Minnesota Republican ‘Made Some Mistakes and Errors in Judgment’

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The words “sin” and “adultery” evidently did not occur to former state Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch:

Amy Koch apologized [Wednesday] for “engaging in a relationship with a Senate staffer,” though she did not name the individual.

(We are left to wonder if “engaging in a relationship” can be roughly translated as “making the beast with two backs,” or “getting to second base,” or perhaps “kinda like Lewinsky, IYKWIMAITYD.”)

Koch declared in an official statement that she’s “made some mistakes and errors in judgment” and has “deep regret.” She apologized to constituents, the Republican party, fellow legislators, and her family.

(“Deep regret” = “Damn it, I got caught.”)

“The events of recent days have been very difficult for me and those close to me,” Koch said.

(It wasn’t “events of recent days,” but more likely “events of certain previous nights,” that caused the difficulty.)

Koch did not address the public speculation about the identity of the staffer with whom she was having the affair, widely rumored to be communications chief Michael Brodkorb, who was ousted from his positions with the GOP in the wake of Koch’s resignation.
Instead, she emphasized that what she did with her staffer was not a crime. Although she had an “inappropriate relationship” with a subordinate, Koch denied she had “violated any laws or Senate rules” or “misused any state funds or property.”

(“Love is not a crime!”)

Koch ended her statement by writing that she needs to focus on the “challenging days ahead” while she works through “some very personal issues.”

“Personal issues”? Lady, you were shagging the help, OK?

Your aide was hired at taxpayer expense, and “civil servant” cannot plausibly be translated as “love slave.” Whatever “inappropriate” acts transpired between you — c’mon, spare us the tidy euphemisms and start spilling the sweaty details — these carnal indulgences weren’t just a matter of two lonely souls who met by random chance. You were the Boss, he was your subordinate, and both of you were supposed to be selflessly pursuing the public interest, rather than gettin’ some action.

Scoring. Heavy petting. Frottage. Knocking boots. Whatever universe of imaginable erotic possibilities may be encompassed in that annoyingly vague phrase “inappropriate relationship.”

And so it’s mighty damned convenient, Senator, when after flagrantly abusing the office with which you were entrusted by voters (and for which you were paid with taxes collected from the citizenry) you deny that these misdeeds were illegal or unethical, refuse to name the government employee whom you made your amorous plaything, minimalize this sordid scandal as “errors in judgment” and appeal for sympathy as the wounded victim while you deal with “very personal issues.”

Sigh.

No need to guess what the Left is doing with this ugly mess:

The gay and lesbian community of Minnesota has issued a letter of apology to recently resigned Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch for ruining the institution of marriage and causing her to stray from her husband and engage in an “inappropriate relationship.”
“On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage,” reads the letter from John Medeiros. “We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.”

What Amy Koch and (allegedly) Michael Brodkorb have done is not merely “mistakes” or “errors in judgment,” but is in fact a shameful disgrace of the Republican Party. Yet when I look at the Memeorandum thread about this story, I don’t see a single conservative blogger denouncing these two adulterous hypocrites.

Where’s the judgmentalism? Where’s the accountability, huh?

Senator Koch is married, as is her rumored stud muffin boy toy backdoor man paramour, and surely both of them as human beings need support and healing more than they need public scolding, but what about the needs of the Republican Party, the conservative movement and the citizens of Minnesota whom the Senator and her sweetheart were honor-bound to represent?

More than a week has passed since this scandal became public — I first blogged about it Sunday — and while Senator Koch resigned her post as Majority Leader and said she would not seek re-election next year, she evidently believes she can serve out her term.

Really? Are Minnesota Republicans going to permit their disgraced former leader to continue collecting her salary, as if nothing were amiss?

Hell’s bells, state Senate GOP leaders kept this scandal under wraps for nearly three months after a conscientious Senate staffer blew the whistle on Senator Koch’s workplace affair!

