Houston “Organizing For America” office closed and director fired after a James O’Keefe operative caught them actively abetting vote fraud disenfranchised the multiple-American community.

One down, many many many to go (including an episode in the video below where our friend Erin Haust visited the OFA office in Hopkins, MN):

And then maybe the Minnesota Office of the Secretary of State!

We spoke with Terry Jacobson, who’s running for MN House in HD49B, and Keith Downey, running for Senate in SD49.

And join us tomorrow or the 56 Club’s cruise on the St. Croix!

…a Scandinavian-American to the bone, a little innate ethnic pessimism is always struggling with my normally optimistic nature.

Deep in my liver, I do feel as if the Democrats could sweep all eight Congressional districts this fall.  Indeed, given that they have an incumbent President, the Dems should  feel humiliated if they don’t win the Presidency and flip both chambers of Congress next month.

So that part of me always has a hard time reacting to news like this:  when adjusted for a more realistic weighting, the latest KSTP/SUSA poll shows Cravaack ahead of Rick Nolan.

Gary Gross (with the odd bit of emphasis added):

First, this KSTP-SurveyUSA poll oversamples Democrats by a 7-point margin. That can’t be justified, especially considering the fact that the Cook Report listed MN-8 as a D+3 district in 2010. Chip’s won over more Iron Rangers, meaning the Cook Report’s PVI rating is more like D+2 this year.

Second, Chip gets 89% of MN-8 Republicans, 6% of MN-8 DFLers and 53% of MN-8 independents.

Third, the proper weighting of the district is 35% DFL, 34% GOP, 31% independent. That means Chip gets 30.2 votes from Republicans, 2.1 votes from DFL voters and 16.5 votes from independents for every 100 voters. That’s 48.8 votes per hundred for Chip. That’s assuming there isn’t an enthusiasm gap, which there is. That enthusiasm gap favors Chip by a pretty solid margin.

Fourth, Rick Nolan gets 7% of Republican votes, 87% of DFL voters and a pathetic 36% of independents. That means Nolan gets 2.4 votes from the GOP, 30.5 votes from the DFL and 11.2 votes from independents per 100 votes. That’s a total of 44.1 votes per 100 for Nolan.

After factoring the enthusiasm gap that favors Chip, this race isn’t as close as the horserace figures indicate. This race is still competitive. Still, this snapshot must have Chip’s campaign smiling.

This race has been the Holy Grail for MInnesota DFLers.  If they don’t beat Cravaack, Duluth will be the new Arnhem.

Project Veritas is back with its own October Surprise:

In it, “Organizing For America” workers in Connecticut and New Jersey (and a director in Texas) directly abet voter fraud.

To evidence like this, the defenders of the status quo bleat “you have no convictions!” – ignoring the fact that we do, and it’s the wrong measure, as our system’s laws are design by people whose main goal is to (let’s be idealistic here) jam warm bodies into the polls on the assumption that “high voter turnout” is a good goal in and of itself.  (More cynically?  Well, you know where I’m going with that, don’t you?)

Nick  Coleman – the same one that used to sneer down his patrician mainstream-media nose at all of us villein bloggers – is blogging up a storm these days. 

He Who Knows Stuff has some advice for A-Klo:

Amy Klobuchar has been working hard to win the endorsement of Republican car dealers, like the ones featured in her campaign ad at the end of this post. But she hasn’t done so well impressing Minnesota progressives who are wondering why the state’s Senior U.S. Senator hasn’t been an outspoken opponent of the two heavy-handed Republican-forced constitutional amendments on the Nov. 6 ballot.

The car dealer ad is pure AKlo — a “She’s the Senator for All Minnesota!” ad about as sharp as mush in a bowl.

She’s sharp enough to know that her popularity – sky-high though the polls show it to be – is the same kind that Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan used to have in North Dakota.  Klobuchar is smart enough (or advised by people smart enough to know) that Minnesota is a purple state, that Barack Obama’s going to have all the coattails of a string bikini, and that she needs to shut up and make nice with everyone and not stick her neck out for anything.

Especially to oppose one amendment that, win or lose, will pin a negative on her, and another one that’s going to win by 3:2 even if the GOP doesn’t smoke the DFL on turnout.

There’s not much there, there with Amy Klobuchar.  But she’s not that dumb.

Coleman:

 The question is: Do Hugely Popular Politicians Still Have an Obligation to Try to Make a Difference?

Heh.  Coleman apparently thought Klobuchar was Paul Wellstone,  Politicians measure “obligations” as closely as engineers measure bridge gussets (which, if memory serves, Nick’s got some trouble with.  And memory does indeed serve).

Part of me isn’t sure that Coleman meant this next passage exactly as it sounds.  Part of me – the part that reads phrases like “do popular politicians have an obligation to make a difference” – thinks he means it exactly as written.  And the third part of me really really hopes he meant it exactly as it sounds (emphasis added):

 And both, at this point, seem likely to pass, in part because there is confusion among many Democrats as to how they should vote.

Are Democrats really such lemmings, or does Nick Coleman really think that’s all they are?

(Note: Requests to speak to Klobuchar, as well as to officials of her campaign, received no response).

Hey! Just like all us regular bloggers!

