I’ve never cared much for Radiohead – but you gotta hand it to lead mope Thom Yorke; he nailed that whole “end of an era” thing long before anyone else:

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is warning the music industry is on the brink of collapse, insisting young musicians should resist signing record deals because the major labels will “completely fold” within months.

The British rockers broke away from their longtime label, EMI, in 2007 and went on to embrace the new digital era with the release their seventh album, In Rainbows, which they offered up over the internet and allowed fans to choose the price.

These days music is pretty much a give-away; the money is in the touring and live appearances – the things that can’t be put up on BitTorrent.

That’s why in some ways it’s better never to have been signed in the first place.  Getting signed meant getting an “advance” from the record company.  The advance had to pay for recording, videos and touring, and had to be paid back out of touring revenues and royalties…

…if any.

And if you were one of the 90-odd percent of bands whose albums never got airplay or significant sales, and whose live touring careers never took off, that meant you were in debt from the beginning of your “career” which, if you were one of those 90-odd percent of bands that never took off, was going to be short; labels in the seventies would drop artists that didn’t turn a profit after two albums; by the nineties, one album was all a new artist got.

In the meantime, many artists that never got signed to “the big time” but stuck with touring and built thriving local and regional followings – including recording and selling their own CDs – are doing fairly well.  Sometimes really well.

And they’re the lucky ones:

Yorke has now issued a warning to upcoming artists, urging them not to sign traditional record deals because they would be tying themselves to “the sinking ship”…He says, “It will be only a matter of time – months rather than years – before the music business establishment completely folds. (It will be) no great loss to the world.”

Expect the Federal Trade Commission to advocate socializing the music industry any day now.

The big problem – well, one of many big problems – with the institutional media is that for most of recent memory they have regarded themselves almost as a band of monks from the high priesthood of truth and knowledge, as if “journalism” is some sort of aescetic monastic calling, a pledge to an ink-stained life for the greater good of the world around one.

And like all monastic orders, there are rituals and traditions:

Helen Thomas wasn’t celebrated as a journalist so much as a monument to journalism’s historical legacy. She kept her front-row seat, he column, and her steady stream of awards for no reason other than she always had. And the reverence she inspired had little to do with her work and far more to do with the political media’s sense of institutional self-importance. Helen Thomas wasn’t a very good columnist, but she was a living symbol of a media age past—and the press corps couldn’t let her go.

But there’s a sinister side to this.  “Journalism” is desperately trying to save itself.  The free market is a tough row to hoe, but some news operations have managed to slim down and find a business model that works.

But the Federal Trade Commission  is proposing buffing up Big Journalism with lots and lots of government money – building on this sense of pseudo-religious sentiment:

These days, journalists have successfully inculcated a similar sense of sentimental reverence for the media in the federal government. As the media transitions into the digital age and old business models look increasingly shaky, both the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are investigating how the government can prop up journalistic institutions edging past their prime. And the spirit that drove Washington’s press corps to endlessly celebrate Helen Thomas despite her thoroughly mediocre output is the same one driving these agencies’ efforts.

A recent discussion draft from the FTC titled “Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism” is only the latest example. Its implicit view is that because the news industry of old is struggling, the federal government needs to look for ways to prop it up. The paper starts with the assumption that, thanks to shrinking newspaper revenues and staff, there now exist “gaps in news coverage” (though aside from a brief mention of reduced reporting staff to file statehouse and Capitol reports—many of which were redundant—it hardly makes an attempt to spell out what these gaps are). And although the report admits that some of those alleged gaps are being filled by upstart online news organizations, it warns that they are small, and may not be capable of filling the gaps, whatever they are, on their own.

The answer, naturally, is socialism:

Naturally, that’s where the FTC comes in. The paper contains a raft of proposals to subsidize, sponsor, support and otherwise “save” the news business. Not all of them are rotten: Increased government transparency and anti-trust exemptions are both ideas worth considering. But most of the ideas seek to include local grants for investigative reporting, national funds for local reporting, increased subsidies for existing public broadcasting, and even a journalism division of AmeriCorps to “ensure that young people who love journalism will stay in the field”—as if what journalism lacks is a supply of earnest, doe-eyed youngsters indebted to a federally-run program for their careers. These aren’t proposals to save journalism so much as to save the romance of journalism—the same romance that kept Helen Thomas secure in her press room seat—and to pay for that romance with taxpayer dollars.

The answer should be a Constitutional amendment ensuring separation between journalism and government.

gIt’s  a joke among people who work in applied sciences and technology; engineers are lousy at parties, and they don’t dress up well.

It’s not part of their lives, of course; their job is to keep your plane from falling apart in mid-air, to keep your gusset plates from ripping apart, to make sure grandma’s pacemaker keeps running until grandma stops from other causes.

Making small talk?  Picking out shirts that match pants?  It’s just not part of their lives.

So if around age 45 an engineer were to switch careers to, say, wedding planning?

That’d be kinda weird.

Likewise, when someone who spends their entire career keeping their opinion out of their work as a matter of vocational ethics, who suddenly starts getting paid to have one?

Matt Welch writes about Helen Thomas

I am tempted to feel bad for an 89-year-old lady getting caught in what might be passed off as a senior moment, but there’s no reason to believe that her statement and tone don’t reflect her basic views.

They also, I believe, reflect an interesting, under-appreciated, and ultimately impermanent media phenomenon: The longer someone is submerged in what they and their organizations regard as traditional “straight” reporting, the more gruesome the results are when the gloves come off. As Thomas herself reportedly said in a 2002 speech, “I censored myself for 50 years…. Now I wake up and ask myself, ‘Who do I hate today?'”

That’s a great start…

Straight reporters have been taught for six decades to submerge or even smother their political and philosophical views in the workplace. Like all varieties of censorship, this process creates resentment and distortion. Whatever it is that you feel prevented from saying, you will be more likely to scream once given the chance. This is why, for example, some of the most politically opinionated people you’ll ever meet are newspaper reporters a couple drinks in out yakking with their colleagues.

Degrading the quality of that discussion still further is the likelihood that the partisanship-averse journos haven’t bothered to construct their own self-conscious political philosophy…

This explains so much about Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman…

Blogging hits the ballot in California.

On Tuesday, voters in the Golden State will chose nominees for the state’s U.S. Senate general election.  And while most of the media oxygen for the race (already fighting for air against the uber-expensive GOP gubernatorial primary) has been sucked up by the Republican electoral 3-way, Democrats must thin their herd as well.  Only two Democrats are saying “no ma’am” to another term for incumbent Barbara Boxer: a disheveled, quixotic blogger and a vainglorious Hollywood “producer” whose campaign seems to be an excuse to post pictures of him with famous people.

