Shot in the Dark

Category: Chanting Points Memo

  • Chanting Points Memo: Ancient History

    Sign number 30 that the DFL is so scared of Tom Emmer that they don’t even bother washing their underwear anymore; they’re bringing up “the DUI issue again”. It popped up last spring during the endorsing convention – and, rumor has it, one of the big PACs is going to run a big ad buy…

  • Chanting Points Memo: Buying Minnesota With Daddy’s Money

    So far in this campaign, as the DFL hammers its way toward its primary next month, most of the attacks against Tom Emmer have come from a shadowy group, “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”. I’ve busted them repeatedly stretching the truth and/or lying; Channel Five followed suit earlier this week. But who are these people? …

  • Chanting Points Memo: Cue Captain Renault

    There’s still a month until the primaries.  Tom Emmer’s been crisscrossing Minnesota, doing what he does best – meeting people.  In his bio with Bill Salisbury in the PiPress, he estimates he’s met 100,000 Minnesotans.  I’d imagine that translates to 80,000 votes. And the DFL still has a solid month before they have their coronation for…

  • Chanting Points Memo: The Alliance For A Deceitful, Sloppy, Not Very Bright Minnesota

    The “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” – an astroturf group sponsored by a consortium of DFL-linked pressure groups – has been behind much of the smear-mongering against Tom Emmer so far this campaign. They’ve occupied themselves with a klutzy false-flag website, a couple of twitter accounts (one of baldfaced propaganda, and one, “StuffEmmerSays”, that tried to…

  • Chanting Points Memo: The Case Of The Landscaper Who “Got Dirt”

    During the 2006 election, the Star/Tribune ran a story about Alan Fine, the GOP candidate for the Minnesota house against then-candidate, now-representative Keith Ellison. The piece, with a byline from reporters Rochelle Olson and Paul McEnroe, but which reportedly included a lot of reporting from Erik Black, dropped right before the election, and covered a 12-year-old…

  • Chanting Points Memo: When Is A Cut Not A Cut?

    You just can’t keep some people happy. The media and DFL have been chanting for the past week that Emmer hasn’t released his plan for completely re-engineering government.  I pretty well walked through the reasons not to yesterday. But another reason might be that Emmer knows – as anyone who watches the Minnesota DFL can…

  • Stuck On Stupid Wishful Thinking

    The DFL is getting its money’s worth. Figuratively speaking, naturally. After the Strib, MPR and the MinnPost ran pieces that called (on rather specious grounds) for Tom Emmer to release his plan for re-engineering state government, the regional sorosphere is taking up the chanting point.  That’s how the DFL machine works. Since it is a…

  • Chanting Points Memo: Emmer’s Detailed Plan!

    Back during Desert Storm, Saturday Night Live – which still had Phil Hartmann, Dennis Miller, Jan Hooks and Dana Carvey, and was hence still funny at the time – parodied one of the military press conferences that were such a staple of the coverage of that war, way back when. In it, a stoic military…

  • Chanting Points Memo: Coulda Woulda Shoulda

    I could make Scarlett Johannson the happiest woman in the world. Let’s see if Tom Scheck and Erick Black start staking out Ms. Johannson’s house. It might be easier than answering the questions about their coverage of the Emmer campaign. ———- Tom Emmer launched “Emmertruth” – a site dedicated to countering the media’s context-mangling DFL-agenda-m0ngering…

  • Chanting Points Digest: Emmer’s First Six Weeks

    We’ve been covering the DFL’s chanting points for the past month or so. As the DFL still has two months to go until they get to the primary, they still have eight weeks of internecine bloodletting before they actually have to try to unite behind Mark Dayton. And so the regional media and the left-leaning…

  • Chanting Points Memo: The Mindy‘s Thin, Runny Gruel

    Andy Birkey of the Minnesoros “Indpendent” and Bradlee Dean of punk-rock fundamentalist ministry “You Can Run But You Can Not Hide” and AM1280’s “Sons Of Liberty” are so different from each other that Hollywood is reportedly talking about putting them on an island and doing a reality show. Not without reason, of course; Dean is…

  • Chanting Points Memo: “LGA Cuts Are Destroying Minnesota” (Part V)

    Last week, someone asked “what about Rochester”. Interesting questions. The “Big Three” – Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth – are interesting cases in that they have all been run by more-or-less DFL-dominated regimes for all of recent memory; the Norm Coleman/Randy Kelly years in Saint Paul were an anomaly in that you had moderate DFLers…

  • Chanting Points Memo: “LGA Cuts Are Destroying Minnesota!” (Part IV)

