So Long, Kirsten. Have Fun. It’s Always Party Time In Our Nation’s Capital.

So now we say good-bye to Kirsten Baesler, our long-running North Dakota Superintendent of Public Instruction.  She’s headed off to Washington to work for Donald Trump, more specifically, to work for professional wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon (more about her in a minute).

I haven’t written about her for about a dozen years, except when she spent part of the night in jail five years ago when she got hauled in for drunk driving. She’s been in the news a few other times as well.

I came across a story in The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, written by their former political reporter Mike Nowatzki (who’s gone on to a pretty visible career himself as press secretary to Governors Doug Burgum and Kelly Armstrong), about a couple previous arrests.

Back in 1997, well before she was in the public eye, Baesler was arrested for shoplifting when, according to her own press secretary, Dale Wetzel (himself a pretty good Associated Press reporter for many years), Baesler was grocery shopping with her 9-year-old son and 4-year-old twin sons, had a cart full of groceries, and placed a bag of macadamia nuts in her purse and forgot to pay for them.

Uh huh. She was found guilty and paid a $100 fine, but didn’t go to jail.

A second arrest came in 2015, a few years after she was first elected, when she was charged with assault after an alleged attack on her boyfriend in another apparent drunken incident. Nowatzki wrote another long story about her. It’s fascinating. You might be able to read it here. If not, I’ll summarize.

Baesler and her boyfriend (she had been divorced a few years earlier) and two friends spent the night drinking at a Bismarck bar, and then, when the bar closed, the four of them left to continue the party at the boyfriend’s home.  Baesler fell asleep for a while at the boyfriend’s house, then woke up angry. Then, the story says, police were called to the boyfriend’s home at 1:43 a.m. when he alleged she got mad and began throwing things at him, eventually hitting him with a Yankee Candle jar.

Then Nowatzki quoted from a police report, “(The boyfriend) said Baesler – he identified her by her work title, ‘Kirsten Baesler, North Dakota Superintendent of Public Instruction’ – threw a bottle at him and crushed his nose. He later told police that Baesler threw several Yankee glass-jar candles. An officer noted (the boyfriend) had a small cut on his forehead and dried blood that ran down the side of his nose to his mouth. There was also blood throughout the kitchen, on the floor and cabinets, all documented in photos in the police report.”

Apparently, according to the story, after the call to police, Baesler said she wanted to go home, so one of the friends of the couple who had accompanied them to the boyfriend’s home agreed to drive her home.

But first  they stopped at his house to let a dog out, and Baesler again fell asleep there. Apparently she was having a pretty sleepy night. When she woke up, he gave her a ride to her Mandan home, where police later arrested her.

Nowatzki’s story said Baesler was “. . . handcuffed, hauled off to jail and run through the legal process.”

She was arrested by Mandan police on suspicion of simple assault, a Class B misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a $1,500 fine. The whole story gets a little confusing then, but apparently she spent the night and part of the next day in jail in Mandan, then was transferred to the Burleigh County Detention Center.

Then a bond hearing was held, and Baesler’s sister posted a $150 bond later that evening and took her home. The charges were later dismissed. Don’t ask.

The third arrest was for suspicion of drunken driving. According to news reports, Baesler was arrested Feb. 26, 2020, in Bismarck along Interstate 94 after a state trooper noticed the vehicle she was driving swerved multiple times.

News stories said the Highway Patrol followed Baesler nearly 10 minutes. Dashcam footage shows Baesler’s pickup crossing lanes and swerving. There’s even a short movie to go along with this one. You can watch it here.

Just after 9:44 P.M., the officer turned on his lights indicating for the driver to pull over, even honking to get her attention. Baesler continued driving and switching lanes, until finally pulling over, seven minutes later.

When asked why she didn’t pull over right away, Baesler replied, “I wasn’t gonna stop on the highway.” To which the officer responded, “When you see lights, you don’t have a choice. You pull over where you’re supposed to stop.”

She was then asked to do standard roadside tests, like counting backward, which she failed. There’s a little longer video that includes her counting backwards. You’ve gone this far down this rabbit hole. Take a look.

After failing the roadside tests and refusing to take blood and breath tests, Baesler was arrested for driving under the influence.

Baesler pled guilty to driving under the influence. A standard sentence included a $500 fine, a year of unsupervised probation, and $250 in court fees. I’m not sure if she lost her driver’s license for 6 months, but that also seems to be the standard procedure on a DUI conviction.

Three arrests, two convictions. She’ll fit right in with this administration in Washington.

I also came across this short story done by the Associated Press in 2020:

“JAMESTOWN, N.D. (AP) – North Dakota Republicans auctioned bottles of wine named for and signed by North Dakota Superintendent Kirsten Baesler just days after she was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving.

“North Dakota District 12 and 29 Republicans held their Lincoln Day dinner last weekend. House Majority Leader Chet Pollert says that for years the dinner has included a wine auction as a fundraiser for candidates.

“Eleven bottles of “Baesler’s Bulldog Red” and “Superintendent Baesler’s Honor Roll White” were auctioned. The Bismarck Tribune says Baesler signed the bottles Saturday – three days after her arrest on suspicion of driving drunk.”

So now she’s going to Washington where she probably won’t have to drive much anyway. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, her new boss, is the wife of Vince McMahon, the founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE—you’ve heard of them) and also worked in the first Trump Administration.

McMahon’s job, it seems, with Baesler’s help, is to dismantle the Department of Education, President Trump’s stated mission. He wants to get rid of it completely. It won’t be easy. It was created by Congress in 1979, during the administration of Jimmy Carter, and so Congress would have to approve eliminating it. I don’t think that is likely, but McMahon and Baesler can start chopping it down without completely getting  rid of it. Kirsten is gambling that hers is one of the jobs that won’t go away. Because she’s giving up a pretty good job here at home, one that pays her almost $150,000 a year. That’ll buy a lot of “Bulldog Red.”

I think I’ll end this story with a rerun of a short political post I did a dozen years ago.  It got me in a little trouble then, and probably will again. But it’s fun. And maybe Kirsten will be gone to Washington before I get around to putting this on my blog.

HONEST, HONEY, IT’S JUST TEMPORARY

July 26, 2012

There’s a funny story going around political circles these days about Superintendent of Public Instruction candidate Kirsten Baesler’s breast implants (no, she didn’t do it just for the campaign—she did it a couple years ago—although she may have had a long-term plan and this was the beginning of her implementation). Seems Kirsten didn’t bother to tell her then-husband (they have since divorced—he claims infidelity, she claims he was a drunk) that she was going to do it, and so to explain it to him when she came home, she told him a story about having a biopsy or lump removed or something like that, and, and claimed her doctor said there would be some “swelling” for a while.  Except that the “swelling” didn’t seem to go down. Still, her husband  remained convinced (love really IS blind sometimes) that it was just a matter of time, until his sister finally took him aside and said something like “Dude. She got a boob job.” Turns out he was about the only one who bought the “swelling” story. Friends of the couple say she caused quite a stir in church when she walked down the aisle wearing a tight blouse shortly after the procedure.