Joe Doakes writes:

Pioneer Press On-Line forwarded article from NationalJournal “fact-checking” the debate, that included this bit:

Romney on assault weapons ban:

Responding to a question about assault weapons, Romney said, “We, of course, don’t want automatic weapons, which is already illegal in this country.” Actually, the federal ban on assault weapons — first enacted in 1994 under former President Clinton — expired in September 2004, during the George W. Bush administration.

Um, kids, Clinton’s assault weapons ban did not affect fully-automatic weapons, which is what Romney was specifically talking about. He knows the difference that you evidently do not. The “fact-check” sounds like it was written by one of our old friends.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Yep.

Attention, media “fact checkers”; we covered this the other day.  Read it and learn something.

I’m the first to admit that confirmation bias hits everyone.  Myself included.

But for the life of me, I’m not sure how anyone, ever, could say Barack Obama even came close in the debate last night…

…except among a base that needed a spiff to keep them from driving into bridge abutments aroiund the country, and maybe to give the low-information voters that are the Democrats’ only real growth market a fresh charge on their chanting points.  By those standards – “victory” means your supporters get a morale boost, and idiots get a fresh dose of “Planned Parenthood” – then yes, the president’s performance was adequate.

Of course, like Ringo Starr, he only did it with a little help from his friends:

Romney had the President on the ropes, stammering and babbling over his Adminstration’s performance in re Benghazi – and Crowley in effect came off the bench to tackle Mitt.

As predicted.

The best thing about the debate after sleeping on it?  The Libya issue is going to be front and center in the headlines for the next five days, until the foreign policy debate.  And this time The One won’t have Candy Crowley to save him.

…but as a Second Amendment activist I found myself very, very jazzed that we finally have a Prez candidate who not only can articulate the difference between Automatic and Semi-Automatic weapons…

…but actually did it, on national TV.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Holy Cow, it turns out Hillary Clinton actually DID win the election and actually HAS been running the government while Obama golfed.

I Knew It!!

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Truly a profile in courage.

On Obama’s part, naturally.

…and lost?

Women are defecting from Obama in the swing states, according to USA Today/Gallup:

And don’t sweat the non-battleground numbers, Real Americans; they include California, New York, Massachusetts and other states that are definitely not battlegrounds…

Losing a “War on Women” – and by losing, we mean “having it shown to be a febrile propaganda cookie that women shunned in droves” – may be among the best things that could happen to American society.

Follow-up quiz:  In the wake of this polling, will the Obama Administration’s attempts to scare The LIttle Ladies back into compliance with The Party be:

A:  Desperate
B: Very Very Desperate
C: Pathetically Desperate
D: Overdrive/maximum overboost/Baghdad Bob-level desperate?

(And for all you history buffs – if the Dems lose the “War on Women”, does that make the Sandra Fluke kerfuffle sort of a Gleiwitz Incident?)

Leah Barkoukis notes something that should replace the tingles in Chris Matthews’ and Barack Obama’s legs with chills of dread.

For this entire election, the Obama Administration, and Democrats up and down the food chain, have been laboring mightily to pound a couple of sound bites into voters’ heads; that Republicans will take away contraception and send illegal immigrants back across the border and give tax breaks to billionaires while soaking the middle class, that Barack Obama ended the war on terror by killing Osama Bin Laden, and that the economy is chugging right back to life and even if it doesn’t it’s Bush’s fault anyway.

These are aimed at the “Low-Information Voter” –  the people who don’t care much about politics, who don’t really follow issues in depth, whose votes are swayed by the loudest chanting points in their minds when they go to the polls (among those who can be convinced, at any rate; union Democrats and single-issue pro-lifers don’t figure in this).

But what happens if the meme rattling about the low-information voters’ heads isn’t fictional wars on womyn and the poor?  What if, in spite of the media’s best efforts, the single “chanting point” on their mind is the one they see with their own eyes, and hear from their families and friends?  That the economy sucks and nobody cares who inherited it from whom?

That, Barkoukis says, is Why Lindsay Lohan’s Endorsement Matters:

Lohan is a low information voter convinced that (a) employment is really important, (b) thinks that employment is not being sufficiently handled by the White House right now and (c) thinks that Mitt Romney is better equipped to handle employment.

