Remember how it became a running joke that the surest way to see if George W. Bush was going to cut a group’s funding was if he’d done a recent photo-op with it? I mean, it happened again and again.

Well now, today we see Tom Emmer, a tax cut fanatic in the mold of George W. Bush and outgoing governor Tim Pawlenty, had a photo-op at a company that, if Emmer had had his way, would likely have gone under.

The scandal surrounding Tripp Emmer, son and campaign employee of Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, is not Tripp’s underage drinking. The real scandal here is what’s shown in the Facebook photo they’re not talking about. This is the photo that shows Tripp Emmer posing with a young woman who is apparently passed out due to intoxication of some sort and proudly pointing to the crude drawings of spurting penises that cover her face and body — drawings that have every appearance of having been placed there without her knowledge or consent.

One of the big themes of the candidates and activists of the Republican Party of Minnesota, as it is for Republicans nationwide, is that they are gifted with boatloads of business sense and know how to run things. However, reality has a way of intruding on even the most expensively-repeated propaganda. Two cases in point: Tom Emmer and Tony Sutton.

Minnesota Republican ratbleeper Tom Mason is quite likely one of the reasons you’re reading this blog right now. But to show this requires me to go back nearly eight years, back to the birth of the progressive side of the blogosphere.

One of the first results of the Citizens United ruling is the creation of the business-funded group MN Forward, the allegedly “bipartisan” outfit whose actual political leanings may be divined by the following evidence: Its head honcho is Brian McClung, who less than two months ago was the deputy chief of staff Tim Pawlenty; and its first TV ads have been for Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, who is essentially Pawlenty without the mullet and even less humanity.

But a funny thing happened on the way to buying yet another corporate-friendly Republican governor. A couple of funny things, actually.

Target Corp. and Best Buy are proving that their profits are the most important thing in the long run, not the long-term rights of all the people — employees and customers — in areas where they do business.

If any of the Democrats in the race — Margaret Kelliher, Mark Dayton, or Matt Entenza — said something as blatantly wrong (not to mention nutty) as what Emmer’s been uttering, it would be described as such on the front page of both local papers and be a big story in local newscasts for weeks, and none of the Dems would have dared repeat it, even in front of a friendly group.

I’m beginning to think that I may have really been onto something with my theory about Michael Steele and the DNC switching places with their alternate universe doppelgangers – it seems like I’ve been reading an awful lot of stuff that only makes sense in a world where all of conservatism’s principles are true.

Say, did you know that waiters and waitresses pull in $100,000 a year? Really! Tom Emmer, the Republican candidate for Minnesota governor, says so — and he said it in front of a whole bunch of reporters at a press conference he’d called.

Robert Erickson, famed proponent of ending illegal European immigration, endorses Tom Emmer. Or does he?