Georgia ‘right to die’ group indicted in Minnesota

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“Right to die” doesn’t cut it in Minnesota. Jon Collins at MPR reports: “Four members of a Georgia-based right-to-die group are being charged for assisting an Apple Valley woman in her 2007 suicide. Doreen Dunn was 57 at the time of her death. She had suffered from chronic pain caused by complications from an operation in 1996, according to Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom.  Backstrom said Dunn’s family members were not aware that she had committed suicide until three years after her death.  Dunn’s death was initially ruled as a death by natural causes. There was no evidence of suicide found in her home, Backstrom said. However, a Georgia investigation on a different case in their state uncovered evidence to lead us to believe that Doreen Dunn had indeed committed suicide after consulting with an organization called the Final Exit Network.  Dakota County Attorney’s office alleges that four members of the group counseled Dunn on how to end her life, and that two group members were present when she killed herself with helium and a plastic bag. A Dakota County Grand Jury indicted the group on four counts. The four individuals are facing an additional 13 charges.”

As our Beth Hawkins also reports, Common Cause has had it up to here with ALEC. Jake Grovum at Politics in Minnesota says: “On the heels of a federal complaint to the IRS over the American Legislative Exchange Council’s alleged misuse of federal tax law, Common Cause’s Minnesota chapter has followed the lead of its national organization, asking Attorney General Lori Swanson and the Campaign Finance Board to investigate ALEC’s activities in Minnesota. ‘ALEC operates as a corporate lobby group masquerading as a public charity,’ Mike Dean, head of Common Cause Minnesota, said in a statement announcing the two complaints. ‘Minnesotan taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize ALEC’s lobbying efforts.’ The pair of complaints come from allegations that ALEC is involved in lobbying activities but presents itself for tax and campaign finance purposes as a charitable organization. By doing this, the complaints allege, ALEC is flouting state tax law by classifying its funds as part of a charitable effort and failing to register as a lobbying organization under state campaign finance and public disclosure regulations.”

For a righter-than-right perspective on Gov. Dayton’s latest veto of the GOP’s tax cut bill, we turn to Greg McDonald at NewsMax: “State House Speaker Kurt Zellers called the veto Monday “personally offensive and outrageous” and said it would put a “Closed for Business” sign across the state … The bill pushed by Zellers and other Republicans would have provided businesses with property tax breaks many of the state’s top corporate leaders had sought. The bill would have also provided tax breaks for the purchase of capital equipment and for employers who hired veterans. … Republicans lawmakers were particularly incensed over the veto, which killed a primary component of their so-called job creation plan, because some of them had agreed to support a bill to help facilitate the building of a new $975 million stadium for the Minnesota Vikings football franchise. ‘The governor showed a great amount of flexibility on his top priority, the stadium, and little or no flexibility on issues related to small business job creation,’ said David Olson, president of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce.”

At the PiPress, Bill Salisbury is saying: “With the veto, Senate Majority Leader David Senjem, R-Rochester, said Dayton ‘has earned the title ‘Jobs Killing Governor.’  House Speaker Kurt Zellers, R-Maple Grove, said GOP lawmakers changed the second tax bill to accommodate the administration’s wishes. Calling the veto ‘disrespectful,’ he said it ‘erodes my trust and confidence in Gov. Dayton and his administration.’ But Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, said Dayton made it clear in private meetings with GOP and DFL leaders in the final week of the session that he would not sign a tax bill that increased the deficit. ‘Why they decided to put a poison pill (the property tax freeze) in the tax bill … is just a mystery to me,’ he said.” But then they spent most of the session carefully crafting veto-ready legislation.

Brian Bolduc at The National Review checks out Mnnesota’s Senate race and says: “On Friday, roughly 2,200 Minnesota Republicans will assemble at their party’s state convention in St. Cloud to nominate a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Three men are vying for the nomination: Kurt Bills, a state representative from Rosemount; Pete Hegseth, an Iraq War veteran from Stillwater; and Dan Severson, a former state representative from Sauk Rapids. And according to several party insiders, the race is a dead heat. … Bills’s support for the gold standard and his skepticism toward aid for Israel have earned him the backing of the state’s Ron Paul movement. Gregg Peppin, a Republican consultant who’s assisting Bills, estimates that the delegates affiliated with the Paul movement are 40 to 50 percent of the total. (Hegseth’s campaign puts the percentage in the mid to high 30s.) … Hegseth, meanwhile, is running an energetic campaign, especially for a newcomer who entered the race only on March 1. He raised $160,000 in one month — more than Bills ($45,500) and Severson ($54,000) did combined in the first quarter. And he’s received a slew of endorsements, including those of Texas governor Rick Perry and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. ‘I think that Hegseth has a very unique background, and he is an exciting candidate for a lot of people,’ Johnson observes.”

