Anointed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has selected (or had selected for her) woke leftist Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
ice President Kamala Harris selected progressive Minnesota governor Tim Walz on Tuesday to be her running mate for her 2024 presidential campaign, a move meant to placate the far-left faction of her party and appeal to the midwesterners Harris needs to win in November.
“I am proud to announce that I’ve asked @Tim_Walz to be my running mate,” Harris said on X, with a link to donate to the Harris-Walz campaign.
“As a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his,” she added.
“It’s great to have him on the team.”
Snip.
A military veteran and former teacher, Walz began his political career with a narrow victory over a Republican incumbent in a 2006 congressional race. He won reelection five times and became a reliably liberal Democratic member.
In 2018, Walz won the Minnesota gubernatorial election, and four years later comfortably held the seat after presiding over the race riots sparked by the death of George Floyd. Minnesota Democrats secured a legislative trifecta in 2022, and Walz subsequently signed progressive legislation on issues ranging from abortion and guns to school lunches and noncompete agreements.
Republicans will likely highlight Walz’s progressive record and the fraud scandals the Minnesota government has suffered under his watch. They will also point out that, as Minnesota governor, Walz failed to stop the 2020 riots, allowing widespread looting and property damage, including the ransacking of a police precinct.
“It’s no surprise that San Francisco Liberal Kamala Harris wants West Coast wannabe Tim Walz as her running-mate – Walz has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden State,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.
“From proposing his own carbon-free agenda, to suggesting stricter emission standards for gas-powered cars, and embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote, Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide.”
By selecting Walz over Shapiro, Harris is hoping the progressive wing of the Democratic party will continue backing her candidacy as she quietly walks back the radical stances she took four years ago, when she lurched to the left for a short-lived presidential run.
Shapiro, a Jew, would have received major backlash from progressives for his support for Israel’s war against Hamas. While his position on the war itself is mainstream among establishment Democrats, he did condemn antisemitic protests on college campuses and volunteered for a non-combat role with the IDF when he was in college.
Walz, by contrast, has spoken sympathetically about the left-wing anti-Israel protests that have become a fixture across America since Hamas slaughtered 1,200 civilians and took 25o hostages on October 7th.
My reading of the tea leaves led me to believe that Josh Shapiro would be the pick, but it seems that in the 24 years since Al Gore picked Joseph Lieberman as his running mate, the increasing pro-Jihad radicalization of the Democratic Party base has made it impossible to pick a Jewish running mate.
Using old-fashioned “first to 270 wins” reasoning, picking Walz over Shapiro doesn’t make much sense. Nailing down Pennsylvania (which the Shapiro pick wouldn’t guarantee, but which would at least give the Democrats a better chance at) would be a big help in getting to 270. Democrats also need Minnesota to win, but if they actually need Walz to secure blue-leaning Minnesota, the last midwestern “blue wall” state still standing in 2016, then the ticket has already lost.
No, the Walz pick indicates that the powers behind the throne in the Democratic Party are all-in on wokeness and social justice, even if it means losing the 2024 election to Trump. Because Walz has relentlessly pursued a woke agenda as governor.
For starters, Walz is all in on stealing children from parents who refuse to allow them to be mutilated.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly announced running mate — Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — signed a bill in April of 2023 allowing the state to make custody determinations if a child is denied access to sex-change procedures.
The “Trans Refuge Bill” allows for “temporary emergency jurisdiction” if a parent denies their child sex-change procedures, according to the bill’s text. The bill defines the interventions, which include sex-changes, hormone replacement and cosmetic surgeries, as “medically necessary” so long as it “respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined” by the child.
Snip.
The bill amends “child custody and child welfare provisions” pertaining to out-of-state laws that would interfere with Minnesota’s “gender-affirming health care” laws.
Minnesota’s bill provided a loophole allowing individuals, including children, from other states to receive transgender treatments and asserted that out-of-state provisions “interfering” with access to these procedures “must not be enforced or applied within the state.” At the same time, Minnesota law gives the state “temporary emergency jurisdiction” to make a custody determination if the child “has been unable to obtain” these transgender treatments.
The bill defined transgender treatments for children as “medically necessary” physical health care or mental health care that “respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient.” This includes interventions that “suppress” the development of their biological sex like hormone therapy, procedures that “align” the patient’s physical body with their “gender identity” through cosmetic surgeries and sex-change surgeries.
Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit comes news that the Trump campaign has already unleashed a video targeting Walz’s pro-child-mutilation stance:
Walz is also all in on flooding the country with illegal aliens and laying the groundwork for a mass amnesty.
