2024

[Seacoaster(1)]

Re: our discussion about real conservatism:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/styl ... esota.html

"n 2006, during his first campaign for Congress, Tim Walz was scheduled to speak at a fund-raising dinner in his hometown, Mankato, Minn. At the time, he was a political unknown in a tightly contested race against a six-term incumbent. The dinner was a chance to stump in front of his local district of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and to bolster his campaign coffers.

There was only one problem: Mr. Walz had laryngitis.

As guests loaded up plates with food, they were surprised to see someone else take the stage: Gwen Walz, Mr. Walz’s wife.

She was used to speaking in front of a crowd: Like her husband, Ms. Walz had been a public-school teacher for more than a decade. Those sitting in the audience were impressed by her confidence and clarity.

“There were other candidates who spoke, and she was the most articulate of the bunch,” said John Klaber, a North Mankato resident who was at the fund-raiser almost two decades ago. “We all looked around and said, ‘Why isn’t she running?’”

Most of the American public got its first good look at Gov. Tim Walz last week at a rally in Philadelphia alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, who had that day announced him as her running mate. At the end of his speech, the nation also got its first glimpse of the woman to whom he has been married for 30 years.

As Ms. Walz enters the national stage, critics on the right are already trying to portray her — as they have with her husband — as a left-wing radical who countenanced the civil unrest in her state after the death George Floyd. But at home in Minnesota, where she has spent most of her life, friends and political observers describe her as the coolheaded and ultracompetent counterpart to a man known for an intuitive and charismatic political style.

“We have always worked as a partnership,” Ms. Walz, 58, told the self-improvement podcast “What If It Works” last month, later adding, “We are still one another’s closest advisers.”

Ms. Walz did not comment for this article.

The first gubernatorial spouse in Minnesota to keep an office in the state capital, Ms. Walz regularly advises her husband and has used her platform to advance policy initiatives, most significantly around offering college degree programs to inmates.

Editors’ Picks

Do You Know These Novels That Were Adapted Into Video Games?

Should You Get Another Covid Shot Now?

She Suspected She Was Adopted. It Turned Out She Was Right.
ImageMs. Walz, wearing a black pantsuit, stands up above a table covered in boxes of doughnuts, holding her husband’s hand.
Ms. Walz spoke to a room full of fellow teachers on the eve of her husband’s inauguration as Minnesota governor in 2019.Credit...Eric Miller/Reuters
A Package Deal
“When you get Tim, you get Gwen,” said Mr. Klaber, who worked with Ms. Walz in the Mankato school district for more than a decade.

Raised in the tiny farming town of Ivanhoe, Minn., only a 15-minute drive from South Dakota’s eastern border, Ms. Walz is the daughter of schoolteachers, and the eldest of four sisters. Ms. Walz was a caretaker in the family, according to her youngest sister, Heidi Ohlmann.

“She’s always looking out for everyone,” Ms. Ohlmann said in an interview.

She described their hometown as a tightly knit “utopia,” where their parents were heavily involved in the local Lutheran church. (At 85, Ms. Walz’s mother is still the church organist.)

Ms. Walz stayed nearby for college: After getting degrees from Gustavus Adolphus College, a small liberal arts school in southern Minnesota, and Minnesota State University in Mankato, Ms. Walz moved to Alliance, Neb., to teach English.

There, she met Mr. Walz, who taught ninth-grade geography at the same school. On their first date, Mr. Walz took her to see “Falling Down,” the 1993 Michael Douglas movie about an aggrieved white man having a nervous breakdown in Los Angeles. In a 2019 profile in the Star Tribune, Ms. Walz said she rebuffed a kiss afterward, to which Mr. Walz responded, “That’s fine, but you should know I’m going to marry you.”

They were married the next year and soon moved back to Minnesota, taking jobs at Mankato West High School, where she taught English and he taught social studies.

The Walzes were perceived by students as a single unit, so much so that taking classes with both of them gained a nickname: Walz home-school.

Former students remember Ms. Walz as demanding but fair. According to several former students, Ms. Walz required her class to use color-coded notebooks to keep track of the coursework, which included classics like “Walden,” “Our Town” and “Beowulf.”

One former student, Nicole Griensewic, 41, remembered complaining to Ms. Walz that she graded much harder than Mr. Walz.

“‘I can’t be like the Easter Bunny, hopping around handing out A’s like my husband does,’” Ms. Griensewic recalled Ms. Walz as responding.

Megan Holleran edited the school’s newspaper, the West Side Story, and said that Ms. Walz, the faculty adviser, was an encouraging figure who respected the staff’s editorial independence.

Ms. Holleran recalled writing an editorial about what she argued were unthinking displays of nationalism in the months after Sept. 11, 2001 — part of a wide range of perspectives the paper published on the American response to the terrorist attacks.

“She didn’t dictate, she advised,” Ms. Holleran, 41, said. “And she really saw the potential in giving us those responsibilities.”

Students also remembered Ms. Walz for making L.G.B.T.Q. students and racial minorities feel welcome. (Mr. Walz was the faculty adviser and founder of the high school’s gay-straight alliance.)

“They fostered an inclusive environment before that was really a thing, an inclusive culture before that was really a phrase,” said Angie Brunner, 41, a former student of Ms. Walz’s, who was one of the only Korean American students at Mankato West.

The Walzes discussed their students together and tried to help them thrive, including when the couple served as prom advisers. According to Sherri Blasing, the principal of Mankato West and a former neighbor of the Walzes, the couple strategized to make sure no one had to attend prom alone.

The Big Shift

In 2004, Ms. Walz stopped teaching to become the assessment coordinator for the Mankato school district, a job she held until 2018, when her husband was elected governor. And in 2006, Mr. Walz ran for Congress.