We’ve had two stories in the past few weeks about traditionally-DFL sinecures softening up, bit by bit.

The first was yesterday; Aaron Brown notes that HD6B – the post-redistricting home of Iron-Range DFL political statue Tom Rukavina – has seen the local paper endorse the Republican challenger, nurse and political newcomer Jason Colangelo, over career DFL/union Jason Metsa:

Aaron “Minnesota” Brown:

In all likelihood, this race will fall easily to Metsa.

But I’m going to keep an eye on 6B because Colangelo has done well in winning over some notable support thus far…Last week he received a remarkably enthusiastic endorsement from the Duluth News Tribune and I predict that editor Bill Hanna is cooking up an epic Mesabi Daily News endorsement for Colangelo after the MDN bludgeoned Metsa before his August primary win over Lorrie Janatopoulos.

Colangelo might be green, but he is following a playbook that I’ve always considered the GOP’s best chance on the Range — unabashedly pro-union, some fairly reasonable ideas for an expanded Range economy, all while preserving the GOP base on social issues. Enough to win? Not likely this year, but if Colangelo “beats the spread” on this one we could a more competitive challenge from him in the future, provided he can handle the heat of increased scrutiny.

This, in “normal” times in Minnesota, is unthinkable.

But these aren’t normal times.  Brown:

But if Rep. Chip Cravaack’s attempt to turn the Range GOP red with a tent revival of mining politics works, watch out here.

And there are rumors filtering down from the Range that Cravaack’s strategy is hitting paydirt in some unexpected places.

More as those rumors get more substantial.

More at noon.

If you’re in Saint Paul this evening, stop by the Hernandez for Congress Taco Fiesta, from 5-8PM.

It’s at 2028 Dayton Avenue in Saint Paul:

View Larger Map

Come on over! Suggested donation is $30 – or feed the whole family for $40!

…that while everyone knows Mary Franson (GOP HD8B) supports the Marriage Amendment…

…that her opponent, retired school teacher and endorsed DFL challenger for the seat Bob Cunniff, hasn’t made his opinion on this bill public yet.  His website and facebook page are silent on the subject.

Just in the interest of free inquiry, it might be good for people to ask Mr. Cunniff what he thinks about this intensely fractious issue.

(Or try to.  His campaign website includes no way of contacting the campaign or the candidate, other than the ‘Volunteer!” page.  You might have to persevere a bit).

If you get an answer, by all means leave a note in the comments.

UPDATE:  Welp, here’;s a real profile in courage (via commenter Jay McCue):

He winds up and gives that issue a 55-yard kick down the road.  “It’s up to the voters”.  Right, that’s correct.  But how do you stand on it?

The Minnesota left has spent this entire year cycling through one rationalization after another to try to inveigle voters into spiking the Voter ID Amendment – which I’m predicting will pass by 60-40, if not 66-33, this fall.

The latest? “It’s going to harm veterans”.

Dave Thul – who’s served heaven only knows how many tours overseas – is back to blogging, and with style.  He’s back into the game with a flensing of this “issue” over at True North – Part One and Part Two.

In part one, Thul’s debunking of Secretary of State Ritchie is complete and comprehensive; I’m not going to try to pick and choose pull-quotes.  I’ll give you the conclusion…:

Secretary Ritchie’s outrageous claim that military voters will be prevented from voting is based on false propaganda (address required on the Photo ID), assumes the worst interpretation of ‘substantially equivalent’ even though that is not in line with the spirit or intent of the law, and then posits the concept that NCO’s and officers in uniform will be complicit in preventing military voters from casting their ballot by refusing to attest to their identity. The fact that Secretary Ritchie can repeat this claim with a straight face would be laughable if it wasn’t so insulting to the intelligence of Minnesota voters. But the fact that Sec Ritchie has singled out military families and veterans groups to make this claim to is over the top partisan political campaigning, and it has started a backlash.

…and charge you to go read the whole thing.

He promised a backlash; that comes in part two; Secretary Ritchie has been using state resources to campaign against Voter ID with Veterans and Gold Star groups:

Last week, the Gold Star Mothers of Minnesota brought to light a disturbing situation; Secretary of State Mark Ritchie using state resources to actively campaign against the Voter ID amendment. But it wasn’t just an isolated incident, Sec Ritchie also used his office to make false claims about military voters being prevented from voting to another group- The Minnesota Veterans of Foreign Wars.

The Minnesota VFW puts out a quarterly newsletter called the Gopher Oversea’r. Mailed out in a newspaper format, it includes messages from the state commander and ladies auxiliary president, news and events around the state of interest to veterans, and a short OpEd section with letters and commentary. The last issue included a commentary from SecState Ritchie that was so outrageous and over the top, it drew a firestorm of criticism from VFW members around the state. In response, the editor of the newsletter sent an email to all VFW post commanders and officers that included an apology as well as several letters representative of the angry response. This email was important because the next issue of the Gopher Oversea’r will not be published until after the election.

That the Secretary of State feels compelled to run roughshod over state law and ethics to try to fight against Voter ID is a tell to the disingenuity of their protests about how much the amendment will supposedly cost or who it’ll “disenfranchise”.  The DFL has never cared about squandering tax money, and they don’t care about rights.   But Voter ID will gut a key source of their votes – duplicate, fictional and illegal voters.

