Photo: Hagedorn for Congress

As the Republican’s April 17 convention to nominate Rep. Tim Walz’s opponent approaches, southern Minnesota Republicans are jockeying for position and throwing some barbs. Jim Hagedorn, who sparked controversy late last year when he scrubbed incendiary posts from his blog, is criticizing Allen Quist for his “allegiance” to Rep. Michele Bachmann and his penchant for making over-the-top political statements. Hagedorn levied the charges in an email to Republican activists obtained by Bluestem Prairie.

“Mr. Quist’s allegiance to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is understandable, and I would expect nothing less as Mrs. Quist serves as the congresswoman’s district director,” wrote Hagedorn. “Congresswoman Bachmann has impeccable conservative credentials and serves the 6th District with distinction. But tying one’s candidacy to another campaign is politically risky and offers the media a free pass to issue stories about Bachmann-Quist, rather than Tim Walz and his liberal voting record.”

Hagedorn then attacked Quist for his statement in December saying that the battle against Democrats is more important than the battle against terrorists.

“Despite being a solid conservative, Quist campaigns are known for making provocative statements that often generate sympathy for opponents and undermine our conservative cause,” said Hagedorn. “Even during this relatively short campaign, counter-productive attacks made by Mr. Quist concerning Tim Walz and the Democratic Party provided Walz with a national media platform as well as a national fundraising base.”

Quist’s history of provocative statements goes back to his early campaigns. In his 1994 bid for the governor’s mansion, Quist said that men are “genetically predisposed” to be the head of the household and that soundbite appeared in most major newspaper across the country.

But Hagedorn isn’t without his own provocative statements. Earlier this month he said Walz policies are a “plague” on America and that liberals ‘carpet bombing’ the nation.

Photo: hagedornforcongress.com

The rhetoric in Minnesota’s First Congressional District is reaching a fevered pitch as five candidates, Randy Demmer, Jim Engstrand, Jim Hagedorn, Frank McKinzie and Allen Quist, vie for the Republican endorsement to run against DFL Rep. Tim Walz. While Quist made news early in the race when he said that Democrats were more dangerous than terrorists, Hagedorn came out with his own speech to Republican activists warning of liberal “carpet bombing” and calling Walz’s politics a “plague” on America.

Here are a few snippets of Hagedorn’s speech:

“The national liberals are all but carpet bombing the greatness of America – taking dead aim on the United States Constitution, our dynamic Free Enterprise system, and the enduring concepts of personal responsibility, individual opportunity, personal freedom, and traditional cultural values.”

“Tim Walz’s extreme liberalism represents a plague to our American way of life. Instead of listening to you – the moderate-to-conservative voters of southern Minnesota – Tim Walz follows the commands of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the fringe left.”

“Tim Walz is the most liberal Congressman in the history of southern Minnesota, and to reclaim America we must defeat Tim Walz and those like him!”

“Now, if there is a big-spending, big-government, high-tax idea to kill jobs or undermine economic recovery, President Obama-Speaker Pelosi and devoted liberal worshiper Tim Walz will sniff it out.”

“Tim Walz is such a left-winger that he believes we must limit carbon emissions to save the earth from global warming.”

Walz is on the list of Democrats the National Republican Congressional Committee is targeting in 2010.

Quist led the Republican pack with $32,853, Demmer took in $19,200 and Hagedorn raised $5,150.

In terms of cash on hand: Quist had $30,781.37, Demmer had $10,176.52 and Hagedorn $5,150.

By comparison, Walz had $421,203.05 cash on hand.

The Rochester Post-Bulletin compared these numbers to the 2008 cycle:

Just out of curiosity, I looked at the fundraising totals for Republican candidate Brian Davis, who unsuccessfully challenged Walz for the seat in 2008. At this point in the campaign, Davis had nearly $80,000 in cash on hand. But it is worth noting that when Walz won the seat in 2006, he had $40,309 on hand at this point in the campaign.