By now the parents of 3-year-old Hope — after seven years of fertility treatments — both Walzes were upset with the course of the war in Iraq.

“We just asked ourselves, like, What can we do?” Ms. Walz said on the podcast. The rational thing, she said, was for her husband to run for Congress. “We felt the way you stop the war is stop the money, and the way you stop the money is the United States Congress.”

But politics had been on Ms. Walz’s mind for some time.

In 2002, Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president and Minnesota senator, came out of retirement to replace Senator Paul D. Wellstone in a crucial Senate campaign after he died in a plane crash just days before the election.

Ms. Walz, at the time still teaching at the local high school, showed up at a campaign event for Mr. Mondale in Mankato.

“You had such an incredible influence on me, and women of my age, by your courageous and visionary decision in the 1984 election,” she told Mr. Mondale, according to a St. Paul Pioneer Press article from the time. She was referring to Mr. Mondale’s choice of a woman, Geraldine A. Ferraro, as vice president in his failed presidential bid.

Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, who ran Mr. Mondale’s 2002 campaign, met the Walzes during Mr. Walz’s 2006 congressional run. In an interview, she cast Ms. Walz’s approach to being Minnesota first lady as a reflection of her dedication to public service.

“There is an ethic in Minnesota of what it means to be a good citizen,” Ms. Smith said. “It’s not enough to keep your sidewalk shoveled and mow your grass.”

According to the 2019 Star Tribune profile, Ms. Walz sat in on a job interview for the state’s new corrections commissioner. She also went on the attack over legislation that Mr. Walz and Democratic lawmakers in the State House wanted to advance, once warning state legislators that they could face electoral consequences if they didn’t vote on gun reform measures.

Ms. Walz is not closely involved in Mr. Walz’s day-to-day political operation. And it’s common for political spouses to devote themselves to pet causes or policies. (Doug Emhoff, Ms. Harris’s husband and the second gentleman, keeps an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and has been involved in Biden administration policy on expanding access to legal aid.)

But Ms. Walz has gone deeper than most, spending her time as first lady pushing a policy agenda that she has been passionate about for years. In 2012, while working on an orientation program for congressional spouses, Ms. Walz was introduced to the Bard Prison Initiative. Founded in 1999, the initiative provides college education to prisoners in New York, leading to degrees from Bard College.

After Mr. Walz became governor in 2019, Ms. Walz went to work touring prisons in the state and later helped recruit the Bard Prison Initiative’s director of national programs to a special role within the state department of corrections, drastically expanding access to college courses within Minnesota’s prisons.

But her policy-forward approach to being the governor’s spouse hasn’t come without setbacks.

At a May 2019 forum at Twin Cities Public Television promoting a PBS documentary about the Bard Prison Initiative, the atmosphere turned tense after Ms. Walz and other panelists seemed unprepared to discuss the racial dynamics of the criminal justice system. The awkward discussion was made worse when the governor’s office subsequently asked the television station not to circulate a video of the forum. Twin Cities Public Television deleted the video but maintained that the action was not a result of pressure from the governor’s office. (A Walz staffer later told Minnesota Public Radio that the request to conceal the video had been an “overreaction.”)

In recent days, since her husband’s vice-presidential nomination, Ms. Walz has come in for criticism from the right for an interview she gave to a Twin Cities television station in which she discussed the protests that followed the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd. She said that she had kept the windows of the governor’s mansion open during the civil unrest so that she could smell tires burning on the street — a way of understanding the tense atmosphere in the city.

“I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening,” she added.

Despite her political involvement, friends say Ms. Walz is at heart a Midwestern mom.

Famous for her scotcheroos — chocolate and butterscotch-laden Rice Krispies bars — Ms. Walz goes all out decorating the governor’s residence for Christmas. And she speaks with the long O’s and flat A’s of a lifetime spent almost entirely in Minnesota.

“There couldn’t be a better person to do this,” Richelle Norton, a former student of the Walzes, said of Mr. Walz’s joining the Democratic ticket. “Except for Gwen.”

[Seacoaster(1)]

Re: our discussion about real conservatism:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/styl ... esota.html

"n 2006, during his first campaign for Congress, Tim Walz was scheduled to speak at a fund-raising dinner in his hometown, Mankato, Minn. At the time, he was a political unknown in a tightly contested race against a six-term incumbent. The dinner was a chance to stump in front of his local district of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and to bolster his campaign coffers.

There was only one problem: Mr. Walz had laryngitis.

As guests loaded up plates with food, they were surprised to see someone else take the stage: Gwen Walz, Mr. Walz’s wife.

She was used to speaking in front of a crowd: Like her husband, Ms. Walz had been a public-school teacher for more than a decade. Those sitting in the audience were impressed by her confidence and clarity.

“There were other candidates who spoke, and she was the most articulate of the bunch,” said John Klaber, a North Mankato resident who was at the fund-raiser almost two decades ago. “We all looked around and said, ‘Why isn’t she running?’”

Most of the American public got its first good look at Gov. Tim Walz last week at a rally in Philadelphia alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, who had that day announced him as her running mate. At the end of his speech, the nation also got its first glimpse of the woman to whom he has been married for 30 years.

As Ms. Walz enters the national stage, critics on the right are already trying to portray her — as they have with her husband — as a left-wing radical who countenanced the civil unrest in her state after the death George Floyd. But at home in Minnesota, where she has spent most of her life, friends and political observers describe her as the coolheaded and ultracompetent counterpart to a man known for an intuitive and charismatic political style.

“We have always worked as a partnership,” Ms. Walz, 58, told the self-improvement podcast “What If It Works” last month, later adding, “We are still one another’s closest advisers.”

