Lynne Torgerson launched her second campaign against Rep. Keith Ellison on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 this weekend at her home in Golden Valley, calling for a return to “Judeo-Christian values” and labeling Ellison as a “radical Islamist” who wants to do away with the U.S. Constitution.

Torgerson, who has the backing of Tea Party Nation, also took shots at fellow Republican challenger Chris Fields for his divorce and support for LGBT rights.

Torgerson is running for the Republican nomination in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District. Earlier this year, she told Tea Party Nation that she would be running—the group backed her previous run for office. Torgerson raised $60,000 in the last cycle—nearly as much as the Republican in the race. She self-financed $25,000 of that money and she was the only Minnesota-based donor to her campaign; all other contributions are from out of state. She ran as an unaffiliated independent.

One of Torgerson’s main issues is an opposition to civil rights for gay people. She said homosexuality goes against “natural law.”

“Two men cannot make a baby. Two women cannot make a baby. Further, all cultures which have evidenced moral decline have fallen,” she wrote. “Homosexuality has traditionally been seen as evidence of moral decline. Thus, homosexuality is not good for America, nor any culture.”

Torgerson told Golden Valley Patch at her 9/11 campaign launch that she was “entering the race to stand for the moral, Judeo-Christian values the country was founded upon. That’s our foundation, and if we don’t have our foundation in place, then the economy and things aren’t going to be doing so well.”

She said it was important to her to support the U.S. Constitution.

“I still need to expose Keith Ellison for being a radical Islamist. I do believe that he says he does eventually want to replace the U.S. Constitution with sharia law,” Torgerson said.

Torgerson told Patch she recently asked Ellison whether he believed the Constitution or “Sharia law” was supreme.

“He evaded the question,” she said. “He refuses to state that the U.S. Constitution should be supreme over Sharia law, which is to me quite surprising. He talked about how the Constitution has been amended and it appears that he would amend the Constitution to incorporate Sharia law.”

Torgerson’s question was caught on video posted by her campaign. In the exchange, Ellison said there are no communities in the United States that have tried to install Sharia law.

“I believe that the United States Constitution which has been amended well over 25 times is the bedrock of American law,” Ellison said. “This whole movement to try to ban Sharia, this bill has been introduced in over 22 states, in my view, this is a very thin-disguised effort at religious persecution of people who are Muslim.”

Rep. Keith Ellison weighed in late last week on the controversy surrounding the firing of National Public Radio’s Juan Williams after he told Fox’s Bill O’Reilly that he gets “worried” and “nervous” when he sees people in Muslim garb get on an airplane. Williams dishonored his own legacy, especially his work on the “Eyes on the Prize” documentary on the civil rights era, Ellison said, calling Williams’ remarks “ugly” and “bigoted.”

On The O’Reilly Factor last Monday, Williams said, “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

NPR terminated Williams contract, stating that his remarks on O’Reilly’s show were “inconsistent with [NPR's] editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

“Sadly, Juan Williams has taken a bat to all the work he did around civil rights,” Ellison said, discussing the topic on MSNBC’s The Ed Show. “I feel like taking all that stuff off my shelf and putting it in the garbage, because I just really feel he has dishonored his legacy to that extent.”

“The people who got on that airline on 9/11, they made sure they didn’t have any so-called ‘Muslim garb’  — whatever that is,” he said. “They made sure they were as mainstream-looking as they possibly could, because they were trying to harm our country.”

Ellison added, “The people who are just practicing their faith or their culture, more likely, these people aren’t any danger to our country. These folks are just minding their own business.”

“I think it’s un-American what Juan Williams said.”

Ellison said Williams should apologize “profusely” to Americans. Williams was given a $2 million, three-year contract to host The O’Reilly Factor within 24 hours of his firing from NPR.

Here’s the video of the exchange:

Franklin's photo as used in a stamp. Photo: USPS

Corrected (see end of post): Last time independent congressional candidate Lynne Torgerson had problems with photography, it was for using a stock image of the U.S. Supreme Court building — instead of the House wing of the Capitol where she’d serve if elected — on her website. This time, the Minneapolis attorney is using an iconic 9/11 image on her campaign site without the photographer’s permission.

Torgerson’s recently redesigned campaign site features a photo of firefighters at the World Trade Center following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The image is correctly identified as that of Thomas E. Franklin, although Torgerson also includes a copyright symbol and the identifier “Staff Photographer.” Contacted by the Minnesota Independent, Franklin says, “I did not give Lynne Torgerson permission” and indicated he’d contact her about the unauthorized use.

“I love Minnesota,” he added, “but I do not endorse her or any other candidate.”

The photograph is so iconic that the U.S. Postal Service turned it into a “Heroes” stamp that raised funds to assist families of emergency personnel injured or killed responding to the 9/11 attacks. Franklin was present at the stamp’s March 2002 unveiling with President George W. Bush and 9/11 first responders.

Last November, the Star Tribune’s Eric Roper caught another misused photo: On her website at the time, Torgerson showed a picture not of the House wing of the U.S. Capitol, but of the Supreme Court building.

The photo made it “unclear if Torgerson is ready to give up the law just yet,” Roper wrote. But if an attorney is ignoring copyright in using the memorable 9/11 image suggests perhaps she should brush up on the law a bit longer.

