True North

An organization named Alliance for a Better Minnesota is making a major ad buy attacking Sen. Coleman for high oil prices. Here’s what’s being reported:

A left-leaning political group is about to air ads questioning Republican Senator Norm Coleman’s loyalties when it comes to rising gas prices and the profit-rich oil industry.

The Alliance for a Better Minnesota says it is purchasing six-figures worth of ad time across the state to run the 30-second spot. The group says the ad will start airing this weekend and run for at least a few weeks.

The ad says Coleman has supported billions of dollars of tax breaks for oil companies and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from them.

Coleman’s campaign says he has backed increased fuel-economy requirements for new cars and supported efforts to shift tax incentives from oil companies to renewable-fuel programs.

This “left-leaning political group” obviously doesn’t think that Sen. Coleman is green enough so they’re attacking him. What a yawner. This organization is a wimpy clone of MoveOn.org, a thousand other progressive organizations with upbeat names and socialist agendas. The goal of these ads is to avoid playing defense by going on offense.

As we saw earlier today, it’s the envirowhackos that can’t make the case for their radical agenda. They ran millions of dollars of ads but couldn’t even get a simple majority to vote for cloture on the Cap and Tax bill. That they pose as a mainstream organization is insulting.

I’m all for new solutions to our energy problems until they cause expensive and unexpected problems. For all the talk about green being the way, there’s alot of problems with some of the existing alternatives. Just ask Andy Aplikowski what he thinks about new technology.

What’s happening is that people aren’t liking green products once they learn more about the downside of the products. It’s one of those ‘the more you know, the less you like’ kinds of things.

As is my habit, I decided to check into what Alliance for a Better Minnesota is about. One of my habits is to see who they’ve worked with in the past. Fortunately, they usually store that on a page of its own so that progressives can see their organization’s bona fides. This website wasn’t like that but I still found what I was looking for.

One of the directors for ABM is former Klobuchar campaign manager Ben Goldfarb. He’s currently with Wellstone Action!, which boasts of its associations with such famous leftist organizations as Amnesty International, EMILY’s List, Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM), the Human Rights Campaign and Moveon.org. Oddly enough, EJAM evolved from “a 2003 Minneapolis Urban League (MUL) meeting.” Here’s what EJAM is about:

EJAM evolved from a 2003 Minneapolis Urban League (MUL) meeting focusing on health disparities in communities of color. This meeting served as the foundation for a coalition of community members and organizations coming together to focus on environmental justice and health disparities. Issues that came up at the meeting were coal plant pollution, need for neighborhood legal advocacy assistance, lead poisoning, and health disparities.

Since then, the MUL has hosted monthly EJAM meetings to define mission, goals, and scope of the newly formed coalition, which consists of: North Minneapolis community members, MUL, NAACP, Sierra Club North Star Chapter, Metropolitan Area African American Chamber of Commerce, Institute for Agricultural & Trade Policy, Women’s Cancer Resource Center, Council on Black Minnesotans, Indigenous Women’s Network, African American Tobacco Network, Synergy Publishing, Alliance for Metropolitan Stability, and members of area churches, public schools and the medical community. In Fall 2004 EJAM established its first 15-person Board of Directors.

In other words, this is like a clearinghouse of ultralilberal causes. Of particular interest to me is IATP’s involvement in the coalition. That’s the organization that Mark Ritchie founded. Let’s remember that they’re the extremist group that helped incite the WTO riots in Seattle during the Clinton administration.

The point of this research is to know who we’re dealing with when the dishonest ads start running. It’s important to be prepared to question the sincerity of the attacks. Not all of these organizations are dirty. Many are legitimate, though, so it’s important that we know the difference.

Sen. Coleman should take each opportunity to highlight the things he’s done that’ve helped Minnesotans. That means highlighting constituent services. It also means policy initiatives that’ve helped Minnesotans.

There’s nothing that stops negative attacks faster than building, then maintaining, a positive image.

Cross-posted and comments welcome at Let Freedom Ring.