Ms. Walz did not comment for this article.

The first gubernatorial spouse in Minnesota to keep an office in the state capital, Ms. Walz regularly advises her husband and has used her platform to advance policy initiatives, most significantly around offering college degree programs to inmates.

A Package Deal

“When you get Tim, you get Gwen,” said Mr. Klaber, who worked with Ms. Walz in the Mankato school district for more than a decade.

Raised in the tiny farming town of Ivanhoe, Minn., only a 15-minute drive from South Dakota’s eastern border, Ms. Walz is the daughter of schoolteachers, and the eldest of four sisters. Ms. Walz was a caretaker in the family, according to her youngest sister, Heidi Ohlmann.

“She’s always looking out for everyone,” Ms. Ohlmann said in an interview.

She described their hometown as a tightly knit “utopia,” where their parents were heavily involved in the local Lutheran church. (At 85, Ms. Walz’s mother is still the church organist.)

Ms. Walz stayed nearby for college: After getting degrees from Gustavus Adolphus College, a small liberal arts school in southern Minnesota, and Minnesota State University in Mankato, Ms. Walz moved to Alliance, Neb., to teach English.

There, she met Mr. Walz, who taught ninth-grade geography at the same school. On their first date, Mr. Walz took her to see “Falling Down,” the 1993 Michael Douglas movie about an aggrieved white man having a nervous breakdown in Los Angeles. In a 2019 profile in the Star Tribune, Ms. Walz said she rebuffed a kiss afterward, to which Mr. Walz responded, “That’s fine, but you should know I’m going to marry you.”

They were married the next year and soon moved back to Minnesota, taking jobs at Mankato West High School, where she taught English and he taught social studies.

The Walzes were perceived by students as a single unit, so much so that taking classes with both of them gained a nickname: Walz home-school.

Former students remember Ms. Walz as demanding but fair. According to several former students, Ms. Walz required her class to use color-coded notebooks to keep track of the coursework, which included classics like “Walden,” “Our Town” and “Beowulf.”

One former student, Nicole Griensewic, 41, remembered complaining to Ms. Walz that she graded much harder than Mr. Walz.

“‘I can’t be like the Easter Bunny, hopping around handing out A’s like my husband does,’” Ms. Griensewic recalled Ms. Walz as responding.

Megan Holleran edited the school’s newspaper, the West Side Story, and said that Ms. Walz, the faculty adviser, was an encouraging figure who respected the staff’s editorial independence.

Ms. Holleran recalled writing an editorial about what she argued were unthinking displays of nationalism in the months after Sept. 11, 2001 — part of a wide range of perspectives the paper published on the American response to the terrorist attacks.

“She didn’t dictate, she advised,” Ms. Holleran, 41, said. “And she really saw the potential in giving us those responsibilities.”

Students also remembered Ms. Walz for making L.G.B.T.Q. students and racial minorities feel welcome. (Mr. Walz was the faculty adviser and founder of the high school’s gay-straight alliance.)

“They fostered an inclusive environment before that was really a thing, an inclusive culture before that was really a phrase,” said Angie Brunner, 41, a former student of Ms. Walz’s, who was one of the only Korean American students at Mankato West.

The Walzes discussed their students together and tried to help them thrive, including when the couple served as prom advisers. According to Sherri Blasing, the principal of Mankato West and a former neighbor of the Walzes, the couple strategized to make sure no one had to attend prom alone.

The Big Shift

In 2004, Ms. Walz stopped teaching to become the assessment coordinator for the Mankato school district, a job she held until 2018, when her husband was elected governor. And in 2006, Mr. Walz ran for Congress.

By now the parents of 3-year-old Hope — after seven years of fertility treatments — both Walzes were upset with the course of the war in Iraq.

“We just asked ourselves, like, What can we do?” Ms. Walz said on the podcast. The rational thing, she said, was for her husband to run for Congress. “We felt the way you stop the war is stop the money, and the way you stop the money is the United States Congress.”

But politics had been on Ms. Walz’s mind for some time.

In 2002, Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president and Minnesota senator, came out of retirement to replace Senator Paul D. Wellstone in a crucial Senate campaign after he died in a plane crash just days before the election.

Ms. Walz, at the time still teaching at the local high school, showed up at a campaign event for Mr. Mondale in Mankato.

“You had such an incredible influence on me, and women of my age, by your courageous and visionary decision in the 1984 election,” she told Mr. Mondale, according to a St. Paul Pioneer Press article from the time. She was referring to Mr. Mondale’s choice of a woman, Geraldine A. Ferraro, as vice president in his failed presidential bid.

Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, who ran Mr. Mondale’s 2002 campaign, met the Walzes during Mr. Walz’s 2006 congressional run. In an interview, she cast Ms. Walz’s approach to being Minnesota first lady as a reflection of her dedication to public service.

“There is an ethic in Minnesota of what it means to be a good citizen,” Ms. Smith said. “It’s not enough to keep your sidewalk shoveled and mow your grass.”

According to the 2019 Star Tribune profile, Ms. Walz sat in on a job interview for the state’s new corrections commissioner. She also went on the attack over legislation that Mr. Walz and Democratic lawmakers in the State House wanted to advance, once warning state legislators that they could face electoral consequences if they didn’t vote on gun reform measures.

Ms. Walz is not closely involved in Mr. Walz’s day-to-day political operation. And it’s common for political spouses to devote themselves to pet causes or policies. (Doug Emhoff, Ms. Harris’s husband and the second gentleman, keeps an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and has been involved in Biden administration policy on expanding access to legal aid.)

