That’s some headline I saw on the front page of the Star Tribune this morning.

Say what? Republicans opposing the extremists in their ranks? This is good to see…except the mainstream Republicans are only opposing this one radical group because it’s fighting against the extremism of the mainstream Republicans.

Top officials in the Minnesota Republican Party recently gathered to take an unprecedented vote: formally condemning a right-wing group that has antagonized GOP elected officials for years.

Action 4 Liberty was repeatedly attacking Republicans in the divided Minnesota House for compromising with Democrats, while also encouraging “grassroots Patriots” to oust party officers at local conventions and replace them with hardline activists.

The state GOP’s executive committee declared that leaders of Action 4 Liberty are more focused on “tearing down Republicans” than helping the party win elections: “The leadership of the organization instead works only to enrich themselves, attack those actually making a difference, and claim victories they had nothing to do with,” read the declaration brought forward by committee member Bobby Benson, who’s the state chief of staff for Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer.

This is a counter-move led by Tom Emmer’s wing of the party, and Emmer is an unpleasant conservative hardliner and big fan of Donald Trump. Action 4 Liberty is just an even more extreme subset of the Minnesota Republicans — they call Tom Emmer a Globilist[sic] RINO which tells you how far out these guys are. This isn’t an effort to make the Republicans a little more sane, it’s just a civil war within the party that’s going to bring more chaos to the far right, and leave them unchanged.

Action 4 Liberty has had some recent successes, which leave me unimpressed.

Action 4 Liberty has enlisted grassroots activists across the state in its effort to push the GOP further to the right, telling them to seek party positions and primary incumbent lawmakers. Its success has varied over the years, with many of its candidates losing primary battles to more moderate Republicans. But last year, the group rallied activists who ousted state GOP Chair David Hann, endorsed far-right Republican Royce White for U.S. Senate and blocked GOP U.S. Rep. Michelle Fischbach from winning the party’s endorsement.

Michelle Fischbach is my representative, and she’s a horrid conservative. I am pleased to see her blocked from accomplishing anything. It is amusing that it’s her fellow Republicans who are busy standing in her way.

The DFL doesn’t care which crazy faction controls the MNGOP, since they’re going to suck no matter what.

Minnesota DFL Chairman Ken Martin released the following statement after MNGOP Chair David Hann was deposed on Saturday with the help of far-right activists, including the group Action 4 Liberty.

“The Minnesota GOP has been completely captured by the most extreme, fringe activists in Minnesota politics,” said Minnesota DFL Chairman Ken Martin. “Control of Minnesota’s entire state government is on the ballot in 2026. Today’s chaos shows that if Minnesota Republicans regain power, they will be beholden to the same far-right fringe that now dominates the national Republican Party.”

The Minnesota GOP has not won a statewide election in Minnesota in almost two decades.

Remember Garbage Pail Kids, those collectable cards that illustrated horrible, disgusting cartoon characters? They were pretty tame in comparison to this version: an illustrator drew up some “Enemies of Democracy” cards (perfect name, by the way) and has posted them on Instagram. There are lots, and all of them gruesomely accurate.

Now I’ve gotta collect them all.

Despite my enduring fondness for the great state of Oregon, I hadn’t been following the politics there, so I missed an amazing turn of good news from the 2025 elections in Oregon.

November’s election told the Oregon Republican Party it needed a fresh start. While voters nationally returned President Donald Trump to the White House, it was a different story in Oregon, where Republicans lost the 5th Congressional District seat; lost all statewide contests; and lost a seat in each legislative chamber, returning the Democrats to supermajorities in both.

Wow. We have to do that in the next election for all 50 states.

As the article points out, the Republicans have had to do some soul-searching and fix what’s wrong with them. I don’t think they can, but it’s good that they’re at least trying. The first step was to find new chairman for the Oregon GOP. They found a guy.