Guess which of the three scored a profile by the New York Times:

No, this is not your typical Senate campaign command center; but then again, [Mickey] Kaus is not your typical Senate hopeful. His lair speaks more to his career of the last 10 years — prolific blogger and professional curmudgeon — than the one he’s currently aspiring to. As the one-man show behind Kausfiles on Slate, Mr. Kaus was one of the first political bloggers, after a print career that included stops at publications like Newsweek and Harper’s…

“If you’d asked me is he ever going to run for Senate, I’d say, ‘Are you crazy?’ ” says Michael Kinsley, editor at large of The Atlantic Wire and a longtime friend. “He seems like a classic blogger — someone who is happier in front of his computer than he is out kissing babies.”

But Mr. Kaus has thrown himself into his quixotic campaign with surprising earnestness, undeterred by his prospects (grim) and general diagnosis (insane). He is the first person to admit that he has absolutely no chance of becoming California’s next Senator, but contends that this is not really the point. He says he is running as a protest candidate in order to draw attention to his pet issues.

California has often been viewed as political laboratory – from recall elections and an ever-expanding list of constitutional propositions – even if most of their creations have taken on a Frankensteinesque quality in recent decades.  So it might as well be that the strengthes and limitations of the first fully blog-based candidate be demonstrated on a West Coast ballot.

Much like the blog, Kaus Files, that launched him into prominence within the punditry, Mickey Kaus’ candidacy has been rife with political paradoxes.  Instead of focusing on areas where he agrees with the Democratic base, Kaus is solidly running to Boxer’s right on unions and immigration.  Attacked as a closet Republican, Kaus invokes Paul Wellstone is his campaign’s sole TV advertisement.  Treating his campaign as a Dave Barry/Gore Vidal joke candidacy one minute, the next Kaus is writing serious political manifestos.

Yet it’s hard to escape the feeling that had Kaus taken himself – or his campaign – more seriously, his spoiler candidacy might have done more than simply garner a few memorable press clippings for his scrapebook. 

If the mood of the electorate is hostile across the country, California voters appear ready to find the nearest Bastille.  Every single major party candidate has their approval/disapproval numbers upside-down, including Boxer at 37/46 – and that’s relatively healthy compared to most of the other statewide candidates.  And whether California Democrats wish to acknowledge it or not, Kaus’ pet issues of unions and immigration are two big parts of the mosaic of problems that have painted the state forever in the red.

When even the LA Times refuses to endorse the incumbent, you know the political climate has turned stormy.  But the limitations of Kaus’ own personality precluded him turning the non-endorsement to his advantage.  Or as the paper put it: “But we can’t endorse him, because he gives no indication that he would step up to the job and away from his Democratic-gadfly persona.”

Blogging has certainly give Kaus an leg-up otherwise undeserved by his campaign.  What other forum would allow a candidate with a $36,000 budget, no visible support and with such blunt honesty about his chances that he was deined a speaking slot at the Democratic convention, as much media fanfare as Kaus has enjoyed?

But persuading an electorate is world’s away from simply unleasing opinions into the ether of the internet. Even recognized as one of the Founding Fathers of internet journalism and blogging, the height of Kaus’ popularity was 40,000 unique visitors each day – a tremendous audience in blog terms but a pittance in political value.

“The Kaus blog speaks to a very smart and important influential niche, but it’s still just a niche,” says the conservative blogger Jonah Goldberg, who has supported Mr. Kaus’s campaign in the National Review Online. “The universe of bloggers is a hell of a lot smaller than a lot of bloggers like to think.”

UPDATE: So much for the New York Times. Kaus was demolished, as expected, but surprisingly finished in 3rd – 55,000 votes behind Hollywoodd hanger-on Brian Quintana for 5.2%.

For the benefit of those who mistake “chanting the chanting points on cue” for “reporting”:

Apologia

ap·o·lo·gi·a
/ˌæpəˈloʊdʒiə/ Show Spelled[ap-uh-loh-jee-uh]
–noun
1. an apology, as in defense or justification of a belief, idea, etc.
2. Literature . a work written as an explanation or justification of one’s motives, convictions, or acts.

Antonym: This piece, which doesn’t “apologize” for anything, but merely demands that a “journalist” substantiate his conclusion with in-context, accurate information, or drop it.

Glad we could clear that up.

(PS:  Saying “Suuuuure, he didn’t” isn’t the most convincing argument).

The media’s been starting – juuuust starting – to get a little critical of The One.

The immigration debate?  Jobs For Congressmen?  Oil washing up on the media’s vacationing grounds?  When you have not only CNN and Brian Willians but also Chris Matthews and Jon Stewart tagging on him, it’s gotta be bad for The Anointed – doesn’t it?

Unless you remember the mainstream media’s prime directive – keep Obama and Democrats in office – it might seem that way.

Paranoid?  Well, Ed Driscoll and I are both on the same wavelength.

Assuming BP is able to get the oil spill in the Gulf plugged, how much of this is the media laying the groundwork for their “comeback kid” narrative to roll out…right around September or early October, and running to, oh at least, the first Tuesday in November — and possibly longer, depending upon the outcome on election night?

Who knows how the next months will play out, but it’s something to salt away for the future.

Best way to tell?  If the Media and left (ptr) find a squishy moderate-ish Republican to start building up – a la McCain and Huckabee – for later tearing down, you’ll know Ed’s onto something.

In the 1930’s, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty earned himself a place in literary infamy by whitewashing Stalin’s forced famine of Ukraine.

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias can at least take comfort in the fact that their junketeering whitewash of China’s authoritarian assaults on human rights has historical precedent, but will probably not lead to a Pulitzer that gets contested fifty years after their deaths:

Klein and Yglesias’ group was taken to tour a spanking-new village built on the outskirts of the northern city of Dalian. As Yglesias describes it, “back in 2006 the former “village” of rudimentary structures was razed and the government constructed a large and extremely nice park (it’s in a very scenic area), reforested the hillsides, and constructed a series of apartment complexes. The former villagers now live in modest but up-to-date structures.” But don’t worry about the forcibly displaced, Yglesias admonishes us, because, “[w]e spoke to one retired couple who was given four apartments—they live in one and rent out the other three to families who’ve either moved out to Cha’an from the central city or else moved to the area from less prosperous regions of China. The town’s current party boss said he was given five apartments.” Klein’s coverage on the website of the Washington Post was equally credulous. He informed his audience, “A conversation with some residents revealed that they didn’t just get one free apartment in the new building. They got four free apartments, three of which they were now renting out. And medical coverage. And money for furnishings. And a food stipend. And — I’m not kidding, by the way — birthday cakes on their birthdays. Sweet deal.”

The problem is, it’s not a “sweet deal” for most of the millions of Chinese displaced by development projects every years.  China has no real concept of private property; every hovel is considered state property, for the state to destroy as needed for any reason.

Big hydroelectric dam?  Millions relocated (with no documentary evidence of “sweet deals”).  Beijing holds the Olympics?  Over a million relocated.

