You’ve seen her ads:  Tarryl Clark bags on Michele Bachmann for not voting for a congressional tax cut.

I saw the ad, and nodded, and moved on; something about it didn’t pass the sniff test, but I couldn’t quite make out why.

Yesterday in the comment section, commenter Gundog76 put his finger on it.  Not only is Bachmann in the party that is not in power – so any legislation on any issue that she presents starts off at a handicap – but in fact the party in power doesn’t want to vote on pay cuts:

In a letter sent Thursday afternoon, Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.) pressured Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) to hold a vote on her bill to cut congressional pay by five percent and save taxpayers $4.7 million next year before Congress breaks for its fall recess.

“For months, and despite multiple requests to move it forward, the bill has not seen any progress in the House,” said Kirkpatrick in the letter. “It seems that it is being swept under the rug.”

Kirkpatrick’s letter comes in the wake of a Rasmussen poll released two weeks ago which found that 75 percent of the 1,000 people surveyed wanted lawmakers to reduce their salaries until the federal budget is balanced.

So in other words, if Michele Bachmann were drooling at the prospect of cutting congressional salaries (which she might be, we don’t know), it wouldn’t matter, because the leader of Tarryl Clark’s party in Congress has spiked any vote on the issue.

The Minnesota DFL; if they’re moving their lips, they’re lying.

The other day, I paraphrased an old PJ O’Rourke quip; only in baseline budgeting can it be said one is “cutting” a budget when one merely reduces the “planned” increase.

Where have you gone, P.J. O’Rourke?  Our state turns its broke eyes to you.

The local leftyblog buildup and and array of special interest pimps have been caterwauling “Emmer Plans To Cut $2 Billion From Health And Human Services!”.  It’s a return to the Reagan era Democrat attack, “they want to starve the children and throw Grandma out into the street!”.

Like virtually everything the DFL and media (ptr) have said in this campaign so far, it’s either grossly lacking in context, or it’s a lie.

In this case, it’s both.

The Health and Human Services budget from the 2010-2011 biennium is 9.083 billion.

The “Autipilot” increase calculated by the State Office of Management and Budget, which assumes everything increases in proportion with previous requests and calculated “needs” for the 2012-12 biennium, was 12.0 billion.   As Emmer notes in pretty much every stump speech, that’s a 32% increase.  And there is nothing to say that budget, if left on autopilot or to the DFL (pardon the redundancy) won’t grow by that same rate in perpetuity, until it is the entire budget.

Mark Dayton’s budget “plan” stated no figure for HHS spending.  Tom Horner plans to spend an incredible 12.14 billion – more than even the “autopilot” increase – a 34% hike in spending. To be fair to Horner, his stump rhetoric says that some of that spending is to go to getting people off of the HHS bandwagon.  It’s a laudable goal – indeed, it should be part of future HHS spending planning.  But leaving aside the fact that Horner hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected, and that the DFLers that survive in the legislature will make sure that all spending goes to entitlements, the fact is that in the middle of a deep recession when state unemployment has just topped 7% for the first time in decades, Emmer’s premise is that jumpstarting the economy and re-engineering our wasteful government is much more important.  That’s the premise; it’ll be tested this November.

Emmer plans to spend 9.75 billion on HHS.   Do the math yourself.  That’s a 7% increase.

So the DFL chanting shrieking point is “Emmer is slashing two billion dollars from the HHS budget!”  It’s buncombe, of course; for starters, there will be no actual official 2012-2013 budget until the next legislature and administration produce one.

The “budget” from which Emmer will “cut” is a hypothetical estimate, with all numbers basically entered via an opaque formula that is based largely on recent-past growth.   It is not an actual budget.

And, most importantly, by every rational measure, Emmer increases HHS spending.  Not as much as the DFL would prefer, and not to the extent to which they’ve jiggered the system, and not in a way that might not require HHS to prioritize its spending more wisely – which is, indeed, what Emmer’s plan calls for.  But it is not a cut.

The DFL must be really worried – or really not think the citizens of Minnesota are very smart – if this is the best they can manage.

I’ll wager “both”.

Do you remember way back last week, when the biggest crisis of the week was “Emmer didn’t get his budget validated by the Minnesota Department of Revenue“?

Either does the media, I’ll bet.  From DFL-leaning Tweep “Stowydad“:

Dayton says he has sought tax plan info from state gov’t. Revenue Dept. has no recent record of request by, answer to Dayton camp

And I’m going to suggest that, unlike Emmer’s plan, it hasn’t been vetted in pieces, either.

