Can it be called "full" tin foil hat unless someone is literally wearing a tin foil hat? So OK, Dan Severson's tin foil hat might be purely metaphorical. How tin foil hatty? In a speech to the West Metro Tea Party last June, he said:
His evidence? He believes it. Should we have some schadenfreude with an article of faith in the GOP, recalling the fools they made of themselves in the Franken-Coleman recount? Sure. So, in order to believe that Franken somehow stole the recount, you have to believe Franken pulled this off despite:
-- An observer from each campaign watched each ballot being counted, with the right to challenge the decision on any ballots they wanted.
-- The canvassing board, including Republican appointed judges, was unanimous on all decisions and all but a few votes.
-- The entire proceedings was webstreamed live by The Uptake, so anyone who wanted could see each ballot.
-- The election contest court, also webstreamed live, including Republican appointed judges, was unanimous in its decision, and found for Franken on all facts and rulings.
-- The state Supreme Court, including Republican appointed judges, unanimously upheld the decision of the election contest court.
-- The Coleman campaign, asked by the judges if they were alleging fraud, said "no" every time.
In that classic act of people in denial, in a press conference earlier this week, Severson cited a debunked study. He said Minnesota Majority found 6,000 illegal voters in the 2008 election. They actually sent county attorneys and election officials on thousands of wild goose chases. They found a few former felons who voted or merely registered without voting before their rights were restored, and election officials had already detected most of those. My understanding is even Minnesota Majority doesn't stand by that report anymore. But conspiracy theorists, including the voter fraud variety, never give up the one bit of evidence they have no matter how false.
But if you can't convince the fact-based world, then just shoot the people with Obama bumper stickers. From that same speech:
.
Oh, heck no, we're not done yet.
So you're supposed to serve God before your country --- provided you're a Christian. Muslims have to put the Constitution ahead of their religion. Wouldn't that have been offensive to all the non-Christians in attendance? Oh right, tea party meeting. Never mind.
Those quotes come from a meeting transcript. I'm posting it below, so feel free to look for more goodies. I don't know who transcribed it, but I compared it to audio of the meeting, and it's accurate.
Dan Severson Remarks at West Metro Tea Party Meeting
June 24, 2014
COMMENTATOR
Next we have the Republican endorsed candidate for Secretary of State, and I don’t know how many of you remember the last election cycle but there were two elections that were so close that chewing your fingernails while you were in line to vote may have tipped the scales, and somehow, the bad guys won them both. Plus, we have all the businesses, Minnesota business is stuffed in a drawer. I have a business, I run a business, I spend a lot of time complying with something that’s just ridiculous and there’s no resources there. So now, I have just one question for our next speaker, what will your foreign policy be regarding Illinois? I want to keep those people out of here. Can we get a warm welcome for Doc Severson?
SEVERSON
Well, Chicago politics is alive and well in Minnesota. We got the guy that’s leading it right down the street. When we were coming in the streets were blocked up on 395, 394 whatever, and I’m thinking ‘what in the world is there an accident up there?’ And sure enough there’s cars blocked across, people are backed up for literally a mile on both sides, and I’m thinking ‘this is Barack Obama’. He’s here in our state tonight and he’s in, and I, and I think you know all those cars that have Obama stickers on the back oughta turn into targets at that point, you know? You just gotta wanna go ‘what is he doing to me? Even in my own state, in my own town, right now’. It’s a little hard to follow that act with the common core. Obviously Illinois politics is here. It’s in, not just here, it’s in the United States. And so, how do we respond to that? I’m a physics teacher, I mean not a physics teacher, I was a physics major. Fighter pilot, that was kind of why I did it but the bottom line is my, my core curriculum if you will was systems analysis. If I was to do a systems analysis on this whole process I’d say if you are activists, which you are in this room tonight, your first mode of action should be go down to your local BBPO. Go to the Republican Party sign up to be an election watch, election judge, or poll watcher. And I’ll tell you why. About three weeks ago I got a call from a lady who actually called me in 2008 after she witnessed fraud going on up in Hibbing and she was a poll watcher who saw these buses coming in and these bus folks were coming off, they were coming in and they were being vouched for. And that was just the beginning of irregularities. One of the poll watchers and elections judges there was from Chicago. Literally from Chicago, and she would not give her name. And so, she’s telling me all this stuff, for forty-five minutes she downloads on me, she doesn’t even live in my district. And I said you know what? Go back, talk to your Representative Tony Sertich, talk to your city clerk, and give them two weeks to respond and if they don’t call me back. She did two weeks later. I said okay, file an affidavit, fill out an affidavit with all these complaints and I’ll send it. So I did. I sent it up to Mark Ritchie. Mark Ritchie came back and he said ‘not my job.’ Secretary of State says ‘not my job’ and so he said ‘talk to the county attorney’ so I did. I went through this whole process, bottom line is went up to the Supreme Court, Supreme Court said we’re not gonna hear it. This was my attempt as a sitting State Representative to say you know what there’s fraud going on, this is during the Franken-Coleman recount, and you guys need to pay attention to this. This is relevant, right now. Why do we have Obamacare? Al Franken. Why do we have Al Franken? Voter corruption. Fraud. Why do we have a majority in the House and the Senate right now, and a Governor that are anti-business? They are anti-business. Voter fraud. Because they will go across the state and they will find the seats that are vulnerable. They will find the ones that are within a certain margin and then they will load the buses. And they will stuff the ballots. Now, she called me up three weeks ago, and she said you know I’ve just gone up to election judge training and the election judge, the election judge who’s giving the training said there are three envelopes and when you get these envelopes you sign it, you do not see it. But she’s pretty, pretty stout. She goes this doesn’t seem right. So she goes in the statute. She finds the statute 204 Charlie point 24 that says you have to seal that ballot before you sign it for the election judges. She says ‘what should I do?’ I say ‘go back to her, tell her you want that in writing that that is not, that, that is what they’re instructing people to do’. She did. She went back there. She challenged her. And she said ‘why are you making this trouble? Just do it’. And, so Marsha kind of gets in her face and says ‘well you’re telling me to break the law’. And she says ‘I’m telling you to do your job’. And so this, this is one instance up there. Now we find out this is taking place in Crow Wing county as well. So the next step on this is to, she just wrote a letter to Secretary Ritchie and the AG today, sending them a message to say ‘this is going on out here. What are you going to do about?’ Well Ritchie’s pushing this from behind. Their office is pushing this from behind. So this goes to the Secretary of State, this goes to the Attorney General, now she’s info’d me on this, she’s info’d Eric Kardell who was the one who filed the three lawsuits against Ritchie for the Constitutional Amendment to the Constitutional Ballots and for the online voter registration, all three of which were struck down by the courts. So, this is another one. What we have is a systematic abuse of power, a systematic, offenders of the law. And that’s Mark Ritchie. Now, it gets better, because now we have Steve Simon who’s running on the DFL ticket. Got endorsed back there. If you go to his webpage, his webpage says I intend to go after the, the excellent leadership of Mark Ritchie and continue in his basic legacy. So what we’ve got here is we’ve got the Democratic party that sees these court challenges as not a problem, we’ve got Barack Obama who sees all of the striking down that the courts are doing on his affairs as not a problem, these are mere speed bumps in his impediment to overthrow the American people. And so, part of this process is let’s backup. How do we backup? How do we really have an impact? How do we really guard our liberties? You, here tonight. Every other citizen that believes the Constitution is our guarding framework and is willing to take a little time to be an election judge or be a poll watcher and document and then challenge. And when it doesn’t happen, then they are willing to go the course like Marsha, and his doing, to go that extra mile, to say you now what? We will not give up on this process. When she did that, she contacted me originally and when she walked through this process everyone in the community started to shun her. And she actually lost business, she was attacked by some of the city officials, but she stayed the course. She’s a born-again Christian. She’s a strong person. But she fundamentally believes God has put her in this process for a purpose and so that’s who she is. And that’s the awesome part of it. We as Christians are here in America not to serve America we are to serve a living God number one. He will direct us and he will put us in a place where we can have a living impact. And we need to trust him that he will give us the strength to stay the course. That’s why I’m running for Secretary of State again. I tell ya, running a state wide race, try ????? your toe a few times. It’s not much different because, you know, it just takes a lot longer for it to swell. So, it’s kinda, it’s kind of one of those deals where, for me the Secretary of State is, is really about bringing accountability to our government. I’m passionate about business. I’m a business owner. I’ve got a non-profit. I’ll tell you just briefly about the work I’ve been doing in the, immigrant community. In fact I just got a call today from a Russian Lady. She is a Russian Doctor. She came from Russia in the nineties, her husband and her came, they had five hundred dollars, they came here, established and are now fairly wealthy but her Dad was a high official, elected official in the Communist party. And they chose to leave that place and come here. And so we did a video last December, I did about a thirty, thirty minute video of her and it’s on YouTube that she just talks about how she loves America. How America is like a dream. America compared to Russia is like a place that everyone in the world wants to come to. And so, these are, these are the immigrants that come to America because they believe America is a place they can live their God-given destiny. And it’s in every community. It’s in the Latino community, it’s in the Somali community, it’s in the Asian community or the Hmong, the Cambodians, but here’s the real clue as they have no idea how a representative government functions. So the first thing that Democrats do is they go to their swearing in and they’ll say, tell me this, they say ‘you’re in America now. America’s a democracy, so you’re Democrats, and here’s how the Democrats do it.’ But they’re starting to wakeup now because the values the Democrats are pushing are not the values of their culture. Pro-abortion, pro gay marriage, and you know, government depends, those are not the values that they came to America for. So now then, now comes a political or, not just the Republican party but the Conservative message to say you know what, if you just came here to do business then we wanna come alongside you. We want to help you in that process. In fact, one of the initiatives that I will take as the Secretary of State is to create a private sector board of successful business people who are really willing to engage in this and I’ve already reached out and they are willing to do this and then take some of the minority businesses, some of those individuals who have come here for the purpose of doing business and put ‘em on a board together, on a panel and say okay what are the barriers that you’re experiencing here. And then as we find those barriers then we push it through to the legislative process and then we remove those barriers and then those individuals, the successful business people, will mentor these younger people, the younger businessmen or the new immigrant business people and create a network that actually begins to get them integrated in. Now how many of you have ever been to the Hmong village? Over there at Jackson. It’s an amazing place is it not? It’s kind of like stepping into a third-world country. I mean, I was over in Hong Kong, I’ve been over in the Far East and it’s kind of like you just step into that. They’ve got some amazing food over there, they’ve got some amazing stuff. And if you wanna go over there, and it’s good because there are over three hundred businesses that are Hmong businesses that are incorporated in the place. But guess what? They’re just servicing the Hmong. There’s only two people in here who have been there. If you want an experience go over there, and experience it. But they need to move that out. Those businesses need to be integrated into the grander society. Why? Because as long as they stay quarantined, they do not have the cultural impact. They don’t get to see what American success is all about. And so that’s the same in every one of these communities I’ve been working with. And they are passionate, I mean they are passionate. Another good friend of mine, when I first met him, at the end of this conversation he said, this is a guy who came here with eighty-five bucks in his pocket and now has a business with one hundred twenty people in it, he said I love America, I would die for this country. So how many young people do we have that are going through our public education systems that are in this mentality of America owes me a living. You know you’ve got the ninety-niners, you know those people that are out there on the mall that are sitting because they can’t get a forty-thousand dollar or sixty-thousand dollar job here, a year job. So, here’s the ones that have come here, have known adversity, and now are making pretty good money. But they understand that it’s the concepts, it’s the liberties, it’s the freedoms, the God-given freedoms that we have in this country that have allowed them to do that. So, I don’t know what else to say other than that I challenge you to become poll watchers, become election judges. And, we can field some questions here. I can talk about the outreach, I can talk about the programs I’m working on as Secretary of State. My vision for Secretary of State is not unlike the national side where I’m becoming an ambassador to these communities, not just to these communities but to other areas for Minnesota and create the workforce that really creates opportunities for the workforce. But again, getting back to the whole issue of election integrity, if we don’t have clean elections, we don’t have a Republic. If we don’t have clean elections, we cannot elect people who are pro-business. If we don’t have elections, our conservative future is languishing.
COMMENTATOR
By the way Doc, I met Doc at an airport in Blaine. It was the first time I met him, and the guy is tireless and works hard. He’s been to the North Metro many times. We’ve got a question right here?
QUESTION #1
I wanted to know if you were aware that during the Franken Coleman situation that the people who are handicapped from the Minnesota State Academy for the blind and the deaf and all around Minnesota, that in order to gain that Franken vote, because they needed that one more Democrat on there, that the special needs people, young adults and in high school, were rounded up and brought into vote. And their teachers and everybody else were telling them about how they were supposed to vote and they were run through like a herd of horses. And it really bothered me and I have a step-son who’s special needs and he blew his cork and he started talking about it and I explained to people don’t you realize that a lot of these special needs people have guardians through the courts. Whether there their parents or someone else and you can’t just round them up and tell them where to vote but that’s what happened. And then also when I was doing voting for my son as an absentee thing there in New Hope here, they kept telling me ‘oh you can’t do that, you can’t submit that’, and legally you can it was in the book. And then I had to go over to city hall and tell them that now they told me that they have to put this in the safe and put it in there because I wasn’t allowed to leave it where I was supposed to at the voting booth. So I just wanted to make you aware of that so that you would know.
