But that’s not to say that Olson didn’t play a vital role in the contest. In fact, his influence was sufficient to help knock off the Republican candidate in a district that’s dominated by the GOP. Allison Krueger, who defeated Olson in the Republican primary, received 22,260 votes — 93 less than Democrat Lisa Fobbe. (Strangely there were an additional 1,366 write-in votes that are not attributed to Olson.)

Just how Republican is Senate District 16? Bush won it by 22 points in 2004; Pawlenty won it by 20 points two years ago. Even McCain-Palin took it by 20 points yesterday — among the highest margins in the state for the Republican ticket.

But perhaps Senate District 16, which includes Big Lake and Princeton, is trending a tad blue. One of the two state House seats in the area was also taken by a Democrat yesterday. Gail Kulick Jackson, in her third try, knocked off seven-term incumbent Sondra Erickson by just 99 votes.

Both contests will be subject to recounts under state law owing to the extremely close vote tallies.

But in August Republicans in Senate District 16 — which tracks Highway 169 from the northern suburbs (Big Lake, Zimmerman) up to the Mille Lacs area — endorsed Olson for a senate seat. The decision resulted in strident criticism from GOP pooh-bahs, including (bizarrely) Sen. Norm Coleman.

Grassroots Republicans were outraged by the meddling in local affairs. In August, for instance, I attended a meeting of Pine County Republicans, and there was a vigorous discussion of the Olson matter. “There is no excuse for party elites who believe they have more power than the grassroots,” said Michael Monte, the group’s secretary, at the time. The Pine County GOP passed a resolution commending party officials in Olson’s senate district for their actions.

The controversy seemed to be over, however, last month when Olson lost a primary battle to Allison Krueger. Even news that Olson iintended to mount a write-in campaign seemed merely an indication that he’d joined the ranks of fringe candidates forever tilting at electoral windmills.

But now comes the rather remarkable news over the weekend that Republicans in Senate District 16 — by an overwhelming 61-18 margin — have endorsed Olson’s write-in campaign. According to the St. Cloud Times, local GOP chairman Dave Wilson, had this to say about the decision: “People on the Olson side are going to be pushing as hard as we can with limited financial means to get him elected.”

All of which must be taken as remarkably good news for Democratic candidate Lisa Fobbe in a strongly GOP-friendly area. While the senate district voted narrowly for Amy Klobuchar in 2006 (48.3 to 47.6 percent), Gov. Tim Pawlenty crushed Mike Hatch by a 20-point spread that same year, and in 2004 George W. Bush received support from 61 percent of voters.

Fobbe says she wasn’t entirely surprised by the latest twist in GOP saga. “He has actually been active ever since losing the primary,” she says of Olson. “I’ve seen him more than I’ve seen Allison.”

Al Franken will comfortably advance from today’s primary election to take on Norm Coleman in the U. S. Senate race. With more than 80 percent of the results in, Franken is carrying 67 percent of the vote in the seven-candidate field. His most credible challenger, attorney Priscilla Lord Faris, is currently garnering support from 29 percent of voters.

Dean Barkley will be joining Franken and Coleman on the ballot as the Independence Party candidate. The former Senator, having served briefly after the death of Paul Wellstone, is routing the seven-candidate field with more than 60 percent of the vote.

In House races, only Reps. Michele Bachmann and Keith Ellison faced primary opposition. Both incumbents are earning support from more than 80 percent of voters in results so far reported by the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office.

A pair of House districts featured primary battles to determine who will take on the incumbent. In the most intriguing showdown, GOP-endorsed challenger Brian Davis currently leads state Sen. Dick Day by a 62-38 margin in the First Congressional District and will advance easily. Less interesting is the contest in the Seventh Congressional District, where Glen Menze and Alan Roebke are battling to see who will run against nine-term incumbent Collin Peterson.

There were a handful of intriguing state-legislative contests taking place today. It appears to be a split decision for the override six. Two-term incumbent Neil Peterson is paying the price for his vote to override Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of the transportation bill earlier this year, losing to GOP-endorsed challenger Jan Schneider by a 57-43 margin. Rep. Jim Abeler, however, is headed to the general election, carrying 64 percent of the vote.

Minneapolis Rep. Willie Dominguez is finished serving at the Capitol after just one term. He was trounced by challenger Bobby Joe Champion, who garnered the DFL endorsement. Meanwhile veteran Reps. Phyllis Kahn and Joe Mullery have handily beaten back intra-party challengers.

Finally it looks unlikely that Rep. Mark Olson — who was kicked out of the Republican caucus and denied endorsement after being arrested for domestic assault — will be headed to the state senate. He’s currently trailing Alison Krueger in a contest to see who will represent the GOP in the general election.