That arguably logical sequence is all that it takes for a low-information voter to support Mitt Romney. The thing is, there are millions of voters like her. That should terrify the Obama campaign.

A stopped clock is right twice a day.  It is a fact that Obama’s policies will institutionalize U6 numbers in the double digits.  Linday Lohan may not know what a U6 number is.  Either may your underemployed nephew who graduated from college with a degree in anthropology two years ago and has been temping ever since while living in your sister’s basement.  But both of them – your idiot nephew and Lohan, whose father is reportedly unemployed – know what their lying eyes tell them.

One b-list actress and rolling train wreck isn’t a trend, of course.  But let’s presume for a monent that a significant chunk of low-information voters are, improbably, focused on something that matters.  Bad news for Obama, ja?

Question for Minnesota:  does this mean Minnesota voters will shun the Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s low-info voter campaign?

Or, counterintuitively, does the success of the GOP legislature in taming the state’s fake “deficit” and helping unemployment edge down to a near-low in the US actually harm them in the battle for the not-overly-informed?

This is my first round of predictions for this cycle.  It’s neither complete nor final.

Second CD:  John Kline wins by eight.

Third CD:  Erik Paulsen beats Brian Barnes by 14.

Sixth CD:  MIchele Bachmann beats Jim Graves by at least 12, setting a pattern – Bachmann wins by double digits – that stands until at least 2020 (and who knows what the next round of redistricting will do).

Eight CD: For all their money the Dems pour into this race, Cravaack wins by two.

OK – your turn.

The media is having its usual bout of victorian vapours over this picture.

This would fool MPR, the AP, or any leftyblogger.

But as Stacey McCain notes, there is just not a chance in hell this isn’t a false-flag:

I can pretty much guarantee that this man photographed at a Romney rally in Lancaster, Ohio, is not in fact a Republican, but rather is a plant sent out by the Democrats as a dirty trick.

• Clue #1: Wearing a “Romney/Ryan” sticker on the back of his T-shirt. Nobody does this. Nobody.
• Clue #2: It’s kind of chilly in Ohio this time of year, and the guy’s wearing only a T-shirt, while those around him are wearing coats.

What’s the old saying?  “If something is too good to be true, it probably is”?

That’s true for photographs too, isn t it?

My guess is that this guy also wore a coat when he entered the rally, then stationed himself toward the back of the crowd (in front of the riser where the press photographers are stationed) and then removed his coat to expose the T-shirt, with the explicit purpose of having it photographed.

• . . . aaanndd, Clue #3: No name? A press photographer is going to take a picture like this and make no effort to ID the guy? Nuh-uh.

Fearless prediction:  This will turn out to be a bit of false-flag slander.  This is what the Democrats, nationally and here in Minnesota, do when they’re in trouble.

Second fearless prediction:  given the way it’s disappeared from the media, they are probably on the brink of finding that the shooting at the Obama headquarters in Denver was a false-flag, too – just like the one four years ago.

I coudln’t get to this one last week; the ChiTrib endorses…

…a conservative Republican for Congress.  Even the ChiTrib thinks Jan Schakowsky (IL-9CD) is “too partisan”

We have in the past gone hot and cold on Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the 9th District. She’s always up for a good debate and it’s a pleasure to spar with her. But she’s also one of the most partisan, liberal members of the House.

When the Democrats finished drawing the new congressional maps, Republican Tim Wolfe awoke to find himself living in the 9th. The district is considered safely blue. Wolfe lives in Arlington Heights, a pocket of red voters who were tossed into the 9th by mapmakers to protect the Democratic tilt of other districts. Wolfe decided he had to run against Schakowsky. “You know what Jan is going to offer,” he says. “More government, more taxes, more debt, more government intrusion. … She stands for the exact opposite of what I stand for in most cases.”

Am I the only one wondering if Schakowski owes one of the publishers a chit of some kind?

…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.

Since Slow Job brought it up last night – here is the record of spending for the past two administrations:

Via Instapundit

By the way – I missed this part of the debate last night, but Biden lied about his votes on both wars.