While I’ll never, ever label a blog post “breaking” or “developing”, let’s just say I’m gonna try to find out more about this one.

As Tom Emmer was setting up at Permac Industries in Burnsville to announce the first part of its budget plan, the Minnesota DFL party’s Twitter account announced…:

Spoiler Alert: Tom Emmer to Hold Press Conference at Company Saved by the Recovery Act Funding He Opposes http://ht.ly/2A8QT #goDFL

This prompted other DFLers to crow that Permac had been “saved” by the stimulus, or “expanded” because of it.  They harped, naturally, on the irony; Emmer opposes the measures that, they said, kept Permac in business.

Wow.  That woulda been a fumble.

Except it’s not true.

Permac has received not one nickel of cash from the stimulus.

Two sources with knowledge of the situation confirmed that Permac hired a worker who’d gone through a Dakota County training program that had received stimulus money to help train the unempoyed.  The hiree was an unemployed worker.

Permac also got a tax break from the Bush Administration stimulus.  Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is exactly the sort of “stimulus” Emmer proposed at the press conference fifteen minutes later.

Why is the DFL lying to the people?

UPDATE:  It wasn’t just leftyblogger Sally Jo Sorenson who claimed the tax break and the county-trained worker “saved” Permac.  The DFL’s press release said so.

I’m working on contacting a Permac source to address this gross DFL distortion.

Charting and predicting the continuum of DFL chanting points.

Last Week: “Where is Emmer’s plan?”

This Afternoon: “OK, where is the rest of Emmer’s plan?”

A Few Weeks From Now: “Where is the last little bit of Emmer’s plan?”

Novenber 3: “Where’s Mark Dayton?”

The New York Times publishes a morale booster for the DFL, a week after the MPR/Humphrey Institute poll showed the Minnesota Gubernatorial race a dead heat.

The analsysis – from “Five Thirty Eight”, a left-leaning statistics blog run amok (without mentioning anything about “Lies” and “Damned Lies”, for some reason) says Mark Dayton has a 78% chance of winning the gubernatorial election; they claim the current stats point toward a 46-41 Dayton win on November 2.

The DFL Chanting Point Bots are duly repeating that “78%” figure as if it is the be-all and end-all of the story.

They’re ignoring the part where the sausage gets made.

Look at the polls they select for their sampling.

The sample gives full weight (“.99”) to an August 2 Survey USA poll that came out about a week before the DFL primary.  When the DFL was outspending Emmer 16:1, and flogging their astroturf campaign against Target to maximum effect.

It gives 2/3 weight (“.66″) to last week’s MPR/Humphrey Institute poll, which showed the race a dead heat.

It gives .4 credit to the un-creditable Strib/”Minnesota” Poll, which showed a ten point Dayton lead, and a tiny little fringe of weight to Rasmussen and Survey USA polls from earlier this summer that showed Emmer inside the margin of error and long before Dayton started his orgy of spending on his slime campaign.

In other words, the stats that the DFL and media are  jumping up and down and caterwauling about could hardly be better cherrypicked to show Dayton in a commanding lead; they are, to say the least, a misleading sample given a questionable weighting.

Take this number seriously at your own risk.

A few weeks ago, “Politics in Minnesota” (PIM) made a splash by moving all of its content behind the “paywall” – pay for read – decided that yesterday’s piece by Paul Demko on the farm family Tom Emmer uses as an example of state overregulation from the stump deserved to be a freebie.

Why do you suppose that is?

Amos and Amon Baer are unlikely figures to find themselves at the center of the governor’s race. But in recent weeks the names of the Clay County farmers have been mentioned repeatedly by Republican nominee Tom Emmer at campaign events.

During this month’s gubernatorial debate on TPT’s Almanac program, for instance, Emmer brought up the plight of the Baer brothers as a prime example of the state’s overly burdensome regulatory framework. The GOP challenger bemoaned that it would take $40,000 and two years of bureaucratic wrangling to expand their hog operations in Minnesota. Instead the Baer brothers simply went across the border to North Dakota and were up and running within six months.

Demko’s point?

But the Baer brothers are hardly your standard, struggling family farmers. They are part of a renowned, multi-million dollar farming operation that started, literally, from scratch some five decades ago.

The Baers are a large business now.

I’ve heard a number of lefties crowing that “they’re not a typical farm family!”