President Biden’s “border czar,” Veep Kamala Harris, has chosen a fellow soft-on-illegal-immigration politician as her running mate.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, 60, who was named Harris’ vice-presidential pick Tuesday, has supported efforts to turn his home state into a sanctuary state while also backing other stances that cater to undocumented migrants.
“My position on Minnesota becoming a sanctuary state boils down to who has the responsibility for enforcing immigration laws,” Walz told CBS News in 2018.
“Here’s what I believe: Congress has given federal agencies the authority to enforce immigration laws in Minnesota, and I support their doing so,” he said. “Congress has not given local law enforcement that same authority. The role of law enforcement is to enforce state and local laws, not federal immigration laws, and I strongly believe that they should not do so.”
Translation: Democrats love illegal aliens a whole lot more than natives, and want to keep as many here as possible.
“Sanctuary state” is an unofficial term that refers to states that limit or deny local law-enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
As governor, Walz also has signed several pieces of legislation to provide state-funded health care, driver’s licenses and free college tuition to illegal migrants.
“Ensuring drivers in our state are licensed and carry insurance makes the roads safer for all Minnesotans,” Walz said in 2023 after signing the bill to allow thousands of illegal migrants in his state with driver’s licenses.
Walz is also all in on supressing the speech of his political enemies.
The plan for what some have deemed a “bias registry” was first hatched in January, in the 2024-25 budget request by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. Department leaders requested $395,000 in fiscal 2024 and $250,000 every year after to add two full-time staffers and to upgrade the department’s “data tracking capabilities.”
There is “currently a void,” they wrote, “with respect to tracking and reporting on both criminal and non-criminal discrimination and hate incidents in Minnesota.” They believed it was critical to collect more information about allegations of hate that weren’t technically criminal or likely to be investigated by law enforcement — someone in a car yelling a derogatory comment at a passerby was one hypothetical example cited by supporters of the plan.
Snip.
No longer would the human-rights department be tasked to “solicit, receive, and compile” information about allegations of discrimination or bias. The new language said the human-rights department would instead:
Analyze civil rights trends pursuant to this chapter, including information compiled from community organizations that work directly with historically marginalized communities, and prepare a report each biennium that recommends policy and system changes to reduce and prevent further civil rights incidents across Minnesota.
Translation: We’re going to give social justice warriors a way to use the power of the state to suppress conservative speech.
And of course, Walz notoriously let his state burn rather than confront #BlackLivesMatter/Antifa rioters in 2020:
It was 6:29 p.m. on the last Wednesday in May 2020, when Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey phoned Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Riots had erupted the day before over the police killing of George Floyd, and the city was overwhelmed.
Frey pleaded with Walz to call in the National Guard.
Less than three hours later, the city made a written request to Walz’s office for 600 guardsmen to help quell the chaos that was engulfing the Twin Cities.
Rioters were burning buildings. They were shooting at police officers and attacking them with Molotov cocktails, fireworks, bricks, and bottles filled with cement. At least three people died during the riots.
Faced with one of the most serious public emergencies in Minnesota history, Walz froze.
“He did not say yes,” Frey said of his request to Walz. “He said he would consider it.”
The far-left governor did not agree to call in the Guard until late the next day, according to a blistering postmortem, the Review of Lawlessness and Government Responses to Minnesota’s 2020 Riots, released in October 2020 by the Minnesota senate.
Instead of sending in the 600 guardsmen that Minneapolis had requested, Walz sent in only 100 late that Thursday. The Guard wasn’t fully mobilized until Saturday, four days after the first building burned, according to the senate review.
Walz claims that he thought the riots would “die down organically,” but I think that’s a lie. The same far left social justice cabal that’s trying to foist Harris and Walz off on America without a primary is the same one that helped pay for, plan and execute those riots for their own purposes.
But Jim Geraghty would like you to remember that Walz isn’t just woke, he’s also manifestly incompetent, with many vast fraud schemes occurring on his watch.
The dirty, not-so-little not-so-secret about Walz is that he’s not a good manager. On his watch, the Minnesota government has endured one embarrassing scandal after another entailing mismanagement, fraud, waste, and abuse….
Let’s start with the state’s handing hundreds of millions of dollars to Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future, the largest Covid-aid fraud scheme in the country.
The Feeding Our Future fraud scandal. Announcing the federal fraud indictment against the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, FBI director Christopher Wray called it “an egregious plot to steal public funds meant to care for children in need in what amounts to the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme yet. The defendants went to great lengths to exploit a program designed to feed underserved children in Minnesota amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, fraudulently diverting millions of dollars designated for the program for their own personal gain.” The nonprofit reportedly used a quarter of a billion dollars in federal funds to purchase luxury cars, houses, jewelry, and coastal resort property abroad.