And when that’s at stake, the law and ethics take a back seat.

Who’s a better actor; Scarlett Johannson or Donald Rumsfeld?

Now, if you’re a sophisticated polling operation like the Star/Tribune “Minnesota Poll” – a Mason-Dixon joint – it’s an easy question; Ms. Johannson will likely outpoll the former Secretary of Defense.

Of course, you may respond “but measuring a Secretary of Defense in terms of acting skill is meaningless!”

And if you say that, then you’re already too smart to buy the latest Minnesota poll.

———-

The final Star/Tribune Minnesota poll of this long, nauseating week was released this morning – and it has two conclusions:

After two years of budget battles, vetoes and the longest state shutdown in Minnesota history, DFL Gov. Mark Dayton is winning the popularity battle with the GOP-controlled Legislature, a Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found.

A slim majority of 53 percent of likely voters say they approve of Dayton’s job performance, while 31 percent disapprove. Another 16 percent say they are undecided.

For the majority leaders of the Legislature, the poll found 51 percent disapprove of the job they are doing. Another 21 percent approve and 24 percent are undecided.

This poll really needs two responses.

Damnation With Faint Praise

The poll notes that Governor Dayton scored a 53 percent approval rating.

Now, on its face, that’s not a good number.  Under 50%, says conventional wisdom, is trouble – and Dayton is a governor that’s done virtually nothing in two years but make odd, slurred pronouncements before scuttling away into his office under the cover of a fawning media.

But as always, you have to look below “the face”.  Of course, the poll has the same absurd, worse-than-Watergate-level turnout model – Democrats 41, Republicans 28 – as all the other polls this week.

However, for some reason the Strib doesn’t favor us with the full range of crosstabs; while reporter Jim Ragsdale notes the Governor’s geographic strengths and weaknesses, at no point in the article is the approval of Republicans or Democrats explained.

Is this an accident?  Or would showing it reveal something about the poll the Strib doesn’t want us to see?

Because if we assume Democrats are over-polled by 3%, and that they were the vast majority of the “approve” numbers, then Dayton’s approval drops down to right around 50% – and the “disapprove” numbers jump into the high thirties if we assume most Republicans disapprove of Dayton’s job.

Of course, it’s all guesswork until the Strib releases those crosstabs.

Damnation By Packing Peanuts

Of course, the numbers on the legislature are just plain nonsense

For the majority leaders of the Legislature, certain trouble spots stand out: Only 24 percent of voters in the metro suburbs outside of Hennepin and Ramsey — which include strong GOP areas — approve of their leadership, while more than half disapprove. In southwestern Minnesota, 57 percent disapprove. They had slightly stronger showings in Rochester, where 30 percent approve, and in the northwest corner of the state at 33 percent.

This is just a stupid thing to measure.

Grading a legislature, as an entire body, all together, is like asking what a football fan thinks of the NFC Central Division.  You will get a dog’s breakfast of opinions, or no opinion – because the division is not the focus (except for bracketing playoffs).

One startling figure is that the GOP-controlled Legislature only broke even among Republican voters: 31 percent approve, 32 percent disapprove and 37 percent are undecided. Undecided numbers are higher throughout the Legislature’s poll, suggesting many voters do not have a clear opinion on the topic.

Well, dug.

I disapproved of the Legislature’s job!   The GOP caucuses gave away too much money in 2011 and caved on the stadium last year without getting anything useful in return!  I give them a “D”.

Does that mean I’m going to support Mark Dayton?  Not if you held a gun to my head (not to give the SEIU any ideas).

It’s a meaningless number.

So Why Run A Poll With A Meaningless Number?

That one’s easy; it gives the Strib a nice tidy number – 53-21 approval ratings! – to toss in front of people who don’t pay much attention to what the numbers actually mean.  These voters – the “Low-Information Voters”, people who retain headlines from the Mainstream Media and believe things that appear in the Strib – are the target for this sort of polling, or as it’s known in the world of logic, a “non-sequitur”.  The Strib is comparing apples and axles, just like comparing Donald Rumsfeld with Scarlett Johannsen.

While the individual numbers might be valid (they’re not – remember, the turnout model is absurd), at least in terms of math used to generate the numbers we see – but even if both numbers were in fact dead-nut accurate, what the Strib has done is created a phony horserace.

And why would the Strib splash a phony, non-sequitur comparison on its front page when it only serves to show Mark Dayton with a decisive (if phony) lead…

…oh, wait.

Never mind.

More Monday.

As we’ve been noting this week, the DFL candidate in the 3rd CD, Brian Barnes, may be a heck of a guy – but his campaign has been making some odd choices.

Their campaign signs – one of which I finally saw on the street the other day – still  violate FEC law. which is all nit-picky and anal-retentive, but I sure didn’t make up the law.  They still apparently are either conjuring up polls from the ether, or have found a pollster that’ll do polling for free or, more likely, are using internal push polls to try to convince potential donors to pony up for what will likely be a quixotic bid for office.  And one of Barnes’ “political organizers” has been disparaging small town and suburban people, who make up approximately all of Paulsen’s district.