Noting Rick Perry’s endorsement, the Houston Chronicle links to a Daily Princetonian piece on Hegseth’s college years: “Each month, Hegseth and the other editors would sit around beers and draft “The Rant,” a series of acerbic paragraph takedowns of liberalism, on-campus and beyond. It was here in The Rant where the Tory’s top editors frequently struck their sharpest — and most contentious — blows. ‘Congratulations to Halle Berry for her Oscar-worthy achievement this year. We only wish the performance itself was considered as important as the racial identity of the actor doing it,’ the editors of the Tory wrote in April 2002, criticizing Berry for ‘accepting the award on behalf of an entire race.’ In September, Hegseth and the other editors reacted to The New York Times’ announcement that it would print gay marriage announcements in its pages by arguing that the Times could then logically print announcements of other ‘marriages.’ ‘The [New York Times’] explanation sounds nice on the surface, but its logic is dangerous,’ The Rant read. ‘At what point does the paper deem a ‘relationship’ unfit for publication? What if we ‘loved’ our sister and wanted to marry her? Or maybe two women at the same time? A 13-year-old? The family dog’? When asked in the interview if he stood by everything the Tory wrote under his tenure, Hegseth said he, as publisher, did not see his job as censoring the viewpoints of his writers, giving them the opportunity to be aggressively conservative.” Is that synonymous with “cloddish”?

Every construction project hits a snag somewhere. In downtown St. Paul, Cossetta’s is looking at another fat bill to redirect rain water. Frederick Melo the PiPress writes: “After more than two hours of presentation and discussion, the Board of Zoning Appeals voted 4-2 to deny a stormwater variance for the ongoing expansion of Cossetta’s, the popular West Seventh Street pizzeria and Italian market. … The alternative would be to spend $250,000 to dig a concrete tank trench 10 feet deep, 100 feet wide and 40 feet long to hold 60,000 gallons of water, said his engineer and his attorney. That would require the removal of 10,000 cubic feet of bedrock, said [attorney Eric] Galatz, with little guarantee that the basement will not be impacted by overflow.”

The U.S. Supreme Court will not be going “activist” on Tom Petters. The AP says: “The U.S. Supreme Court says it won’t take up the case of Minnesota businessman Tom Petters. In documents made public Tuesday, the nation’s highest court denied Petters’ request to review his 2009 conviction on charges he orchestrated a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme. This means the lower court decision upholding his conviction will stand. Petters is serving a 50-year sentence at a federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan. He continues to proclaim his innocence.”

Although she has never made a “gaffe,” Congresswoman Michele Bachmann continues to be arguably the most reliable font of unreliable information in state history. The latest, from FactCheck.org: “In several urgent fundraising appeals, Rep. Michele Bachmann falsely claims that biased ‘liberal judges’ redrew her congressional district ‘in retaliation for repeatedly standing up to President Obama.’ The truth is that only two of the five judges were Democratic appointees, and Bachmann’s Minnesota district has become even more Republican than it was before. It’s true that a bipartisan panel of judges redrew district lines and placed the town where Bachmann lives in an abutting district represented by a Democrat. But she has chosen to again run in the 6th District, the one she has represented since 2007. And she doesn’t even have to move to do that. Bachmann has sent out several appeals that carry the same message: Bachmann email, May 11: A major development has just occurred in my race for the U.S. House of Representatives and I’m asking for your immediate help … You see, in retaliation for repeatedly standing up to President Obama on the national stage, liberal judges have redrawn the lines of my Minnesota Congressional District to try and wipe me off of the political map once and for all. Their bias was so obvious they even gerrymandered my home — where my wonderful husband Marcus and I live –- entirely out of my District and placed it into one held by a six-term Democrat incumbent’!”