    In the first three parts of this series, I showed that the example of government fiscal starvation Jeff Rosenberg used in his plaintive plea for more Local Government Aid (LGA) – Brainerd shutting off some of its streetlights – was not borne out by the numbers.  I also showed that the DFL’s claim that cities are…

  • Chanting Points Memo: “LGA Cuts Are Destroying Minnesota!” (Part III)

    There are a little over five million Minnesotans.  About 4.3 million of them live in “cities” of widely-varying sizes and government types, from plucky Montevideo up to metropolitan Minneapolis, from conservative Mound to neo-Wobbly Duluth. These cities have a few things in common.  They levy property taxes to pay part of their municipal bills –…

  • Chanting Points Memo: Emmer And The Yellow Quote

    Over the years, we’ve become used to the Minnesota Independent’s sloppy, agenda-driven “reporting” on issues. Yesterday, Andy Birkey at the Mindy topped himself in a piece about a “donation” from the Tom Emmer campaign to “You Can Run International” (YCR(, an Annandale-based ministry.  YCR is a fundamentalist group that started as a metal-rap music ministry that…

  • Chanting Points Memo: “LGA Cuts Are Destroying Minnesota!” (Part II)

    Question:  Has your disposable income gone up 44% in the past ten years?  As I noted yesterday, Local Government Aid was originally set up to transfer wealth from the wealthy Twin Cities to smaller towns in then-poor outstate Minnesota.  To a great extent, it worked; outstate Minnesota came a long way very quickly, in what…

  • Chanting Points Memo: LGA Cuts Are Killing Minnesota! (Part 1)

    I wrote about it yesterday:  the regional left wants to make Governor Pawlenty’s cuts to the “Local Government Aid” program a major issue in the campaign. If there is any justice – and if Minnesotans can read numbers – it should backfire badly on the DFL. I wrote yesterday about a piece in Twin Cities…

  • Chanting Points Memo: The “Republican” Horner

    Luke Hellier at MDE finds more background on the “Republican” Tom Horner: “What they (MCCL) set out to do could have a dramatic impact in 1997,” said Tom Horner, of the Bloomington-based public policy firm Himle Horner Inc. “The involvement of the pro-life community makes the end-of-life decisions much more of a political debate than…

  • Chanting Points Memo: The Humphrey Institute Poll

    So yesterday Minnesota DFLers were grinning like toddlers that’d just made a good pants at this MPR report that referred to this Humphrey Institute poll that showed Dayton beating the DFL primary field, and – more importantly – beating Emmer. But the media reports on this poll have been, to be charitable, sloppy.  To be…

  • Chanting Points Memo: Emmer’s “Absences”

    If you believe the Dem’s current chanting points on the subject, you’d think that Tom Emmer had spent the last year at Sandals.  Of course, when they say this they are seemingly oblivious of then-Senator Obama’s 300 missed Senate votes during his presidential campaign (documented all over the place). Don’t they think people remember this?…

  • Chanting Points Memo: The Black Bag

    You pretty much expect the DFL to lie about things; they’re stuck behind an administration that is becoming less popular daily and a Congress that might, maybe, outpoll Charles Manson.  They’re strapped to a Healthcare bill that is about to blow up in their faces, electorally.  And at a time when jobs are tight and…

  • Chanting Points Memo: “Uncertified” Teachers

     If you’ve read anything about education in the past 20 years, you’ve heard that the school systems are crushingly short of science and math teachers. If you’ve had kids in the public school system, you’ll know that the system is even shorter of good math, science and technology teachers.  It’s not a wonder, of course;…

  • Chanting Points Memo: “Emmer Is An Extremist”

    For a while, I wondered if “Tom” wasn’t the MNGOP’s gubernatorial candidate’s middle name.  Listening to the Minnesota media, one might think his first name is “Right-wing-Extremist”. In the meantime, they christened his opponent and erstwhile sparring partner in the House, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, as a “moderate”.  But Rachel Stassen-Berger, writing in the Strib, notes that…

  • Chanting Points Memo: The Green Issues Forum

    The DFL and Media were in full dudgeon over the weekend, as Tom Emmer “missed” a gubernatorial candidates forum attended by the three DFL candidates and the Independence Party schlep. It seemed so clear-cut coming from the Strib: Emmer was invited but did not show for the event. But former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton and…

  • Chanting Points Memo

    From the Dictionary In The Dark: Chanting Point:  (Noun)  Similar to a “talking point”, but intended to be recited by rote (often as part of large real or virtual crowds) rather than critically analyzed. The DFL response to Tom Emmer has largely consisted of what I’ve christened “chanting points”; bits of rhetoric that may or…