Category: Convention ’08
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Hard To Believe It Was Four Years Ago
Chad the Elder takes us down memory lane, back to four years ago, when his night of the RNC got washed out by a passing hurricane. And it led me through my own little set of flashblacks- all the time I spent covering the convention in my city back then, and the unruly guests we had. Good…
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They Know What Matters
The state deficit is zooming out of control. Two of the three gubernatorial candidates have no idea how they’re going to fix it; they’re a step or two shy of hosting a contest looking for ideas. The DFL, which has controlled the legislature for the past four years and dominated it completely for two, has…
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Newsweek: “Go to your room, voters!”
I started out my “adult” life, at least to about halfway through college, as a liberal. But starting in high school, I had doubts; the Dems were a disaster on national security; the economy was falling apart; I started to have doubts that “giving everything to everyone” was anything more than a good campaign promise…
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A Realistic Proposal
With the dismissal of yet another “ethics complaint” against Norm Coleman… The Federal Election Commission has dismissed a complaint by the state DFL accusing former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman of using campaign funds for personal use to pay legal fees stemming from a lawsuit in Texas. The FEC today reported the dismissal of the complaint…
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Against Type
It’s not often that I find myself defending Saint Paul mayor Chris Coleman. Indeed, I die a little inside at the thought. But they say you can learn a little about a guy by his enemies. So here goes; good job, Mayor Coleman. A group of stalkers followed Coleman to a fundraiser last week: About…
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We Got A Call
On the show last Saturday, Ed and I got a phone call from “Doug”, a volunteer driver who ended up spending most of the convention shuttling MSNBC people around the Cities. And yow – what a phone call. Ed has the audio from the phone call – it’s about six minutes. Give it a listen.…
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Convention: Sublime To The Ridiculous
With all the talk about Sarah Palin’s sublime speech and the anarkids’ display of petulance, it seems we’ve pretty much missed talking about the dumbest display of the entire RNC; “True Blue Minnesota”‘s jumbotron. Now, when TBM started talking about mounting “huge” jumbotrons high above downtown Saint Paul, on Cathedral Hill, to beam messages of…
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Shaken, not detonated
A couple of our loyal commenters accused law enforcement of “overreaching” during the pre-RNC house raids that uncovered various and sundry household items; asserting that the items uncovered could be used for anything. Does Freedom of Assembly Include the Right to Carry a Bucket of Urine? And Now She’s A Weapons Expert The Star Tribune…
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The Family Business
I ran into Leo Pusateri and his son, Leo III, at the demonstrations on Thursday. And Leo III has a serious future in the whole “reporting” business, with his posts (here, here and here) on the demonstrations.
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Pro Forma
The Associated Press states the bleeding obvious; the GOP isn’t real stacked with minorities. The Republican National Convention showcased a Native American color guard, a black preacher and video footage of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, all part of its effort to present the GOP as a picture of diversity. What it hasn’t offered is…
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What I Did All Day: 8PM
I joke constantly that doing the Northern Alliance Radio Network is the easiest talk radio gig in the world, because you rarely need to do any actual show prep. John, Chad, Brian, Ed, King, Michael and I blog about the stuff all week; we’re completely, constantly immersed in our material. Prep is almost redundant. Counterintuitively,…
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Breaking News
The City of Saint Paul has asked downtown businesses to send workers home in advance of the 4PM protest march. This is the protest dealt with in the meeting I personally covered about six weeks ago: “We worked very hard to make the Day 1 march on the Xcel something that you can bring your…
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Smells Like Mean Spirit
Mary Mitchell at the Chicago Sun-Times makes the by-now ever-more-obligatory nod to the power of Sarah Palin’s speech last night… …but calls it “mean-spirited”. “I love those hockey moms. You know what they say the difference is between a hockey mom and a pit bull — lipstick,” Palin said. And then she showed us what…
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There’s There, There
Bruce Benidt from The Same Rowdy Crowd – one of the better (read: more readable, less drearily awful) leftyblogs in town – seems to enjoy good oratory too: Democrats have come up against a force here. It’s the same force — absent substance — that worked for George Bush. But Palin is ten times the…
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Pundits Gone Wild
I was sitting two booths down from Hugh Hewitt last night, on Radio Row. At one point, I was in a clutch of guys – Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Duane Patterson, King Banaian, Ed Morrissey – that’d challenge anyone’s intellectual adequacy (unless you, like I, ignore the concept). And you could tell they were elated at…
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Overheard From The Pacifica Radio Booth
PACIFICA AIR TALENT: “Like, what’s with Sarah Palin’s kids names? Trig? Track? Piper? Is she like from California?” THE OTHER SEVEN PEOPLE GATHERED AROUND THE PACIFICA TABLE: “Like, totally haha”.
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Body Language
I’ve said it before – I’m an oratory geek. It’s the family business; Dad was a speech teacher for most of four decades, and has actually had a longer radio career than me (he’s been doing weekly editorials at KDSU, a public station in Fargo, since the eighties). And of course, I’ve noodled around the…
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What If A Bunch Of El-Flopola Self-Styled “Radicals” Took Their Masks Off And Nobody Cared?
Last weekend’s raids in Minneapolis drew a fair share of controversy; many commentators posited that, based on the list of materials captured in the raids, it appeared that Ramsey County sheriff Bob Fletcher overreached in carrying out the raids (although I personally will wait to hear more about the evidence against the various arrestees). I…
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A Bit Of Thatcher
One of the things I loved about Lady Margaret Thatcher, former conservative Prime Minister of the UK, was her sheer gleeful unrepentance. She – like her friend Ronald Reagan – had a vision and mission; they both took it to the people directly, bypassing the media and going straight for mainstreet in their respective nations,…
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John McCain…
LIVE BLOGGED …is getting much more than he bargained for tonight. Sarah Palin is on tonight. She is as comfortable in front of this crowd as she is at her son’s hockey game. This bodes well so far. …and now she’s going after Obama and Biden! Un bee leeeev a bull! She aint wastin’ no…
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Rudy Giuliani…
LIVE BLOGGED …is giving the speech of his lifetime. If you believe in Voodoo, Barack’s backside is quite sore by now from the application of Rudy’s foot. Cindy McCain is cradling Sarah Palin’s baby boy as Rudy speaks. Highlights: A few years later, he ran for the U.S. Senate. He won and has spent most of…
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Welcome To My City, Protesters
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Does Freedom of Assembly Include the Right to Carry a Bucket of Urine?
Police raid RNC protest sites in Twin Cities First of all, protesting is a loser’s game. It has no lasting impact on policy or public opinion. If you want to affect policy, you have to be organized, respectful, and these days demonstrate that you have at least one hundred thousand voters of the same consensus,…
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Gustav, You Little Bastard
Gustav is expected to achieve Category Five status, equal in category to Katrina NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AFP) — Desperate to avoid a repeat of the Katrina catastrophe in 2005, New Orleans began mandatory evacuations Saturday as another deadly hurricane, Gustav, bore down on the city. Traffic crawls on major route out of New Orleans Campaigns…
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Four of these things belong together
Four of these things belong together Four of these things are kind of the same Can you guess which one of these doesn’t belong here? Now it’s time to play our game (time to play our game). Joe Barack Gustav Sarah John “That’s right boys and girls. If you guessed Gustav, you’re right! Gustav has…