NewsNight Minnesota; 7031; Reform Party Candidates Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump

NEWSNIGHT Minnesotan is a production of KPCC LOL for the stations of Minnesota Public Television So welcome to NEWSNIGHT I know Harmon hang on to your hat because NEWSNIGHT is all over the map tonight. First we'll go national and look at the new Reform Party presidential candidates. Then we get in our time machine and head back a hundred fifty years to see what Minnesota looks like before statehood. And finally we meet the force behind mall makes a dance troupe as they like to give us a Newsnight minister of this day right here of course you never know what might be today is all. In part it's a blending Foundation creating a stronger Minnesota by bridging rural and urban community. The McKnight foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life for Minnesota families and by petroleum group fueling a clean future diversity unit reporting on NEWSNIGHT. Minnesota is provided by the J and Rose Phillips Family Foundation promoting good relations among

all races and religions and the headlines a huge day in Reform Party politics. Pat Buchanan left the Republican Party today to seek the Reform Party nomination. Donald Trump also changed his party allegiance today from Republican to reform and the Reform Party's highest ranking elected official Governor Jesse Ventura tells The New York Times he knows he should be the party's presidential candidate but he's promised to remain our Governor Ventura said he's intrigued by Trump running and he thinks Buchanan is from the far right which is not what the Reform Party's all about. Thirteen million dollars in federal funding may have something to do with all this interest in the Reform Party nomination. But Pat Buchanan says he's seeking the reform nod because the two major parties are frauds. My friends this year I believe is our last chance to save our Republic before she disappears into a godless New World Order. Then our leaders are constructing in betrayal of everything for which the founding fathers fought and

lived and died where Pat Buchanan failed in the Republican Party and he would have gotten no votes he would have you know he was virtually essentially thrown out of the party by the fact that he did so badly. And I don't think the Reform Party should be taking loses. Well Minnesota has a uniquely important role in all of this thanks to Ventura's power in the Reform Party. So with Buchanan and Trump now both joining the Reform Party what do Minnesota's reformers have to say. Phil Madsen is the man behind Governor Ventura's groundbreaking website. He's here to talk presidential politics and tell us about his effort to form a new pack of political reporters. Well first of all felt Rick McQueen talk to us a couple of weeks ago and said. Minnesota's Reform Party is strongly considering leaving the National Party what does now Buchanan declaring today have to do with all this. Well the declaration today is not brand new news I mean we knew this was coming but it's certainly you know his entrance into the party prompts a discussion about who we are and what we stand for. Now in Minnesota when we started the party in 1992 we started it specifically to be a party

of the political mainstream. We openly and we still do outright reject the extremism of the reform the liberal left and the conservative right. We want nothing to do with that kind of extremism and that's why you want nothing to do with Buchanan is that what you're saying he identifies himself with that point of view. And in Minnesota we're in pretty good shape because the people who join the party have identified themselves as centrists or political moderates nationally. The Reform Party is not as strong in each state as it is here in Minnesota we are you know clearly the leading state. So the question is is you know it's a battle for the soul of the report the Reform Party state by state and nationwide and today as you know with both Trump and Buchanan coming into the Reform Party to seek the Reform Party's nomination it's an exciting time actually because each of them are going to be bringing a lot of people into the party. The party will definitely be a factor in a presidential election. Trump believes that he you know he's not going to go for it unless he can win. You know and they're talking about is he serious or not. It's deja vu in listening to the early talk about Jesse Ventura.

But if Buchanan were the Reform Party's nominee would Minnesota indeed split and post its own presidential candidate just to just leave. Personally I would support Minnesota leaving the national party if you can I was the nominee. Again our whole purpose for being is to create an alternative in the political center a political sector that has been abandoned by the other two parties and we just cannot be who we are and still affiliate with Pat Buchanan as a defining candidate of the National Party. Why can't you affiliate with him is it mostly social issues. Yes his problem is not that he's prole life. His problem is that he wants to put it on the front burner right now in the Reform Party we have got pro-choice people pro-life people we get along fine by leaving the social issues off from the party platform and letting people live their lives as they see best by trying to politicize the issue and get government involved in personal decision making. It just doesn't work. And as long as we keep the social issues off from

the front burner. We're in good shape we're happy growing party but the minute you do it it's divisive it's polarizing and we end up in bad shape. OK we know Buchanan says he will not compromise and he wants abortion on the front burner. How about Trump what do we know about Trump in all of this. Well not a whole lot right now he's he's new to politics he's you know he's got an open track record in his personal life his business life is certainly well documented. He's got a book coming out in December that's going to lay out his agenda for America. He'll be hitting the campaign trail so at least that's what his staff says and other people will be able to find out it's the neat thing is you've got Buchanan and Trump it's a horse race that the media craves the party is a huge beneficiary already of the press attention that we've been getting. OK it's good. Quickly our last topic the website you're seeking volunteer reporters are they supposed to compete with the Capitol press corps tell us briefly how this is all supposed to work. Well that's a new story that just. Baffles me quite frankly they have I really should be magine has an idea. Does nothing about it. You know a reporter called me. We've chatted about ideas talked about the future.

