Best of all, Timmy gave me a postage paid envelope so I could send a "contribution" back to him:
So here's my "contribution" which is a subject that is near and dear to the hearts of all the people who are owners of RENEWED carry permits: Please feel free to comment or add or correct details as you see fit. If you just want to bitch, kindly STFU, because unless Obama has managed to revoke the Constitution in the last week, I have the right to speak my piece.
Dear Governor Pawlenty:
I have recently received your mailing requesting a contribution for some PAC you are involved with, and I wish to inform you that under no circumstances will I be donating even a single penny to any fund raising group you are involved with now or in the future. Just for the record, I have been a registered voter since 1972 and have voted in every election since, and have almost always voted a straight Republican ticket.
Unfortunately, you have very publicly and very clearly not come through on one of your solemn campaign promises that you made to a group of people who were probably most instrumental in your winning the election by a razor-thin margin of only 20,000 votes, and I am talking about the law abiding and 99.9% conservative voting Minnesota citizens who at that time had a permit to carry a pistol under the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. At the time of your election, there were approximately 20,000 carry permits issued, and that is the margin you won by. I doubt that you could name another group who both votes in every election and votes for the Republican candidate at the high 90 percent range that we did that secured your victory.
At some point after that, you made a personal promise to carry permit holders that you would have the carry permit reciprocity issue with other states fully resolved by January 1st, 2007. Well, that date came and went a long time ago, and as of this time in 2010, this matter has still not been resolved.
To delineate the matter in greater detail, you or one of your subordinates delegated the responsibility to perform this task to the Commissioner of Public Safety, Mike Campion. In one or more meetings between Mr. Campion and the organizers who were responsible for the passage of the MPPA, it became abundantly clear that Mr. Campion’s true agenda was to limit the degree of reciprocity with other states as much as he could. The means by which he did this was to adopt as strict an interpretation as possible of granting reciprocity with other states who “had similar carry statutes” to the MPPA. In other words, if he could find any difference, no matter how small or trivial between the MPPA and the carry laws of other states, then that state was excluded from the list. There were repeated discussions on this issue, and in all of them Mr. Campion refused to listen to any and all arguments about the fact that other states granted reciprocity with a far wider interpretation of “statute similarity” than he did.
So the January 1st, 2007 deadline came and went, and it became abundantly clear that you and members of your administration had no intention of honoring your solemn promise to the group of people who got you elected. Your credibility became a joke within the carry permit community, and for your information quite a few T-shirts were printed up and worn at places like the Republican Headquarters at the State Fair that said :
”I GOT SLOW-ROLLED BY THE PAWLENTY ADMINISTRATION AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT!
As time passed, the carry permit community became more embittered with your failure to keep your promise to us, and in the beginning of 2008 when fund raising activities were started for the state and national elections, quite a few of us had decided not to donate a single penny to the Republican Party solely because of your actions. So when various members of the carry permit community, whose numbers at the time had grown past the 50,000 mark were contacted via phone by staffers of the Republican party attempting to raise funds, they were told in no uncertain terms that your failure to keep your campaign promise was the reason that the people being called were not going to donate at all to the GOP. It became obvious that this was a fairly widely held sentiment, because after a while some of the staffers started admitting over the phone that this wasn’t the first time they had heard this statement, and tried to apologize for the situation.
Then, there was an unexpected invitation from Mike Campion in the Spring of that year to once again discuss the reciprocity issue with some of the MPPA organizers, and there was renewed hope that perhaps our complaints and vocal withholding of campaign funds might force some action on this matter. The day of the meeting arrived, and to the complete shock of those who were invited to the meeting, all Mr. Campion did was re-iterate his previous position without any variance whatsoever, which begged the question of why he had gone to the trouble of asking any of us too meet with him again in the first place. My guess is that the withholding of campaign funds did cause either you or one of your staffers to tell Mr. Campion to handle this issue, but Mr. Campion chose to do exactly what he had done before, which was as little as possible.
I have no way of knowing how much of this information you may be aware of, but as Governor of the State of Minnesota the buck stops with you in any circumstance. It could be that you were not aware of what was going on, but many believe that you were fully aware of what was being done, and that you ordered it to happen the way it did. As far as Mr. Campion is concerned, I am sure that you know full well how he embarrassed himself and disgraced his office by pre-announcing the investigation of the Metro Gang Strike Force, which allowed some Strike Force officers to start destroying evidence before the investigators arrived. As far as the carry permit community is concerned, Mr. Campion’s actions handling the reciprocity issue were just as disgraceful.
And so to sum up, Governor Pawlenty, there are now nearly 70,000 carry permit holders in this state who all vote along the same conservative lines, and you have ZERO credibility with ALL 70,000 of these voters. You made a clear promise to us concerning carry reciprocity with other states, and you did not follow through on that promise. Not to put too fine a point on it, Governor Pawlenty, but your track record in keeping your campaign promises is not dissimilar to President Obama, who at this point is clearly NOT going to be a two-term President. Since your failure to keep your promises to the voters who elected you are discoverable, and widely known, they WILL become ammunition for the campaign of any Democrat you run against, and thus your ability to be elected to another public office is equally tainted as Obama’s.
None of the 70,000 carry permit holders in this state will ever forget or ever forgive your failure to keep your promise to us, and we will not be lured into ever believing again anything you say in any run for public office.
And so, Governor Pawlenty, not one penny will ever come out of my pocket or tens of thousands other permit carrying Minnesota citizens for any cause that you are leading, because you are no longer trustworthy in our eyes.