The Barnes campaign (push-polls notwithstanding) are generally considered a long shot by the Democrat establishment.  And like all long-shot campaigns, Barnes’ has to try to find something to try to get some traction.

Some long-shot campaigns overcome that obstacle via ruthless budgeting, solid  organizing and above all, relentless hard work; see Chip Cravaack in 2010.

Others – the ones who can’t manage the budgeting, work and organizing – have to find some Hail Mary or another, something that’ll give ’em a hook to get them some mindshare, some little slice of the public consciousness.  See the Tim Penny and Tim Barkley gubernatorial race in 1998, which used a former pro wrestler as an elaborate marionette to serve as the face for their campaign.

Barnes’ campaign seems to have chosen the old standby, “have your people relentlessly repeat a set of chanting points” (along with the DFL’s usual “bank on fawning media coverage“).

Wait – that’s no old standby.  That’s because it doesn’t actually work.

But no matter.  The Barnes campaign seems to be focusing on having its people relentlessly repeat a couple of chanting points in hopes that one of them catches on.

• “He’s Not Really A Moderate”:  The theory, of course, is that the “Moderate” voters in “purple” districts like Edina, and “blue” districts like Bloomington, will repel from talk that Paulsen “votes like Michele Bachmann”.  On the other hand in an election cycle where the smart people know that we’re headed for a fiscal cliff, I – an obstreporous conservative – see that as a feature, not a bug.   The real point is, people – outside the wonk class – vote for a person and a record and a number of issues.  Not a wonk’s label.  Paulsen’s conservative enough for me – I wish he represented CD4 (note to self – vote for Tony Hernandez as many times as Mark Ritchie allows you to).  Chanting “you’re like teh Bachmann” is not a policy.
• “Where’s the public debate?”:  This is the latest one.  For months, Barnes’ people chanted “where’s the debate?”  Then, two debates – one at KSTP-TV and one with the League of Women Voters – were scheduled.  The chanting point changed to “where’s the public debate – as if a debate that Barnes’ people and the DFL could flood with DFL lemmings and SEIU droogs with photocopied questions would actually get people to the bottom of the issues.  Quick – where’s Betty McCollum’s public debate?  Keith Ellison’s?

In re this last – the Barnes campaign is reportedly mailing around a video of Paulsen “dodging” a question at a town hall back in 2009.  Unstated; it’s a question from former Minnesota leftyblogger and one-man tracking firm Dusty Trice, and it’s a pointed trap question intended to look bad on Trice’s video.

It didn’t work; in fact, Paulsen’s performance at that particular town hall (not a debate, mind you) drew this compliment from conservative talk show host Jack Tomczak:

Ok, I was kidding. I’m a kidder, I kid. It wasn’t Tomczak. It was leftyblogger “Two Putt” Tommy Johnson, the Twin Cities’ foremost leftyblog journalist, who is generally conceded to be the  DFL’s  intellectual standard-bearer.

And if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

———-

Someone asked me the other day – “why are you burning up so much time on the Barnes campaign.

As usual, two reasons.

• If you’re a Republican toiling away in SD67, or CD5, just know that there are DFLers that are having just as much fun – and spending a lot more money than your candidate in doing it.
• And if you’re a Republican in the 3rd CD?  Don’t believe the hype.  Oh, turn out to the polls; there are so many things that we need to crush with an epic turnout this November; Obama, Obamacare, the DFL’s drive for majorities in the Legislature, the Strib poll and so very very very much more.   But this is not the speed bump they’re looking for.

And a note to the Barnes campaign; instead of badgering Paulsen about debates, try running a coherent campaign that gives the voter an actual reason to vote for you.

Hope I’m not giving too much away, there…

On paper, the Minnesota Third Congressional District is “purple”.  And by “on paper”, I mean “In the Strib“.

Yes, for decades the district was represented by moderate, IR-era Republicans like Jim Ramstad, Bill Frenzel and Clark McGregor.

And Erik Paulsen has had to work with a lot of different constituencies to win in the Third; he’s done it by showing ample respect to the parts of his district that aren’t, perhaps, solidly GOP – places like Brooklyn Park, Edina and Bloomington…

The MN 3rd Congressional District

…even as he’s worked hard in conservative strongholds like Maple Grove.

And it’s worked.  Paulsen beat Ashwin Madia by something like eight points to succeed Ramstad in 2008 – a lousy year for Republicans – and destroyed Jim Meffert in 2010 by over twenty.

This year’s DFL candidate is  Brian Barnes.  We’ve talked about Barnes before; he claimed the Minnesota police unions were “extreme right-wing” (they’ve endorsed Amy Klobuchar) and his campaign misrepresented Representative Paulsen’s position on a controversial bill.

So far, Barnes’ campaign has “opportunities for improvement” – even compared with the non-entity Meffert, to say nothing of fhe relatively savvy Madia bid.

More bizarre, perhaps, have been some of his back-office choices.

We’ll come back to that.

——————

If you come to the big city from rural America, you get used to the cool city kids sniffing down their noses at you.

And so seeing a tweet like this (which has since apparently been deleted from Twitter)?

