According to You Can Run head Bradlee Dean — who says homosexuals, President Obama, and liberals are criminals and that the separation of church and state is a myth — Emmer was on hand to raise money for the ministry.

“The spirit of God was there,” Dean said on his Saturday radio show on AM 1280 The Patriot. “We had Tom Emmer there, the gubernatorial candidate for 2010, a potentially important guy.”

Interestingly, though, Emmer chose not to mention his attendance at the fundraiser on his list of campaign appearances from last week.

Update: Emmer’s campaign told the Minnesota Independent, “Rep. Tom Emmer stopped by the event for a social hour before the dinner and program. The program is headquartered out of Wright County which is Rep. Emmer’s county and has many supporters in Tom’s legislative district. It was not mentioned in the campaign update because it was not a campaign event.”

Coleman wrote his own fundraising letter on behalf of Bachmann in September. Franken was a listed co-host for a fundraising event for Clark, a DFL Party state senator, in Minneapolis last week. Maureen Reed is also mounting a 2010 challenge to Bachmann.

Coleman’s comments Tuesday came in response to a question from his Harvard audience about whether “death bed” rhetoric and “Nazi imagery” were hurting the Republican Party. “I don’t think that the signs you mention are part of the party or central to the discussion,” Coleman countered.

In the course of his response, Coleman brought up “the Michele Bachmanns out there.” He disputed a link between extreme rhetoric and elected officials or the Tea Party movement. “Your basic notion is mistaken,” he said. “You’re taking something way out on the fringe and you’re applying it to the legitimate anger that folks have.”

But earlier, Coleman seemed ready to harness anger himself with this line in his speech: “Pity the politician who comes between a citizen and their constitutional Second Amendment rights.”

Coleman, a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, is treading on Franken’s former stomping grounds: the Minnesota funnyman-turned-statesman was a math major at Harvard.

He has cast himself as someone who can bring young people into the Republican Party, showing off his savvy by naming things like travel agents and 8-track tapes that the students in his audience don’t use. Besides, he asserted, young people don’t deal with social issues on a day-to-day basis. “Very rarely are you going to think about what’s going to happen on Roe v. Wade today,” Coleman said.

Coleman said he looks for middle ground on social issues. He advocated “doing those things that support young women so they don’t have to have an abortion.” Gay marriage is “a pretty narrow issue,” he said, citing civil unions as a possible compromise on the more contentious issue of how to define marriage.

“The philosophy of conservatives really is more in line with your generation,” Coleman said. “I just think we haven’t done a good job of articulating it.”

Coleman articulated this reason for having lost his re-election battle to Franken last year: his yes vote on bailout bills to stave off a depression in October 2008. “But for the collapse of the economy, I don’t think the race would have been close,” he said.

Rep. Tim Walz and Allen Quist

Quist’s announcement at 1 p.m. in the Rochester City Council chambers will settle a candidacy question that only a month ago he told the Minnesota Independent was “a big if.”

Quist gained the GOP endorsement in 1994 but failed in a run at becoming governor, losing in the primary to incumbent Arne Carlson, who went on to win re-election. Quist was elected to three terms in the state House in the 1980s.

His wife Julie is Bachmann’s district director.

Walz is a DFLer who has held the southern Minnesota district since unseating Republican Gil Gutknecht in 2006.

In addition to Bachmann, the ads are targeting Republican Reps. John Boehner of Ohio, Denny Rehberg of Montana, Lee Terry of Nebraska, Roy Blunt of Missouri, and Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri, as well as Democrat Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania.

“Stain,” as the ad is titled, “highlights the cash from Big Oil and other special interests taken by Members who voted against the American Clean Energy & Security Act, a comprehensive clean energy and climate plan that will put America back in control of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet,” according to a statement from the Sierra Club.

Here’s the full ad:

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

STATEWIDE: Ask Al more. Five dollars and cab fare to New York City will get you a lunch audience with Sen. Franken. [Washington Post's In the Loop]

TWIN CITIES: Random acts of criminality on YouTube. Police are on the trail of local thugs who posted a clip showing them attacking people on bikes and on foot. [Fox 9]

PRIOR LAKE: Native Americans get ready for Copenhagen. They want a say in climate-change talks. [Associated Press]

DASSEL: Steve Dille out. The Republican state senator won’t run again; he was one of the eight GOPers who helped override Gov. Pawlenty’s veto of transportation funding in 2008. [Litchfield Independent Review; Polinaut]

PRAIRIE ISLAND: Lege has last say on nuke storage. The people’s reps at the state Capitol could reverse a regulatory OK for Xcel Energy to store more nuclear waste. [Rochester Post-Bulletin]

STATEWIDE: Or possibly universe-wide? Minnesota Public Radio’s designs on dominance in news. [Braublog]

My Washington Independent profile of WorldNetDaily made the case that the conservative website, which opinion-makers brush off as a conspiracy hub, is actually incredibly influential on the right. Here’s some evidence for that argument.