I suspect that when DFLers think of “typical farm families” they think of Amish people with tractors; bucolic stereotypes that may have been perfectly valid when the “Democratic Farmer Labor” party put “farmer” into their name.

The Baers may be a very large farm operation – but farms, especially on the Plains – have had to get much bigger and more diversified to survive.  The Baers got much much bigger, and survived pretty well.

The nerve of them.

A problem with authority

Allen and Edna Baer arrived in Minnesota with 13 kids in tow after being kicked out of a Hutterite community in North Dakota for insubordination. (Allen, according to one account, “wondered a bit too loudly why Heinie, the leader of the community, never helped to wash dishes, and he was told to leave.”)

I’m picturing Paul Demko being sent to North Dakota,trying to research Hutterite history.

But no matter.  Demko’s piece blows the lid off the big story; business people put a lot of time and effort into succeeding, and don’t like it when government gets in the way:

“It’s the permitting scheme that has been set up in Minnesota that is the problem,” [Amon] Baer told Capitol Report. “It’s not specific to chickens; it’s not specific to dairy; it’s not specific to hogs. I really hope that by him using that story, somebody someplace will sit up and take notice and say, ‘Gee, maybe we have been a little too tough on the livestock industry.’”

…But not everyone agrees that Minnesota’s regulatory mandates are putting an undue burden on farmers.

Not everyone has to agree for it to be a fact…

…but I digress.  Demko goes on to show that you can have a whole slew of facts and still miss the truth.

Because Minnesota does have a thriving ag sector:

There’s also little evidence that Minnesota’s livestock industry – and hog production in particular – has suffered in comparison to other states in recent years. The state has the third-largest hog market in the country, accounting for roughly 11 percent of the total swine production, ranking only behind Iowa and North Carolina, according to statistics maintained by the United States Department of Agriculture.

“We continue to crank out a lot of hogs,” said Wayne Martin, who works with hog farmers through the University of Minnesota Extension program. “It’s not like we’re shutting down hog production here by any means.”

Other sectors of Minnesota’s livestock economy are equally robust. The state is the top turkey producer in the country and ranks tenth in cattle and calves. Overall the state has the eighth-largest livestock market in the country.

Right.  There are a lot of Americans.  They gotta eat.  So the people who produce food are certainly able to sell it.

And yet…:

But farming, and the hog market in particular, have undergone seismic changes over the last three decades. In 1984 there were more than 400,000 hog farms in the United States; last year there were fewer than 65,000. Those operations that have survived have either gone into niche markets or grown exponentially larger. In 1994, hog operations with more than 5,000 animals constituted less than 30 percent of the market; by 2008 that figure had risen to nearly 90 percent.

In other words:  while the Baers are supposedly “not a typical farm family” because they are getting bigger and more diversified to stay in business, the reason for this is that the ‘typical farm family” is now running a gas station or selling insurance  these days; the people who stay in agriculture, especially on the Plains, are growing, and – like Target and Best Buy and WalMart – finding that they have to keep growing to survive.

But this, according to Politics in Minnesota, deserves to be available for free?

Pat Kessler is one of the small pack of “deans of Minnesota political journalism”.

And he’s done some good work during the campaign so far.

But his “Reality Check” piece yesterday deserves a look.

First, Immigration:

Tom Emmer, the Republican Candidate for Governor, said he supports Arizona’s tough new immigration crackdown. However, on Sunday, he toned down previous comments about how “wonderful” it is.

“What I said was … I was asked one question: ‘what do you think about the Arizona law?’ I said ‘it’s a good start when you talk about Arizona,'” said Emmer on WCCO Sunday Morning.

But, IN FACT, that’s not what he said.

On Minnesota Public Radio, Emmer described Arizona’s law as “wonderful,” said it does not target minorities and that it’s appropriate for police to ask for papers.

“I think what Arizona did is a wonderful first step,” said Emmer. “I’m very disappointed at the federal government.”

That’s the big “reality” check? Emmer went from a “Wonderful” start to a “Good” start?

So we’re parsing adjectives, here?  Is there some hidden difference in weight between “Good” and “Wonderful” starts?   Especially since both adjectives describe precisely the same approach?

Given how illegal immigration polls, I’d say either adjective works just fine with the voter.

Emmer was also noncommittal about whether he supports allowing Minnesota to opt out of federal laws, like President Obama’s new health care plan.

“You said I proposed that once,” he said. “What I have always proposed is that you gotta go based on the constitution.”