But Ms. Walz has gone deeper than most, spending her time as first lady pushing a policy agenda that she has been passionate about for years. In 2012, while working on an orientation program for congressional spouses, Ms. Walz was introduced to the Bard Prison Initiative. Founded in 1999, the initiative provides college education to prisoners in New York, leading to degrees from Bard College.

After Mr. Walz became governor in 2019, Ms. Walz went to work touring prisons in the state and later helped recruit the Bard Prison Initiative’s director of national programs to a special role within the state department of corrections, drastically expanding access to college courses within Minnesota’s prisons.

But her policy-forward approach to being the governor’s spouse hasn’t come without setbacks.

At a May 2019 forum at Twin Cities Public Television promoting a PBS documentary about the Bard Prison Initiative, the atmosphere turned tense after Ms. Walz and other panelists seemed unprepared to discuss the racial dynamics of the criminal justice system. The awkward discussion was made worse when the governor’s office subsequently asked the television station not to circulate a video of the forum. Twin Cities Public Television deleted the video but maintained that the action was not a result of pressure from the governor’s office. (A Walz staffer later told Minnesota Public Radio that the request to conceal the video had been an “overreaction.”)

In recent days, since her husband’s vice-presidential nomination, Ms. Walz has come in for criticism from the right for an interview she gave to a Twin Cities television station in which she discussed the protests that followed the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd. She said that she had kept the windows of the governor’s mansion open during the civil unrest so that she could smell tires burning on the street — a way of understanding the tense atmosphere in the city.

“I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening,” she added.

Despite her political involvement, friends say Ms. Walz is at heart a Midwestern mom.

Famous for her scotcheroos — chocolate and butterscotch-laden Rice Krispies bars — Ms. Walz goes all out decorating the governor’s residence for Christmas. And she speaks with the long O’s and flat A’s of a lifetime spent almost entirely in Minnesota.

“There couldn’t be a better person to do this,” Richelle Norton, a former student of the Walzes, said of Mr. Walz’s joining the Democratic ticket. “Except for Gwen.”

[PizzaSnake]

Re: our discussion about real conservatism:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/styl ... esota.html

"n 2006, during his first campaign for Congress, Tim Walz was scheduled to speak at a fund-raising dinner in his hometown, Mankato, Minn. At the time, he was a political unknown in a tightly contested race against a six-term incumbent. The dinner was a chance to stump in front of his local district of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and to bolster his campaign coffers.

There was only one problem: Mr. Walz had laryngitis.

As guests loaded up plates with food, they were surprised to see someone else take the stage: Gwen Walz, Mr. Walz’s wife.

She was used to speaking in front of a crowd: Like her husband, Ms. Walz had been a public-school teacher for more than a decade. Those sitting in the audience were impressed by her confidence and clarity.

“There were other candidates who spoke, and she was the most articulate of the bunch,” said John Klaber, a North Mankato resident who was at the fund-raiser almost two decades ago. “We all looked around and said, ‘Why isn’t she running?’”

Most of the American public got its first good look at Gov. Tim Walz last week at a rally in Philadelphia alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, who had that day announced him as her running mate. At the end of his speech, the nation also got its first glimpse of the woman to whom he has been married for 30 years.

As Ms. Walz enters the national stage, critics on the right are already trying to portray her — as they have with her husband — as a left-wing radical who countenanced the civil unrest in her state after the death George Floyd. But at home in Minnesota, where she has spent most of her life, friends and political observers describe her as the coolheaded and ultracompetent counterpart to a man known for an intuitive and charismatic political style.

“We have always worked as a partnership,” Ms. Walz, 58, told the self-improvement podcast “What If It Works” last month, later adding, “We are still one another’s closest advisers.”

Ms. Walz did not comment for this article.

The first gubernatorial spouse in Minnesota to keep an office in the state capital, Ms. Walz regularly advises her husband and has used her platform to advance policy initiatives, most significantly around offering college degree programs to inmates.

Editors’ Picks

Do You Know These Novels That Were Adapted Into Video Games?

Should You Get Another Covid Shot Now?

She Suspected She Was Adopted. It Turned Out She Was Right.
ImageMs. Walz, wearing a black pantsuit, stands up above a table covered in boxes of doughnuts, holding her husband’s hand.
Ms. Walz spoke to a room full of fellow teachers on the eve of her husband’s inauguration as Minnesota governor in 2019.Credit...Eric Miller/Reuters
A Package Deal
“When you get Tim, you get Gwen,” said Mr. Klaber, who worked with Ms. Walz in the Mankato school district for more than a decade.

Raised in the tiny farming town of Ivanhoe, Minn., only a 15-minute drive from South Dakota’s eastern border, Ms. Walz is the daughter of schoolteachers, and the eldest of four sisters. Ms. Walz was a caretaker in the family, according to her youngest sister, Heidi Ohlmann.

“She’s always looking out for everyone,” Ms. Ohlmann said in an interview.

She described their hometown as a tightly knit “utopia,” where their parents were heavily involved in the local Lutheran church. (At 85, Ms. Walz’s mother is still the church organist.)

Ms. Walz stayed nearby for college: After getting degrees from Gustavus Adolphus College, a small liberal arts school in southern Minnesota, and Minnesota State University in Mankato, Ms. Walz moved to Alliance, Neb., to teach English.

There, she met Mr. Walz, who taught ninth-grade geography at the same school. On their first date, Mr. Walz took her to see “Falling Down,” the 1993 Michael Douglas movie about an aggrieved white man having a nervous breakdown in Los Angeles. In a 2019 profile in the Star Tribune, Ms. Walz said she rebuffed a kiss afterward, to which Mr. Walz responded, “That’s fine, but you should know I’m going to marry you.”