SEVERSON
In 2010, it was 2010 during that Secretary of State race there was an incident up in Crow Wing County. I’m not sure how many of you remember that. I got a call that night it was about that very thing. There were some adults, it was an adult daycare facility, that had been bussed in there. And it was somebody who was not partisan at all. He was a veteran. He saw this stuff going on and he just went irate. And so, it eventually got around to me and we got it on the national news the next day because I’d been talking with some of the reporters out in Washington D.C. and Lord knows the end game of that process. In our Constitution it says if you are mentally incapable, if you’re under guardianship or if you’re a felon, it says you cannot vote, it says you shall not vote. So if it says you shall not vote, who’s responsibility is it to ensure that they don’t vote? Who do you think? The Secretary of State. He says ‘not my job. That’s what he says. ‘This is not my job’. Yet another abdication of his responsibility to protect the Constitution. And Steve Simon says he’s going to follow right after the character of Mark Ritchie. That’s why this is such an important race in this process. This is not just something that we can say if we lose the Secretary of State it’s not a big deal. We lose the Secretary of State folks, we’re done, we’re done. And I can commit to you, that I will kick over rocks. I will undue that place and I will use my public stance in the pulpit to make sure that this word gets out. If I have to go to every town, every auditor, every election official to do this thing, that’s my commitment to you. And if it’s still Governor Dayton, which I certainly hope it’s not, I will be on his doorstep with the news media talking about how he is an affront to the Constitution and our values.
QUESTION #2
I’ve been told that you work a lot with the Somali community, is that correct?
SEVERSON
Yes
QUESTION #2
When my mother was growing up in the tenements of New York she said ‘there were a lot of immigrants, they all assimilated’.
SEVERSON
Yep
QUESTION #2
I’ve lived extensively with an Iranian-Muslim woman, and she assimilated. Why does it seem the Somalis don’t want to assimilate?
SEVERSON
You know, that’s a good question. And I, part of it is how they have been quarantined in this process. When I first met with them about two and a half years ago, I sat around the table as really kind of the first Republican that’d ever done this, and their were about nine of them around the table. They said ‘We’ve come here. We just want to do business. They put us into the section eight housing, and then they put non-profits all around us to keep us here. We just want to do business’. So, part of the fault is with us as Republicans, with conservatives that have not reached out and befriended them and said you know what there’s a better way. There is, there, and, I’m not going to get into too a lot of rhetoric but I’ll tell you what, the ones that I have met who are passionate about America, are probably the majority. There are some radicals, and one of the first messages I took to the community was to say you know what if you want to get out of this assumption that all Muslims are bad or that all Somalis are bad, you’re going to have to verbally speak out against this extremist Islam. And so they took that on board but there was really no news media that would go in their face and say ‘okay talk about it’. So that’s one of the challenges they have as a community, to get on record, to get to those news media people that will actually put that stuff out and say ‘hey, we do not want Sharia Law, we do not want all the stuff that the Radical Islamists want. We just want to be part of America’. And so that’s the message that we need to carry to them. To say these are the conditions of being an American. Number one, is that you don’t force your religion on anybody. And number two, is that you are willing to speak out against Radical Islam and number three that you will not endorse or support or vote for Sharia Law. The Constitution is the founding document of this country, I swore an oath to defend the Constitution thirty years ago and I still abide by that oath. And so that’s one of the first questions I have to many of this communities as I go into ‘em that are Muslim I say ‘if you’re for Sharia Law, we’re done, no’. We will have no communications with them.
QUESTION
Who paid for Ritchie’s grand tour of the state when he was campaigning against voter ID?
SEVERSON
You did. You did. He did it under the guise of going out there and educating some of the auditors and then afterwards he would go and speak to the news media about how these Constitutional Amendments were bad. So you’re exactly right. We, the people. He should have never injected into those Constitutional Amendments. It might be, I mean, Mark Ritchie’s Mark Ritchie, you know. He is a political hack. He believes that everything that he does is for a higher purpose of turning everybody into purple kool-aiders (maybe kool-aid haters). The beef I got is with Governor Al Quie, you know. Who really turned on the Republican Party, by endorsing Tim Penny instead of. That’s my beef. And then you’ve got Arne Carlson, who did the same thing. Those are some, those are some issues. I can contend with the Democrats. They’re identified. When we have Republicans who are doing it, that becomes hugely problematic. So, and one last thing, we’re going to have a new Secretary of State, it’s gonna cost some bucks. If you go and look at Steve Simon’s public disclosure statement on his holding, you’re eyes will water. The guy is a millionaire. And so what we’ve got is Dayton, who’s a millionaire. You got Matt Entenza who’s contending for the auditor who’s a millionaire. And you got Steve Simon who’s a millionaire. And yet they have the nerve to go to these communities and say, ‘we’re of the people’. So, I do not have the assets that he has and I believe that we are in the right for the right reasons. And so, if you can spare a twenty-dollar bill it would be much appreciated. We are working for the public subsidy agreement I have to raise six-thousand dollars in less than fifty dollar increments. So anything you do contribute, fill out your name here so I can include you on that report. Thank you for all you do, and I am serious if you become an election judge or poll watcher. You will be the most effective at the grassroots level.