No wisecrack followups for either of those factoids.

Chuck Woolery on Twitter last night:

Biden, my strong catholic belief has driven me to support gay marriage, abortion forced birth control on the church and blatant lying. Amen

— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) October 12, 2012

I do have to confess; not since Ben Vereen’s prime, or maybe the heyday of Riverdance, have I seen tap-dancing like pro-“choice”, pro-gay-marriage Catholics rationalizing their politics with their faith (or at least the cafeteria version of it).

The smirking?  The 82 interruptions?  The incoherent girly giggling?

No big deal.  I expected that from Biden.

Biden’s approach to the debate was, in a conventional social sense, “rude” – but this is politics.  Conventional rules, at least under the surface, are more or less irrelevant.

For starters, Biden is well aware that virtually nobody changes their mind over the Veep debates.  The Veepstakes are all about getting bases jazzed for the final sprint.  And what you saw was the comparison of the tactics the campaigns believed with reach their various bases.

Ryan was thoughful, on point, intellectually cogent, and stayed on the message – “we’re going to start making the tough choices, and get people back to work” – the sort of things the conservative base is concerned with.

Biden was arrogant, blustery, giggly, interrupting constantly – he was, in fact, the very model of the modern Liberal.  The model of the lefty base is, in fact, Fast Eddie Schultz and Chris Matthews.

I don’t think it was just boorishness, though.  Biden is a bobblehead, but he’s not stupid.  I think he knows that if the whole country was talking about what a jabbering, smirking, inappropriately-giggling jag he was, they would spend less time talking about the past four years, Benghazi, four years of 8% unemployment (not to mention the most important issues of the past year, last Wednesday’s debate and Big Bird).

So far, it’s working.

But the part that I wanted to yell from the mountaintops?  Bident’s closing statement.  He stated his purpose, and the administration’s as making sure the “playing field is leveled, they, in fact, have a clear shot, and they have peace of mind”

Government-leveled playing fields are level.  They are as clear as an IRS form.  And government doesn’t give peace of mind (barring the bits and pieces of safety net that actually serve as safety nets, which we already paid for, thank you very much), it only takes it away.

Red meat tofu for a not-so-bright base?  Absoluteley.

Deserving re-election?

Pfft.

Lara Logan shreds the Administration’s lies on Afghanistan:

Remember all those years Democrats looked their knowing looks and said “but Bush hasn’t gotten Bin Laden!”, concluding with a smug grin like a toddler who’d just filled a diaper. We’d reply “if they killed Bin Laden tomorrow, the war wouldn’t end” – but they were too busy showing the diaper, apparently, to pay attention.

Sometimes it sucks to be right.

The US Center for Narrative Control is battling a deadly outbreak of Scrutonium.

Iowahawk reports from the front lines.

The left and media (PTR) was skipping and gamboling about like happy little meerkats yesterday; a new PPP poll showed – as PPP polls tend to do – nothing but good news for Minnesota Democrats.

In an automated phone survey of 937 likely MInnesota voters, they found…:

PPP’s newest poll on Minnesota’s amendment to ban gay marriage finds it running slightly behind, with 46% of voters planning to support it and 49% opposed.

That represents a 4 point shift compared to a month ago when it led for passage 48-47.

The poll claims that the major movement has been among indies and women.

“The marriage amendment in Minnesota continues to look like a toss up,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “Voters are very closely divided on the

issue.”

Well, we more or less knew that.

Then, they addressed the other Constitutional Amendment:

When we polled on it in June it was leading for passage by a 58/34 margin. By September that had tightened to a 56/39 advantage. And now it’s leading only 51/43. Democrats are now even more opposed to the voter ID amendment (23/71) than they are to the one on

marriage. And although independents continue to support it their 52/41 favor for it is down a good deal from 62/33 a month ago. This fight may end up a lot closer than people

initially expected.

Or it may not.

We’ll come back to that one.

They also put the DFL up substantially on a “generic legislative ballot”, which would be big news if voters voted for a generic legislature.  They don’t, of course.