Photo: hagedornforcongress.com

In his new “white paper” on terrorism, First Congressional District candidate Jim Hagedorn offers some controversial rhetoric: “Young men from Islamic-dominated nations, who have no legitimate reason to visit the United States, should not be granted access to our country,” he writes. Later, he provocatively states that “[t]errorists should be given last rites, not Miranda Rights.”

But when asked by the Minnesota Independent for details on specific terror-fighting strategies — what he considers “legitimate” reasons for U.S. visits by Muslim men, for instance — the Blue Earth Republican’s response was 25 words long, delivered by cellphone text message.

Hagedorn’s treatise whacks Democrats in the shins for “mismanaging the terrorism issue”:

Rep. Tim Walz’s support for President Obama’s closure of the Guantanamo Bay military prison; Walz’s suggestion that al Qaeda terrorists be housed in Rochester’s Federal Medical Center; Walz’s opposition to anti-terrorism and counter-terrorism measures used to monitor and intercept enemy communications in Islamic-dominated nations; and Walz’s support for the Obama administration’s policy of “Mirandizing” captured terrorists, is proof of the Congressman’s complete lack of appreciation, understanding, and weakness on the continuing terrorism threat to America.

And: “[F]ederal bureaucratic incompetence and a culture of political correctness are getting Americans killed. Proof of this is found in the Ft. Hood murders. Major Hasan should have been removed from his post, but bureaucratic bungling and worries over political correctness contributed to devastating loss of life.”

He also picks up Republican talking points about the Obama administration, stating that it’s “handling terrorist activity as ‘a law enforcement matter,’ rather than ‘an act of war.’” (One needn’t go far — The Daily Show, say — to debunk that claim.)

But the paper is scant on details of what Hagedorn would do differently. The Minnesota Independent posed several questions to Hagedorn on ideas in his paper, including what methods he supported for assessing the guilt or innocence of terrorism suspects; whether he considered tourism or study “legitimate” reasons for Muslim men to visit the US; and what he would do to prevent another tragedy like the one at Ft. Hood.

That request was met, hours later, with a lone text message:

“The terrorism paper outlined my philosophy that terrorists must be dealt with as enemy combatants and that my approach contrasts sharply with Obama/Pelosi/Walz.”

Seeking elaboration, we tried one more text-message volley:

Hagedorn, and fellow CD-1 GOPer Allen Quist, are both invoking terrorism in their campaigns. The pair got a “thumbs down” from the Mankato Free Press editorial board last week for the negative tone of their campaigns, including Quist’s headline-grabbing statement that fighting “radicals” like Walz and Barack Obama was a bigger “battle” than fighting terrorism.

Quist was called out on MSNBC for using the “terrorism exploitation machine” in hopes of winning election.

Hagedorn, with his terrorism white paper, now joins Quist in that camp, says Hamline University professor David Schultz, although he disputes the use of the term. “It’s clearly not a white paper,” he told the Minnesota Independent, stating that such documents are usually nonpartisan, reference scholarly sources, weigh competing options, and, in many cases, arrive at options for potential plans of action. “It reads like a candidate’s press release…. This is really more about ideology and fear mongering than anything else. ”

But unlike Quist, who prioritizes defeating Walz and Obama higher than fighting terrorism, Hagedorn sees the two as directly linked. He ominously states: “[D]efeating al Qaeda may be contingent upon reclaiming political power from the liberal Democrats.”

In Schultz’s eyes, though, they’re using nearly identical rhetoric. “In a variety of ways, they’re doing what I call interesting McCarthyite actions… It’s a form of red baiting: Equating Democrats and liberals with Muslims and terrorists. It just depends on where they want to put the accent.”

He says Hagedorn’s paper “just reeked of all the worst things you do when you want to conjure up people’s fears and prey on people’s racism.” But, he concludes, “often it’s incredibly effective.”

While Schultz  says the First Congressional District is relatively conservative with a low percentage of Muslim residents, the Cook Political Report, as of Jan. 15, still lists Walz’s seat as “Likely Democratic.”