Sweet.

Yglesias and Klein are on a junket managed and staged by a public relations firm based in Hong Kong called the China-United States Exchange Foundation. While the firm claims on its website it is a “non-government” organization, it would be impossible for it to operate without strictures imposed by the Chinese government. China has no concept of freedom of the press, and there is simply no way that the Beijing government would tolerate a group of American journalists traveling around the country with impunity. In other words, Yglesias, Klein, and their “fellow travelers” are being shown precisely what the Beijing government wants them to see. It is a non-governmental tour in name only. The fact that Klein and Yglesias report back on such obviously staged scenes without a hint of doubt raises serious doubts about their journalistic competence. The “sweet deal” that Klein alluded to above is obviously too – in fact, sickly – sweet. It is plainly obvious to anyone who knows a whit about China that they were visiting a stage-managed potemkin village.

The “Potemkin Village” – named after a Czarist minister who built a fake village to show Western visitors how well the Russian serfs were being treated (they were treated like slaves elsewhere in Russia) – is a great totalitarian tradition; dictators build a really, really nice demonstration of something controversial, to show how benign, even wonderful, it is.  Hitler even built a “Potemkin” concentration camp, Theresienstadt, to show visiting human rights dignitaries and, one presumes, the 1940’s anscestors of Klein and Yglesias, how good concentration camp inmates had it.

Sad to say, they bought it back then, too.

Leftyblogs:  Speaking “sweet deal” to power.

After watching a huge national disaster on the Gulf Coast, a propensity to golf while the world falls apart, a dearth of press conferences, a slew of risible verbal faux pas, a year of ramming unpopular legislation down the peoples’ throats, adopting and accelerating all of the aspects of the current War on Terror Man-Caused Disaster that were considered so noxious three years ago (including every single element of the Patriot Act), and watched epic corruption up to the White House Door, I thought  “When will our media – which was so punctual about “investigating” each of these things before 2009, get on the stick.

Victor Davis Hanson says have no fear!

Somewhere around the millennium, a new style of aggressive, public-interested, and astute reporter began sermonizing in print, advising on the Internet, and lecturing us on television. At the time I mistakenly assumed that reporters were too often partisans who were creating new, almost impossible standards of probity in order to embarrass conservative opponents: they wanted Republican scandal first, news second. But now, I see that they were simply laying nonpartisan new ground rules for the Bush administration so that they could later prove their integrity and professionalism when a member of their own faith would come into the new crucible of public examination. There was never, you see, a hate-Bush media. So we will shortly see that now as they unrelentingly turn their scrutiny on Barack Obama and his legion of ethical and competency lapses.

Onward and upward!

You are a leftyblogger.

You write a post that is so chock-full of long-debunked shrieking points that there’s no room for any information of value that  you might, improbably, know.

In and among the mindless uncritical droogs who support you with more of the same, a small group of pro-civil liberties people with actual facts on the issue at hand set you straight.

What do you do?

You delete their substantive and fact-clogged comments about the time they start to make you look like the un-informed naif you are; when even that doesn‘t work, you declare those who disagree with you “propagandists”, and take your toys and run away.

Not that anyone should expect better.

The leftyblog community is turning cartwheels because James O’Keefe pled guilty to his phone shenanigans in Mary Landrieu’s office.

But as with pretty  much everything you read on leftyblogs, the facts are wrong:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana has filed a court document admitting that James O’Keefe did not intend to tamper with the phones at Mary Landrieu’s office, or commit any other felony.

Oh — and the good folks at the Department of Justice don’t particularly want you to know that. This post reveals that, at O’Keefe’s hearing, the Assistant U.S. Attorney tried not to read that part of the document in court. What’s more, the U.S. Attorney pointedly omitted this critical information from their press release.

And the part that the press carries is, of course, the only reality the lefty smear machine cares about.

his Twitter feed.

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 started doing assemblies in schools, and have branched out into multimedia, including a weekly radio program, “Sons Of Liberty” on WWTC-AM, where my “Northern Alliance Radio Network” also broadcasts.  Disclosure:  I know Bradlee Dean via the station; we talk radio quite a bit; I disagree with him on not a few things, theologically and politically, and he and his ministry say a few things I don’t personally endorse.  But we’re on the same team (and I’m waiting to see which leftyblog is the first to copy and paste “we’re on the same team” while omitting the previous couple of sentences).

Birkey:

The Minnesota House campaign of Rep. Tom Emmer donated to the ministry of You Can Run But You Cannot Hide Intl., Inc., according to the press secretary for Emmer’s gubernatorial campaign. Emmer is one of several Republican leaders involved with the ministry of Bradlee Dean, who leads a hard rock band that brings its message of Jesus Christ into public schools and recently affirmed the practice of Muslim countries executing gays and lesbians.

First, the “donation”. 

According to a source very close to the Emmer campaign, “the “contribution” was nothing more than buying seats at a dinner”, a teen outreach event.   It was not a direct cash donation to YCR, as Birkey’s article implies.

Tomayto Tomahto?  Not really – accuracy and context count. 

But Birkey goes farther into the weeds.

According to campaign finance reports, Emmer’s campaign gave You Can Run $250 in late 2008 (pdf).

In the last few months, Emmer has appeared on Bradlee Dean’s radio show — the same show on which Dean said, “Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America. This just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination.”

Well, no.  Emmer did not appear on “the same show” where Dean gave the quote above.  He appeared on a completely separate episode of the program.   And they talked about politics.  Not Islam and Christianity’s views on gays.   Birkey’s wording is incredibly misleading; the subtext – that appearing on a radio show implies agreement rather than trying to engage an audience – is even worse.  

And if Birkey wants to believe appearance equals agreement, he might want to have a word with NARN guest R.T. Rybak.

And Dean was talking about traditional biblical and quranic theology, not advocating actions by a civil government.  Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam are both rather harsh on the subject of homosexuality, and Dean is nothing if not a fundamentalist.  But it’s crazy to take Dean’s quote – about an outrage on the part of Muslim governments – and spin it as sympathy for lynching gays (see “UPDATE”, below).

So to summarize, Andy Birkey wants you to believe that seats “donated” at an outreach dinner in November 2008 for a group whose radio program didn’t go on the air until August 2009  implies…what?  That Tom Emmer harbors some sympathy for putatively outrageous views on gays?

Seem a little stretchy to anyone?

Emmer also posed for a picture with leaders of You Can Run,

As he did with pretty much everyone who attended any Republican function in the past year or so, myself included.  Heck, if Andy Birkey had shown up, he’d probably have gotten a picture with Emmer too. 

Emmer, by the way, responds pretty definitively to the issue to MPR’s Tom Scheck.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION:  I talked with Bradlee Dean – that’s how I roll, reporting-wise. 