@JenE4rmTheBlock
Small town ppl seem to not understand how the real world works
8/31/12 7:54 PM

Pretty run of the mill provincialism – right?

Sure, why not?

Now, how about this one?

This I’d be more prone to call “bigotry” – pretending to know the hearts and souls of people she’s apparently decided to disparage, or just filling in her own stereotypes, based on perhaps the least dispositive trait a person can have; where they live.

Of course, it’s Twitter.  And if there’s a medium with a lower barrier of entry than blogs, it’s Twitter.  The format lends itself to breezy generalization and letting out one’s inner douchebag.  I’ll cop to it; it sometimes brings out the worst in me, too.

But if you’re a candidate running for office in a district that includes towns like St. Michael,  Loretto, Albertville, Rockford and other exurban holdouts as well as burbs like Edina, Bloomington, Minnetonka and the like, you might think it’d be bad form to  employ someone who practices active bigotry toward a big, poitically-active chunk of your constituency.

But Barnes does.  This is “JenE4rmTheBlock”‘s business card:

(I’m not going to post the Instagram link to the photo under the same name as the Twitter feed. It includes an email and what appears to be a personal phone number. If someone wants to claim “it’s not teh same person” by way of trying to impugn the story, I’ve got it. It’s her).

But I’m not doing this to kick dirt on Ms. “4rmTheBlock”.  This is aimed squarely at Brian Barnes. campaign

Candidate Barnes:  is it your position that the people of Saint Bonifacius or Luverne “don’t get how the world works”, or that the folks in Minnetonka, Maple Grove and Bloomington are “Racists” and ‘Homophobes?”   Your “political organizer” has just insulted two groups of people who, together, make up roughly 100% of the district you’re running for.

Does this seem like a good campaign plan?

———-

So we’ve got editing problems, some magical invisible freebie polling, and a “Free-spirited” staff.  What else could go wrong with Barnes’ campaign?

More tomorrow.

I’ve lived in Saint Paul for most of the past 25 years.

And in that time, the half-life of a GOP campaign sign in my neighborhood is roughly five days.  They – every single one of them – gets stolen or destroyed.

“It’s just kids out pranking” say the local DFLers.  “There’s nothing political about it”.  But my DFLer neighbors’ signs remain blissfully undisturbed.

(And at least one source reports to me that they’ve seen a middle-aged woman in a mini-van stealing Tony Hernandez signs.  Pranking kids?  I think freaking not).

Whomever it is, it means either…:

• The DFL in Saint Paul runs a perennial campaign to silence dissent, or…
• DFL-leaning “Kids” (and “moms”) have no respect for difference of opinion.

Neither of them is a particularly flattering verdict of the Saint Paul DFL.

I got this email earlier this week:

This is a burned Vote Yes sign in the Macalester Groveland neighborhood of St. Paul.

There are several Vote No signs up and down our block. All unscathed.

This needs reporting.

This is not the first time this has happened.

More of that respect for diversity, I guess.

This week, we’ve been looking at the DFL-endorsee Brian Barnes and his campaign for the MN Third Congressional District seat held by Erik Paulsen.  Yesterday we noted they bobbled a niggling but, er, Federal regulation on their new batch of lawn signs.

Today?  We’ll get serious.

Earlier this week, the Barnes campaign sent a fundraising email to their mailing list; they just spent a ton of money getting a Minneapolis creative agency to produce a TV ad, and those don’t come cheap.

That’s fine.  Everybody does it.

But here’s where it gets interesting.  The third paragraph in the email says (I’ve added the emphasis):

Every dollar at this point goes toward getting our message to persuadable voters. We have been steadily closing the gap on Congressman Paulsen. We started with voters supporting Barnes 24% and Paulsen 39% in May, and we’ve gained 20 points to his 8! In fact, he is beginning to lose voters since we’ve been successfully showing voters he only talks like Jim Ramstad, but he votes more extreme than Michele Bachmann.

Let’s back that up for a moment; amid the awkward phrasing (are they claiming the race is 47-44 or not?), there are some questions.

What polling?

According to sources familiar with the history of the race, Barnes’ former campaign manager, Tom Beckfield, last month said that there had been no polling in this race.  That’s as of August.  And we know that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Dems’ national campaign organization and warchest, had done no polling in the 3rd CD – or at least they’d not released any into the public domain.  So if Barnes has national polls, they’re illegal.

Beyond that?  The campaign included no polling expenditures in their FEC reports through July.

But the fundraising email claims to have tracked results from May through the present.  Via what polling?

The source notes that the Barnes campaign is doing intermal push-polling.  Are these the results that the email is trumpeting?

Since the campaign reports no polling expenses, and the DCCC hasn’t done it, what else could it be?

If you see Brian Barnes, ask him if you could.

(There are times I wonder – what if we had a group – perhaps a whole industry, with printing presses and transmitters and stuff, whose job it could be to check this sort of crap out?)

Tomorrow:  If you live in Waconia or Minnetonka, one of Barnes’ staffers has something to say to you.

Protect My Vote finally has an ad up:

The other day, I took a rare drive thorough the western suburbs.  I don’t get out there much, so it’s always fun to drive through a place that’s been good Republican territory – or at the very least, a place with a vigorous two-party government (which most of the “safe Republican” districts in this state are, in stark contrast to the one-party DFL gulags of Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth). 

And I gotta say – I love the smell of a Republican-dominated district in the morning.  It smells like…prosperity.  And competence.  And hope.

It’s campaign season, so I noticed a lot of campaign signs.  There were lots of DFL signs sprinkled with healthy clusters of GOP signs in Bloomington.  The balance shifted decisively the farther north and west I got – Minnetonka, Maple Grove and the like.  Lots of signs for city council, Henco Commission and of course Erik Paulsen.

One that I completely missed?  Third District DFLer Brian Barnes.  40-odd days before the campaign, I saw not a single Barnes sign.

Now, we’re told that’s about to change.  Candidate Barnes tweeted this, last Wednesday:

Lawn signs are in! Get one this Saturday at one of our Day of Action events: facebook.com/events/4455344…#MN3#stribpoltwitter.com/BarnesForMN/st…

— Brian Barnes (@BarnesForMN) September 19, 2012

(Say what you will about Barnes’ politics – whatever they are – but that is one adorable baby).

But let’s not focus on babies.   Look at the sign.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Now, I don’t know much about Federal Elections Commission law – other than that it’s incredibly intrusive, and that Sheldon from “Big Bang Theory” isn’t anal-retentive enough to follow it.  I’ve seen campaigns for federal-level office – Senate, Congress – have to completely redesign entire literature pieces, signs and other products to fit some picayune codecil or another in FEC law.

But here’s the book – literally – for Congressional Candidates and their committees.  All 180-odd pages of it.  It’s the sort of stuff campaign managers and communications people make the big bucks to know.

And tucked away on page 66 is this little bon mot:

A disclaimer notice must be clearly and conspicuously displayed. A notice is not clearly and conspicuously displayed if the print is difficult to read or if

the placement is easily overlooked. 110.11(c)(1)…In printed communications, the disclaimer must be contained within a printed box set apart from the contents of the communication. The print of the disclaimer must be of sufficient size to be “clearly readable” by the recipient of the communication…

So where’s the “Paid for by…” whomever disclaimer?

In this photo, it’s that little squiggle of white tucked into the lowest of the stripes on the “flag”.

Aesthetically, it works for me – I mean, I didn’t write that FEC crap – but that’s no box,, and “inside the stripe” is the very definition of not “set apart from the contents of the communication”.

The FEC goes on:

…and the print must have a reasonable degree of color contrast between the background and the printed statement. 110.11(c)(2)(ii) and (iii). Black text in 12-point font on a white background is one way to satisfy this requirement for printed material measuring no more than 24 inches by 36 inches

While FEC regulations make me look for fiber supplements, we’re on my turf now.

Thin white type on a red background is a fairly low-contrast combination, especially on a sign that ‘s supposed to be viewed from a distance.  Indeed, for the 10% of men who have some degree of red-green color-blindness and depend on contrast to see reds and greens, it is to some degree or another nearly unreadable at all.

If these are the signs they handed out last Saturday, then they’re going to have a problem.

(And I’ll solicit feedback from my readers in the Third.  Are you seeing these signs out there?)

———-

Now,  this is pretty niggling stuff.  True, it’s the stuff campaigns pay “consultants” the big bucks to know – and Barnes’ campaign has certainly ponied up for consultants.  Like, thousands and thousands of dollars worth.   And it does have the salutary effect of infringing federal campaign regs – so even if I think it’s no big deal, there’s a building full of intensely anal-retentive people in DC who likely do.

It’s just the first – and, let’s be honest, the most understandable and least not-ready-for-prime-time – of a series of flubs the Barnes campaign has put out in recent weeks.

———-

As a complete side issue, I’m going to make the first of my fearless  predictions;  Barnes may do better than Jim Meffert in 2010 – but not much.  I say Paulsen wins in November by 16.

Pat Hall is running for Senate in Senate District 57. Here’s his website.

John Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives is demanding the U of M release the video of Governor Dayton’s speech to the Humphrey Institute, which we discussed earlier this week.

Here’s Gilmore’s email to the U of M, which explains it better than I could:

Email to U of M General Counsel

If, as Gilmore notes, the U really did claim it was “too expensive” to videotape the Governor, and that local TV stations taped the event but are sitting on it (why?) – well, what’s the U protecting?

I live in the Fourth CD – St. Paul, Ramsey and an unfortunate tail of Washington counties – and I’ve focused mostly on that Congressional race so far.

But if you’re a conservative, you need to pay attention to the race in CD8, where Chip Cravaack – one of the single greatest Cinderella stories of the 2010 cycle – is fighting a very tough re-election bid.

He’s up against Rick Nolan, an old-school northwoods ultraliberal DFLer who served in Congress back in the statist seventies.  While the MN DFL is an intellectual throwback to a time when neither US industry nor the notion of big government had any real challenges, Nolan is a literal throwback:

• Jobs be damned:  Nolan sided with Twin Cities environmentalists and the EPA to block the PolyMet mine – and the 500 jobs it’d have brought to an area that could really, really use 500 jobs.
• We All Belong To Government: Back when he was in Congress, he repeatedly voted to jack up small business taxes – and has given us no indication he’d be any less a tax-extremist than Barack Obama or Mark Dayton.
• A One-Man Death Panel: Nolan supports Obamacare, which would gut the Medicare that so many of his constituents depend on.