In a Feb. 16 YouTube interview with a GOP political consultant, the eventual winner, Gerald “Jerry” Cummings, 51, a pastor and insurance agent from Columbia County, sketched out a path to success for his party in Oregon, saying Republicans should spend less time “tangled up in social issues” and focus on building the party rather than on angry rhetoric and internecine warfare.

I guess that’s a promising start, but “pastor and insurance agent”? Yuck. I’d put a big red flag on him. But too late, they did more digging and found a few little problems, like his poor relationship with creditors. And his wife.

Court records provide details from a long-running divorce and custody case, which stretched across three counties and lasted nearly a decade, that raise questions about Cummings’ ability to set the tone his party desires. More recently, lawsuits filed by Cummings’ creditors undercut his suitability for a role that requires managerial acumen and financial skills.

Bob Tiernan, a former lawmaker, GOP party chair and the runner-up in the 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary, says he’s disappointed that Cummings is leading the party. “We need the strongest possible people there,” Tiernan says. “We need somebody that doesn’t have damaging accusations against them—whether they are true or not.”

It was an acrimonious divorce. Cummings is a sicko.

In court records, which have never been previously reported, Cummings’ ex-wife, a pastor’s daughter, said the couple met in the Portland area when she was 16 and he was 26 and an associate pastor. “On occasion, he would visit [her] when her parents were out of town and take her to hotels,” a trial memo filed by her attorney says. “He persuaded her that her parents did not truly love her as only he did, and that having sex with him at such a young age was appropriate.”

The couple married in 2003, when she was 19. “From the beginning of and throughout their marriage, [Cummings] would tell [his then-wife] about his sexual fantasies with young girls while they were having sexual intercourse,” the trial memo says. “He promised not to act on those fantasies so long as [his then-wife] allowed him to do whatever he wanted in their sexual relationship.”

But in a handwritten application for a restraining order coinciding with the divorce filing, the woman said her husband’s behavior spun out of control.

“I was handcuffed and hit with hangers,” she wrote. “Early in the marriage, he had a whip he hit me with.”

She added other allegations, including spousal rape. “He forced me to have sex with him and caused injury,” Cummings’ ex-wife wrote. “He has threatened if I don’t perform sexual activities, he will perform sexual activities on minors and he mentions them by name.” (OJP is not naming Cummings’ ex-wife because of her allegations of sexual violence.)

He denies all the allegations, except, of course, that he committed statutory rape on a 16 year old, and he does admit that he was a terrible husband, and [she] and I, both victims of early sexual assault, had a very unhealthy marriage.

It’s good that he claims he never acted on his pedophilic/hebephilic desires, except of course the fact that he had sex with a 16 year old when he was 26, but still…what is it with conservative authoritarians and their fantasies of having sex with children? Speaking for myself, I’ve never felt that — if anything I’m repelled at the idea — but I guess if you’re Republican, it’s just normal.

Anyway, it’s telling that when the Oregon Republicans decided to dive back into the pool of candidates and find someone new and fresh and full of healthy ideas to reinvigorate the party, all they came up with is another rotten apple. I guess if all you’ve got is a big barrel of rotting fruit, you’re not going to find a shiny clean unblemished representative by rummaging through it.

This goes for the Democrats, too — we’re less likely to come up with a pedo, but instead will find a shriveled, nearly mummified old gomer who will persist in pushing the failed ideas of the past.

There’s a big anti-Trump protest in St Cloud this weekend. We’re not having such a good event here in Morris, although I did overhear two old ladies in the coffee shop this morning, and while they also complained about the Democrats, they grumbles a lot about Elon Musk. They really hate Musk, which was heartwarming.

I couldn’t be at any protests today, but I did spawn an individual many years ago who carried on for me.

Good work, young man!

Does this man look like a far-right conservative advocate for manliness?

Maybe. He does have woman assistants posing to help him sell shaving products while their sterna are exposed. He is a weird, twisted macho man — that’s Jeremy Boreing, one of the founders of The Daily Wire, along with that shaved chipmunk, Ben Shapiro. He was responsible for that weird conservative “comedy”, Lady Ballers, that proposed that men would dress up as women en masse so they could form a whole basketball of “transgenders,” who would then win all their games. That’s Jeremy Boreing. Sexist, not funny, and with ambitions to make movies to support his conservative beliefs, because reality doesn’t do the job for him.

