Minnesota
January 24, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton began slurring his speech more than he normally does and then collapsed while giving his penultimate State of the State address to a joint session of the Minnesota legislature last night. The collapse was of course caught on camera. The 30-second video below was posted online by the Telegraph. Dayton regained consciousness and was escorted out of the room. The Star Tribune story on Dayton’s speech
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January 20, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota Senator Al Franken wants so badly to count for something. As a United States Senator he is a powerful man, but Harry Reid stripped some of the power from the minority that Franken and his Democratic colleagues now occupy. Like most of his other of his Democratic colleagues, Franken flails away as he seeks to lead the cranky opposition to Trump in the Senate. As a humorist, Franken was
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January 18, 2017 — Scott Johnson
In his bid for election as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison has staked out his ground in the Sanders/Warren socialist wing of the party. Let us concede this much. It’s a big wing. No one will get to Ellison’s left in the contest for DNC chairman. Ellison has therefore announced his refusal to attend the inauguration of Donald Trump on Friday. The Star
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January 16, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Power Line readers who mischievously pull for Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison to emerge victorious in his bid for the chairmanship of the DNC are not alone. We have noted that former Obama administration green jobs commissar and Mao man Van Jones is with you. We have noted that juicebox Mafioso Matthew Yglesias is with you as well. We may have reached the reductio ad absurdum of this trend.
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January 15, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken have announced their opposition to the confirmation of Senator Sessions as Attorney General of the United States. What’s happening here? Klobuchar aspires to become a player of national importance in the Democratic Party. She has published the obligatory memoir to advance her case. She isn’t about to offend the lunatic left in her party by supporting Sessions. In search of a rationale on
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January 5, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I’m scheduled to appear on Denver’s afternoon drive-time Rush to Reason (“Denver’s Afternoon Rush!”) radio show with John Rush and Dan Meurer at the top of the hour at 4:00 or 6:00 p.m. (Central) hour today; Dan has invited me on to talk about “The curious case of Ilhan Omar.” The show airs on KLZ 560 AM and 100.7 FM. The Rush to Reason show website is here. You can
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January 1, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I wish I had thought to keep a list of best columns and articles of the past year, but I didn’t. I do have a few tabs I kept open to revisit. I can guarantee that these columns and articles are worth your time. Here they are in alphabetical order by author: James Ceaser, “What’s next for the left?,” Weekly Standard (February 8, 2016). Matthew Continetti, “The return of street
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December 27, 2016 — Scott Johnson
RealClearPolitics executive editor Carl Cannon comes to the defense of DNC chairman wannabe Keith Ellison in an Orange County Register column in which he finds Ellison the victim of “the character assassination that’s now a permanent feature of our politics.” Cannon has an arguable point to make about the necessity of civility and good faith in our politics. Although the point is arguable, it is misapplied to the case of
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December 23, 2016 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota’s own Keith Ellison is the DNC chairman wannabe with a past. He’s a past and long-time local advocate of the Nation of Islam who claims not to have picked up on the doctrines of the hate cult until well into his tenure. Since he abandoned the Nation of Islam and turned or returned to Islam, Ellison has been a friend of CAIR and other radical Islamist front groups such
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December 20, 2016 — Scott Johnson
I wrote the Weekly Standard article “Louis Farrakhan’s first congressman” and posted the companion Power Line post “Keith Ellison for dummies” in October 2006, when Ellison was on the verge of election to Congress representing Minnesota’s Fifth District. The latter piece includes some of the basic documents supporting my narrative of Ellison’s long association with the Nation of Islam. I was provoked to write these pieces by the poor job
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December 18, 2016 — Scott Johnson
Frank Loesser prospered writing songs for the movies, for the war and for Broadway. As John Bush writes in his Allmusic profile of Loesser, “it appears that Frank Loesser had several careers packed into his one life.” Loesser wrote “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” in April 1942. It was only the second song for which he had written both the words and the music; the first had preceded
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December 15, 2016 — Scott Johnson
Donald Trump narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in the contest at the top of the ticket in Minnesota this year, but in other respects Republicans had an astoundingly good year. They amplified their majority in the Minnesota House to an unprecedented number in a presidential election cycle, when the turnout advantage usually accrues to Democrats, and took the majority in the Minnesota Senate. Republicans haven’t held a majority in the
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December 13, 2016 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota state rep.-elect Ilhan Omar made news last week when she announced on Facebook that she had been subjected to bigoted threats by a D.C. taxi driver. Omar was in Washington to attend a conference for Democratic state legislators seeking to steer the country further to the left as well as two briefing sessions at the White House. Valerie Jarrett was on hand at the briefing sessions to lend her
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December 10, 2016 — Scott Johnson
Working from public documents and my own interviews in 2006, I constructed a picture of Keith Ellison as a serious long-time advocate of the Nation of Islam. This is the picture I drew of Ellison in “Louis Farrakhan’s first congressman” and in the companion Power Line post “Keith Ellison for dummies” just before his election to Congress in 2006. Ellison’s past and his continuing deceptions about it have emerged anew
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December 8, 2016 — Scott Johnson
Speaking at a gathering of Democrats in Denver last week, Keith Ellison argued that he could both represent Minnesota’s Fifth District in the House and lead the Democratic National Committee if elected its chairman. “All there is to do is to vote ‘no,’” Ellison explained, vowing that he would spend “every other moment” working for the party. No comment was sought from Ellison’s Democratic colleagues in the Minnesota congressional delegation.
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December 7, 2016 — Scott Johnson
Alan Dershowitz thinks that Keith Ellison is just the man to lead the Democratic Party — if you want to bury the Democrats. On that point, he agrees with many Power Line readers on Ellison’s candidacy to to chair the DNC. In the video below, Professor Dershowitz expounds on what he sees as Ellison’s — what’s the word? — “weaknesses” as a prospective party leader. Professor Dershowitz argued his case
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December 6, 2016 — Scott Johnson
As Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison seeks to take on the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, the Washington Post has published Ellison’s column whitewashing his past in the Nation of Islam as part of its Acts of Faith series bearing on religion. There is a certain logic in this. To enjoy Ellison’s column, you must suspend your disbelief and ignore the evidence that starkly contradicts it. You must
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