They’re not even sure whether to pursue ethics charges against her!

If this is not an ethics violation — if humping the office help isn’t against the Senate rules — hadn’t they better make some changes to the rules PDQ? Shouldn’t Minnesota Republicans be united in demanding Senator Koch’s immediate resignation? And shouldn’t conservative bloggers stop pretending that this sin-soaked public stain on their movement never happened?

Oh — and what’s this business of Minnesota officials refusing to name Senator Koch’s lover? Like he’s a victim or something? Like they’re afraid that he might sue them for libel or “inflicting emotional distress”? Has Michael Brodkorb denied being Senator Koch’s secret sweetheart? At some point, doesn’t an absence of denial become a sort of confession?

Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

Go ahead and sue me, Brodkorb. I’ll plead insanity.

Great News! John Dennis Undeterred In The Anti-Pelosi Struggle

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by Smitty

Do you remember John Dennis, brought to national attention by this Ladd Ehlinger outing?

I just got a phone call from his campaign, and he’s running in 2012. Granted, his numbers are even rougher than Patrick Murray’s against Jim Moran, but the struggle against the Ruling Class Overlords permits no rest.

John Dennis on FaceBook

Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right. Two Thousand Wrongs? A Right Jolly Commie Start.

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by Smitty

IoawHawk called it a “Last minute entry sweeps Stupidest F’ing Thing You Will Read This Year awards”.

Neil Clark blazes beyond beclownment bounds:

No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place.
Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Really, Eastern European realms?

  • employment So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.
  • welfare provision The Eastern European death toll stands at 1 million, according to the Black Book of Communism.
  • education All the political indoctrination you can stand, no?
  • women’s rights The right for young girls to be exploited by Olympic teams?

Read the whole thing. Just another fact-free, purely emotional appeal. Do remember: China and North Korea are still Communist. You can go there and get your Marxism totally on, baby.

Report: Huntsman, Bachmann, Santorum Fail to Make Virginia Primary Ballot UPDATE: Close Calls for Newt and Perry

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A certain number of petition signatures had to be delivered by close of business today in order for candidates to be included on the ballot for the March 6 Virginia Republican primary.

Rick Santorum supporter Lisa Graas just informed me by e-mail that, according to University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato, three candidates — Santorum, Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman — failed to collect enough signatures in time to meet the qualifying deadline.

UPDATE: Andrew Cain of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:

Four Republican presidential candidates – Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Ron Paul — submitted paper work in time to qualify for Virginia’s March 6 primary ballot. . . .
Rep. Michele Bachmann, former Sen. Rick Santorum and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman did not submit signatures with Virginia’s State Board of Elections by today’s 5 p.m. deadline.
Those who submitted the required signatures must clear another hurdle. The Republican Party of Virginia has until Tuesday to certify which candidates qualify. . . .
The State Board of Elections will turn over the petitions to the respective political parties for validating. Republican will begin the process Friday morning and have sought volunteers to help with the process.
Candidates must submit the signatures of at least 10,000 registered voters, with 400 from each of the 11 Congressional districts.
Romney submitted 16,026 signatures; Paul 14,361; Perry 11,911 and Gingrich 11,050.

UPDATE II: NBC’s Alex Moe reports:

The Gingrich campaign might be able breathe a sigh of relief.
After Newt Gingrich’s third event in less than 24 hours in Virginia, the former House speaker announced that his campaign has secured enough signatures to be on the ballot in the state.

Notice that Perry also barely cleared the 10,000-signature threshold. As Lisa Graas notes below, because some signatures will prove ineligible, it is recommended that candidates get at least 15,000 signatures to qualify. If Romney wants to dispatch lawyers to keep an eye on the validation process, they might be able to disqualify enough petitions to knock Perry and Gingrich off the ballot.