They were married the next year and soon moved back to Minnesota, taking jobs at Mankato West High School, where she taught English and he taught social studies.

The Walzes were perceived by students as a single unit, so much so that taking classes with both of them gained a nickname: Walz home-school.

Former students remember Ms. Walz as demanding but fair. According to several former students, Ms. Walz required her class to use color-coded notebooks to keep track of the coursework, which included classics like “Walden,” “Our Town” and “Beowulf.”

One former student, Nicole Griensewic, 41, remembered complaining to Ms. Walz that she graded much harder than Mr. Walz.

“‘I can’t be like the Easter Bunny, hopping around handing out A’s like my husband does,’” Ms. Griensewic recalled Ms. Walz as responding.

Megan Holleran edited the school’s newspaper, the West Side Story, and said that Ms. Walz, the faculty adviser, was an encouraging figure who respected the staff’s editorial independence.

Ms. Holleran recalled writing an editorial about what she argued were unthinking displays of nationalism in the months after Sept. 11, 2001 — part of a wide range of perspectives the paper published on the American response to the terrorist attacks.

“She didn’t dictate, she advised,” Ms. Holleran, 41, said. “And she really saw the potential in giving us those responsibilities.”

Students also remembered Ms. Walz for making L.G.B.T.Q. students and racial minorities feel welcome. (Mr. Walz was the faculty adviser and founder of the high school’s gay-straight alliance.)

“They fostered an inclusive environment before that was really a thing, an inclusive culture before that was really a phrase,” said Angie Brunner, 41, a former student of Ms. Walz’s, who was one of the only Korean American students at Mankato West.

The Walzes discussed their students together and tried to help them thrive, including when the couple served as prom advisers. According to Sherri Blasing, the principal of Mankato West and a former neighbor of the Walzes, the couple strategized to make sure no one had to attend prom alone.

The Big Shift

In 2004, Ms. Walz stopped teaching to become the assessment coordinator for the Mankato school district, a job she held until 2018, when her husband was elected governor. And in 2006, Mr. Walz ran for Congress.

By now the parents of 3-year-old Hope — after seven years of fertility treatments — both Walzes were upset with the course of the war in Iraq.

“We just asked ourselves, like, What can we do?” Ms. Walz said on the podcast. The rational thing, she said, was for her husband to run for Congress. “We felt the way you stop the war is stop the money, and the way you stop the money is the United States Congress.”

But politics had been on Ms. Walz’s mind for some time.

In 2002, Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president and Minnesota senator, came out of retirement to replace Senator Paul D. Wellstone in a crucial Senate campaign after he died in a plane crash just days before the election.

Ms. Walz, at the time still teaching at the local high school, showed up at a campaign event for Mr. Mondale in Mankato.

“You had such an incredible influence on me, and women of my age, by your courageous and visionary decision in the 1984 election,” she told Mr. Mondale, according to a St. Paul Pioneer Press article from the time. She was referring to Mr. Mondale’s choice of a woman, Geraldine A. Ferraro, as vice president in his failed presidential bid.

Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, who ran Mr. Mondale’s 2002 campaign, met the Walzes during Mr. Walz’s 2006 congressional run. In an interview, she cast Ms. Walz’s approach to being Minnesota first lady as a reflection of her dedication to public service.

“There is an ethic in Minnesota of what it means to be a good citizen,” Ms. Smith said. “It’s not enough to keep your sidewalk shoveled and mow your grass.”

According to the 2019 Star Tribune profile, Ms. Walz sat in on a job interview for the state’s new corrections commissioner. She also went on the attack over legislation that Mr. Walz and Democratic lawmakers in the State House wanted to advance, once warning state legislators that they could face electoral consequences if they didn’t vote on gun reform measures.

Ms. Walz is not closely involved in Mr. Walz’s day-to-day political operation. And it’s common for political spouses to devote themselves to pet causes or policies. (Doug Emhoff, Ms. Harris’s husband and the second gentleman, keeps an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and has been involved in Biden administration policy on expanding access to legal aid.)

But Ms. Walz has gone deeper than most, spending her time as first lady pushing a policy agenda that she has been passionate about for years. In 2012, while working on an orientation program for congressional spouses, Ms. Walz was introduced to the Bard Prison Initiative. Founded in 1999, the initiative provides college education to prisoners in New York, leading to degrees from Bard College.

After Mr. Walz became governor in 2019, Ms. Walz went to work touring prisons in the state and later helped recruit the Bard Prison Initiative’s director of national programs to a special role within the state department of corrections, drastically expanding access to college courses within Minnesota’s prisons.

But her policy-forward approach to being the governor’s spouse hasn’t come without setbacks.

At a May 2019 forum at Twin Cities Public Television promoting a PBS documentary about the Bard Prison Initiative, the atmosphere turned tense after Ms. Walz and other panelists seemed unprepared to discuss the racial dynamics of the criminal justice system. The awkward discussion was made worse when the governor’s office subsequently asked the television station not to circulate a video of the forum. Twin Cities Public Television deleted the video but maintained that the action was not a result of pressure from the governor’s office. (A Walz staffer later told Minnesota Public Radio that the request to conceal the video had been an “overreaction.”)

In recent days, since her husband’s vice-presidential nomination, Ms. Walz has come in for criticism from the right for an interview she gave to a Twin Cities television station in which she discussed the protests that followed the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd. She said that she had kept the windows of the governor’s mansion open during the civil unrest so that she could smell tires burning on the street — a way of understanding the tense atmosphere in the city.

“I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening,” she added.

Despite her political involvement, friends say Ms. Walz is at heart a Midwestern mom.

Famous for her scotcheroos — chocolate and butterscotch-laden Rice Krispies bars — Ms. Walz goes all out decorating the governor’s residence for Christmas. And she speaks with the long O’s and flat A’s of a lifetime spent almost entirely in Minnesota.