The American Action Network just released an infographic about Nolan:

It’s suitable for framing and sending to any relatives you have up north.

Or just emailing.  Whatever.

The DFL is trying to tell northern Minnesota that they can return to their glory days of the 1960’s and 1970’s by returning to the government of the era.  It’s just not true.

Mark Dayton gave a speech the other day.

John Gilmore at MN Conservatives heard the audio.

And we’ll get to that.  But first, the review:

Gov. Dayton’s first two years have been abysmal. What was it he wanted to do as governor anyway? Wouldn’t a house and senate controlled by republicans offer him the perfect opportunity to lead? To show compromise? To get things done as these political types like to pretend they can? If one was a real leader instead of a lost soul looking for external housing to shore up the inner, yes. But a leader is not who Gov. Dayton is and it is not who he will be in the coming two years, either.

John’s a good friend of this blog.  But I’m not sure whether he’s overestimating Dayton, or underestimating him.

On the one hand, the entire body of evidence that Mark Dayton has ever been that kind of politician is…the body of Mark Dayton’s spoken record claiming it.

On the other hand?  Mark Dayton, his beliefs, his “ideas” and “ideals” and “policy initiatives” – are about as relevant as mine are to the job – because Mark Dayton isn’t really the governor.  Indeed, when they paint Mark Dayton’s official gubernatorial portrait – hopefully in two years – it should look a little like this:

It’s an intercom speaker.  Dayton occupies a seat with the sole mission of repeating, like that intercom speaker, what Alita Messinger and Elliot Seid and Javier Morillo and Tom Dooher to say.

And when he doesn’t have electric cables tied to him, figuratively, to carry their messages, he may as well be that intercom speaker; he’s about as fluent a public speaker as a disconnected intercom.

Back to Gilmore:

Last week the Governor, sounding like a vaguely fascist mandarin, simply insisted without any intellectual depth or sustained engagement that taxes must increase because of his perceived need of all that government must do. His idea of the size & scope of government is not open to discussion. There is no opting out from it because he knows best. What’s that called again?

He made his statement at what, until just yesterday, I had been led to believe was simply a speech reported on by the press. Instead, as MinnPost reported the day before (as did the Pioneer Press), it was a University Lecture. MinnPost polished the knob by saying that the title “university lecturer” could be added to Mark Dayton’s resume. No, really.

Yet what shocked is that this was a lecture grandly titled: “Minnesota’s Future: Challenges and Opportunities” given to the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs Policy Fellows (there’s more intellectual diversity among supporters of Ron Paul by orders of magnitude; the Fellows are the stuff of David Mamet’s nightmares). This was a liberal/progressive/left confab with Little Lord Fauntleroy in attendance.

Now, listening to Mark Dayton speak is, to this speech teacher’s kid, a singularly masochistic thought.  The guy has the diction of Michael Stipe circa 1984.  He’s not a monotone – he’s got two or three tones, really.

And that’s just style points:

I listened to the audio of the Governor’s 25 minute speech. It is appallingly bad. To learn only after the fact that it was a university lecture proper for a set of fellows was mind boggling. He spoke from notes as best from what I could tell. Meandering, at times pointless, at others a non-sequitur minefield, his speech revealed that there is serious trouble with our Chief Executive.

Here’s the problem:

But wait there’s more! The event was closed to the public.

Pardon? Is this possible? Is Common Cause Minnesota on it? From whence shall our help come? Surely the event was taped and surely I will get my hands on it. Try making it private. The entire speech and question and answer session should be posted on the Humphrey School’s website without delay. This event was not a private function.

Huh.  Odd, that.

Where are Common Cause?  The ACLU?  All the usual watchdogs?  MPR’s “Poligraph?”

But here’s the real question:

Why would the press acquiesce in this? Access? Or just the usual hot dish politics? Both?

That’s easy.  For some of the media, it’s access.

For others, it’s that they see themselves as the DFL’s Praetorian Guard.

Remember – after over a decade of hearing about the Governor’s history of alcohol abuse and treatment, of mental illness and concomitant prescriptions for various psychotropic medication, the sum total of the Twin Cities mainstream media’s coverage of Candidate Dayton’s chemical and psychological history was one, single, solitary piece in the Strib by Rachel Stassen-Berger, in January 2010 – roughly nine months before anyone outside the wonk class gave a crap about the election.

Our Governor’s visual performance at this public event is what is being deliberately withheld from the public. What an odd thing to say about Minnesota politics.

Nothing odd about it.

Nothing new, either.

During a weekend where a casual listen to National Public Radio programming repeatedly, er, repeated that the economy double-dog-is in recovery, and Mitt Romney is probably doomed, I got to hear the network ask itself and its listeners:  Is National Public Radio biased?

This was the question addressed by NPR’s “On The Media” over the weekend.

The program, hosted by Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield, with some help from NPR’s Ira Glass (host of “This American Life”, which probes the obsessions of America’s white liberal upper-middle-class), ran the question a couple of different ways – listen at your leisure – including via some people who believe NPR is conservative.