What does this have to do with Governor Tim Walz, you ask? Well, a state legislative audit concluded that the Minnesota Department of Education was asleep at the wheel and for years had ignored red flags concerning the nonprofit.
From those noted right-wingers at, er, the local CBS News affiliate:
The report from the legislative auditor found that the Minnesota Department of Education’s last review of Feeding Our Future was in 2018, and while it found serious issues with the nonprofit’s operations — including that it did not collect enrollment information from sites — it failed to follow up. . . .
Over the course of several reviews, the department found that Feeding Our Future lacked financial resources and dedicated accounting staff, and noted that staff salaries were above average.
Still, the report said that by 2019, the nonprofit managed more than six times the number of sites than the average multi-site sponsor participating in the program. The department’s payments to Feeding Our Future also increased by 2,800% between 2020 and 2021.
“Time and time again over the four years it participated in the federal nutrition programs, MDE missed opportunities to hold Feeding Our Future accountable,” Legislative Auditor Judy Randall told the Legislative Audit Commission Thursday.
Between June 2018 and December 2021, the department received more than 30 complaints about the organization — ranging from unethical practices to demanding kickbacks from vendors — which must be investigated by law.
But the department’s investigation procedures were “of limited usefulness” in the context of alleged fraud, the auditor found. At one point, the education department asked Feeding Our Future to investigate complaints about itself.
Some of the complaints weren’t looked into at all, “despite their frequency and seriousness.”
Every state government deals with waste, fraud, and abuse. But no other state has ever gotten taken to the cleaners to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars.
But we’re just getting started.
“Hero pay” wasted on dead people. In 2022, Walz signed into law a plan to pay Minnesota’s frontline workers “hero pay” for their hard work during the pandemic. The state’s initial estimate was that roughly 667,000 people were eligible for hero pay, meaning they would receive $750 each. But within a few months, the state announced that more than a million Minnesotans had qualified, reducing the payment to $487.45.
If an estimate that’s off by roughly 333,000 people raises your eyebrow, you have good instincts.
Not only were a significant portion of recipients ineligible, some of them didn’t have a pulse.
Alas, the “Department of Labor and Industry, the agency tasked with overseeing and implementing the Minnesota Frontline Worker Pay Program, did not comply with requirements for the program,” according to a state auditor. The auditor’s report concluded that less than 60 percent of recipients of the bonuses were eligible, the eligibility of 32 percent of recipients could not be verified, and 9 percent were definitely ineligible, including some who were deceased.
The full report can be read here. Notable detail: “Based on our initial data analysis, one individual was deceased for more than two years prior to the application submission date.”
Look at the bright side. Tim Walz isn’t going to let Minnesota’s hardworking frontline zombies go unrewarded.
“Didn’t follow procedures for avoiding conflicts of interest.” The same pattern is evident in the Minnesota state government’s handing out of grants for arts and behavioral health:
Minnesota Department of Human Services Behavioral Health Division did not comply with certain grants management policies, matching similar findings of a 2021 audit.
The audit, released Thursday, found the agency didn’t follow procedures for avoiding conflicts of interest and gauging whether nonprofits were financially stable enough before awarding grants. . . .
The audit found the DHS Behavioral Health Division failed to complete financial assessments for more than 40 percent of grants reviewed. The grants ranged from $49,000 to nearly $1 million, and totaled $11.5 million. A 2021 audit had a similar finding.
Wait, there’s more.
State agencies have not resolved inaccurate retroactive payments for 30 percent of employees tested by the Office of the Legislative Auditor. The Minnesota Board of Firefighter Training and Education and the Department of Public Safety didn’t retain documentation for overtime paid during Covid-19 leave and didn’t comply with state policy for using state-issued credit cards or reimbursing employee expenses.
Back in 2019, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services admitted that it paid $29 million over a period of five years for opioid treatments that were never administered. The payments involved federal money that the state agency distributed.
In another oddity, Walz’s text messages mysteriously disappeared despite public-records laws, his appointed state cannabis director was selling products that violated state law, and one of his appointments to the gubernatorial Task Force on Broadband stepped down after allegations of domestic abuse came to light.
Walz is terrible. And we haven’t even gotten to his ideology, which has pushed the state’s policies hard to the left.
It’s not just that he’s a leftist. He’s an incompetent leftist.
Of course one man’s incompetence is a Democrat’s “tasty trough of graft.” From Pigford on, Democrats have demonstrated that they’re happy for ineligible people to feed at the trough as long as they check the right social justice boxes.
Together, Harris and Walz represent the worst of the modern Democratic Party’s radical far left agenda and endemic corruption.