UPDATE III: Hat tip to The Right Scoop on Twitter for this Politico article by Emily Schultheis adding further background:

The state’s primary, which is slated for Super Tuesday on March 6, has some of the most stringent ballot access requirements in the country: 10,000 signatures from registered Virginia voters, including 400 from each of the state’s 11 congressional districts. And the elections board recommends getting at least 1.5 times the number of required signatures — 15,000 for presidential candidates — in case any of them are found to be invalid.
Mitt Romney, who filed Tuesday, was the only candidate to get 1.5 times the required number of signatures . . .
The Gingrich campaign had announced yesterday, after “scrambling” to organize in the state, that it had reached the required number of signatures.
The state parties will certify the signatures from each of the candidates and decide by Dec. 27 whether or not the four GOP candidates are eligible to appear on the ballot, Piper said.

UPDATE IV: OK, we’ve nailed down the facts. Now for the big-picture “What Does It Mean?” stuff that’s usually above my paygrade. (Because it’s Thursday evening three days before Christmas, all the super-genius Smart Guy pundits in D.C. are off the clock, so I’ll give it a shot.)

The Right Scoop says, “I wonder if they struggled to get the 10k signatures needed.” And yeah, of course that was the situation.

On a conference call with grassroots supporters last week, a top Santorum staffer had discussed ballot-access issues in several states. Virginia was singled out as a tough one, because of the “stringent” factor described in the Politico article: Not just the 10,000-signature minimum, but you have to get 400 signatures in each of 11 congressional districts, and the deadline hit in the middle of the holiday season, at the same time that the campaigns were going all-out in Iowa.

The Santorum people on the conference call were asking for Virginia volunteers to help with their ballot-access drive, saying they were hoping for a “Christmas miracle.” Given the low-budget situation with the Santorum campaign, they had no other choice but rely on volunteers. (Romney, of course, could afford to hire professional ballot-access people.)

Contrast Santorum’s situation to the ballot shortfalls by Huntsman and Bachmann — both of whom have raised and spent multiples of Santorum’s campaign budget — and Santorum’s shortfall in Virginia, while certainly disappointing, is not nearly as embarrassing as the others.

The fact that Gingrich was “scrambling” to hit the 10,000-signature threshold in Virginia shows the gap between his high-profile “front-runner” status and the relative weakness of his campaign operation.

But certainly the biggest question mark is why Perry could only get about 900 more Virginia signatures than Newt. The Perry campaign had millions of dollars cash-on-hand in early September, and has unloaded a huge amount on TV ads the past month, yet they barely cleared the Virginia ballot threshold? That doesn’t bode well.

So, yeah: Romney’s now looking a bit more likely as the nominee.

UPDATE V: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Now that I think about it, a wild-card idea: If we assume a four-way Virginia primary between Romney, Newt, Perry and Paul — that is to say, if Romney’s big-money lawyers can’t disqualify either Newt or Perry — could Ron Paul win Virginia?

Think about it: Gingrich and Perry waging an all-out knife-fight to be the “Not Mitt” conservative candidate, both of them taking their shots at Romney. Meanwhile, Paul’s army of fanatics descend on the Old Dominion to turn out every possible libertarian/Constitutionlist/fringe-kook vote. In a four-way primary, if the other three candidates run in the 20%-30% range, couldn’t a maximum effort by the Paulistas produce a shocking upset in Virginia?

War-gaming these crazy possibilities is such fun, isn’t it?

UPDATE VI: Now a Memeorandum thread. I’m sitting here with Fox News on the TV in my home office, and they haven’t even mentioned this story yet. Everything’s all, “Congressional compromise, blah, blah, blah, Iraq, blah, blah, blah.” Maybe they don’t grasp the significance. Probably because their super-genius Smart Guy pundits are all on holiday this week.


Hatin’ on the Hawkeye State, Or: Should Iowans Burn Jim Geraghty in Effigy?

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Mob violence is rare in Iowa, but National Review‘s Jim Geraghty would be well-advised to avoid any gatherings of Hawkeye State Republicans after he blasphemed against the Sacred Caucuses this morning.