Torgerson, who’s running for the U.S. House seat held by Rep. Keith Ellison, has strong views about Islam, and her campaign site references 9/11 and Ellison’s Muslim “cohorts” various times. Also running in the 5th Congressional District: Republican-endorsed candidate Joel Demos; Independence Party candidate Tom Schrunk;  Barb Davis White and Gregg Iverson, who are running in the DFL primary against Ellison; and progressive Michael Cavlan.

Franklin’s image as it appeared on Torgerson’s site:

Update: In comments, Torgerson says she was given permission to use the image, and an email from Frank Scandale, Franklin’s editor at The Record in New Jersey, confirms that fact and outlines the photo’s terms of use:

Tom Franklin was unaware that the legal department of North Jersey Media Group did indeed  give Lynne Torgerson permission to use the photo on her web site as long as the following copyright notice appeared:  ©2001 The Record (Bergen County, N.J.) Photo by Thomas E. Franklin.

By giving Ms. Torgerson permission to use the photo, The Record was not  endorsing her  candidacy or in any way supporting her views.

Franklin accurately stated he didn’t authorize Torgerson’s use of the image, but the Minnesota Independent should’ve taken the extra step of contacting his paper to inquire further about reproduction rights. We regret the error and apologize to Torgerson.

“Twenty-five percent of my people believe the Pentagon and Rumsfeld were responsible for taking the twin towers down,” said Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat who represents a conservative Republican district in Minnesota. “That’s why I don’t do town meetings.”

Maybe you heard about the speeches Bachmann, Pawlenty and Coleman gave inside the meeting hall. This video is mostly from outside the hall, at a table where the group We Are Change Minnesota gave away 500 “The Obama Deception” DVDs.

It’s largely shot from a tabletop perspective, sort of a leaflet’s-eye-view of the group’s interactions with passing Republican Party stars, featuring off-kilter camerawork and nearly unintelligible audio.

Bachmann is the most generous with her time and attention (from the 2:50–5:00 mark), exchanging email addresses and promising to bring her colleague and teacher Ron Paul to town to talk about the Federal Reserve Bank and fiscal policy.

It’s almost impossible to discern audio from the Pawlenty part (5:00–6:10). In the clip’s most creative moment, the camera is apparently hidden within the stack of DVDs, their white sleeves providing the video a peek-through-Venetian-blinds feel.

Coleman’s segment (6:10–7:40) is notable for where he draws the line on We Are Change Minnesota’s offerings. He accepted a copy of “The Obama Deception,” produced by Alex Jones of Infowars.com and PrisonPlanet, but he refused an “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth” disc about a controlled-demolition plot. “I just don’t believe it,” says Coleman before heading off with his entourage.

“To me questions haven’t been answered and are not being answered about 9/11,” he told Jones, host of the nationally syndicated radio show, adding that he suspected a media coverup. He has issues with the rate at which the towers fell, reports that steel girders were melted rather than pulverized and the fact that a building not hit by a plane fell in its footprint:

“Two planes struck two buildings … but how is it that a third building fell five hours later? How could this building just implode into its own footprint five hours later. That’s my first question. The 9/11 Commission didn’t even devote one page to that in their big volume of investigation.”

[A]s the ABC affiliate, Channel 5 broadcasts ABC network programming but does not determine the content of it. We are the only locally-owned television station serving the Twin Cities, and hope that you will judge ABC network offerings separately from Channel 5′s own local news and public affairs programming… We also suggest that you make your opinion known to the originator of the program: ABCNEWS.

That drew a miffed-seeming reply from ABC News:

That’s flat-out false, says an ABC News spokeswoman. “ABC News did not participate in any way in the production of this movie,” Cathie Levine told me earlier today. In fact, she said, the news division didn’t even let the production use its file footage, following ABC News policy.

Yep, that was the headline that greeted me in this morning’s Star Tribune.  And while I’m ecstatic that these deplorable wretches (well, at least those found guilty) are finally being brought to justice, the timing seems a bit too opportunistic.  Here we are under two months before the November elections, almost 5 years after 9/11, and President Bush all of a sudden decides it’s finally time to try these suspects.  Holding the trial off until now seems like a thoroughly calculated political move intended to con the American public into believing that this administration is effective on defense (oh, and never-you-mind the war going on).

Oh well, we’re sure to see more of these tactics between now and November.  All we can do is sit back and try not to let the fear-mongoring get to us.  In the mean time, I’m still happy that justice is finally going to be served, it’s just too bad partisan politics got to decide the timeframe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you agree or disagree  that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terror  attacks?	OVER-ALL	DEM	GOP	IND
Agree	46%	32%	65%	39%
Disagree	50%	65%	30%	56%

I was upset enough about the public’s general acceptance of this blatant falsity back in 2003, but three years later 46% of Americans still believe this garbage!?  It’s been well documented that Al Queda despised Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq because they saw it as a secular pock-mark on their vision for a radical islamic Middle-East.  The feeling was mutual and Saddam managed with varying success to keep Al Queda out of his borders. But if there’s all this hard proof, where did the American people get this idea? Hmm… (look below the fold for an answer):

Although Cheney was the most vociferous supporter of this connection, Bush himself along with GOP lawmakers continued to claim this for quite a while.  But the 9/11 commission and George Tenet both resoundingly concluding that there is no link must have cooled their jets because we haven’t heard that much about a link since the 2004 elections.  So why do people still believe this garbage?  What would it take for them to accept the truth?  Would the Commander-in-Chief denying it be enough?  ‘Cause we can do that one: