Tag Archives: Jennifer Carnahan

Wanted: Live Attack Tarantula. Asking for a Friend.

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So I have two closely related questions this morning.

1: Where do I go to get a live tarantula suitable for throwing at someone?

2: Where do Republicans get these people?

I’m of course today referring to Marisa Simonetti, Hennepin County Commissioner candidate for District 6, (where I live), who is accused of slinging a honkin’ big spider at her Air BnB tenant. Being as she’s just out of jail, she has yet to offer her side of the story, but we do know from police photographs that there was a tarantula involved in some way.

Whatever way and however the tarantula was transported, either in the tupperware container seen in photos, or by air from Simonetti’s hand to the tenant’s face, it’s yet another episode among many involving the extraordinarily curious-to-incendiary-to-nefarious characters in orbit around today’s Republican party.

Focusing strictly on Minnesota let’s quickly not forget:

Anthony “Tony” Lazzaro a self-styled but generally accepted Minnesota Republican “insider.” He’s the 32 year-old guy convicted of sex trafficking indisputably underage girls. The Guardian reported, “Prosecutors argued during the trial that Lazzaro enlisted [co-defendant Gisela] Medina, who he initially paid for sex, to recruit other teenagers – preferably minors – who were white, small, vulnerable or ‘broken’. ‘He wanted sex, and not just any sex’, federal prosecutor Melinda Williams said during closing arguments on Friday. ‘He wanted sex with minor girls under the age of 18. And he had a plan to get it.’ Lazarro’s attorney, Daniel Gerdts, argued that the government’s ‘salacious’ prosecution was based on ‘completely unfounded’ allegations. ‘The prosecution clearly disapproves of Mr Lazzaro’s playboy lifestyle’, Gerdts said. ‘And frankly, as the father of three daughters, so do I. The opprobrium is well deserved, but that is not why we’re here’.”

(I’m pretty sure they were there because the small, white and broken girls in question were all around 15 years old.)

Oh, but wait! Let’s not forget this: “Pictures on Lazzaro’s social media accounts showed him with prominent Republicans, including ex-president Donald Trump and former vice-president Mike Pence. He gave more than $270,000 to Republican campaigns and political committees over the years.”

… which explains why the state’s nigh-on-to-bankrupt GOP treated Lazzaro like a mover and a shaker.

Or, how about Jennifer Carnahan, the quite obviously hot mess wife of deceased Congressman Jim Hagedorn? Because she was wiling to be the nigh-on-to-bankrupt Republican party’s chairman, which requires a willingness to say any matter of hysterical and nutty things into a microphone, Carnahan and her party ended up suing each other over a series of claims, most involving rank financial incompetence. MPR’s story on the settlement, which involved no one paying anyone anything but nevertheless generating a lot of press suggesting both were bonkers, said, “GOP officials said they were pleased the ‘baseless’ lawsuit wouldn’t move forward. ‘After the mediation, she gave up her case without the party paying her anything’, the party statement said. ‘Now the Republican Party of Minnesota can continue our singular focus on solving Minnesota’s real problems, including flipping the Minnesota House in 2024 and stopping the reckless spending and overreach by the DFL trifecta’.”

That’s right. You read that correctly. They close out accusing the DFL of “reckless spending.”

Or, let’s not forget Tony Sutton, the GOP’s party chairman several iterations before Carnahan. A young, corpulent fellow with a stake in the Baja del Sol fast food chain, Sutton was a “must see” press every time he stood up to loudly rail against, you know, “reckless spending” by DFLers and admonishing everyone in sight to learn to “live within their means.”

An act like that could only go one way. And it did, when Sutton resigned the job having run the party into $2 million of debt and then … wait for it … declared personal bankruptcy as a kind of dessert plate.

I could go on … and on. (Hell, I could do 2000 words on Royce White the Jew-phobic, strip-club loving loon running against Amy Klobuchar.) And I should mention, of course, DFL Senator and ninja cat burglar Nicole Mitchell, who broke into her stepmother’s home to steal back … her father’s ashes. That’s very weird, and not at all good, but somewhat short of sex trafficking teeny boppers and running up $2 million on the company credit cards.

But bad as Mitchell looks, the numerical disparity in batshit partisan craziness is so weighted toward this last generation of Republicans she qualifies as the exception that proves the rule.

So “why” do so many of these incompetents and sociopaths turn up under the modern, post-talk radio Republican umbrella? Allow me to freely speculate.

Today’s conservatives are so far removed from any legitimate or meaningful policy concerns their entire focus is … the game. Acting in and playing the game … for their own personal benefit.

I mean the (alleged) tarantula thrower, Ms. Simonetti, is a 30 year-old Kristi Noem lookalike who claims to be a “businesswoman” leading “the Simonetti real estate team” (and tell me you aren’t curious about the financial bona fides of that?). She would make $113,000 if elected. That’s a well-paying gig that wouldn’t necessitate renting out her basement to strangers.

And who knows? As “the only true conservative” in the District 6 race and someone inveighing regularly about “rampant crime”, Simonetti — even if convicted of assault with tarantula — may ride the MAGA coattails to victory in November.

We’re living in that kind of world.

Dear Minnesota GOP: Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.

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Just a brief word of thanks to Minnesota’s Republican party. Amid such a torrent of bad news — a new wildfire of COVID infections thanks entirely to MAGA Nation, half the West and northern Minnesota turning to ash, religious lunatics overrunning Afghanistan and (Trumpus Americanus again) demanding to tote their firearm/penile extensions through the State Fair — our local Republicans have served up a delicious late summer sexual distraction.

Colleague/site czar Joe Loveland has had his say on the matter of GOP chairwoman Jennifer Carnahan and what has been revealed following very close pal “Tony” Lazzaro’s indictment on sex trafficking, which is a euphemism for pimping under age girls.

Since Joe posted, a new round of stories — every political reporter in town is salivating over this mess — has revealed a gay staffer’s complaint that Carnahan “outed” her when convenient to show some LGBTQ bona fides to “moderate” Republicans, (I’d like names and numbers on that crowd if you don’t mind), but then turned around and vilified her to the (presumably much larger) GOP base laser-focused on keeping America free of swishy “preversion”, to paraphrase the great Col. Bat Guano.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, four other local party muckety-mucks stepped up to describe Carnahan’s basic office theology as “morally bankrupt”, not to mention “toxic.”

A modern Republican bureaucracy dedicated to fund-raising and messaging “morally bankrupt” and “toxic?” I could not be more shocked!

Back in my newspaper days — in the rare times I was actually in the newsroom — it was amusing to listen to the guffawing and snickering among hardened reporters over the latest statement from the chairs of either party. The stuff was always so ham-fisted and hyperbolic. Every other day one or the other was “demanding” or “calling for” the other party to concede moral dereliction, humiliating defeat and accept a month in the public stocks.

Who in god’s name were they talking to? What sort of imbecile responded to that kind of spittle-flecked ranting? (Not that I’m opposed to spittle-flecked ranting, you understand.)

Remember Tony Sutton? A lot of us didn’t think the Republicans could top a guy who so grossly “mismanaged” the party’s finances he was found guilty of “circumventing” finance laws, fined $33k, forced to resign as chair and then a couple years later filed for personal bankruptcy for not having the wherewithall to cover $2.1 million in debts, despite being CEO of the Baja Fresh chain of taco joints.

Former state GOP Chair Tony Sutton files for bankruptcy | MinnPost

The guy was a hapless cartoon. Must watch TV every time he stepped up in front of a mic to rail against the ruinous depravity of free-spending liberals.

But now we have Carnahan. And Anton “Tony” Lazarro.

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As I follow this story, Carnahan and Lazzaro linked up several years ago — when “Tony” was in his mid-twenties and already living the high-life, a bit like Mr. Sutton. I’d like to think Carnahan was charmed by Lazzaro’s ethics and sense of civic responsibility. But you know … I’m thinking it was really all about the Benjamin’s, as the kids say. Young Mr. Lazzaro had a lot of cash and was soon writing a lot of checks — a quarter million dollars plus of them — to Carnahan’s candidates. With each check he was brought deeper into her embrace … figuratively speaking, of course.

This was the same young man living downtown at the Hotel Ivy, (a quite posh residence), driving a Ferrari and pictured sitting atop a private jet on his Facebook page.

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Some of us, perhaps you and me, would observe that spectacle and ask something like, ‘Where is that little douchebag getting that kind of cash?”

But apparently where her new BFF “Tony” was getting Saudi sheik-style dough never crossed Ms. Carnahan’s mind. (Quite Trump-like, Carnahan is now playing the “I don’t really know him that well” game.) All that mattered waas that he had it and she was tapping him.

So I guess I’m really not that shocked that “toxic” and “morally bankrupt” are words in current fashion to describe Ms. Carnahan’s office environment.

While we await some morally righteous, hyperbolic condemnation from the likes of the GOP’s Senate Majority Leader, Paul Gazelka — Minnesota’s Cotton Mather — or Congress critters Tom Emmer, Pete Stauber or Michelle Fishbach or … well any Republican whose name regularly makes the news, we can at least express a little appreciation.

This farce is a lot more entertaining than watching a bunch of morally righteous, routinely hyperbolic, fundamentally transactional zealots rampage across some hell hole on the other side of the planet.

Cruelty Is No Longer A Disqualifier For Republicans

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I can think of lots of legitimate reasons why Republican Party Chair Jennifer Carnahan should resign.

Pathetic fundraising.  No statewide offices held.  Unwillingness to condemn traitorous insurrectionists and their inciter.

However, knowing a donor and activist accused of sex trafficking isn’t one of them. 

Now, if it’s discovered that Carnahan knew about the child victimization and did nothing about it, that’s different.  But as far as I know, that evidence doesn’t exist.  Until and unless proof surfaces, Carnahan doesn’t deserve to lose her position over a purely “guilt by association” charge. Party chairs and politicians need to work with thousands of people, and they can’t be expected to know everything about all of them.

Meanwhile, however, the evidence that Chair Carnahan is breathtakingly cruel has been confirmed.  Oddly buried at the end of a long Pioneer Press article is this shocking tidbit:

Carnahan also confirmed that an audio clip being circulated by her critics on social media contains callous comments that she made about her husband’s (Minnesota Congressman Jim Hagedorn) medical condition during a phone conversation. Hagedorn is battling stage four kidney cancer, and announced last month that he’d had a recurrence. He was first diagnosed in February of 2019, shortly after he took office and a couple months after they were married in December 2018. Doctors removed his affected kidney in December of 2020 after a course of immunotherapy.

“I don’t care. Jim, he’s going to die of cancer in two years,” she can he heard saying. “So be it.”

Gulp.

For the record, the leader of the party that endlessly preaches “personal responsibility” blames the comment on, wait for it, wine and grief. 

That might be the most lame crisis response I’ve ever heard. Millions of spouses with terminally ill spouses feel grief and indulge in wine, but their grief and buzz doesn’t cause them to express indifference.

This part is pretty damning.  Then again, it probably won’t drive her out her job.  If mere cruelty were a disqualifier, Republicans still wouldn’t be worshiping en masse at the altar of a man who mocks handicapped people, brags about being a serial groper of women’s genitals, screws a porn star while his wife is carrying his child, and belittles a decorated prisoner of war. 

Fortunately for Carnahan, in today’s Republican Party, cruelty clearly isn’t close to a disqualifier.