Franken-Coleman Recount Update, 12/29/08: Meet Mark Ritchie

While we wait for the county and state canvassing boards to come back from their holiday break – as The UpTake notes, no official action will be made public on the recount front until tomorrow, though the Coleman campaign is already trying to be obstructionist yet again, this time by refusing to count over nine-tenths of those 1600-odd absentee ballots that were improperly rejected -  I thought I’d take some time to tell you all a little about Mark Ritchie, Minnesota’s hardworking straight arrow of a Secretary of State.

As many of you are aware, Ritchie is (oh noes!) a Democrat, having won the seat fair and square in 2006, wresting it from the hands of Mary Kiffmeyer, a Republican whose tenure as Minnesota’s SoS was marked by heated battles between her and then-US-Attorney (and fellow Republican) Tom Heffelfinger over his efforts to encourage Native Americans to vote.   The disagreements were so heated that she has been linked to efforts to have Heffelfinger fired from his USA job (he left before they could fire him).    Ever since Kiffy lost to Ritchie, enraged RPM (Republican Party of Minnesota) partisans have been looking to trash him in revenge, and so a steady stream of anti-Ritchie billets doux keeps bubbling up from various conservative smear shops — a smear campaign that has escalated since the start of the recount.  

If one can be judged by the quality (or lack thereof) of one’s enemies, Mark Ritchie passes that test with flying colors.  My all-time favorite attack on Ritchie comes from www.ActivistCash.com, an arm of the Center for Consumer Freedom, which is itself a Rick Berman front for his work on behalf of the tobacco, alcohol and restaurant lobbies.  ActivistCash’s angle is to imply that their enemies — which include the Humane Society (!)  — all are a) trying to hide their funding and associations, because b) they’re ashamed of them or whatever.  (Except, of course, that all the information that ActivistCash implies is being hidden is in fact readily available to the public, but what the hey — can’t let facts in context get in the way of a good smear!) In Ritchie’s case, the ActiCashies try to scare us all with the news that — are you clutching your pearls yet? — Mark Ritchie "runs the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy from the same building where he operates Peace Coffee."   Heh!  Peace Coffee is the organic, shade-grown, fair-trade brew of choice for ethical local coffee drinkers; attacking them is kinda like attacking oxygen and puppies and bright sunny days.   (How eco-serious are they?  They transport all their coffee by either bike or biodiesel-powered van — yes, even in our famous Minnesota winters.)

About the closest Ritchie’s ever come to an actual scandal was when he got called out for adding the publicly-available e-mail addresses of various persons onto a political mailing list.  Or, as The Big E summarizes at MN Blue:  "Mark Ritchie obtained emails that were publicly available. His campaign sent an email to the addresses he’d obtained. Two of these people were right wingers Mark Giga and John Tomczak. They are friends of Michael Brodkorb. Brodkorb ran with this story. The MN Legislative Auditor investigated and said Ritchie did nothing wrong."  That’s right, kiddies:  Ritchie was cleared of wrongdoing by Minnesota Legislative Auditor Jim Noble, in a PDF report that can be read here.  (If the name of Michael Brodkorb sounds familiar, it’s because his efforts to be accepted as a non-partisan pundit whilst pushing the RPM/GOP agenda have been limned before at FDL.)

The bottom line:  This is a guy you can trust to have the public’s interests at heart.