Say goodbye to Boreing, he’s out at the Daily Wire.

The Daily Wire is seemingly undergoing a rapid and dramatic implosion following the resignation of co-founder Jeremy Boreing.

According to a Twitter/X thread compiled by journalist James Li, the company has laid off roughly 25% of its workforce, including the complete shutdown of its kids division, and fired Alyssa Cordova, the vice president of public relations.

Cordova is alleged to have played a central role in crafting an aggressive and controversial PR strategy, which included stalking former employees online and maintaining dossiers on perceived enemies.

Internal sources blame Boreing’s leadership for the current crisis, claiming his departure should have happened sooner to prevent job losses.

With leadership in disarray and significant layoffs, questions loom about the future stability of The Daily Wire and its high-profile personalities like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles.

Oh yeah…Matt Walsh (“What is a woman?” he asks, since he doesn’t know) and Michael Knowles (sick little Catholic fundamentalist) all work there, too. Maybe they’ll be kicked off the gravy train soon.

Would you believe the Daily Wire had a kids’ programming division? They were making a knock-off of Bluey to inoculate children with conservative values. It’s going, too.

This is what happens when oil billionaires like Dan and Farris Wilks, who funded the Daily Wire try to force support for an unpopular agenda, rather than responding to popular interests organically. They flounder and fail repeatedly, and while the big money men might think the message is great, billionaires tend to be unimpressed with stuff that just costs them cash with little return.

Hey, let’s hope PragerU is next to decay.

Israel has done it again. They are blatantly committing atrocities in their ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.

Some of the bodies of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, killed by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave nine days ago in Gaza, were found with their hands or legs tied and had gunshot wounds to the head and chest, according to two witnesses.

The witness accounts add to an accumulating body of evidence pointing to a potentially serious war crime on 23 March, when Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance crews and civil defence rescue workers were sent to the scene of an airstrike in the early hours of the morning in the al-Hashashin district of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.

Paramedics and rescue workers are not terrorists, but the Israeli soldiers who gunned them down are.

No more aid or military assistance to Israel, because that would be contributing to war crimes.

I’ve been watching this race for the Wisconsin supreme court. It was a contest between a liberal (that is, sane) judge, Susan Crawford, and a conservative (that is, insane) judge backed by a Koch brother, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, and it was pretty much a demonstration of the power of rich people to buy elections. Elon Musk was actively campaigning for Brad Schimel, the right-wing wackaloon, throwing tens of millions of dollars at him and appearing at rallies, where he was awkwardly jumping to make a schlubby “X” shape, doing his usual inarticulate, stammering speechifying, and handing out million dollar checks.

It’s not just how much Musk and his groups have spent—more than any donor to a judicial election in US history—but how he has spent this money that makes Musk’s intervention in Wisconsin so alarming.

In addition to funding two dark money political groups that ran TV ads against liberal Judge Susan Crawford and sought to get out the vote for conservative candidate Brad Schimel, Musk resurrected a controversial scheme from 2024, paying voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges.” He then awarded Scott Ainsworth, a mechanical engineer from Green Bay, $1 million for signing the petition.

On the Friday before the election, he dramatically escalated this sketchy tactic, saying he would travel to Wisconsin to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” Unlike paying a Wisconsin resident to sign a petition, these million-dollar checks were contingent on someone actually voting. Legal experts quickly pointed out that Musk’s pledge violated the state constitution, which prohibits offering “anything of value…in order to induce any elector to…vote or refrain from voting.”

Musk backtracked, saying the money would only go to people who signed his PAC’s petition, holding a rally in Green Bay on Sunday where he hand-delivered two $1 million checks. The Wisconsin attorney general sued to stop him, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to intervene before the event.