(Photo courtesy of cursedthing)

There’s a primary election today in Minnesota. You can be forgiven for not having noticed. With the temporary Republican takeover of the Twin Cities and a U.S. Senate race that’s been billed as a two-candidate duel for months, it’s easy to overlook the September balloting. But there are some intriguing questions to consider in looking at tomorrow’s results:

1. How comfortably will Al Franken advance out of the Democratic primary? There’s little doubt that the DFL-endorsed candidate will ultimately emerge from the six-candidate scuffle. His most serious challenger is Priscilla Lord Faris, an attorney and former Sunfish Lake City Council member, who filed at the last minute after citing concerns over Franken’s viability. But Lord Faris has run a schizophrenic campaign, initially running TV spots attacking Franken, but then pulling the ads (only to see Sen. Norm Coleman adopt the footage for his own attacks). The other challengers are the usual cast of gadflies, including perennial candidates Ole Savior and Dick Franson. Coleman faces just one challenger on the Republican side: fugitive arsonist Jack Shepard. Anything less than a Franken romp could indicate lingering questions about his candidacy among the DFL faithful.

2. Who will survive the Independence Party scrum? Jesse Ventura ultimately proved more interested in press attention than running a political campaign, but there are seven contenders for the IP crown. Three notables stand out from the pack. Dean Barkley enjoys the greatest name recognition, having served as director of the Office of Strategic and Long Range Planning during the Ventura administration and briefly as a U.S. senator following the death of Paul Wellstone. He also has the backing of the former Governor. Jack Uldrich is an author and former IP chairman. Southeastern Minnesota farmer Stephen Williams earned the party’s endorsement prior to the emergence of his two chief rivals. Whoever survives Tuesday’s primary will face the formidable task of siphoning off attention from the much anticipated Coleman-Franken showdown.

3. Does Dick Day have a chance in hell? Almost certainly not. But the eccentric state legislator from Owatonna could benefit from low turnout. He’s raised no money (almost literally), but enjoys widespread name recognition in the First Congressional District and is popular with the far right. Conversely, Brian Davis has raised a formidable war chest and enjoys the GOP’s official backing, but is a political neophyte. The winner gets the opportunity to take on Rep. Tim Walz.

4. Who will survive to get throttled by Collin Peterson? The suspense is agonizing. Alan Roebke is a convicted felon who doesn’t have enough money to pay for gas to campaign in the sprawling Seventh Congressional District. Glen Menze is the GOP-endorsed candidate and a veteran of the 2000 campaign, when he lost to Peterson by a mere 40 percentage points. The powerful chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, who is seeking his tenth term, would have to be caught in a compromising position with livestock to lose this election.

5. How many times will Republicans chant “Drill, Baby, Drill!” at Michele Bachmann’s victory party? Poor Bachmann. She’s been eclipsed by Sarah Palin as the designated GOP pinup girl for oil drilling. But the freshman legislator should be able to take solace in a thumping primary victory. Her challenger, St. John’s University psychology professor Aubrey Immelman, walked the entire district during the campaign — but will almost certainly be spared a similar trek to Washington. Elwyn Tinklenberg, running as a Blue Dog Democrat, and the Independence Party’s Bob Anderson await Bachmann in the general election.

6. Will alleged wife beater Mark Olson represent the GOP in November? In the most intriguing grass fire of the primary campaign, Rep. Mark Olson — who was kicked out of the Republican caucus after being arrested for domestic abuse — won the local GOP chapter’s backing for a state senate seat. This incited state party officials to denounce the endorsement, with Sen. Coleman even bizarrely entering the fray and GOP flak Michael Brodkorb trashing the candidate. The heavy handed tactics of GOP poohbahs seems to have backfired, however, with local activists rallying to Olson’s defense. We’ll find out tomorrow as he squares off against Alison Krueger in the primary. The winner will face Democrat Lisa Fobbe.

7. What will happen to the Override Six? The six Republicans who flouted party dictates by voting to override Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of the transportation bill last spring have faced stiff reprisals from their party. The GOP stripped the turncoats of their leadership positions and several were denied endorsement by local party activists. Will voters also punish them at the ballot box? We’ll get a partial answer tomorrow. Rep. Neil Peterson, who was denied the GOP endorsement in 41B, will take on Jan Schneider. And Rep. Jim Abeler will face a similar task in battling Don Huizenga for the right to appear on the November ballot.