“There couldn’t be a better person to do this,” Richelle Norton, a former student of the Walzes, said of Mr. Walz’s joining the Democratic ticket. “Except for Gwen.”

“ Ms. Holleran recalled writing an editorial about what she argued were unthinking displays of nationalism in the months after Sept. 11, 2001 — part of a wide range of perspectives the paper published on the American response to the terrorist attacks.”

I want Ms. Holleran to run for office.

[ggait]

The only real hope for restoring a conservatism that values integrity, demonstrates real compassion and defends our foundational constitutional principles isn’t to try to make the best of Trump, a man who values only himself. If he wins again, it will validate his cruelty and his ideological transformation of the Republican Party. If Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin, and conservative Americans will have a chance to build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life."

We'd be in such a different place if Hillary had bothered to visit Wisconsin. And James Comey had not sent his 10/28/2016 letter to Congress.

Recall that after Romney lost in 2012, the GOP commissioned its autopsy (see below) which concluded that the GOP had to become more moderate and inclusive. Written by then RNC chair Reince Preibus.

But then Trump gets nominated (crazy) and squeaks it out in the EC (crazy). Instead of building a bigger GOP tent, Preibus becomes (crazy) Trump's first chief of staff. We've had 10 years of the Trump GOP hijack, and we are at risk of getting another Trump term (crazy). And folks like Liz Cheney and Romney and David French are long gone GOP pariahs.

It will take a long time for the GOP to reboot even if Trump loses to Harris. And if he wins another term....




March 18, 2013 -- In what they called the "most comprehensive post-election review" ever made of an electoral loss, the Republican National Committee and a group of project co-chairs unveiled a report today saying that they need to open their playbook and put their "cards on the table face up" in order to win presidential elections in the future.

While unveiling the 100-page report at the National Press Club today, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said he wanted the report, or autopsy, to be "honest" and "raw," stressing the message of inclusion to Americans who might not be on board with all the party's policies. The report, called the "Growth and Opportunity Project," lays out an extensive plan the RNC believes will lead the party to victory with an extensive outreach to women, African-American, Asian, Hispanic and gay voters.

[DMac]

Fellow Guardsman speaks out, telling it like it is ('cept for the "chief" part....don't know how a Lt. Col. with 20 years in phukks that up).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP6UTysjpBo

[Seacoaster(1)]

Fellow Guardsman speaks out, telling it like it is ('cept for the "chief" part....don't know how a Lt. Col. with 20 years in phukks that up).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP6UTysjpBo

Perfect. Thanks for posting.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Fellow Guardsman speaks out, telling it like it is ('cept for the "chief" part....don't know how a Lt. Col. with 20 years in phukks that up).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP6UTysjpBo

Perfect. Thanks for posting.

So Old Salt is out here lying…

[Typical Lax Dad]

I wonder what else they tell their kids when they sit around the dinner table?

https://www.threads.net/@brianpatafieco ... gfdxFkU0sw

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://factkeepers.com/jd-vance-is-a-c ... -the-poor/

Like I said, dude is a phony. I know plenty of people from Middletown.

[a fan]

Fellow Guardsman speaks out, telling it like it is ('cept for the "chief" part....don't know how a Lt. Col. with 20 years in phukks that up).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP6UTysjpBo

Perfect. Thanks for posting.

So Old Salt is out here lying…

This is EXACTLY why I'm so angry.

F these people, posing as Americans. They are RUINING our country. Nothing is too low. Nothing is disgusting enough.

They can't blame Trump for this sh9t they are doing.

Do you think these idiots thought for even a second that they're telling their fellow Veterans----whatever you do, don't run for office?

Nope. End justifies the means. F them. A pox on their house.

[Kismet]

Fellow Guardsman speaks out, telling it like it is ('cept for the "chief" part....don't know how a Lt. Col. with 20 years in phukks that up).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP6UTysjpBo

Perfect. Thanks for posting.

So Old Salt is out here lying…

This is EXACTLY why I'm so angry.

F these people, posing as Americans. They are RUINING our country. Nothing is too low. Nothing is disgusting enough.

They can't blame Trump for this sh9t they are doing.

Do you think these idiots thought for even a second that they're telling their fellow Veterans----whatever you do, don't run for office?

Nope. End justifies the means. F them. A pox on their house.

They are merely imitating Orange Fatso. They are certainly not leaders.
A few years ago Meryl Streep hit the nail on the head after Fatso demeaned a disabled reporter and how these despicable and unkind acts provide a permission structure for lots of people to act like a-holes - watch the entire video

[a fan]

Fellow Guardsman speaks out, telling it like it is ('cept for the "chief" part....don't know how a Lt. Col. with 20 years in phukks that up).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP6UTysjpBo

Perfect. Thanks for posting.

So Old Salt is out here lying…

This is EXACTLY why I'm so angry.

F these people, posing as Americans. They are RUINING our country. Nothing is too low. Nothing is disgusting enough.

They can't blame Trump for this sh9t they are doing.

Do you think these idiots thought for even a second that they're telling their fellow Veterans----whatever you do, don't run for office?

Nope. End justifies the means. F them. A pox on their house.

They are merely imitating Orange Fatso. They are certainly not leaders.

The worst part? NONE of this has to do with conservative values. None of it.

Walz is a Veteran of the National Guard, and his wife is a teacher.

And these uneducated idiots believe what the 1%er R's tells them: that Walz is an insane far-left hippie-socialist.....and that Trump with his fully inherited money complete with gold-plated-toilet is "one of them", and is looking out for middle America.