IN FACT, Emmer is a sponsor of a constitutional amendment to exempt Minnesota from all federal laws that are not enumerated in the Constitution. Under his plan, no law could go into effect unless two-thirds of the Minnesota legislature votes to approve it.

I wonder if Kessler is confused; rejecting federal laws not enumerated in the Constitution is the precise definition of “going back to the Constitution”.

After I wrote my piece on Friday – the left and media’s current chant about “investors targeting Target”, which showed that the three firms that the Strib was crowing about amount to .0015, or fifteen ten-thousandths, of Target’s market capitalization – I wondered; how do the various “Socially Responsible Investment” (SRI) firms stack up against a company like Target?  Which, let us not forget, is Minnesota’s second-largest corporate donor to charity and one of the most PC-friendly companies in the business, but can afford to be, because they kick market ass?

I figured it’d be interesting to compare Target’s market performance to that of the three SRI funds mentioned in the Strib piece.

But I can only do two.  Because try as I may, I can’t find a ticker symbol for Trillium.

Here’s the comparative performance so far this year.  Target (TGT) is blue, Walden (WSEFX) red, Calvert (CAAAX) yellow:

Walden’s about even on this dismal year; Calvert is off about four (after being down nearly ten a month ago). Target is up a couple, after being up fifteen this spring, before the consumer confidence numbers tanked much of the retail market (which the press also spun as anti-Emmer news!)

So – so far in 2010, both of the SRI funds are dogs, and Target is at least holding its own.  Indeed, the earnings of all three firms seem to follow a similar curve – with the SRIs just a point or two below Target.

So how about over the past couple of years?

Wow.  That’s pretty amazing.  Since the beginning of 2008, when the recession really sank in, all three companies took a dive…after Obama’s election.  All three dropped by 40-50%.  Target is back up 5% over the period; Walden and Calvert are both 20-30% off.

Seems like Target stock – with or without contributions to MNForward – may be the only solid performer in Walden or Calvert’s portfolios.

Whose advice are you going to take?

It was in all the headlines today:  “Target feeling investor backlash”, screamed the Strib.

Emphasis added:

The backlash from gay-rights supporters against Target Corp.’s recent political donation now includes some institutional shareholders.

Three management firms that collectively hold $57.5 million of Target stock — Walden Asset Management, Calvert Asset Management and Trillium Asset Management — filed a proposal asking Target’s independent board members to undertake a “comprehensive review of Target’s political contributions and spending processes including the criteria used for such contributions,” according to a statement released Thursday night

Sounds pretty serious, huh?

There are two problems with this “story”:

Small Potatoes:  57.5 million dollars in Target stock equals about 0.0015 of Target Corp’s $38,190,000,000 (that’s thirty eight billion dollar and change) market capitalization; fifteen dollars out of every ten thousand worth of Target market capitalization.

That’s like taking fifteen cents out of a hundred dollars.

The amount of Target Corp stock owned by the three firms named in the story would have to move the decimal point a couple notches to even qualify as “pissing in the wind”.

This is not a serious challenge to Target.

But the Star Tribune didn’t figure the Minnesota voter needed to know that.

Who Are Those “Investment Firms”? The Star Tribune, and the rest of the media covering this story, don’t feel it important to elaborate on who the three “institutional shareholders” involved in this “resolution” are.

All three are firms involved in “socially responsible investing”.  Walden is one of a group of investment companies demanding that President Obama create an office of Corporate Social Resopnsibility.

The purpose of the office would be to enhance and coordinate corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities across the government, at home and abroad, and to pursue policies and initiatives to strengthen the CSR commitments of the private sector.

A joint letter from the groups, released today, was organized by the 500-member Social Investment Forum (SIF), the U.S. membership association for socially and environmentally responsible investment professionals and institutions.

Calvert Asset Management also pursues left-friendly policies.

The organizations are asking the SEC to require companies to report annually on sustainability indicators in accordance with the most up-to-date reporting framework of the Global Reporting Initiative and on other material ESG matters as they come to light.

In a letter to SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro that accompanied the proposal, the investors said: “The present global economic crisis has made it readily apparent that our existing system for corporate reporting has failed shareholders. We believe that robust sustainability reporting could have mitigated some of the impacts of the financial crisis. These types of disclosures would have promoted longer-term thinking by investors and corporations, and earlier detection of predatory lending and other destructive business practices. There is a tremendous opportunity to learn from these gaps and to construct a system of safeguards to protect investors. We are confident that mandatory sustainability reporting will contribute significantly to rebuilding public trust in corporations as well as the agencies regulating them in the wake of the present crisis.”

