Secrets of the City

Federal officials have charged four men with plotting to tamper with the telephone system in the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. The connection between the four men? They shared a common experience as young ideologues writing for conservative publications.

Joseph Basel, of Minnesota, and Robert Flanagan, son of the acting U.S. Attorney for northern Louisiana, dressed up as telephone repairman (yeah, just like in the movies) with hardhats and toolbelts, entered the Hale Boggs building, went to Senator Landrieu’s 10th floor office (where they met up with their associate James O’Keefe, the filmmaker who dressed up as a pimp for a video expose of ACORN), and allegedly tried to wire-tap the phone.

But who is this Basel guy anyway? Basel was one of three founders (and editor) of The Counterweight, a monthly conservative publication at University of Minnesota-Morris.

Unfortunately for him and the other three young men involved, it seems they’re not getting much support from the conservative sector. A crime, after all, is a crime. According to Lake Minnetonka Liberty, “O’Keefe and his associates deserve every day in jail that they get.  After all, they must stand for the ‘Law and Order’ that the conservative movement champions.  Well, they broke the law and now must face up to the order of doing prison time.”

…at least that’s what City Pages claims — that MinnPost is “a place where you get a free pass if you hate gays, liberals, and the ACLU.”

Ouch!

Last month, MinnPost published a two-part Q&A with Katherine Kersten. And this week they’ve followed it up with a Michele Bachmann piece.

While City Pages has repeatedly expressed serious concerns about MinnPost’s editorial decisions/ties, MinnPost Managing Editor Roger Buoen argues that Minnesota journalists need to do a better job of covering the right.

Of course, City Pages had something to say about that, too.

Michele Bachmann scored big in Palm Beach this weekend during the Restoration Weekend conference, a virtual “who’s who of conservative activists and conservative leaders” (Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter). But according to MPR’s Polinaut, she “got the biggest ovation for saying Al Franken stole the election and she’s the ‘left’s number one target.’”

Regardless of how you might feel about the woman, you have to admit, she’s just not boring! And she might be a better comedian than Al Franken himself.

It seems Michele Bachmann has been hard at work (with a little help from Fox News). But how do we feel about having a Rep. that Time Magazine mocks, saying “it’s not sporting or even reasonable to expect [her] to make sense”; and whose “wider background of knowledge” Salon describes as going “from the conservative blog RedState — led by a guy whose idea of a brilliant political tactic is sending fake dog poop to a Democratic congressman — to the WSJ’s notoriously ideological editorial page and then to the IBD editorial page, which is sort of a poor man’s WSJ for people completely uninterested in anything but a strict conservative line”?

Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., is still awaiting an apology from Bachmann for the use of Holocaust images in signs carried at her tea-party protest. See his YouTube video.

Still, the woman has been hitting the headlines full force. And now she has mainstream media speculating over her ambitions. Meanwhile, Taryll Clark sets out to depose her.