F them. They DESERVE four more years of Trump making the coastal libs richer, while middle America continues to drown.

[Kismet]

Fellow Guardsman speaks out, telling it like it is ('cept for the "chief" part....don't know how a Lt. Col. with 20 years in phukks that up).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP6UTysjpBo

Perfect. Thanks for posting.

So Old Salt is out here lying…

This is EXACTLY why I'm so angry.

F these people, posing as Americans. They are RUINING our country. Nothing is too low. Nothing is disgusting enough.

They can't blame Trump for this sh9t they are doing.

Do you think these idiots thought for even a second that they're telling their fellow Veterans----whatever you do, don't run for office?

Nope. End justifies the means. F them. A pox on their house.

They are merely imitating Orange Fatso. They are certainly not leaders.

The worst part? NONE of this has to do with conservative values. None of it.

Walz is a Veteran of the National Guard, and his wife is a teacher.

And these uneducated idiots believe what the 1%er R's tells them: that Walz is an insane far-left hippie-socialist.....and that Trump with his fully inherited money complete with gold-plated-toilet is "one of them", and is looking out for middle America.

F them. They DESERVE four more years of Trump making the coastal libs richer, while middle America continues to drown.

It's what LEMMINGS do.

[old salt]

You then went all-in on Tailhook.

I only mentioned Tailhook tangentially, in reference to my support of Jim Webb. I only went "all in" in response to your question. Don't ask, if you can't tolerate a good faith answer based on first hand knowledge. Next you reprised relevant articles which I previously posted which are consistent with, & supportive of my current position.

I still stand by what Jim Webb & John McCain said about the Tailhook purge, in what I posted & elsewhere. Patsy Schroeder -- not so much. She demanded an audience before the innocent officers she smeared, could not handle their criticism, then demanded another witch hunt.

The integration & acceptance of women into Naval Aviation was already well underway & was inevitable for the tailhook comminity, as soon as women were authorized for combat duty. Tailhook aviation is extremely demanding & unforgiving. The resistance expressed in the open session was skepticism based on safety concerns about pushing women pilots into that position who did not measure up & resistance to washing them out in training, which is exactly what happened in fatal crash during the initial carrier qualification of women F-14 pilots.
Read the first CMR report. 6 pages. pdf => https://www.google.com/search?q=kara+hu ... e&ie=UTF-8

I still challenge you to cite any proven specific allegations of sexual assault or rape by Naval Aviators before of after those arising from Tailhook '91.

[PizzaSnake]

You then went all-in on Tailhook.

I only mentioned Tailhook tangentially, in reference to my support of Jim Webb. I only went "all in" in response to your question. Don't ask, if you can't tolerate a good faith answer based on first hand knowledge. Next you reprised relevant articles which I previously posted which are consistent with, & supportive of my current position.

I still stand by what Jim Webb & John McCain said about the Tailhook purge, in what I posted & elsewhere. Patsy Schroeder -- not so much. She demanded an audience before the innocent officers she smeared, could not handle their criticism, then demanded another witch hunt.

The integration & acceptance of women into Naval Aviation was already well underway & was inevitable for the tailhook comminity, as soon as women were authorized for combat duty. Tailhook aviation is extremely demanding & unforgiving. The resistance expressed in the open session was skepticism based on safety concerns about pushing women pilots into that position who did not measure up & resistance to washing them out in training, which is exactly what happened in fatal crash during the initial carrier qualification of women F-14 pilots.

I still challenge you to cite any proven specific allegations of sexual assault or rape by Naval Aviators before of after those arising from Tailhook '91.

And what would you accept as “proven?”

Are you honestly suggesting that Naval Aviators haven’t committed these crimes prior to and following the Tailhook escapade? Or, are you saying that they weren’t brought to justice?

[old salt]

You then went all-in on Tailhook.

I only mentioned Tailhook tangentially, in reference to my support of Jim Webb. I only went "all in" in response to your question. Don't ask, if you can't tolerate a good faith answer based on first hand knowledge. Next you reprised relevant articles which I previously posted which are consistent with, & supportive of my current position.

I still stand by what Jim Webb & John McCain said about the Tailhook purge, in what I posted & elsewhere. Patsy Schroeder -- not so much. She demanded an audience before the innocent officers she smeared, could not handle their criticism, then demanded another witch hunt.

The integration & acceptance of women into Naval Aviation was already well underway & was inevitable for the tailhook comminity, as soon as women were authorized for combat duty. Tailhook aviation is extremely demanding & unforgiving. The resistance expressed in the open session was skepticism based on safety concerns about pushing women pilots into that position who did not measure up & resistance to washing them out in training, which is exactly what happened in fatal crash during the initial carrier qualification of women F-14 pilots.

I still challenge you to cite any proven specific allegations of sexual assault or rape by Naval Aviators before of after those arising from Tailhook '91.

And what would you accept as “proven?”

Are you honestly suggesting that Naval Aviators haven’t committed these crimes prior to and following the Tailhook escapade? Or, are you saying that they weren’t brought to justice?

Neither. I'm asking mdlf76 to substantiate his sweeping negative generalization of all of Naval Aviation.
While there have been numerous allegations of sexual assault & rape throughout the military, how many have accused or convicted Naval Aviators ?

[Typical Lax Dad]

You then went all-in on Tailhook.

I only mentioned Tailhook tangentially, in reference to my support of Jim Webb. I only went "all in" in response to your question. Don't ask, if you can't tolerate a good faith answer based on first hand knowledge. Next you reprised relevant articles which I previously posted which are consistent with, & supportive of my current position.

I still stand by what Jim Webb & John McCain said about the Tailhook purge, in what I posted & elsewhere. Patsy Schroeder -- not so much. She demanded an audience before the innocent officers she smeared, could not handle their criticism, then demanded another witch hunt.