As always, the devil is in the turnout model:

Here it is, buried deep in a set of crosstabs:

That’s D+9.  Not as far out as the D+13 we got from the Strib a while back, but it still higher than 2008.

That’s especially interesting compared to this other bit of crosstabbery:

So Democrats outnumber Republicans 38/29, but conservatives outnumber Dems 37/34?

At any rate – the polling services continue to put out (if you look hard enough for them) polls with turnout models that, when you ask them, they are are legitimately what they’re encountering out there…

…but do not in any way pass the sniff test.

And the media?

Well, they just shovel it on out there.  It’s just the topline number that really matters.  Right?

The Pioneer Press has opted not to give endorsements this year.

I suspect – and this is just a, er, shot in the dark on my part, pure speculation – that there are one or two reasons for this:

• The Pioneer Press has figured out that press endorsements are just another form of bandwagoneering unbecoming a “journalistic” entity.   While the Pioneer Press’ endorsement record is a lot more bipartisan than the Strib’s, a record (generally, across the media, not just at the Pioneer Press) of mostly-DFL endorsements provides prime ammunition for the charge that the press is biased to the left.
• They were facing the prospect of having to not endorse Betty McCollum.  The long-time DFL Congresswoman has been such an incredible non-entity, and has developed into such a rancorously partisan figure in Congress, that a significant part of the editorial board decided not to endorse.  After a fierce battle with the rest of the board, and facing backlash from a pro-DFL staff, the paper decided to just avoid the whole mess.

Again, the above is purely speculation.  It’s only if I were to joke about or mock the ideas above that they would be ensured of being proven correct. [1]

Rather than endorsing 2nd CD representative John Kline, they opt merely to write about how completely he’s dominated the district, but how redistricting might make Mike Obermueller’s DFL bid a little more tenable than whoever it was that ran last time.

(more…)

Yesterday we published the now-infamous (albeit still ignored-by-the-MSM) video of Barack Obama’s Kanye-West-like speech to a group of African-American activists about the racism tied to the aid to Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.

As Paul Mirengoff notes, not only was it racist, it was completely false:

Obama’s claim was false. A few weeks before Obama gave his Hampton speech, Congress had waived the Stafford Act in connection with $6.9 billion in federal aid for New Orleans.

But it gets worse for Obama. Neo-neocon points out that Obama was one of 14 Senators who voted against the waiver of the Stafford Act. So not only was Obama’s complaint false, it was one he would have lacked standing to raise, given his vote on the issue.

Now, Obama voted against the Stafford Act waiver because it was part of a bill providing funds for the war effort in Iraq. Apparently, Obama’s desire to make sure the surge failed and we lost to al Qaeda in Iraq trumped his concern for the good people of New Orleans. Or maybe it was all posturing, Obama’s specialty, since he knew the money would go to Iraq and the Stafford Act would be waived regardless of how he voted.

Perhaps Obama should have voted “present.”

I suggest all of the above, plus the fact that being a Democrat in Chicago means never being accountable to anyone.

Of course, the mainstream media does their best to keep that going nationally.  It’s just gotten a lot harder to do that.

They said if I voted for Barack Obama, racism would prevail.

And they were right:

“Down in New Orleans, where they still have not rebuilt twenty months later,” he begins, “there’s a law, federal law — when you get reconstruction money from the federal government — called the Stafford Act. And basically it says, when you get federal money, you gotta give a ten percent match. The local government’s gotta come up with ten percent. Every ten dollars the federal government comes up with, local government’s gotta give a dollar.”

“Now here’s the thing,” Obama continues, “when 9-11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act — said, ‘This is too serious a problem. We can’t expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you gotta put in. Well, here’s ten dollars.’ And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ‘Look at this devastation. We don’t expect you to come up with y’own money, here. Here’s the money to rebuild. We’re not gonna wait for you to scratch it together — because you’re part of the American family.’”

That’s not, Obama says, what is happening in majority-black New Orleans. “What’s happening down in New Orleans? Where’s your dollar? Where’s your Stafford Act money?” Obama shouts, angry now. “Makes no sense! Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!”

