislators’ recommendations.

“We want safety not just driving across bridges, but driving under bridges,” said Sen. Jim Carlson (DFL-Eagan), an engineer and vice chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, who noted he was on I-35E earlier Saturday night before the concrete broke loose. Later, Carlson said that he knew of other bridges in the state that had similar problems with eroding concrete on their undersides.

Among the more prominent recommendations set forth on Monday was the necessity for bridges to be inspected at least every 12 months, and the setting and followup of specific performance targets at MnDOT, including the stipulation that an analysis be done by the agency whenever any of their goals or forecasts aren’t met. The package also recommends that the state salary cap be lifted for MnDOT engineers in order to assist with recruitment and retain quality personnel, and that either the commissioner or deputy commissioner of MnDOT be a professional engineer (an obvious slap at Goveror Tim Pawlenty’s previous appointment of his Lt. Governor, Carol Molnau, as MnDOT commissioner, needlessly politicizing the agency in line with Pawlenty’s no-new-taxes agenda).

MnDOT management would also be compelled to develop debt financing guidelines that limited the amount of debt the agency can take on. The organization structure of the agency would be made more transparent, and specific duties related to bridge inspection and repair on the part of MnDOT’s central headquarters and its district offices would be clarified. The commissioner would be encouraged to focus the agency’s research funding in three areas: bridge monitoring and inspection technology, improved inspection methods, and examining the long-term costs of deferred highway and bridge maintenance work.

Asked if legislators were micro-managing MnDOT, assistant house majority leader Melissa Hortman (DFL-Brooklyn Park) replied that “The Department of Transportation is a creature of the Legislature. We created it by statute. We fund it with taxpayer dollars. It is our responsibility to make sure that they are providing a safe transportation infrastructure.” That said, legislators say that they are generally pleased with new commissioner Tom Sorel, a civil engineer, and that they plan on working with MnDOT management to further refine their package of recommendations before introducing it in the next session.

At one point in the 35-minute press conference, Pat Kessler of WCCO-TV noted that in the time since Governor Pawlenty declared Minnesota’s bridges to be safe, four of them have been closed for extensive repairs and now a huge chunk of concrete has fallen off another. “Do you think our bridges are safe?” Kessler challenged the lawmakers.  This put the legislators in the position of making a soundbite that might seem hysterical and minimizing what has obviously become a chronic and potentially dangerous lack of maintenance in our infrastructure. Nearly all the lawmakers responded by praising the integrity and hard work done by MnDOT employees, and tipping their hat to Sorel’s nascent moves toward internal reform. “If you pushed me into a corner, yes, I’d say our bridges are safe,” Carlson said. But Hortman had perhaps the best response: “Yes I believe our bridges are safe. But I thought they were safe before the I-35 bridge collapsed.”

“Our job is to restore the trust and confidence of the public. We need to know that our roads and bridges are safe and that money is being spent in a rational and transparent manner,” said Sen. Scott Dibble (DFL-Minneapolis), a member of the senate’s transportation and budget policy division.

That’s easier said than done. A report issued Monday by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials stated that 152,000 of the nation’s 600,000 bridges are either structurally deficit or functionally obsolete, and will require $140 billion to repair. And by MnDOT’s own calculations, even the massive omnibus transportation bill passed over Pawlenty’s veto last session solves only about a quarter of our state transportation funding woes.