For months — really since it was announced at the How to Take Back America Conference — WND has backed a campaign to send “pink slips” to members of Congress. Upon the sending of the five millionth pink slip, WND held a press conference yesterday on Capitol Hill, drawing actual GOP members of Congress, including Rep. Michele Bachmann, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.). A photo of Bachmann (above) and Gohmert (below) with WND Editor Joseph Farah, one of the driving forces of the “birther” movement.

A 60-year-old Port Huron, Mich. woman called up the Kentucky-based customer service center for the Gannett-owned Times Herald of Port Huron to express her anger over the editorial, which criticized Republican U.S. Rep. Candice Miller for attending the rally. The Nov. 12 editorial called out protest signs that depicted Obama as “Sambo” and others that showed the Holocaust imagery, as well as protesters who chanted “Nazi, Nazi.”

The editorial concluded by calling on Miller to apologize for attending the Bachmann-organized event, which it characterized as a “GOP festival of hate.”

No charges have been filed against the woman, but an investigation is ongoing.

CREW’s Matt Jacob told the Minnesota Independent that House members aren’t supposed to use their congressional websites to urge public action on behalf of or against pending legislation.

In its letter (pdf) CREW cited this House rule:

The content of a Member’s Web site … [m]ay not include grassroots lobbying or solicit support for a Member’s position.

Bachmann’s website, CREW says, urged “[t]he people” to travel to Washington, D.C. “and tell their Representatives to vote no to a governmental take-over of one-fifth of our economy.”

Bachmann announced the Nov. 5 “House Call” rally on Fox News on Oct. 30. That left enough time for Bachmann to meet the five-day lead time required to apply for a permit for an event on the Capitol grounds, according to a U.S. Capitol Police guidelines that CREW includes in its supporting documents (pdf).

CREW’s complaint doesn’t cover another apparent aspect of Bachmann’s official efforts as impresario of the Capitol-steps anti-health care rally. According to the Savage (Minn.) Pacer newspaper, Bachmann’s staff helped a man not from her congressional district to find a nearby bus from Eden Prairie, Minn. headed to Washington, D.C. for the rally:

So he called the Savage Chamber of Commerce trying to get a carpool together of other interested business owners. No one contacted him, so he began asking friends and other business owners and then contacted Rep. Michele Bachmann’s office where he found out about the buses leaving Eden Prairie.

The OCE is a newly formed body that has been on the receiving end of sniping from the longer-in-the-tooth but slow-off-the-mark House Ethics committee. Jacob told MnIndy the tally of CREW’s complaints to the OCE is so far “not a huge number.”

In July, the Madison, Wis.–based Freedom From Religion Foundation filed suit over plans to inscribe the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” motto prominently in the Washington, D.C. center, charging that to do so would be unconstitutional and not representative of all Americans, including 15 percent of the population it says are nonbelievers.

Today’s brief (pdf), filed by the American Center for Law and Justice with the U.S. District Court in Madison, calls the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s cause a “crusade,” stating that it “serves no purpose other than to waste judicial resources at a time in our Nation’s history when those resources are needed in cases involving real threats to American liberties.”

The slogans in question “in no way violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. These expressions simply echo the sentiments found in the Declaration of Independence and recognize the undeniable truth that our freedoms come from a source higher than the state…. While the First Amendment affords atheists complete freedom to disbelieve, it does not compel the federal judiciary to redact religious references in every area of public life in order to suit atheistic sensibilities.”

In addition to Bachmann, fellow Minnesota Republican Rep. John Kline and Iowa’s Steve King were also represented in the brief.

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

STATEWIDE: That’s our gal. The proportion of voters who don’t approve of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann is greater in her own district than statewide … so she should run against U.S. Sen. Al Franken in 2014. [Smart Politics]

MINNEAPOLIS: People who voted like instant-runoff voting. Somehow pollsters found 504 of them to ask. [Minnesota Public Radio]

STATE CAPITOL: State IT pros support Gov. Pawlenty. An audit says the guy who online outdoorsmen call a “slob hunter” didn’t track his office’s computer-support expenses either. [Associated Press; Star Tribune]

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: U2 at TCF in June. Bono will talk to Bill Cooper about debt relief. [Star Tribune; City Pages]

MAPLEWOOD: Al Franken visits City Hall. It’s safe to go to Maplewood again. On a Sunday, anyway. [John Nephew]

ST. PAUL: Heckuva job, Goldie. The feds say the Gopher State did good after I-35W fell down. [Minnesota Public Radio]