Allen Quist, Jim Hagedorn

Two of Rep. Tim Walz’s GOP challengers got a dressing down by an in-district paper Friday just as they’re ramping their campaigns up: The Mankato Free Press gave the duo a “thumbs down” — for the negative “tone” of their campaigns.

The paper’s editorial board called out two stories first reported by the Minnesota Independent: The scrubbing of offensive blog posts by candidate Jim Hagedorn, and candidate Allen Quist’s videotaped comments that defeating “radicals” like Walz and Barack Obama is a bigger “battle” than terrorism (he says his words were taken out of context).

The editorial read, in part:

In a recent speech that can be seen on YouTube, Republican Allen Quist said this:

“Terrorism, yes (but) that’s not the big battle. The big battle is in D.C. … Obama, Pelosi, Walz — they’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They’re destroying our country.”

He also called the health care reform bill the “most evil” legislation he’d seen in his lifetime.

Another Republican candidate in the race, Jim Hagedorn, has a history of blog comments that include an anti-gay rant filled with sexual double entendres and one in which he said he hoped the building was “fumigated” after those attending the Paul Wellstone memorial service had left.

Campaigns are all about debates and occasional rants. But too many candidates have focused on anger-filled demagoguery, name calling and personal attacks.

Voters in the 1st District instead deserve to hear about clear policy and philosophical differences of candidates.

Both candidates are starting to ramp up their campaigns: Quist is hosting a Feb. 1 luncheon/fundraiser and town hall in Rochester with, among others, Rep. Michael Burgess, a physician who was in Minnesota for last fall’s town hall meeting on health care with Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Hagedorn is making terrorism a key issue of his campaign (apparently: he doesn’t seem to have an “Issues” section on his site yet). In his letter to the editor of the Fairmont paper, published Thursday, he — unlike Quist — directly links defeating terrorism to ousting Democrats, stating that “given the way President Obama and liberals like Tim Walz are mismanaging the terrorism issue, defeating al Qaeda may be contingent upon reclaiming political power from the Democrats.”

That same day, Hagedorn announced the release of a “white paper” on terrorism; the press release includes similar charges to those leveled in the letter to the editor. I’ve requested a copy of the white paper, which doesn’t appear to be available on his campaign site, from Hagedorn. Update: Here’s the white paper.

Also running in the First Congressional District race are GOPers Randy Demmer and M. Frank McKinzie.

Clockwise from upper left: Allen Quist, Lynne Torgerson, Jim Hagedorn, Mike Parry

Over the last few weeks, several candidates for public office in Minnesota have made (or had revealed) statements extreme enough to garner terms of rebuke like “intolerant,” “appalling,” and “poisonous.” From state Senate candidate Mike Parry’s tweet linking Democrats and pedophiles, to Congressional hopeful Jim Hagedorn’s punningly homophobic “Mr. Conservative” blog posts, recent candidate communiques prompt a few questions: What’s going on? Has the flu jumped to the state’s body politic?

“It’s an especially virulent strain of hatred and intolerance that we see,” says DFL Party Chair Brian Melendez about recent comments by three Republicans and an independent. “I’ve never seen people so openly racist and homophobic.”

Melendez blames “the Teabagger movement” and conservative agenda-setters like U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh. But he also recognizes changing conditions imposed by a new media environment that affects everyone in public life.

“Our lives are much more on the record than 10 years ago or even two years ago,” he tells the Minnesota Independent.

Prof. Ronald W. Greene, who researches political communication at the University of Minnesota, sees the same shifting ground for partisan rhetoric, but he puts the recent rash of outrageous comments in the context of “in-group” speech that has been studied as a commonplace phenomenon for 50 years.

“It’s a well-known process that seems to have been intensified in the new media,” and it’s heightening the fragmentation and polarization of politics, Greene says.

“Speakers think they’re rewarded for this kind of behavior. They have to be more representative of the group than anyone else. You would only be able to differentiate yourself by being more extreme.”