Trillium?  Yep – they’re an investment house that focuses on “Environtmental, Social and Governmental” “investment” – a “movement” focused on bypassing politics to affect policy by jiggering the capital market.

Their performance in the market is a matter of debate, perhaps.

But it’s not debateable that these three investment firms are not random firms purely focused on the non-political, fiduciary interests of the shareholder.  And it’s not up for debate that the three companies all together aren’t even a vaporous fraction of Target’s total worth.

So why does the Strib feel the need to omit all this from their coverage?

Misreporting and incomplete reporting is a pattern.  Two weeks ago, I busted the Saint Paul Pioneer Press claiming that Target’s share values were hurt by the controversy, on a week when the entire mid-to-high-level consumer retail market suffered a setback due to eroding consumer confidence numbers.

Now, this.

Is the Twin Cities’ business press also in the bag for Mark Dayton?  What does this say about the rest of their “journalism?”

I am hosting a debate in five minutes.

I’m calling Mark Dayton’s office to invite him.

HAH! He declined!

What is he hiding?

Nothing, of course; I threw a debate with five minutes’ warning, on a day when Mr. Dayton is likely out preening for his donors campaigning somewhere.

Pretty stupid, huh?

Not much different than the tempest in a Kombucha-bottle the local Sorosphere ginned up over yesterday’s “Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities” “debate” in Winona.

“Why does Emmer hate ‘Greater Minnesota'”, chanted any number of leftyblogs earlier in the week.

A source close to the campaign scoffed at their mock victorian vapours.  “We told them we had a prior conflict”, he said.  The fundraiser has been on the calendar for quite some time, and “since we’re not funded by independent expenditures, we have to raise the money”.

Which doesn’t prevent the Strib and the sorosphere’s chatbots from acting like the absence was a suprise.

Just like they did at the “Green Issue Forum” debate the day after the GOP conventi0n last May.  Even though Emmer had declined the invitation out of hand – it concided with his youngest son’s first communion – the leftymedia and Strib (ptr) feigned Captain Reneault-like shock, shock that Emmer didn’t make it to the debate.

Like Emmer’s “absences”, the “DWI convictions” and the “push to lower DWI penalties”, it’s not just a lie; it’s a Big Lie, an out-of-context factoid that the DFL and media (ptr) is repeating endlessly for the benefit of those too incurious to dig beneath the headlines, but whose vote counts the same as yours anyway.

More next week.

Much more.

Chanting Points Memo: The Green Issues Forum

In  a debate at “Game Fair” over the weekend – a firearm-friendly venue if there ever was one – Tom Emmer pressed Mark Dayton on his record on gun issues.

And perhaps it’s a good thing that we’ve come to the point that Mark Dayton, as extreme a liberal as exists in Minnesota, someone so far to the left that Margaret Anderson Kelliher felt the need to triangulate to his right during the primary, felt the need to go all tactical on the audience:

“I have two loaded .357 Magnum pistols in my home right now in a lock box,” DFL candidate Mark Dayton told a crowd gathered Saturday at Game Fair, a hunting and fishing expo in Anoka. “I have a 9mm pistol at home. I have a twelve-gauge shotgun at home.”

Battle won, right?

Gary Gross at LFR says “not so fast“; I’ll add emphasis:

Here’s Sen. Dayton’s response:

Mark Dayton: Well, I had a D rating from the NRA in 1982 when I ran for the Senate. I had a two- an A rating in 2000. There were two principal votes you can look em up when I was a Senator. One was banning Cop Killer bullets. And one reason that I have the endorsement of the Minneapolis Police and Peace Officers Association, Representative, is because I respect the law enforcement men and women. I was on a ride-along last week to, as I’ve been several times with a police officer in St. Paul. And those guys wear bulletproof vests every time they go out there. Men and women. And anybody who wants to go out there and see them put their lives on the line to protect us.

What, you want to kill cops?

Except – as Gary found – the “Cop Killer Bullet” bill was anything but (I’ll add emphasis):

SEC. 5. ARMOR PIERCING AMMUNITION.