I'm not doing anything different now than I've done in the last six months and a big you know Much Ado About Nothing to quote. Well Phil we'll continue to follow that and see if it indeed happens. Thank you. Well today we sat down with Governor Ventura and talked about the media and the big plan we'll have more excerpts later this week. Here's a taste. If you present the final piece of it how do you think it was received. What do you want to say about it as a whole. Well I I think it's been received fairly good. I feel bad in light and I do hate to go back to it again. But I was lied to by the media which heard it. And I say that in the fact that the Playboy article wasn't supposed to come out till the December issue which would have put it into November which was what our plan was so that we could release the big plan prior to any article like this coming out if there were going to be repercussions from it. All right moving on to headlines the state of Minnesota is firing up the big guns in its ongoing walleye war

with the Province of Ontario. State officials are asking the U.S. trade representative to request a formal naphtha commission hearing on allegations that Ontario fishing regulations are crippling Minnesota resorts on border Lakes especially the Lake of the woods. The regulations require anglers to stay overnight in Canada in order to keep walleye caught on the end Terrio side of the lake. The request for an after hearing is expected to be made this week. And that's a commission that has 10 days to respond. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is meeting in Duluth tonight to hear public testimony on the best way to clean up the contaminated Bay and the St. Louis river Streicher Bay is an EPA Superfund site that contains tars and other pollutants left behind by the interleague Corporation and other companies. The NPC is recommending the contaminants be removed by dredging and or lake or says covering or capping the site in place would be cheaper and much safer. Now neighborhood residents are

divided on the issue. PCA could make a decision as early as tomorrow. Minnesota's first Southeast Asian conservation officer was sworn in today in St. Paul. Officials from the Department of Natural Resources welcomed 36 year old. The first officer to graduate from a new program at the DNR. In addition to enforcing laws of the great outdoors pill will also help bridge communication between the department and the ever increasing Southeast Asian community. Three more people will graduate from the enforcement liaison community program in about a year and after winning a court ruling against the city of Minneapolis has once again resumed demolition of some housing units on the city's north side. Now the last time around the project was stopped after several people were arrested protesting the demolition. About 35 units were raised today another 20 are being prepared for the militia next month. City officials say the redevelopment is designed to create a landmark transformation of the area which they say will result in a mixed income

community. Four hundred fifty seven hundred fifty new rental and owner occupied units construction of the first phase is expected to begin in the summer of 2000. You are right.

If you can figure out this problem a reporter goes into a public meeting to cover a story. Now that reporter is then arrested taken to jail until the meeting is over. Now the reporter is trying to sue in civil court but should he be able to. The answer is clear cut of course he can. Well until we had the other elements in this highly unusual case the reporter is not Native American and the events took place on an Indian reservation so we thought of the good time to get some reservation Law 101 under our belts. Here to help us out with Benson. She's been practicing Indian law for six and a half years. Thanks for coming down before we start you want to point out that the reporter criminal charges against him were dismissed in court. And this happened back in 1970 at the Grand Casino. Now talk about this case will how does that get decided which court you end up in. Well it really depends on who the plaintiff is. If the plaintiff is Indian or non indian if the defendant is Indian or non Indian and if it took place on a reservation and it also depends on whether it's come over civil rights Indian tribes do not have any criminal

jurisdiction over non-Indians. OK but civil it's a different story. Civil is a different story and there it again depends on where whatever it is that the court might have jurisdiction over took place. Generally if an incident occurs on Indian lands that is lands owned by a tribe or an individual Indian on a reservation then a tribe would have jurisdiction over a non-Indian. But if an incident takes place on non-Indian own land within a reservation boundary then it gets very complicated. So what. And again that's not about this case so much with what I'm sure a lot of our viewers I thinking about is. So you go to a casino and you have a good time and you're out about all this and you get into some kind of trouble or there is some civil case that takes place. So you thought on a flight of stairs and you want to sue somebody you're going to have a tough time with figuring out which court to go to. Well if you're the plaintiff if you fall down some steps on tribally own land on a reservation then