A special kind of prejudice causes pundits to disparage the campaign Holy Trinity of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — the crucial early states that have dominated the presidential nominating process for more than three decades now.

What the pundits want is an orderly system that delivers credible Big Name nominees quickly, so that the pundits can then cover the Main Event between the Serious Contenders. What the traditional process provides, however, is an extended, unpredictable and at times anarchic struggle in which Big Names often flop, while voters sometimes deliver enough votes to Obscure Underdogs to embarrass the Political Wizards who had predicted victory for the Big Names.

Let the reader do some research as to what the pundits were prognosticating in autumn 2007, and cite examples in the comments if you wish. My own memory is that all the Political Wizards were wondering which of the alleged GOP front-runners — Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney — would emerge victorious to take on the Democrat nominee, Hillary Clinton.

Oh, those damned voters!

Three months ago, right before those Florida GOP bastards wrecked Christmas by jumping their primary date to Jan. 31, I briefly stated the case for the early-state tradition in an American Spectator column:

. . . There are logical reasons why the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries, especially, have become sacrosanct as the first events of the quadrennial presidential campaign calendar. Both are states with small populations (Iowa about 3 million, New Hampshire about 1.3 million) where TV and radio advertising are relatively cheap. This permits little-known long-shots with small budgets to campaign on a fairly even playing field with better-known and better-funded candidates. Furthermore, Iowa and New Hampshire are states where retail politics — the old-fashioned business of shaking hands and meeting voters one-on-one or in small meetings — are a huge factor in the campaign. Barack Obama famously beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa four years ago because of Obama’s greater strength in grassroots organizing, and Jimmy Carter won New Hampshire in 1976 by bringing scores of Georgians (the “Peanut Brigades”) to go door-to-door for him in the Granite State. So unless we wish presidential campaigns to become all about money and what pollsters call “name ID,” having Iowa and New Hampshire go first looks like a good idea.
Yet we ought not confine ourselves to merely logical reasons for keeping Iowa and New Hampshire first. Aren’t Republicans conservatives, and don’t conservatives believe in the value of tradition? There is something wonderfully traditional — indeed, downright reactionary — about having presidential candidates go through the quaint custom of waiting for returns from tiny precinct caucuses in Iowa and shaking hands with voters in the snowy streets of small-town New Hampshire in February. Nor are these traditions merely sentimental. The pragmatic and utilitarian value of tradition is evident in that voters of Iowa and New Hampshire, long accustomed to their role in vetting presidential candidates of both parties, have become quite shrewd judges in these matters. A joke told by Tim Albrecht, spokesman for Iowa Gov. Terry Brandstad, is quite relevant here: An Iowa Republican is asked whether he supports a certain presidential candidate and answers, “I don’t know. I’ve only met him twice.” Early-state voters are not over-awed by “rock star” candidates and media hype, because they’ve seen it all so many times before. Such is the real value of tradition. . . .

Read the whole thing. Either Jim Geraghty ignored that column or else his Fear and Loathing of Iowa is so profound he could not be persuaded to abandon his hateful vendetta against the Hawkeye State.

Iowans are a gentle and peaceful people, and it’s unlikely they would seek revenge against Geraghty. On the other hand, rural Iowa is a lonely place, and if a journalist were to make a wrong turn somewhere between Pella and Oskaloosa, he might find himself confronted by an outraged Iowan with a long memory: “Did you say ‘Geraghty’? Wait a minute, feller, whilst I fetch my hog-slaughtering knife . . .”

Out in the cornfields, they say, no one can hear you scream.