Four on the edge

Addressed to in-groups to varying degrees, the recent crop of statements were made or revealed — and in a few instances, recanted — by four candidates on four online platforms: a campaign website, a blog, Twitter and YouTube.

First was Torgerson, a Fifth Congressional District independent who tacks conservative on cultural issues, is seeking to unseat DFLer Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress. At her campaign website and in comments to MnIndy and other media, Torgerson espoused a no-holds-barred critique of Islam as antithetical to American values of free speech and equal rights, and called Ellison as “not a proper person to have in our federal government” for his ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Next came Jim Hagedorn, a Republican running for Congress in the state’s First District. His blogging as “Mr. Conservative” was riddled with homophobic and harshly partisan wordplay. “Until Paul Wellstone’s plane crash, DFL Trotskyites were confident the Senator would soar [emphasis his] to victory over Norm Coleman” is one example. Another: Judges striking down Texas’ sodomy law “injudiciously fisted two hundred and twenty-seven years of the Republic’s mores into the bowels of cultural debauchery.” Hagedorn scrubbed those comments from his site.

President Obama is “a Power Hungry Arrogant Black Man,” wrote Mike Parry, the endorsed Republican in this month’s special-election campaign to replace retiring state Sen. Dick Day in District 26, on Twitter. Like another tweet that asked “what’s with Dems and Pedophiles?” in apparent reference to hate-crimes legislation, that message was scrubbed, and Parry issued a partial apology and explanation.

Most recent is Allen Quist, like Hagedorn a Republican running for the state’s First District seat in Congress, seen in a GOP YouTube video saying: “Our country is being destroyed. Every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom… Terrorism? Yes. That’s not the big battle. The big battle is in D.C. with the radicals. They aren’t liberals. They are radicals. Obama, Pelosi, Walz: They’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They are destroying our country.”

Not quite what they intended

None of the four — with the possible exception of Torgerson, writing at her campaign site – seems to have meant for their statements to reach a wider audience. Bloggers acted almost as the candidates’ literary agents, pushing sample quotes into the online political marketplace — sometimes, as with Parry and Quist, all the way into the mainstream media.

Greene sees the resulting whipped-up ferment as a kind of challenge to political polarization and fragmentation by appealing to voters not yet committed to a party. In the competitive dynamics of the new-media environment, such exposures “get the public to look at how extreme these people really are, and erode [candidates'] ability to speak to that voting middle.”

The message, says Greene: Candidates who make extreme statements are “not really ‘of’ these people.”

For his part, Melendez contends outrageous rhetoric isn’t really “of” the rank-and-file Republicans he knows.”They’re not haters like this.”

At the Wabasha County Republicans Christmas party on Dec. 7, Quist said, in part:

“Our country is being destroyed. Every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom… Terrorism? Yes. That’s not the big battle. The big battle is in D.C. with the radicals. They aren’t liberals. They are radicals. Obama, Pelosi, Walz: They’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They are destroying our country.”

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Quist is one of at three colorful Republicans challenging U.S. Rep. Tim Walz in southern Minnesota: Jim Hagedorn was caught scrubbing blog posts deemed racist and homophobic, and Randy Demmer decries Walz’s “culture of dependency” after accepting $75,000 in farm subsidies.

Clockwise from top left: Michele Bachmann, Jim Hagedorn, Lynne Torgerson, Al Franken, Bradlee Dean, Tony Sertich

From U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann famously urging fellow conservatives to “slit our wrists” in opposition to health care reform to state Rep. Tony Sertich warning about “www.anybody.com” running wild at the Capitol, you have the Minnesota Independent to thank — or blame — for foisting these quotations on the world this year.

Our favorite ten quotes from 2009:

“What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”

– Michele Bachmann, member of Congress from Minnesota’s Sixth District, speaking to conservatives in Colorado

“The fruit of morality is Jesus Christ! That’s why we do high school assemblies.”

– Bradlee Dean, founder of You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International, purveyor of punk-rock assemblies to public schools

“If it’s somebody who designs their own Web site and comes down to the Capitol … we could be deluged with www.anybody.com walking through the door saying, ‘I’m the online media, let me have floor access.’ You think the House chamber is a ruckus … now, wait till all the bloggers get here and show up en masse.”