First the correction:  Dean interviewed Emmer on their old KKMS program, before he started on WWTC.  KKMS is Salem’s religious station, while WWTC covers politics.

Now, the update.  I asked Dean “Do you advocate or approve of the government executing homosexuals for being homosexual?”

He laughed a long, deep bellylaugh.  That’d be “no”.

“Would it be fair to say”, I continued, “that the context of the quote Andy Birkey ran was discussing biblical and quranic theology, rather than advocating or tolerating actions by a civil goverment, and that neither Bradkee Dean nor You Can Run International advocate the murder of gays?”

“Absolutely”, Dean replied.

I don’t know about you, but that was not the impression I got from Birkey’s quote.

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 less charitable, they tip us off at the very least to the Humphrey Institute’s and most likely the media’s bias.

For those of you from out of state, the Humphrey Institute is a University of Minnesota think tank that is largely dedicated toward – wait for it – “better”, bigger government.  It tends to be a DFL feeder program.

The story is up-front about the criteria for the DFL primary poll (I’ve added emphasis):

Among likely voters, Mark Dayton (38%) leads Kelliher (28%) and Entenza (6%) in the contest
for the August 10th primary to choose the Democratic Party’s nominee.

That is as opposed to “registered voters”; likely voters are the ones who are most likely to actually make it to the polls.

Now, here is what the Humphrey institute wrote about the GOP race:

The most striking and unusual pattern in the Dayton/Emmer match-up is that a third of
Republicans are defecting from their Party’s candidate, an unusual pattern within the GOP
electorate. Dayton is drawing 11% of Republicans as compared to the 3% of Democrats
supporting Emmer. This may be a temporary blip as Emmer launches his campaign or a sign
that his conservatism may pose a challenge to unifying his party against Dayton.

“Defecting?”

Interesting word choice; it implies that a third of Republicans started out firmly in the Emmer camp, but have left.  Is there some prior poll over the past two and a half weeks – which was when Emmer was endorsed in the first place – that showed Republicans were completely united?  Sure, there are still some Seifert supporters with ruffled feathers; there are some Ron Paul people who are making a point of remaining undecided; there are still some Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger “Republicans” – read “Democrats with better suits” – lurking around the party.

Which means Emmer’s got his work cut out for him – and the campaign knows that, just as they knew it when they lost the straw poll at the GOP Central Committee meeting by a fairly decisive margin.

So is it a sign that Emmer’s “conservatism” is a problem?  It’s possible – but it can not possibly be inferred by any of the data in a single, initial poll five months before the election.

Not that the Twin Cities media will say so.

The latest MPR/Humphrey Institute poll shows Dayton leading the DFL field:

A new Minnesota Public Radio News/Humphrey Institute poll shows former Sen. Mark Dayton with a comfortable lead over the other two candidates competing in the DFL gubernatorial primary.

This is good news for Tom Emmer; Dayton is a national laughingstock with negatives just south of Anastasio Somoza.  If he wins the primary, I’m seriously looking forward to November.

The DFL primary race isn’t all that close at the moment:

The poll of 701 Minnesota adults, which was taken May 13-May 16, shows Dayton is the favorite among likely DFL primary voters by a 10-point margin: 38 percent to 28 percent over House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher.

Dayton, Kelliher and former state Rep. Matt Entenza are competing for the DFL spot on the general election ballot. Entenza received just 6 percent of support in the poll. Whoever wins the August DFL primary will face Emmer in the November election.

Perhaps this is further proof that the DFL endorsement is the kiss of death?

Kelliher received the DFL party endorsement last month. Dayton did not seek it and DFL Party leaders punished him for that by barring him from the state convention. Still, Dayton is getting more support from Democrats.

It wouldn’t be a major-media story about Minnesota politics without a long series of quotes from Larry Jacobs:

“This poll is a real slap in the face to the Democratic Party,” said University of Minnesota political science professor Larry Jacobs, who oversaw the poll.

Jacobs, who heads the Humphrey Institute’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, says it’s not just that Dayton has a big lead over Kelliher among likely DFL primary voters. The poll shows Dayton is considerably more popular than Kelliher with women in the party…Kelliher has campaigned aggressively on the notion that she could become Minnesota’s first woman governor.

“DFLers, are you ready to make some history? Are you ready to make history together?” she said the party’s convention in Duluth.

This being a Humphrey Institute poll, you can expect passive-aggressive context-free sniping at the GOP:

When it comes to the general election, the poll shows only Dayton would win against Republican Tom Emmer. But Dayton would win by just 4 percentage points, well within the poll’s margin of error of 5.8 percentage points.

The poll shows Emmer beating Kelliher or Entenza, but, again, not by enough to be statistically significant.

The MPR story doesn’t indicate if the poll was of registered or likely voters – which is a fairly key bit of context to omit, in that it allows the inescapable Jacobs to have his way with context:

While Emmer has no primary battle on the Republican side, the poll indicates he faces a challenge in uniting the GOP behind him.

A third of the Republicans who responded to the poll said they were either undecided, supporting a Democrat or backing the Independence Party-endorsed candidate Tom Horner.

Jacobs says for the sole Republican candidate to have only two-thirds of party members backing him is extraordinary, and not good news for Emmer.

“Emmer, perhaps because he’s too conservative, is struggling at the outset to rally and unite Republicans,” Jacobs said. “Now, there’s a lot of time to campaign and Emmer, unlike other Republicans who’ve run for governor, is really a new name for many Minnesota voters, so we’ll have to see how that develops. But at this point, the [result] is a red flag.”

Emmer faced a similar hurdle winning the endorsement.  And let’s never forget that he’s alreadty facing the Twin Cities’ media’s usual slur of anyone running to the right of Arne Carlson, the “Too Extreme” meme that the media is doing its duty to help spread (along with a fair chunk of the media’s concerted effort to paint Tom Horner as Republican enough to soak up votes).  Horner eats up 10% in the poll, although the IP is always overepresented in these polls (or has been since 1998, anyway).

But outside the 35% of Minnesotans who will never ever ever vote for a Republican of any sort, there are three dynamics at work:

First:  When people meet Tom Emmer, they stand a good chance of becoming converted.

Second:  When people meet Mark Dayton, they stand a fair chance of falling asleep.

Third:  The media will be doing its best (and the DFL’s bidding) to keep voters from doing either 1 or 2.

Conservatives see government in the same way as we do the guy who cleans out the septic tank.  It’s dirty work that we’d rather not do, and we’re willing to pay a fair price to have it done, but at the end of the day we want a fair deal done, and then we want it to go away.

Liberals  see government like a factory; you put stuff in one end, you get cool stuff out the other.  The more stuff you put in, the more cool stuff you get out!  And if everyone works together to make sure that factory gets all stuff it needs put in, there’ll be no shortage of cool stuff coming out!