Santorum Surge: It’s Real and Spectacular

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For the past three weeks I’ve been wondering: Is it just me? Am I imagining things, or does Rick Santorum have a legitimate chance of scoring an upset in the Iowa GOP caucuses? Robert Costa of National Review today unloads 2,000 words of solid reporting on the subject, a few excerpts of which I’ll highlight:

Sweat equity can do a lot in Iowa, where Santorum has visited all 99 counties — but in this cycle, with the polls fluctuating each week, nothing is guaranteed. His strategy, his wish, is that “slow and steady wins the race.”
“We just believe that the work we’ve done, our respect for the process in Iowa, holding 349 town-hall meetings, will matter as people start making their decisions,” Santorum says. . . .
Beyond his shoestring operation, the backing of prominent social conservatives is playing an important, often behind-the-scenes role in bolstering his quiet winter surge. Bob Vander Plaats, who heads the Family Leader, a social-conservative group, endorsed Santorum on Tuesday, as did Chuck Hurley, the director of the Iowa Family Policy Center. These high-profile reinforcements add heft to Santorum’s evangelical bloc in Iowa, which already included “well-connected and influential pastors like Cary Gordon of Sioux City, Terry Amann of Des Moines, and Albert Calaway of Indianola,” according to The Iowa Republican. . . .
Spending time, rather than money, has its benefits.
“A lot of pastors come to town-hall meetings,” Santorum says, and they, like most Iowans, want to know where a candidate stands on moral issues. By running an accessible, lightly staffed campaign, Santorum has been able to meet hundreds of religious leaders, all of whom coordinate networks, be it a prayer group or big-city congregation. . . .
“We’ve spent a lot of time in towns that the other candidates simply have not,” Santorum says. Bachmann and Texas governor Rick Perry, he acknowledges, are gaining notice this week for bus tours around the state and could see their own sparks. But his campaign has not “rushed,” trying to hit all 99 counties within days, sprinting toward the finish line, he says. “We spent time early on and it wasn’t a 15-minute stop, it was one hour or two hours,” he adds. “Going to the county dinners in Osceola County and Lyon County, up in the northwest corner, these tiny counties, has been important. We spent three hours up there and then had drinks after dinner.”
“The beautiful thing about Iowa is that you can’t buy Iowa,” Santorum says. “We’ve seen some other candidates spend millions of dollars on ads and then not move in the polls. . . .”

You can read the whole thing at NRO, but they do that annoying multi-page thing where you have to keep clicking at the bottom, so you might prefer the everything-on-one-page print-friendly version.

The “under-the-radar” aspect of a campaign, stuff you can’t see if all you’re doing is watching TV news, is what fascinates me, and no pollster or pundit will be able to predict the kind of grassroots surge that Santorum’s strategy is intended to achieve.

Notice today that CNN is trying to gin up a phony controversy about Santorum’s endorsement by Vander Plaats. Try to ignore such distracting noise — inside baseball for the political press — and instead let yourself think about what’s happening out there on the ground in Iowa. That mystery is what’s driving me nuts, and it’s only four more days until I fly into Cedar Rapids to find out for myself.

Et Tu, Blackburn?

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by Smitty

Early last month I was singing the praises of Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who was taking a bold stand against Net Neutrality and FCC over-reach at the Defending the Dream summit.

Via Instapundit, we discover that the legacy media are funding the Stop Online Piracy Act in a big way.

The bill, known as SOPA, would strengthen and extend the penalties for online copyright violations, and could force websites hosting pirated content to come down or prevent search engines from sending users their way. Legacy media companies stand to benefit if there’s less unlawful movement of their content on the web, like pirated movies and songs for download.

Some of the nation’s top tech companies — Facebook, Google and Microsoft, among others — have spoken out against the bill while media companies have pushed to defend it. SOPA’s companion legislation in the Senate, the PROTECT IP Act, is on hold.

I thought that Rep. Blackburn sounded quite educated on the technical aspects of Net Neutrality. Maybe she can enlighten us on how the First Amendment is less important than media profits. I don’t see where her fellow Defending the Dream summit panelist Seton Motley has commented on SOPA.