This was criminal activity, but he’s a billionaire, so no one stopped him. He was openly and brazenly trying to buy an election, and nothing was done. This was particularly ironic, given that…

Republicans have been alleging for years that Democrats have been buying elections, usually with the help of liberal billionaires like George Soros. Indeed, election deniers, including Musk, widely promoted a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was “bought by Mark Zuckerberg” because an organization he funded directed election grants to blue areas to juice Democratic turnout. (In reality, it gave grants to both red and blue areas for routine election administration activities to help offset the Covid-19 pandemic.)

If this happened in any other country, the US would be quick to declare that the elections were corrupt…that is, if a pro-USA candidate didn’t win. Schimel also ran a dirty campaign, altering images of Crawford. It was an all-around disgrace to democracy.

But, good news: Crawford won!

Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford will win Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, CNN projects, maintaining the liberal majority on the court in a key battleground state less than three months into President Donald Trump’s second term.

Crawford, a liberal circuit court judge in Dane County, will beat the conservative candidate Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County judge who received Trump’s backing in the final stretch of the campaign. The race was officially nonpartisan, but Crawford’s victory will be seen as a bright spot for Democrats in Wisconsin and nationwide as voters handed the president’s preferred candidate a defeat in the first major political test of the second Trump era.

I’m wondering if one contributing factor to her victory was that the few remaining principled conservatives, if such a thing exists, must have been appalled at the spectacle. Patriotic Wisconsinites must have been embarrassed at the sight of this South African carpetbagger putting on a show. He looks so small and stupid.

Although, I must admit, I was hoping that my daughter or son-in-law, both Wisconsin citizens, might have been handed a million dollar check. Unfortunately, that big money give-away was rigged (of course it was!) and only MAGAs could win.

Guess who’s considering running for governor of Minnesota?

MAGA election conspiracy theorist and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell has eyes on what could be his next gig. And it isn’t selling pillows.

Lindell on Monday teased a run for Minnesota governor, a race that could see him face off against popular incumbent Tim Walz, who is said to be sizing up a third term in the post.

“I live here in Minnesota,” Lindell said of his potential opponent. “Everywhere I go, no one wants Tim Walz. They don’t.”

Everywhere I go, we all laugh at Mike Lindell. I suspect there might be some consistent differences in the company we run with.

I hope he does run, though. He’ll siphon off money from anyone who is a competitor to the DFL candidate for the position.

Teen Vogue is the surprising vanguard. Here’s an article by a former Democratic staffer who has some strong criticisms of the Democratic leadership.

I walked away from my job as a writer for Senator Chuck Schumer after realizing the cost wasn’t just political fatigue — it was my values and mental health. I spent a year on Capitol Hill in 2019 crafting messages for Senate Democrats. Every day, I wrote essays that trapped me between the progressive principles I held and centrist compromises that felt like betrayals. Eventually, the disconnect between my ideals and the institution I served became impossible to ignore. Leaving my job in the Democratic Party wasn’t just a career move; it was survival.

This summary hits the nail on the head.

In recent years, Democrats like Newsom and Schumer have embraced centrist, incremental approaches to issues that are fundamentally about humanity and dignity. That disconnect continues to push young voters away. But it doesn’t stop with trans rights. Whether it’s watered-down climate policies or half-measures on student debt and health care, the Democratic Party’s reluctance to take bold, unapologetic stances clashes with what young people expect from a so-called progressive movement. To be clear, we’re not asking for perfection — we’re demanding urgency, empathy, and courage. Instead, we’re met with compromises on core values, as if basic rights are up for negotiation. For a generation facing existential crises, that’s not leadership — it’s alienation.

Young voters have historically trusted Democrats to work against outdated policies and toward systemic change. But the shift in party dynamics has left many young voters increasingly disaffected by politics and disconnected from a party that once felt aligned with our values. Reflecting on my time on Capitol Hill, I notice this rupture more than ever.

Resign, Schumer.

I should read more Teen Vogue.