Lori Sturdevant in the Strib  writes;

 A case of the “what-ifs” hit me last week. I was listening to state Sen. Linda Berglin describe her clever ploys for drawing down more than $7 in federal health care money for every new $1 the state spends while still cutting spending overall — and musing about Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s vow to send her handiwork to vetoland.

What if the Legislature’s ablest health care head had been allied these last eight years with one of the state’s most politically gifted governors? What if instead of being sparring partners, Berglin and Pawlenty had been real partners in remaking health care?

Then we’d have gotten what we had from time immemorial through the end of the Ventura years; a government that, like any other addict, can always find a rationalizion to spend more.

Slower growth in state spending is the new normal, and Pawlenty has applied a heavy foot to the brake. Through eight years, the GOP governor has muscled more fiscal restraint into state balance sheets than did any of his predecessors in the previous half-century.

Re-read that last paragraph. 

And everyone finish the last sentence:  “…, no thanks to the DFL, the Mainstream Media and Lori Sturdevant”. 

It’s crucial now for state government to maximize the bang of every tax buck. Large-scale reform is in order. And in a politically purplish state with a penchant for electing divided government, reform requires bipartisan partnerships.

Plenty of them should have been possible in the past eight years.

Rubbish.

While politics is about compromise, bringing real epochal change to government – in this case, breaking Minnesota’s (and especially Minnesota’s “elites'”) smug, smarmy addiction to taxes, spending, entitlement-mongering and wastrelcy – is about taking control and showing the side that you will accept nothing less than a change in the way business is done. 

The DFL have shown great willingness for “bipartisanship” – where “bipartishanship” means “acting like DFLers”. 

No more.

It’s time to get serious with our “elites”;  with a small, finite list of exceptions (responding to attacks on our nation, finding kidnapped children, taking care of families of servicepeople, cops and firemen who are killed or seriously injured protecting us all), “bipartisanship” is the wrong response to the challenges that face us.  Partisanship – fighting for divergent ideas that everyone believes are better solutions than the other sides have to offer – is what makes for better government.

Not necessarily more impeccably-smoothly funded government – but keeping government fed is not our mission, either.

The battle for the Second Amendment, in my lifetime, has turned nearly 180 degrees.  When I was a kid (and a liberal), things were looking pretty bleak; US V. Miller was broadly (and mistakenly) accepted as a precedent; the media and big government culture largely regarded firearms as a social illness that needed to be controlled and then eradicated.

But in one of the greatest grass-roots political movements in American history, millions of law-abiding citizens have turned the tide, for now – vote by vote, state by state, and finally, even turning much of this nation’s bobbleheaded “legal elite” around, to the point where the forces of good prevailed in the Supreme Court two years ago, in the Heller decision.  And with any luck, sometime in the next month or so, the McDonald case will incorporate Heller to all fifty states, causing the “individual rights” interpretation of the Second Amendment to become binding on all lower levels of government.

This is good.

One thing one can not say is that the human rights and civil liberties interpretation of the Second Amendment won because the broad sweep of the extreme “progressive” movement got especially better informed on the subject.

Because if this post at Mahablog is any indication, we have a long, long way to go.

Not content with merely supporting an individual right to own firearms, the National Rifle Association is hellbent on eliminating all restrictions on any citizens carrying guns anywhere he or she wants, including churches, workplaces, and now bars and restaurants. This is in spite of the fact that even in the most 2nd-amendment lovin’ red states a large majority of people think it’s a real bad idea for a bunch of drunken yahoos to be packing heat.

So many responses.

For starters:  the term “packing heat” should be a signal that whomever is writing really knows nothing about the topic.  I know – it’s a correlation that doesn’t equal causation, but there is an extremely high correlation between people who use the phrase (which has been otherwise absent from American English since the 1930s, except in old gangster movies) and abject ignorance on the subject.

Next – “Maha” claims that “big majorities” oppose the rights of legal permit-holders to carry in churches, bars and restaurants.  I’m not sure where she gets this – I’d love to see a cite – but it reminds me of the polls the “progressives tossed about from the seventies through the nineties that claimed a huge majority supported gun control.  The devil was in the details; the vast majority approve of some controls.  Keeping guns away from criminals and convicted felons is “gun control”, and I favor it; I’d be part of that putative “vast majority”.  It’s fodder for giggly statistical games, but it’s not really honest.

Because the only numbers that really matter are these; a law-abiding citizen with a carry permit (which proves, in 40 states, that he or she has no criminal record, no documented drug or alcohol problems, and in many of them has passed a skills course) is vastly less likely to harm you or anyone else than the general public – as in “two orders of magnitude” less.

Yes, the new Tennessee law that lifts all restrictions on where a citizen can carry a concealed weapon, including into bars, provides that the carrier must abstain from drinking.

I have to wonder – do these people either read, or talk with each other?

Because it was two years ago that this blog humiliated the Minnesoros “Independent” on this exact question.   It’s been legal,l in überliberal Minnesota, to carry permitted guns in bars since 2005, provided one’s blood alcohol level is below .04 – half the level allowed to drive a car.   This is true in many other “shall issue” states.

You don’t have to look very hard to find stories of people shooting people in bars.  But you have to look long and hard to find any involving legal carry permit-holders.

The NRA pushed hard for the new Tennessee law:

The NRA’s argument is that while the militia may be “well-regulated,” any restriction on an individual citizen’s ability to carry a firearm amounts to an “abridgment” of the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. This assumes that all such rights are absolute and untouchable by law under all circumstances, but we certainly have never treated any other right that way.

And we don’t treat the Second Amendment that way.

“Maha” writes imprecisely – which is as good as most “progressives” can do on the subject, to be fair.  The NRA is pretty absolutist about the rights of law-abiding individual citizens.  The NRA has also led the way on laws to punish gun possession and use by criminals.

The rub, of course, is that “progressives” never, ever distinguish between the law-abiding and criminals when the topic is guns (or, for that matter, quite a few other topics as well) – which we see in the following clip:

Freedom of speech doesn’t include a right to publish and distribute hard-core pornography, for example. Freedom of religion doesn’t rubber stamp human sacrifice.

That “Maha” thinks my right as someone with a clean criminal record is on par with human sacrifice is almost as telling as the fact she thinks that there are any restrictions on hard-core porn.

The NRA is using bullying tactics to impose its will on lawmakers, even when a whopping majority of constituents (and probably the lawmakers’ consciences, if they have any) disagree with the NRA’s position. There are some cities and states in which a big majority would prefer some level of legal gun control, for safety’s sake.

If decades of statistic don’t show you that controlling the rights of the law-abiding in the interest of  “safety” isnt’ a canard, the example of Chicago is probably lost on you.

Anyway – the issue is at a bit of a head, with the nomination of Elena Kagan to the SCOTUS, and with the high court’s upcoming McDonald decision.