Of course, bias is hard to measure, especially if you camouflage it as carefully as NPR does.

But here’s an easy example:  when Brooke Gladstone refers to the conservative response to NPR’s firing of Juan Williams, she referred to the response as “the Fox outrage”.

Because naturally Fox News – dog whistle as it is for liberals – is the voice of all of American conservatism, right?

Better example:  in the program, Gladstone plays a piece (while interviewing a “conservative volunteer”) in which an NPR reporter asks a commentator “if the country can afford” a tax break for corporations building domestic factories.

Gladstone’s reposnse: “there was a conservative response!”

And on one level, that’s true.  But on another?  The question itself could only come from someone with a purely “progressive” perspective; the idea that money exists first as government revenue, then as the property of those who earn it, is a purely liberal one.

A reporter who was truly detached from any politics might have phrased the question “so what’ll that do to tax revenue?” rather than “can we afford…” with the implied “to spend money via a tax cut”.

Listen to the whole thing.  Feel free to comment.

But when you do, remember; on NPR, the economy is perking right along, and the polls show us Mitt Romney – who, incidentally, favors cutting NPR funding – has already lost.

PS:  We must be between legislative sessions at the state and national level; Gladstone pointed out that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives 2% of its funding from the government.  That’s the same thing Minnesota Public Radio says – when we’re between sessions.  That changes, of course, the moment there’s a serious challenge to public radio funding in the legislature, when the message changes to “look at all the misery that will befall this state if the funding is touched in any way”.

Survey USA polls show that the Voter ID Amendmennt appears to be cleared for landing – barring, naturally, a major change in the landscape – while the Marriage Amendment could be a squeaker.

Let’s start with the Marriage Amendment.

At first glance, the news is good; the amendment is up 50-43.  Now, in elections for Constitutional Amendments, blanks ballots are counted as “no” votes.  So if every single “Undeicded” in this poll either votes “no” or doesn’t vote on the amendment, it flails 51-48.  On the one hand, that seems unlikely; it’s a lot more likely that some of the undecideds will break for the amendment; if an eighth of the undecideds vote “yes”, the amendment passes in a 50-plus-one-vote to 50-minus-one-vote squeaker.

Of course, it’s unrealistic to expect that the landscape will stay the same.  Both sides are going to pour money into this state on this amendment in the next seven weeks.  Given the deep pockets behind the left’s “grassroots” efforts, I suspect they’ll deploy a lot more money.  I suspect, as I have all along, that his vote is going to be a tight one.

Voter ID, on the other hand?

The proposed Voter ID Amendment is unchanged since the last round of polling, over a month ago.  It’s ahead by a 2:1 margin, with only 7% undecided.  IF every single undecided vote is a “no” or an abstention, the measure will pass with a 3:2 margin.

The “yes”  vote crushes among all age groups – even moreso among young voters (which makes sense; they’re the ones that see their classmates being approached to take part in the scams); it wins among every party and ideological stripe except among Democrats and self-identified liberals, and across all regions, income brackets and levels of education.

This measure is going to pass resoundingly.

It goes a little something like this:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to coerce the livelihoods from another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the superior and unequal station to which the Theories of Keynes and Bloomsbury entitle them, a decent respect to the needs of government requires that they should declare other peoples’ property to be public property first, and their own last.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equally vital belongings of Government, that they are endowed by their Government with certain unalienable Duties, that among these are to support the government that makes us all so very equal.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted upon Men, deriving their just powers from, paradoxically, their power.

Governor Dayton has an odd idea of what unites us as a people, and of what this nation is supposed to be all about.

It starts as the same old story…:

Dayton told a group at the University of Minnesota today that his administration is coming up with a plan to overhaul the entire tax code to make the tax system fairer to lower and middle income people. He didn’t offer specifics but said his plan would continue to include an income tax hike on the state’s top 2 percent of earners.

…but quickly devolves into a big toke off the Obama/Soros/Messinger kool-aid-filled water pipe:

Dayton also criticized Republicans in the Legislature and in Congress for being reluctant to raise taxes to pay for new programs.

“This unwillingness to pay taxes and seeing it as a threat to our freedom and our liberty and our way of life, to me, is going to be the death of this country if it’s not corrected,” Dayton said.

You heard him right.

The desire to keep what one earns rather than seeing it squandered, the spirit of dissent against the idea that the fruit of your labor belongs to government first and you, eventually, maybe?   That’s the threat to the nation!

All you peasants have got to quit being so uppity!

Your nobles have spoken!

Funny you should ask!

I was at the 4th CD meeting we discussed the other day.

I’m going to need at least a day to write about it.  And I’d rather not profane 9/11 with it.

Tomorrow.  Maybe.

In their campaign to take down Chip Cravaack, the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota has just launched the dumbest campaign in the history of stupid ABM campaigns, “Keeping up with the Cravaacks”.

The message:  “A lifetime of service, savings, prudent investment and hard work leading to prosperity are something to be mocked”.

This, as the DFL’s environmentalist pals do their best to lower “the average Northern Minnesotan’s” income.

This is the Minnesota DFL in action.