it's up to you to some extent. But one of the. Best Places to go first is to the tribal court because the state court may not have jurisdiction a federal court almost certainly won't have jurisdiction depending on the claims. But a tribal court oftentimes will. What's the reality of tribal court. Some of us who don't have one of those evasions have this general feeling. I don't want to go there. Is it is tough to get on a tribal court. Are the standards the same I guess I should fit in well first thing. Not all tribal courts are the same there are 13 tribal courts in Minnesota and I haven't practiced in all of them. I've only practiced in two so it does vary from court to court but I think a lot of the myths are a lot of the information that you hear about tribal courts in the general media is not correct people think that the rules are completely different than state or federal court and they're not. If you go into for example the shock of communities tribal courts their rules of civil procedure are very very similar to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the court proceedings

look quite a bit like either a state or federal court. In tribal courts get to decide which cases say they don't want to hear a case and say well we will have a problem with the schools elsewhere can they fight. Well tribes will generally enact codes or ordinances that say which types of cases they're going to hear. For example the Leech Lake tribal court for a long time only heard cases involving tribal members that involves hunting or fishing violations and it was only a couple years ago that they passed a broad judicial code that expanded their civil jurisdiction so that now for example if someone slips and falls at their casino they can bring a case in tribal court. The tribal court has jurisdiction to hear if any fine tuning is needed. Were those that were Should it happen. If any Find turn to nothing in the jurisdictional laws Yeah it's too confusing right. No actually fairly clear if you're going to look at a lot of people I think because they just assume that tribal courts are so different they don't even attempt to bring cases they're also tribal courts have historically not published their decisions

as widely as state or federal courts did so it's harder for attorneys to find the law. But that's changing. The Minnesota American Indian Bar Association for example now puts information about Minnesota tribal courts and how to find the decisions on their website so it's getting easier. And I think more and more people are taking the time to learn about tribal courts and what you need to do to get a license to practice there and bring a suit there. But you cannot go to both courts but if you go to tribal court you lose most and well take it elsewhere. Well you can try there is actually just a case in Wisconsin recently where a state case was started in against a tribe in a state court. The tribe brought its own suit in tribal court involving the same exact facts and it turned out that the tribal court decision was issued first. And Under Wisconsin law the Wisconsin court of appeals just ruled that the Wisconsin state court had to defer to the tribal court order because it it was done first so sometimes you do have cases going in both court systems. All right. And Holden time thank you so much. Thank you.

Sometimes I think that you know that the war with the media with the governor is and you've heard it all before just part of his his stick that's what he does because he came out of wrestling but I. Think. He gets truly angry when reporters approach his family I think it then it does go over the line with him and it gets personal. But rebuilding so Reg and other towns in Kosovo is more than a matter of just bricks and mortar. This is the site of one of the worst atrocities of the war. It used to be a pizza shop. People were hiding inside. Sure militia came along and started firing. No one knows how many hundreds of rounds of ammunition they fired. It's almost impossible for the bullet. Well you know the story of this thing is how.

I can still remember an article by one of the manager brothers from the famous manager clinic. Who said if I had a young relative destined to become mentally ill I would prefer that he became schizo for Mike rather than alcoholic because there are some hope for schizophrenia and there wasn't any hope in the midst of. A booming real estate market. Powerful journalists a diverse population and an influx of immigrants. Minnesota in 1909. How about Minnesota in eighteen forty nine ten years before statehood. Minnesota existed as a territory. Yesterday the Minnesota history center opened a new exhibit that captures this colorful and complex era. Last week NEWSNIGHT Daniel Bergen got a sneak peek while staff were finishing up the exhibit. This territory would have been a hundred and fifty years old this year.

It was founded in April 18 49. It's also the hundred 50th anniversary of the founding of the Historical Society. So we thought there would be a good time obviously to take a look back at an extraordinary early vivid period in Minnesota's history a period of enormous cultural and population variety. And everybody who came here talked about that this was a place where all the classes mingled as one of our observers said our every shade of society is here in the territory. We wanted to introduce our visitors to a personality James Madison Goodhue who was one of the most colorful people to come to Minnesota territory he arrives on one of the first steam boats of that it gets here in 1849 April of 1849 and within a few weeks he set up his newspaper printing office here in a log cabin that looked just like this one. And it's a paper that's full of booster ish kind of.

