Bluestem's already looked at the Dellwood Republican representative's bizarre comments in Brainerd last Wednesday in Forget the new senate office building: Matt Dean calls senate colleagues an invasive species and Redwood Falls senator Gary Dahms' reefer madness in MN Senator Gary Dahms shares scary vision of pot-loving DFL majority with Brown Co faithful.
We turn to the New Ulm Journal article from which we drew the latter post for more MNGOP absurdity. In Daudt: No gas tax hike, Fritz Busch reports:
Daudt said there is a big battle in St. Paul that most people don't know about, between metro area "environmental extremists" and outstate Democrats that pitted Dayton against DFL Majority Leader Sen. Thomas Bakk. "Their relationship is much worse than the press reports," Daudt said.
If the tensions between Bakk and Dayton (or Bakk and his own caucus) are a secret, we're Donald Trump with better hair.
Daudt repeats this "metro" environmentalists vs greater Minnesotans in other press reports we've recently read. In Minnesota Political Notebook: Speaker tries to pipe blame to Dayton, Forum News Services' Don Davis writes:
"There is a big divide in Minnesota right now," Daudt said. "It really is between the environmentalists in Minneapolis and St. Paul and those in greater Minnesota who want to see progress on projects like this."
It's clear that Daudt is attempting to brand environmental concerns as urban, while the horny-handed hardworking yeoman workers and farmers in rural areas simply groove on dirty water, nasty air and eroded soil if there's a buck to be turned.
This is something of a surprise to us here in eastern Chippewa County, a good two and a half hour drive to the state capitol if the traffic's good. Earlier this year, our area's environmental group, Clean Up the River Environment (CURE) held its annual meeting in Maynard's Event Center, with local folks leading discussions about how we might do better by water quality, slow climate change, and other riparian matters that the locals value.
CURE is headquartered along the main drag in downtown Montevideo, a leisurely 20-minute drive west from our world headquarters in sunny Maynard when we brake for gophers. We've met the mayor, and she resembles neither Betsy Hodges nor Chris Coleman.
We knew that Republicans are good at gerrymandering, but we had no idea those dirty hippies for clean water (the CURE staff live in Montevideo, Granite Falls and rural Renville and Big Stone Counties) were part of the Twin Cities. For Daudt and pals (including those in the DFL who share Daudt's values), it doesn't matter where environmentalists live, whether the rural folks are raising their voices about big dairies, frac sand mining, pipelines, wild rice waters or Dodge County hog farms.
They're so metro.
Photo: CURE's office in downtown Montevideo. Sort of homespun.
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