– Tony Sertich, majority leader, Minnesota House of Representatives, on floor-access restrictions for online media

“Until Paul Wellstone’s plane crash, DFL Trotskyites were confident the Senator would soar to victory over Norm Coleman … [emphasis his]”

– Jim Hagedorn, Republican candidate for Congress in Minnesota’s First District, in one of the quips scrubbed from his “Mr. Conservative” blog

“Keith Ellison simply is not a proper person to have in our federal government.”

– Lynne Torgerson, independent candidate for Congress in Minnesota’s Fifth District, on her campaign website

“We will be seated. And by ‘we,’ I mean me.”

– Al Franken, addressing young DFLers during the election-contest phase of his recount battle with former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman

“I loathe, hate, despise and detest Franken and all of his supporters. I believe that this so-called hacking is just more dirty tricks by that dirtbag and his pals.”

– Gary Govro, one of the donors whose personal financial information was left unsecured at Coleman’s campaign website

“Complete and utter bullshit.”

– Bruce Schneier, technology expert, on the claim that Coleman’s online database breach didn’t compromise donors’ information

“When I think of Sarah I think of eagles.”

– Man waiting outside Mall of America book-signing event, holding photos he intended to give to Sarah Palin

“No need to poke me. There’s no need to touch me.”

– Staffer at U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum’s St. Paul office, where opponents of health care reform gathered for an impromptu “town hall” meeting

An error message now marks a post pulled from Hagedorn's blog

As the Minnesota Independent first reported earlier this month, 1st Congressional District candidate Jim Hagedorn removed blog posts disparaging of gays, fellow Republicans and Native Americans from his “Mr. Conservative” blog within days of announcing his candidacy. Now, as new deleted posts are discovered, the state’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy group has called for Hagedorn to retract his statements.

While Hagedorn hasn’t responded to the Minnesota Independent’s request for comment, he did tell the Rochester Post Bulletin that he removed the posts prior to 2004 for space concerns. But contradicting that is a July 13, 2004, post that Hagedorn scrubbed — and it’s a post OutFront Minnesota is responding to.

Removed sometime after Oct. 23, 2009, the post likened two men who’d had consensual sex to “barnyard” animals and said that in overturning Texas’ sodomy law, the Supreme Court “injudiciously fisted two hundred and twenty-seven years of the Republic’s mores into the bowels of cultural debauchery.”

To that, OutFront’s public policy director, Monica Meyer, says, “He focused on what feels like bathroom humor, although he probably thought it was more clever than that. It’s not OK.”

“I feel like he was trying to figure out a way to try to make it funny but still pointing out that gay people aren’t the same as everyone else and we can make fun of them,” she told the Minnesota Independent, adding that often candidates will use GLBT people as a “wedge issue” to draw supporters.

hagedornforcongress.com

“You know there’s still fear out there about gay people, and sometimes that leads to violence,” she said, citing a new FBI report that found an 11-percent increase in hate crimes against people perceived as GLBT. “We really should have elected officials and candidates who really call out for fairness for everyone… [Hagedorn] should say that he doesn’t stand by those words.”

Indeed, Hagedorn writes that his blog is all about “cutting humor” mixed with “reflective analysis and hard charging commonsense to promote the brand of conservatism established by America’s Founding Fathers, reintroduced by Senator Barry Goldwater and perfected in modern times by President Ronald Reagan, the author’s hero.”

But some of that humor didn’t make the grade. Posts that were visible on the site as recently as mid-October 2009 were removed, including: a joke, days after Sen. Paul Wellstone’s death, about the “treehuggers” and pedophiles Hagedorn says attended the late senator’s memorial service; a post critical of fellow GOPer, then-Sen. Rod Grams; and his commentary on voter registration problems at South Dakota reservations: “Leave it to liberals to ruin John Wayne’s wisdom of the only good Indian being a dead Indian.”