“Maha”:

Now the wingnuts are screaming that Elena Kagan is opposed to gun rights because –

Elena Kagan said as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in 1987 that she was “not sympathetic” toward a man who contended that his constitutional rights were violated when he was convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol.

Note the “unlicensed” part.

We do.  That’s the point; it is impossible, in DC, Chicago and other cities, for the law-abiding citizen to get the “license”.  In other cities – New York is a great example, as was Minnesota until 2003 – it was entirely a matter of the applicant’s political clout and connections.

More recently she has said,

“There is no question, after Heller, that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to keep and bear arms and that this right, like others in the Constitution, provides strong although not unlimited protection against governmental regulation,” she said.

Right.

And it’s the “…although not unlimited…” bit that we are watching closely.

A conservative’s idea of a “reasonable limit” is “keeping guns out of the hands of criminals”; a “progressive” thinks that putting a gun into anyone’s hands at all makes them suspect.

I don’t read Mahablog much.  But I noticed she’d linked to me:

But that’s not good enough for the gun nuts, who predictably compared Heller to Third Reich Nazis.

Which is a rather “un-nuanced” view of what I actually wrote.   Read it yourself; I criticize those who defend Kagan’s 1987 comments on the Second Amendment by saying “it reflects what the “elite bar” thought at the time”.

The “elite bar” once thought that a black man was worth 2/3 of a white man, and defended slavery with carefully-written, legally-scrupulous opinions – that were morally utterly vacant, since they abridged basic human liberties.

The “Nuremberg Laws” were perfectly acceptable law under German jurisprudence, too.  The German “legal elite” said so.

There’s no comparing the results of the two; Slavery and the Holocaust were evil, while gun control is merely stupid and racist.

But my point wasn’t comparison; it was simply that a stupid opinion isn’t made correct because “the elites believed it was correct”.

The crazy part of this is that the basic position of the gun lobby — that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to own firearms — is settled law at this point. And the issue of gun control isn’t even on the progressivist back burner any more, compared to, say, 15 years ago. It’s not even in the bleeping kitchen.

And how do you think it got that way?

Because millions of us schlumpfy, un-hip guys and gals in flyoverland – the ones that Bill Maher giggles at – made it that way, one vote and one state and, finally, one justice at a time.

And, by “Maha’s” leave, we’re going to make sure it stays that way.

About the only way gun rights are going to be seriously challenged in the foreseeable future is if there is a huge swing of public opinion in the direction of more gun control. A few shoot-outs in Tennessee roadhouses might do it.

Keep waiting.

And if you look at the statistics, you might wanna bring a water bottle.  You’ll be waiting a long, long time.

Side note:  Let’s see if Barbara “Maha” O’Brien is any better at allowing dissenting comments than she used to be.

UPDATE:  Nope, she’s not.  I’m told that several comments critical of her “position” have been removed.

Why are some liberal bloggers so utterly gutless?

Bob Collins at MPR’s NewsCut NewsQ Gather.com posts a picture…:

Notice the sign with the little arrow by it? Click for a larger view. Photo by Bob Collins.

…showing a sign saying “Tax Cuts: Even A Monkey Can Do It”.   That’d be one sign, out of hundreds of signs and thousands of people at the Jason Lewis Tax Cut rally, with a (possibly) racist overtone.

Was that the sign’s intent?  “A monkey could do it” is a not-uncommon way of saying “Duh”; the Bush years saw more than a few “Chimp” references that passed without (disapproving) comment from the mainstream media.

If it was racist – was it a tax protester, or one of the ringers sent from the left to stand by the media’s cameras to smear the tea party?

We don’t know.  Bob Collins didn’t check.  Perhaps it was because it didn’t fit the narrative that the media has set up about the Tea Party, which both the WaPo article and (wittingly or not) Collins extend – that it’s racist until proven otherwise.  Or maybe he didn’t feel like walking through the crowd to check.  We’ll never know.  For the media’s narrative about the Tea Parties, “knowing” might be inconvenient.

Not sure if Bob ever asked Jess Mador how many racists signs were at the 4/15 rally?  There were none.  Partly, I’m sure, because the Tea Party publicized the fact that its security people would have cameras, and would be actively looking for scabrous signs, to post on blogs and run down identities.  I’m not sure that that would have kept a racist away – it’s not like they read blogs.  We don’t know.  But there was not one single racist sign at the rally, and near as we can tell only one questionable one at the Jason Lewis rally last weekend.

Collins adds a bit from a WaPo article quoting a few Tea Partiers and bunch of Democrat pundits saying the Tea Party is “fighting a perception” of racism – that, nobody adds, was largely a media meme in the first place, borne of cameras lingering and editors drooling over signs at previous rallies that were – let’s be blunt – spectacularly non-representative of the Tea Parties as a whole.  “But nearly three in 10 see racial prejudice as underlying the tea party”, the article says, elaborating that “About 61 percent of tea party opponents say racism has a lot to do with the movement, a view held by just 7 percent of tea party supporters.”  In other words, the left – which includes the media – spreads the meme that supports their prejudices; the Tea Party itself rebukes the idea.

How to get to the bottom of this?

I invite Bob Collins to come with me to the next Tea Party event.  We’ll skip the usual MPR Reporter drill – hanging out in front of the crowd taping speakers.  We can wander around there the real fun is; the middle of the crowd, the fringers, the vendor row, where all the real conversation happens.  Y’know – doing a crowd on the dynamics of a grass-roots movement by actually meeting the movement.

Pass the word.

…especially those of you that are tittering over the GOP’s Unity Tour (because a MNGOP without Tom Horner, Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger can’t possibly be “united”).

Just a quick word of advice; the water in the bucket sloshes less when you bend your elbow.

That is all.

Brauer is reporting that Tom Misckhe has gotten the 10PM slot at WCCO:

. This is easily the funkiest hire WCCO has made since the late, lamented Phil Hendrie days… In one fell swoop, CBS and station management have grabbed a genuinely beloved local voice who makes truly original radio.

Beloved, we should add, among people who follow media closely (Brauer and, by the way, myself included).  Mischke had a cult following in the Twin Cities, garnered over nearly two decades at KSTP-AM in which he never really got the ratings it took to be a “Success”, but Hubbard Broadcasting (bless their formerly-penurious little hearts) kept him on anyway.

But this is a great break.  Here’s hoping he’ll return to, or maybe exceed, the greatness of his old evening show.

It’s a different voice, sure, but Mischke epitomizes this place just as much as some of those WCCO stalwarts. Kudos to the brass, who badly need to take chances but until now really haven’t done so. I hope they’re rewarded with blandness-loathing listeners who haven’t felt the need to program “830” into their radio’s pre-sets.

Well, congrats to my neighbor TD.  Hope it’s as great as it should be!