8. Will Minneapolis pols Joe Mullery, Willie Dominguez and Phylis Kahn survive? All three legislators face seemingly formidable primary opposition. Six-term Rep. Mullery, who represents the North Side, was denied the DFL endorsement in favor of activist Peggy Flanagan. But after Flanagan dropped out owing to personal issues, park board member and Dairy Queen owner Jon Olson entered the fray in 58A. Rep. Willie Dominguez just completed his first term and will face off against attorney Bobby Joe Champion. The challenger secured the DFL endorsement and has been strongly backed by U. S. Rep. Keith Ellison, who formerly held the North Side post. Rep. Kahn has seemingly been serving in the legislature since the advent of electricity (1972, actually), cultivating a reputation for eccentricity and eliciting visceral hatred from conservatives. The DFL’er has survived many electoral challenges through the years, but this year she faces Joel Rainville, whose family has exerted an out-sized influence on Minneapolis politics for decades.

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

Kiffmeyer came under fire for her statements regarding the separation of church and state. At a National Day of Prayer event in 2004, Kiffmeyer said that the “five words” that are “probably most destructive” in America today are “separation of church and state.” Kiffmeyer later told the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman, “It’s not the words that are destructive, it’s the way they are interpreted. There are a lot of good church people who don’t think they can be involved in government.” She also told the Minnesota Monitor that her statements regarding the separation of church and state were “cobbled together.”

Despite the fact that Minnesota’s same-day voter registration policy has helped the state maintain the highest voter turnout in the nation for five decades, she often told other officials from other states attempting to implement same-day voter registration that it was problematic and contributed to voter fraud. She told John Fund, author of “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy,” that she was “tired of hearing her state’s same-day registration extolled.” At the same time, she often took credit for the high voter turnout.

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

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

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

Race to the Right, a conservative talk show that appeared on several conservative radio stations around the Twin Cities and St. Cloud, grew very critical of Kiffmeyer after she agreed to go on the air five times, but canceled one appearance and failed to show for three others without notice.

The show’s hosts wanted to discuss the fact that the secretary of state’s Web site carried only metro-area elections results in 2005, an odd-year election. Kiffmeyer briefly touched on the issue in an interview with Minnesota Monitor’s Paul Schmelzer. Of working with the county auditors, she complained: “I did stuff and went to things and found that it is ever-unending. I can’t seem to get ahead … You meet this and it’s more. You meet this, and it’s more. It’s unending.”

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

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

Continued: Click “Read More”On to Minnesota Majority

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

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

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

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

The group’s newest project, globalclimatescam.com, is dedicated to “exposing the truth about global warming hysteria” by pointing out that the planet can’t be warming because we had a cold winter this year.

Olson, of Big Lake, was later expelled from the House Republican caucus, and now may run as an independent for re-election.

WCCO cites Kiffmeyer, also of Big Lake, as saying, “We’ve got to move into the issues … We’ve got to get out of the other stuff. The district needs to move forward now and we’re not doing that.”

“Other stuff,” huh? The team here at Minnesota Monitor has compiled some great quotes from the former Republican secretary of state, who lost her 2006 bid for a third term to DFLer Mark Ritchie. In a January interview with Paul Schmelzer, Kiffmeyer said of the idea of a separation of church and state:

MK: The quote from Thomas Jefferson, the firewall that was created was from the government intruding on religion. That was a quote taken out of his letter to the Baptist Society that said, don’t worry, the government won’t intrude on your religion, because there’s this wall of separation. It was a separation and a wall to keep the government from messing with religion. Obviously, how do you keep people of faith from never having an opinion from government? What segment of society are you going to say shouldn’t? Because I would say, other than the atheists — which, by the way, that’s a religious group, too –

PS: It is?

MK: Atheism is a belief that there is no god. So really, between atheists and Christians and all these others … how many people are left then to have an influence on government if it’s to go the other way? So the wall of separation was intended to say, “you can have freedom to flourish in your religion, OK, and the government won’t mess with your religion.”

You have the freedom. But there’s no such thing as an unlimited freedom. In other words you can’t cry “Fire!” in a theater. That’s the most common example. … Slander is another one; there’s laws against free speech so you can’t slander. Except, by the way, for politicians. You can slander politicians with impunity. So you can slander us.

So slandering politicians is OK, you can’t cry “Fire!” in a theater, and the separation of church and state was simply to prevent government from messing with religion. Not the other way around, and certainly not to prevent one religion, perhaps one that counts a voting majority among its members, from messing with other religions. Gotcha.

At least two other Republicans are seeking the seat, as well as two DFLers. As of last night, Kiffmeyer had not yet filed with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board.

“I have a lot of support and I don’t see any reason why this would keep me from being able to represent people.  It just won’t look good for a while,” said Olson, who was accused of shoving his wife hard enough to leave bruises.

Olson was suspended by the House Republican Caucus until and unless he is cleared.

Olson will be at a serious disadvantage if he presses ahead.  He will receive no staff support from the Republican party and his committee assignments would be dictated by Speaker-designate Margaret Anderson Kelliher, a Democrat.  Olson claimed to be undaunted, however.

“Maybe it means I’m an independent now,” he said. “I don’t know. I’ve always been sort of independent.”