The integration & acceptance of women into Naval Aviation was already well underway & was inevitable for the tailhook comminity, as soon as women were authorized for combat duty. Tailhook aviation is extremely demanding & unforgiving. The resistance expressed in the open session was skepticism based on safety concerns about pushing women pilots into that position who did not measure up & resistance to washing them out in training, which is exactly what happened in fatal crash during the initial carrier qualification of women F-14 pilots.

I still challenge you to cite any proven specific allegations of sexual assault or rape by Naval Aviators before of after those arising from Tailhook '91.

And what would you accept as “proven?”

Are you honestly suggesting that Naval Aviators haven’t committed these crimes prior to and following the Tailhook escapade? Or, are you saying that they weren’t brought to justice?

https://news.usni.org/2023/04/27/annual ... ds-unclear

[MDlaxfan76]

You then went all-in on Tailhook.

I only mentioned Tailhook tangentially, in reference to my support of Jim Webb. I only went "all in" in response to your question. Don't ask, if you can't tolerate a good faith answer based on first hand knowledge. Next you reprised relevant articles which I previously posted which are consistent with, & supportive of my current position.

Baloney, I didn't say a word about it until after you went all-in in response to Kismet. Whose response was to your bringing it up with a fan, and then pages of swift boating garbage. You and I had been having a perfectly reasonable discussion of military culture on another thread, entirely unrelated to Tailhook or any other bad behavior by military officers. But I did then respond to your all-in.

I still stand by what Jim Webb & John McCain said about the Tailhook purge, in what I posted & elsewhere. Patsy Schroeder -- not so much. She demanded an audience before the innocent officers she smeared, could not handle their criticism, then demanded another witch hunt.

The integration & acceptance of women into Naval Aviation was already well underway & was inevitable for the tailhook comminity, as soon as women were authorized for combat duty. Tailhook aviation is extremely demanding & unforgiving. The resistance expressed in the open session was skepticism based on safety concerns about pushing women pilots into that position who did not measure up & resistance to washing them out in training, which is exactly what happened in fatal crash during the initial carrier qualification of women F-14 pilots.
Read the first CRM report. 6 pages => https://www.google.com/search?q=kara+hu ... e&ie=UTF-8

I still challenge you to cite any proven specific allegations of sexual assault or rape by Naval Aviators before of after those arising from Tailhook '91.

Wait a second, you are saying that rapes don't occur in the Navy? None by Naval aviators? Before or after Tailhook???
Really, never? Any other military branches?

Tailhook involved rampant misogyny and sexual harassment and assault. Do you deny that as well now?

[MDlaxfan76]

You then went all-in on Tailhook.

I only mentioned Tailhook tangentially, in reference to my support of Jim Webb. I only went "all in" in response to your question. Don't ask, if you can't tolerate a good faith answer based on first hand knowledge. Next you reprised relevant articles which I previously posted which are consistent with, & supportive of my current position.

I still stand by what Jim Webb & John McCain said about the Tailhook purge, in what I posted & elsewhere. Patsy Schroeder -- not so much. She demanded an audience before the innocent officers she smeared, could not handle their criticism, then demanded another witch hunt.

The integration & acceptance of women into Naval Aviation was already well underway & was inevitable for the tailhook comminity, as soon as women were authorized for combat duty. Tailhook aviation is extremely demanding & unforgiving. The resistance expressed in the open session was skepticism based on safety concerns about pushing women pilots into that position who did not measure up & resistance to washing them out in training, which is exactly what happened in fatal crash during the initial carrier qualification of women F-14 pilots.

I still challenge you to cite any proven specific allegations of sexual assault or rape by Naval Aviators before of after those arising from Tailhook '91.

And what would you accept as “proven?”

Are you honestly suggesting that Naval Aviators haven’t committed these crimes prior to and following the Tailhook escapade? Or, are you saying that they weren’t brought to justice?

Neither. I'm asking mdlf76 to substantiate his sweeping negative generalization of all of Naval Aviation.
While there have been numerous allegations of sexual assault & rape throughout the military, how many have accused or convicted Naval Aviators ?

I have no idea how many "Naval Aviators" have been accused of rape, do you?
Are you saying that "miscreants" don't exist among "Naval Aviators"...somehow they're immune to what has evidently been a huge problem in the rest of the military?

That said, I made no sweeping generalizations of all of Naval Aviation, quite the opposite. Individuals commit crimes, individuals cover them up. And organizations are made up of many individuals, only some of whom as you say are "miscreants".

What exists definitely as a challenge in any command chain hierarchical structure is a culture of us against them, however that's defined. A closing of ranks, a cover-up instinct, indeed demand. It takes superior leadership to overcome that challenge and rarely is that leadership going to persist forever in any such hierarchy.

You, yourself, exhibited some of this in your explanations about Tailhook and it's aftermath, a blaming the victim and rage about those who were damaged in the backwash. She shouldn't have gone there and she shouldn't have gone around her chain of command when she was frustrated...cost her the trust of her fellow officers, Cost her her career.

[ggait]

Fellow Guardsman speaks out, telling it like it is ('cept for the "chief" part....don't know how a Lt. Col. with 20 years in phukks that up).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP6UTysjpBo

Perfect. Thanks for posting.

Kinzinger really shows how lame the attacks on Walz are.

The distinction between "I am a retired CSM" versus "I was serving as a CSM when I retired".

Or the distinction, when talking about gun control measures, between saying "a weapon of war I carried in war" and "a weapon of war I carried during military service and deployments during war time."

Seriously? YCBS.

Absolutely stupid and ridiculous.