(a) EXPANSION OF DEFINITION OF ARMOR PIERCING AMMUNITION.–Section 921(a)(17)(B) of title 18, United States Code, is amended–

(1) in clause (i), by striking “or” at the end;

(2) in clause (ii), by striking the period at the end and inserting a semicolon; and

(3) by adding at the end the following:

“(iii) a projectile that may be used in a handgun and that the Attorney General determines, under section 926(d), to be capable of penetrating body armor; or

“(iv) a projectile for a center-fire rifle, designed or marketed as having armor piercing capability, that the Attorney General determines, under section 926(d), to be more likely to penetrate body armor than standard ammunition of the same caliber.”.

So the “Cop Killer Bullet” bill – written by Ted Kennedy – would have given the Attorney General the power to determine, more or less by fiat, exactly what constituted a “cop-killer” bullet.

Which means they start with the boogeymen rounds – the so-called “Teflon” bullets – and the next day  they’ll be noting, correctly, that metal-jacketed hardball rounds penetrate more than plain unjacketed lead or wadcutters.

It also means that the Attorney General – or more likely his employees in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – could make sweeping rulings about ammunition availability and legality by whim and fiat, creating new classes of criminals at will with a stroke of the pen.

Mark Dayton – for a more bureaucratic world.

Somebody on Twitter pointed me to this PiPress  story claiming that Target’s stock value is suffering because of its donation to MNForward, which is supporting Tom Emmer in this fall’s Minnesota Gubernatorial race.

“Shares in the Minneapolis-based discount retailer have declined 3.5 percent since the morning of July 27, when Target Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel first defended the donation, prompting critics to call for a consumer boycott,” Tom Webb writes for the Pioneer Press.

Perhaps things are finally sinking in at Target headquarters. Last week, Target execs issued a statement amidst all the public scrutiny, saying that they’re brainstorming ways to make amends.

“At Target, we listen to our guests, our team members and our communities — and we have heard them on this issue. We are committed to doing better and regret that we have let down our team members and guests. We are evaluating ways to make sure they know the high value we place on our relationships with them,” Target folks said in a statement.

Interesting claim.  Could it be that Target’s stock price took a hit precisely because of the news of its donation to a PAC supporting Tom Emmer?

That would be very bad indeed.

So I took the liberty of checking the stock prices for four leading consumer big-box stores for the past month or so.  I compared:

• WalMart – in red, on the chart below.
• Target – the slightly lighter blue line (Google quotes didn’t let me change colors…).
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average – the darker blue line.

If you look at the chart, it certainly looks like Target stock did take a dip starting on the 27th of July when, as “Change.com” noted, the flap over the Emmer donation first surfaced.

Of course, the red line for famously orientation-blind and non-fabulous “WalMart” is flat to very slightly improved in that period, too – and seemed to take a slight dip on or around the 27th, as well – not nearly as pronounced, but a dip nonetheless.

So I figured I’d broaden things just a bit.  I picked some more big-box retailers:

• WalMart – in red, on the chart below.
• Costco – in orange below.
• Family Dollar – in dark green, on the chart below.
• Target – Finally, the blue line.

Note the longer scale of the chart below; it’s a month, so July 27 is about a quarter of the way in from the right;

All of the retailers are soft-to-wobbly on and after the 27th – and especially the 23rd through the 27 – with one exception; the dark-green “Family Dollar” chain, whose attitudes about gay marriage are unknown but whose market is downscale and distinctly recession-friendly.

And I thought – “Downmarket Family Dollar doing well, mid-to-low market WalMart and Costco flat to down, mid-to-uppish Target just a tad down…”

So I checked to see if there was a correlation, bringing some higher-end stores into the mix.I added:

• Target remains bright blue, WalMart remains dark red.
• Abercrombie and Fitch, which has spent years and millions courting the gay market (including gay Republicans) is dark green.
• Macy’s, whose marketing and politics are fairly subdued but which earned a “Perfect 100” from the Human Rights Campaign for gay-friendliness (along with – hey, HRC smear victim Best Buy!) – is yellow.

Wow.  On or about July 27, all of the upmarket retailers started taking a dive, more  or less in parallel with Target!  Abercrombie bounced back, of course; Macy’s is down, just a tad more than Target is.

Apparently the market is punishing many companies, regardless of their donations to Tom Emmer!

Or maybe – juuuuust maybe – there was a major announcement about consumer confidence released on or about the 27th that showed bad results for consumer spending or something – a trend that miiiiiight just favor lower-budget stores like Family Dollar, WalMart and Costco, while being a little harsher on slightly higher-concept operations like Macy’s, Abercrombie and Fitch, and Target.

Regardless of their political donations.

Oh, yeah – and while Target is off a bit since July 27, it’s still up over the month.