I’m proud to announce the winners of the “Write Lori Sturdevant’s GOP Conventi0n Column” contest!

It was the tightest contest in the history of Shot In The Dark, with my evil twin brother Jed’s “Anger Close” barely tipping Dave from Mound’s “A Tale Of Two Cities“, by a total of two votes.   Speed Gibson’s  “It’s The GOP’s Turn To Unify” came in a close third.

Thanks to everyone for participating!

I sat about four rows behind Lori Sturdevant in the press pit on Friday.

Now, I’m a gregarious guy.  I took the liberty of introducing myself to MPR’s Tom Scheck (a lot younger than he sounds), the PiPress’ Bill Salisbury (memes about liberal press aside, he’s one of the greats) and WCCO-TV’s Pat Kessler (a charming guy).

But Lori’s body language was pretty emphatic.  She sat in the front row of the press pit, in her trademark scarf (Eric Eskola didn’t even have his with him) and Margaret Thatcher coif…

…and I don’t believe I saw her turn her head once.  The computer, the stage…and that was it.  That was her field of view, near as I could tell.

So between that, and the fact that there’s no figure in the Twin Cities media that I’ve spent more time criticizing than her in the past eight years save her papermate Nick Coleman, and I figured I’d stay in the back of the pit with the other bloggers.

In a sense, fisking her post-MNGOP Convention column was almost pointless;  the eight writers in the contest I’m running to parody the column pretty much caught it all; she renders the DFL’s chanting points so thoroughly that you can almost hear Darth Vader’s “Imperial March” in the background as she describes Emmer’s victory.

I’ll be adding bits and pieces of emphasis to the Strib column.

State Rep. Tom Emmer sold himself to Minnesota Republicans as a candidate who is “not a politician as usual.” At a convention infused with Tea Party revulsion about government spending, that evidently sounded gubernatorial.

I almost titled this column “Our Pauline Kael”.

Yes, he “evidently” sounded gubernatorial enough to convince the GOP to make a go of it.  Go figure.

Emmer, a trial lawyer/legislator from Delano, won an endorsement Friday that appears to assure him of the Republican spot on the Nov. 2 ballot to succeed Tim Pawlenty as governor. That’s so despite the fact that he may be the most conservative candidate endorsed for governor by a major Minnesota party since “Tightwad Ted” Christianson in the Roaring Twenties.

Ever tone-deaf to points of view outside the clubby confines of the media/DFL (pardon the redundancy), Sturdevant misses the point for the first of many, many times in this column.  Emmer won because he is conservative.  Emmer and Seifert got to the final round because they reflect how the MNGOP, and a good chunk of Minnesota, feels.

The piece’s comedic moneyshot is next:

No moderate Republican is girding up to take on Emmer in the Aug. 10 primary. The GOP of 2010 isn’t Star Tribune reporter Rachel Stassen-Berger’s Grandpa Harold’s party — far from it.

Right.

And, amazingly, enough, no “moderate” Democrat is getting lubed up to take on Kelliher, Dayton or Entenza; the DFL/media (ptr) have their choice of left, lefter and leftest.

Why, one might say the DFL “isn’t the party of Lori Studevant’s father/grandfather”, the one that supported the hawkish tax-cutter JFK, to say nothing of the one that cuddled up to Josef Stalin in the thirties and forties – or the Democratic Party of their parents, the party of Jim Crows.

One might say that – if one were not that bright.  Parties change. And all the DFL/media (ptr) clubbiness in the world doesn’t change that!

The GOP changed; Reagan changed the national GOP thirty years ago; that same change is finally happening here.  Like it or don’t, but quit pining for the intellectual fjords; the liberal Arne Carlson/Harold Stassen is one dead parrot.

What counted with those Tea-stained delegates, it seemed, was that Emmer appeared to be the stauncher conservative.

It takes decades of keen-eyed journalistic experience to note the bleeding obvious.

And it takes decades of careful towing of the DFL/media (ptr) line to look at the convention’s results through utterly DFL-colored glasses as Sturdevant does:

Seifert, a legislator since age 24, struck delegates as a career politician. In the vernacular of the 2010 GOP, that’s not a compliment.

Legislative skills aren’t much valued, either. Seifert got little credit among delegates for holding his caucus together on tough veto override votes in 2007 and 2009 — an achievement that greatly strengthened Pawlenty’s hand as governor.

He got credit for it.  Here’s the thing Sturdevant, with all her vaunted experience, missed; there was no evidence of a vote against Seifert among the Emmer crowd; his chops as a legislator are legendary; the MNGOP will do well to get him back into office, hopefully Congress, soon.

But Minnesota, and the MNGOP, want someone with an executive vision.  We’ve had eight years of leadership by a legislator – and Tim Pawlenty has done a great job (to Sturdevant’s eternal and obvious chagrin).   We’re in a time when a big, executive vision counts for a lot.

Sturdevant actually catches that, sort of – although she trivializes it:

The personal qualities euphemistically called “style” mattered more on Friday, and scored in Emmer’s favor. He came across as the affable hockey player he once was for the University of Alaska; Seifert seemed like the studious kid who was always in the library.

I excised a lot of the DFL chanting points from my fisk – but this was too rich to miss:

In coming weeks, Emmer will have to answer for a good deal more. He espouses the idea that government can abandon a big share of the public work it’s shouldered through the decades without damaging this state. That’s a notion that must be considered faith-based, since little evidence backs it up.

Because Minnesota has never tried.  Even after eight years of Pawlenty’s responsible leadership, the DFL/media (ptr) still think that everyone in the state should pay for everything in the state – the immense money-laundering scam that is Local Govermment Aid.

Emmer – and Seifert – want government to be accountable at all levels, rather than playing a fiscal shell game by laundering spending through the state.  It’s a huge winner among conservative circles; if the MNGOP can convince the people of Minnesota to wean themselves from the state’s bread and circuses, it could be a huge change in shining a light on the roaches that hide in the nooks and crannies of the system.

UPDATE AND BUMP:  I’m moving this to the top for today.  Get your votes in by noon!

———-

As noted last week, it’s time for the “Write Lori’s Next Column” contest – in which you, the Shot In The Dark audience (Audience In The Dark) write Lori Sturdevant’s post-MNGOP Convention column for her – to move into its final phase!

Judge each of the columns by the following criteria:

• Which one best captures Strib columnist and DFL flak Lori Sturdevant’s writing style
• Which one best reflects her relentless DFL upsucking?

I’m going to publish one post for each of the contestants; I’ll take a poll at the end, with the winner to be announced on Monday.

There are eight entries:

Dave from Mound’s “A Tale Of Two Cities”

Mr D’s “The Republican Hangover”

Ben’s “Teabags For 2,000”

Bubbasan’s “It Was A Snark And Smarmy Night”

JW Of Minnesota’s “We Are Women, Hear We Roar”

Speed Gibson, “It’s The GOP’s Turn To Unify”

Golfdoc50’s “The Wind Is Blowing Left”

Jed Berg’s “Anger Close”

Vote! Vote! Vote!