New is about Minnesota telling people back East people who are reading the paper back in New York in Philadelphia and Baltimore telling people about this run to your place. He was telling people really how things work here in a very upbeat really delightful kind of prose newspaper prose here on higher physical and mental powers of more meat and muscle force and energy. The immigrant if he is a man and expects to live by exertion will find more inducements to make his home in Minnesota then any regions that. He wanted to give our visitors a sense of what St. Paul might look like in 1857. We luckily have a photographic panorama of the city taken from the roof of the courthouse in 1857 by a photographer named

Benjamin Upton. This is eight years after the founding of Minnesota territory this is St. Paul the groom. These bark lodges very often had the scaffoldings in front of them from which people hung things from food to dry and hung other implements. We've seen in some of the drawings that were made in the 1850s that some of these scaffoldings were also used as a place to put canoes out keep them out of the way keep them dry and safe. So we've decided to do the same thing here and to put one of our most important artifacts in the collection in the exhibit up on one of our climb scaffoldings. It's a Dakota made canoe from about 1890 made by the bluestone family who lived around Mendota in the 1890s. We wanted to introduce people to another person a totally opposite person from James Goodhue in the exhibit and the person that we chose is a young

girl named Myles Okie a wind and fact way you have one of the her descendants. Angela Kavanagh Wilson wrote a script for us imagining what might have been going through the head of a young girl who got years old in the 1850s. Her memories are guarded SugarCRM. As her territory was a place of great complexity. This is not a simple time. This was not a time for nice Daljit this was a bustling verse very complex place full of people who are on the make and bawl of but also in the in people who were also losing a way of life that they've known for generations. For a great sadness that I don't get and. I'm

sure I've grown at some point. Both gay a combination of sculpture dance and theme park ride that is how the New York Post describes a momentous production that moment m o m i x now mall makes is a company of dancers slash illusionists will find out what that

all means in a moment. Tomorrow night mo makes an orbit. Is that the Ordway theater in St. Paul so we invited the moment founder and artistic director most of Pendleton the studio B. Thanks so much for coming now what is this dancer slash illusionist I don't think I know what I'm talking about it's not a dance slasher illusionist but ok. I Are we on. Yeah all right I got a letter about nationalism. What does that mean. Oh well I think it's it's You've said it so well before but I'll try to repeat you badly. It is a mix of a physical visual theater. It's a it's a series of short pieces to dip various kinds of music from rock to new age to classical and we use simple props to create it. Some interesting magical in illusions one piece on a pair of skis to create a really exciting off vertical lines kind of our tangle once skis and it's very humorous upbeat if you don't like you don't have to wait long for changes. It is

it's not a modern dance show it's more in the line of stomp and Cirque du Soleil in that area of the non linear but it's a has a logic and a flow to the musical curve to the evening very majestic and it's evocative people walk away with a little more lightness in their step than it's been successful. You describe just what we say in this business picture is there are a thousand words so let's just take a look at some of your work. Well. That's cool stuff when you get old.

You're going to get me to scare you. No wonder. You get all these you know the name o makes is funny as in Agra term and it's something you put in your in your milk as a supplement for veal calves I kind of don't tell anybody that political right now that you would want to speed up the life of a veal calf. They don't have much time anyway. But anyway this is it was a milk supplement and I was born raised on a dairy farm that my first experiences. Exhibiting cost increase and so I suppose there is some attachment to the my past been in the name but it also is going to a surplus notion do that too. Well whatever you can you can take two disparate images and mix it together with a reggae beat. OK and that's kind of what it is it's the idea of the mix was an 80s term the company's quite old actually. Although with this is our Minnesota debut I got about 30 seconds left. If you're going to strive What do you want people to walk away with after. Well I'd like them to walk away with a with a bit maybe a little less gravity in their step as I was saying a little more

lightness and I think that show is wonderfully imaginative it's highly physical it's I mean these are great athletes as well as dancers and that's because they must have a hard time what when you audition people what do you look for. You know when we look at you know that if they're going to be able to do peer wets in the shanties and run on all fours and be able to laugh at their directors jokes primarily. All right all the way tomorrow night. One type of pharmacy that is all right no one knows about them thank you so much. It's full of a lot more out of. NEWSNIGHT. Minnesota is made possible in part with support from the Blanton Foundation creating a stronger Minnesota by bridging rural and urban communities like Knight Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life for Minnesota families. And by Coke petroleum group we are fueling a clean future diversity unit reporting on NEWSNIGHT Minnesota is provided by the James Rose Phillips Family Foundation promoting good relations among all races and religions.