{"id":33087,"date":"2022-03-28T04:54:51","date_gmt":"2022-03-28T09:54:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=33087"},"modified":"2022-03-30T08:56:21","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T13:56:21","slug":"im-running-for-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=33087","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m running for Congress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I gave my grandsons and their parents my new card which I had printed at the UMD printshop a couple weeks ago. They laughed. My older grandson said it was &#8220;beast&#8221; which evidently means its pretty cool.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/51874576711_218d0d31d3_c.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve played coy long enough. I can beat the stuffings out of Pete Stauber and give him <a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=33083\">the Will Smith treatment<\/a>. I may not beat him but I can do it. My columns have taken a few glancing potshots at him like <a href=\"https:\/\/duluthreader.com\/articles\/2022\/02\/17\/120784-petes-way\">this one<\/a> for instance. I&#8217;ll do it the same way fake Republicans like Donald Trump have been killing off moderates for the last thirty years. I&#8217;ll primary Pete. The math is pretty simple. Republicans who aren&#8217;t hyped up don&#8217;t vote in primaries. the Lunatic fringe does and has been killing moderates since Reagan&#8217;s &#8220;big tent&#8221; was retired.<\/p>\n<p>After a second night of too little sleep I hit upon how to commence my campaign. I&#8217;ll talk about the two MEN (human men)whose legacy is currently dividing America and threatening its Democracy. They will become the start of my conversation on how to save the Earth and Democracy.<\/p>\n<p>But I&#8217;ll start writing that later. For now here is the simple math that could cook Pete Stauber&#8217;s Goose: Its a portion of an email I sent yesterday to a half dozen college students in town.<\/p>\n<p>Dear STUDENT, <\/p>\n<p>I intend to defeat a Trump incumbent in the 2022 congressional primary election &#8211; Pete Stauber. After 2022\u2019s off-year election a single Trump Congressman could tip Congress to politicians dedicated to seeing President Biden fail. I don\u2019t want that to happen.    <\/p>\n<p>Look at the 2020 primary election below and note Pete Stauber\u2019s vulnerability. Had all the democrats, moderate republicans and independents (who skip primary elections) joined forces Stauber would have lost by 9,000 votes. I didn\u2019t campaign. I had already planned a month long trip to France in Sept and October but I couldn\u2019t stomach Pete\u2019s getting a free ride without primary competition. I didn\u2019t campaign especially not with masks and quarantines. This year will be different.<\/p>\n<p>I emailed you earlier but didn\u2019t spell out what was on my mind. Now I want an hour of your time to introduce myself. I am one of the best known politicians in Northeastern Minnesota. That has come with twelve years on the Duluth School Board, twenty years of columns in the Duluth Reader and 35 years of often politically themed snow sculptures in my front yard. Take a few minutes to read a column I wrote a few months back which spells out my priority of leaving my grandsons an Earth that can still be repaired. That\u2019s your Earth too. And please, let me buy you a cup of coffee. My number is 218-***-****. Or just reply to this email. <a href=\"mailto:harrywelty@charter.net\">harrywelty@charter.net<\/a><br \/>\nIn good faith,<br \/>\nHarry Welty<br \/>\nMy card:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/51874576711_218d0d31d3_n.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>A preview of a possible 2022 8th District Minnesota primary election by looking at <strong>the 2020 Republican primary election results<\/strong>. (graphics from Ballotopedia)<br \/>\nIncumbent\u00a0Pete Stauber\u00a0defeated\u00a0Harry Welty\u00a0in the Republican primary for U.S. House Minnesota District 8 on August 11, 2020.<br \/>\n\tCandidate&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;..%&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;..Votes<br \/>\n\t<strong>Pete Stauber<\/strong>&#8230;&#8230;..93.7&#8230;&#8230;..39,058<br \/>\n\t<strong>Harry Welty<\/strong>&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;6.3&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;.2,606<\/p>\n<p>2020 Democratic primary election MN Dist. 8<br \/>\nQuinn Nystrom\u00a0advanced from the Democratic primary for U.S. House Minnesota District 8 on August 11, 2020.<br \/>\n\tCandidate&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;.%&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;.Votes<br \/>\n\t<strong>Quinn Nystrom<\/strong>&#8230;&#8230;.100.0&#8230;&#8230;..46,050<\/p>\n<p><strong>2020 General election MN Dist. 8<\/strong><br \/>\nIncumbent\u00a0Pete Stauber\u00a0defeated\u00a0Quinn Nystrom,\u00a0Judith Schwartzbacker,\u00a0David Pipho, and\u00a0John Evans\u00a0in the general election for U.S. House Minnesota District 8 on November 3, 2020.<br \/>\n\tCandidate\t%\tVotes<br \/>\n\t\t<strong>Pete Stauber<\/strong>\u00a0(R)&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;56.8&#8230;&#8230;..223,432<br \/>\n\t\t<strong>Quinn Nystrom\u00a0<\/strong>(D)&#8230;&#8230;..37.6&#8230;&#8230;..147,853<br \/>\n\t\t<strong>Judith Schwartzbacker<\/strong>\u00a0(Grassroots Party)&#8230;&#8230;..5.6&#8230;&#8230;..22,190<\/p>\n<p><strong>Everything Harry writes \u2026<\/strong><br \/>\nThursday Jan. 6th, 2022<br \/>\nHarry Welty<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/duluthreader.com\/uploads\/image\/article\/120\/158\/120158\/header_1080x\/20308_programs_public_safety_and_fire_fire_and_aviation_regional_info.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><br \/>\n<em>Colorado fire<\/em><\/p>\n<p>For almost 20 years I have ended my Reader columns with a self deprecatory tagline making fun of myself. If Abe Lincoln, my blog\u2019s namesake, could make fun of himself who was I not to follow his example?