UPDATE! The column we’re parodying – or perhaps, joining in parodying – is already out!

Expect a full fisking Sunday or Monday.

But until then – vote vote vote!

As the Minnesota GOP congratulates Tom Emmer for his victory at the convention over the weekend, I thought it’d be fun to take a trip in the wayback machine to visit the keen-eyed analysis visited upon the GOP race by those keen-eyed monitors of the conservative psyche at MNPublius a week ago today (with emphasis added):

Immediately after Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s endorsement by the DFL, the Republican party and Marty Seifert’s campaign engaged in the time-honored ritual of issuing boilerplate press releases attacking her. Neither press release was particularly notable, as is always the case. What was notable, though, was that Tom Emmer’s campaign didn’t bother. The exercise probably took the Seifert campaign all of two minutes. It makes me wonder: Is the Emmer campaign giving up on the gubernatorial race?

Emmer, who has long been the underdog in the Republican race, has been the target of several nasty attacks from the Seifert campaign. Have they shaken his will to continue in this race to the point that his campaign won’t spend two minutes to put together a boilerplate statement on MAK’s endorsement? It would be a shame if Seifert was able to push Emmer out of the race by resorting to personal attacks.

Good call, Jeff Rosenberg!

Can’t wait to see your call on the general!

No, I’m going to speculate that there were two reasons for this:

1. Emmer didn’t do smears.  He didn’t counter-smear during the campaign, when his ancient DUI issues raised a brief kerfuffle.
2. And in fact he won’t need to.  Because Kelliher is a sideshow.  She’ll have no significant money to work with for the next four months, as the DFL establishment engages in fratricide leading up to the August primary; even in the unlikely event that she survives the primary, who cares?  She’s about the most unexiting choice for governor this state has ever had.  Margaret Anderson-Kelliher’s week-old candidacy is already in a coma, barely getting traction even against Dayton and Entenza, much less the rest of the state.  Why would Emmer waste the time it took to even mention her endorsement?

Back to MNPublius:

Or perhaps I’m reading this all wrong, and they just haven’t gotten to it yet. Looking at their press release page, Emmer’s campaign has never released a single press release on a weekend. Maybe their campaign only works from 9 to 5 on weekdays, and they’ll get to it today. If that’s the case, then they don’t really deserve to win.

Which says more about the lefty alt-media’s addiction to “West Wing”-style drama than the merits of the Emmer campaign.  And may be a bit about Emmer’s priorities; after the Unity Breakfast Saturday morning, when many candidates would be hitting the road to start the grind, and as DFL policy-wonk wannabees were sitting in Hell’s Kitchen trying to get a better deal on placard-printing on a Saturday?  Emmer was at his kid’s first communion.

Maybe MNPublius will interpret that as a sign of resignation, I dunno.  I think it shows who’s in control at this point.

The below is a contestant in the “Write Lori Sturdevant’s Next Column” contest, written by “Dave From Mound”.   Vote above.

Last weekend, the DFL loyalists journeyed to Duluth to make their endorsements for statewide offices, including governor.  They joined together, deliberated, and celebrated.  They made history and exited Duluth unified behind their flag bearer.

On Friday, it was the GOP’s turn in Minneapolis.  Needless to say, their convention had a palpable feel that was not evident at the DFL’s productive and positive environment.  It felt as if the caustic infection that afflicts the body politic in Washington DC has invaded our ‘Minnesota Nice’.

Whether it was the heated speeches by Michele Bachmann, who took as many cheap shots and one-liners at the DFL and President Obama as time permitted, or the anti-government Tea Partier banter heard among the delegates, the atmosphere was less a political convention than a well-dressed and better-organized lynch mob.  Where have the reasoned and balanced Republicans gone, such as Governor Arnie Carlson or Jim Ramstad?

Friday’s events were highlighted by the endorsement of Tom Emmer, the conservative state house representative from Wright County.  In contrast to the DFL’s convention, this day of endorsement battles again revealed deep fissures in the GOP by way of petty partisan attacks made by Emmer and his endorsement rival Marty Seifert.

Even after the bruising endorsement battle ended, the sniping by the delegates and their candidates continued as they exited the convention hall.  Each side remained steadfastly committed to their candidates, leading to significant speculation that Seifert will break his previous pledge not to run in the August primary.

The bitter divisions were best illustrated by the political punches thrown by the Lieutenant Governor candidates.  The first body blows were thrown by Annette Meeks, the running mate for Emmer.  In speaking informally with delegates, Meeks was heard disparaging her counterpart, Rhonda Sivarajah, over revelations of her pass DFL association and not-so-conservative past credentials.  Sivarajah, Seifert’s running mate, countered with Meeks’ association to Newt Gingrich, during the time when his infidelities to his cancer-ridden wife were at their height.

Needless to say, the contrasts between the two conventions were stark.  Last week, a unified and energized group of DFLers left Duluth a cohesive political force, ready to take back the Governor’s mansion after 20 years in the political wilderness.  In witnessing the adjournment of the Republicans, the divisions appear incredibly and permanently deep, too deep for their recovery in time for November’s elections.

The below is a contestant in the “Write Lori Sturdevant’s Next Column” contest, written by “Mr D”.   Vote above.

The Republicans were on a 3-day ideological bender at the Convention Center this weekend, so it was perhaps appropriate that they selected a 2-time DWI offender, Tom Emmer, to carry their unsteady banner against the DFL-endorsed Margaret Anderson Kelliher. In their Tea Party-fueled fervor, it seemed that the GOP lost sight of the optics of nominating a twice-convicted drunk driver in the immediate aftermath of tragedies on Minnesota highways only the week before.

The below is a contestant in the “Write Lori Sturdevant’s Next Column” contest, written by “Ben”.   Vote above.

The Republican Party proved that they have been taken over by the extreme right-wing teabaggers. They had a choice between someone who actually knows about government and wins in a very liberal area and a kook from Delano. Of course they chose the kook from Delano what would you expect. The Lt.Gov candidate is a member of the Met Council who wanted to get rid of the Lt.Governor position so will she resign if somehow the people of Minnesota send this crazy duo to the Governors Mansion? Somehow the DUI’s of Emmer’s past didn’t seem to matter to the delegates of the teabagger convention though, and I am sure MADD will let everyone know just how bad Emmer is. Can you imagine someone having veto power while drunk? We are not the former Soviet Union. What were the delegates drinking? If Siefert had been nominated I would have been able to throw my support behind him if Kelliher didn’t survive the primary. But now this conservative will support whoever is the DFL nominee after the primary. It is time to send the Democrats back to the Governors mansion, because in fairness they deserve a chance.