That last one was dubbed racist by the state Democratic Party on Dec. 5. “If I had racist posts out there, and I was running for office, I would want to hide them, too,” DFL chair Brian Melendez told the Rochester paper.

Two more deleted posts have recently been recovered: a Mar. 13, 2003 piece entitled, “Liberal Reassurances and the Vision Thing,” and a post of June 12 of the same year (prompted by the publication of Hillary Clinton’s book “Living History”) which goes heavy on the double entendre in conjuring Bill Clinton’s sexual proclivities. A sample:

Hillary Clinton’s latest quest to prostitute history nauseates all with a pulse…

Were Hillary to “gulp for air” every time some adulterous hussy gulped good old Bill, she’d be in a perpetual state of vapor lock….

… During the most pitiful of the pitiful segments, it was “revealed” that the Heroine relied on faith (not God, mind you) to endure after the splotched blue dress exposed the depth of Monica and Bill’s Macanudo and Domino’s parties. “My faith was so instrumental,” the Heroine shamelessly acknowledged, “I got down on my knees.” Amazing how Bill cajoles his gals to head below the human equator one way or the other…

But OutFront’s Meyer sees some hope in the fact that Hagedorn removed some of these posts, perhaps after realizing they’re offensive to some Minnesotans.

“Perhaps that shows we’re slowly changing the culture of politics,” she said. “Maybe he realized that viable candidates don’t succeed by putting down a group of people. He’s hopefully thinking that doesn’t play well for his political future.”

hagedornforcongress.com

Why should First Congressional District residents vote for GOP candidate Jim Hagedorn over other Republicans or U.S. Rep. Tim Walz? “Well, I’ve got a sense of humor,” he told MPR’s Tom Scheck yesterday. But writings purged from Hagedorn’s blog prior to his candidacy announcement Wednesday present a type of humor that might be problematic for some voters — in a new case, gay and lesbian voters and their allies.

In a July 13, 2004 post (pdf) at his blog, “Mr. Conservative,” Hagedorn laments the Supreme Court decision of a year earlier that struck down Texas’ sodomy law. Spotted by Savage-based blogger DJ Danielson, the excised post is rife with double entendre, including a reference to the justices’ 2003 ruling, which Hagedorn wrote, “injudiciously fisted two hundred and twenty-seven years of the Republic’s mores into the bowels of cultural debauchery.”

The case, Lawrence v. Texas, resulted after John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner (Hagedorn refers to the mixed-race couple as “Salt and Pepper Texans”) were arrested for allegedly having consensual sex. Hagedorn’s version of the arrest:

The whole of the story is that barnyard noises incited Houston’s version of Mrs. Kravitz to summon authorities, presumably, so her neighbors could be hosed down by something other than each other. Police dutifully responded to the dispatcher’s call of “code 69…in progress.” In the end, the human erector set were arrested after cops, copped the copping couple “copulating” – weapons withdrawn, in hand, thankfully still loaded, regrettably cocked and primed to shoot.

Shortly after conviction, the assailants challenged the ruling, as well as the validity of laws that discouraged acts most suitably performed at a Ringling Brothers sexual version of the greatest show on earth.

He continues:

Never was it imagined the nation’s highest judicial body would entertain such an open-n-shut case and then have the cheek to permit the guilty to come from behind and pull one out of their rears, to use a sports metaphor. Even though the defendant’s line-of-reasoning gave new meaning to the term “oral argument,” the ins-and-outs of the judicial process were exposed as penetratingly confounding. The case confirmed to experts and laymen alike that the “Law Is A Ass,” or as the legal letches of MANBLA now whisper to fresh meat: ass IS the law.

Butt (sic) never have winners lost so dearly. The Court’s voyage into uncharted, untreated cultural bathhouse waters was designed to offer a gentle push from behind…to generate a small skip forward for the pink triangle class…to throw them a bone, so to speak.

Hagedorn has not reponded to the Minnesota Independent’s request for comment on the blog-scrubbing.