<\/p>\n<p>During the Civil War when 1-in-30 Americans died because of the war he waged, he infuriated many by answering the most difficult questions with a jibe or an anecdote. They were to our 16th president what parables had been to Jesus of Nazareth.<\/p>\n<p>Readers may have noticed my new tagline, which says most of what I write has little importance: \u201cEverything Harry writes that is not about the imminent destruction of Earth as we knew it is superfluous. But, he does prattle on at\u00a0lincolndemocrat.com.\u201d<br \/>\nI write endlessly about minor issues like the threat to democracy in America, racism and war. Yet, as grave as these seem, they are a historical commonplace.<\/p>\n<p>They are nothing compared to the gun held at my grandson\u2019s heads \u2013 at every grandchild\u2019s head. If I live to be 100 both my grandsons will be on the verge of becoming grandparents themselves.<\/p>\n<p>And if their future looks bleak now, what of their grandchildren\u2019s future?<\/p>\n<p>If we today are no more forward-acting than Americans were 34 years ago when NASA\u2019s James Hanson testified before Congress they may be the last grandchildren to live above ground.<\/p>\n<p>1987 was the year Hanson explained the long understood fact that carbon is an atmospheric insulator letting in light and keeping it in as heat. It was the year my family moved to our current home.<\/p>\n<p>Doing something then would have cost money, required the Koch Brothers to acknowledge science and generally forced politicians to make unpopular decisions.<\/p>\n<p>At least 30 years ago science was not the enemy and the Republican party was not a party in denial. It was simply, as Al Gore so famously explained, \u201cinconvenient.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I took great pride in being a Republican.<\/p>\n<p>Teddy Roosevelt, who was described by his daughter Alice as wanting to be \u201cthe corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening\u201d used his big stick for good. When he saw the imminent extinction of what had once been 60 million bison he created the world\u2019s first national parks. Then he reigned in corporate behemoths by handcuffing their ability to buy politicians.<br \/>\nEven the disgraced Richard Nixon honored Earth Day by establishing the Environmental Protection Agency.<\/p>\n<p>As any trip to Disneyland\u2019s Tomorrow Land demonstrated ,Americans were in science\u2019s thrall. Fifty years ago before supercomputers, before geo-stationary satellites, back when China had a half billion farmers and no one could imagine the world\u2019s rain forests being burned down to choke the oceans with plastic, President John Kennedy dreamed big. He set American\u2019s antique science on a 10-year mission to put man on the moon.<\/p>\n<p>In 1969, weeks after I graduated from high school, I rode my bike around Mankato, Minn., and marveled that Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon overhead.<\/p>\n<p>But today, when science has put a cellphone with a thousand times more information than a thousand libraries in the pocket of every doofus, we have too much information. Facebook trolls, Russian hackers paid to confuse Americans and Koch Brother\u2019s lobbyists are now given equal weight.<\/p>\n<p>Last night I watched David Attenborough, who\u2019s voice has no trace of Al Gore\u2019s condescension, show scenes of earthly destruction. It was an Earth that had ignored James Hanson\u2019s ominous warnings 34 year\u2019s ago.<\/p>\n<p>Because I never throw anything away I flipped through my old news clippings as I was writing this. Lo and behold I found a Newsweek clipping from 1988 that explained the \u201chidden costs\u201d of burning oil (Koch Brother\u2019s oil) and coal (Senator Manchin\u2019s coal).<br \/>\nThirty-three years ago our reporters understood how the green house effect worked and clearly explained its potential consequences.<br \/>\n500 million years ago brainless cyanobacteria shit so much poisonous (to them) oxygen into the atmosphere that they died en-masse. The oxygen breathers that replaced them had five hundred million years to soak up atmospheric carbon, die, get buried and sequester carbon thus keeping Earth cool and in balance. Then a thinking animal discovered the long buried secret of burning carbon.<br \/>\nTonight, the eve of the New Year, I watched Colorado suburbs burning as though they were surrounded by a California forest. They weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>Now it\u2019s apparent the world will end in both fire and ice. That\u2019s because in as little as 10 or 15 years 600 million of the world\u2019s coastal dwellers could be scrambling to move inland. America can\u2019t afford that kind of flood insurance.<br \/>\nI know what my 2022 New Year\u2019s resolution is. Do you?<\/p>\n<p><em>Everything Harry writes that is not about the imminent destruction of Earth as we knew it is superfluous. But, he does prattle on at lincolndemocrat.com.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>By the way my card has a back side. Here it is:<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/51966523949_b1d9d4ba18_z.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>If you have made it this far and are interested in helping me send me an email: <a href=\"mailto:harrywelty@charter.net\">harrywelty@charter.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I gave my grandsons and their parents my new card which I had printed at the UMD printshop a couple weeks ago&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[146,90,75,47,25,148,133],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33087"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33087"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33093,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33087\/revisions\/33093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}