It’s a remarkable moment, and not just for its resemblance to Kayne West’s famous claim that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” but also because of its basic dishonesty. By January of 2007, six months before Obama’s Hampton speech, the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Katrina. Compare this to the mere $20 billion that the Bush administration pledged to New York City after Sept. 11.

Even if you are a low information voter, this has got to be sinking in, doesn’t it?

LL at Lady Logician – a former Minnesota blogger who transplanted to Utah, and didn’t skip a beat – notes that the simultaneous Democrat drive for low-information voters and their war on conservative minorities and women have all come together against Mia Love, who has come from behind to lead in the polls for her Utah US House seat.

LL quotes a Mother Jones hit piece on Love:

 Though a child of immigrants, Love has embraced much of her party’s tough stance on immigration. She has implied that she would back deporting the US-born children of illegal immigrants so as not to reward “bad behavior.” Yet by Love’s own account, she is what Republicans derisively call an “anchor baby”— someone born to immigrant parents specifically to game the immigration system and secure legal status for family members.

Love doesn’t talk about this aspect of her family’s immigration story now that she’s running for Congress, but she once said in a little-noticed interview that her birth on US soil helped bring her siblings to America. In January 2011, Love told the Deseret News that her parents, Jean Maxime and Marie Bourdeau, came to New York in the 1970s, fleeing poverty and looking for a better life. Love said that her parents immigrated legally, but were forced to leave their two young children behind in Haiti because their visa didn’t allow them to bring the kids.

Mother Jones (which, I have to confess, I thought went out of business in the late eighties) calls Love an “anchor baby”.

See a problem with this “reasoning?”

LL does:

The rest of the agenda media has dutifully lined up to run with the story that “anti-immigration immigrant” Mia Love is some an anchor baby – knowing full well that the term stems from the practice of ILLEGAL Immigrants who come to the US for the express purpose of giving birth on US Soil so that their citizen child will not be sent home. Mayor Love’s parents did not come here illegally. They didn’t need an anchor, they had their visas and they certainly could – in time – have filed for their children to join them here legally and without having another child.

So the accusation lies out there – Love lied about her family history.

And that’s really all that matters.  I’m pretty convinced that the  mainstream and liberal media know that the smart people can see past this fairly transparent untruth.  But it’s not the smart people that they’re aiming for.

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.

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.

As we look at the abusive travesty that is the Minnesota Poll – in this case, the ludicrously skewed, 3:2 pro-DFL partisan breakdown in this weekend’s polling on the two Constitutional Amendments – let’s take a trip back through history.

Frank Newport, the president of the broadly-respected Gallup Polls, savaged the Minnesota Poll in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 midterm and gubernatorial elections.

Let’s make sure we’re clear on this.  Pollsters attacking pollsters in public is a little like magicians publicly heckling other magicians.

Is there any evidence the Strib has polished up their methodology?

No.  Indeed, the two polls released over the weekend on the Marriage and Voter ID amendments show quite the opposite – or that some copy editor took a poll of Ramsey County voters and mislabeled it a poll of Minnesotans.

The Strib “Minnesota Poll” is doing what it’s paid to do:  create a pro-DFL bandwagon effect, and suppress GOP voter turnout.  It’s calling Minnesota at Obama with 48% and Romney with 40%.

But the poll uses the same absurd D41/R28 breakdown that the Marriage and Voter ID polls.  This polling would have you believe that while in 2008, with a messianic media darling running against an unpopular two-term candidate (McCain was irrevant) and the war the DFL had a six point advantage in partisan turnout (D39 R33), this year, mirabile dictu, we have a 13 point Democrat advantage in this state?

If you use turnout numbers from somewhere in between 2008 and 2010 – say, D36 R34 – and multiply the changes by the percent of each party that the poll itself says plan on voting for their candidate (93% of Democrats plan to vote for Obama, vs 96% of Republicans), then you wind up lopping off roughly .3% of Obama’s numbers, and adding a whopping 5.8% to Romney’s.

That makes the real split 47.7% Obama, 45.8% Romney.  

Question – especially for you libs in the audience:  In what way is a widely (one might say “lavishly”) publicized poll using a partisan split that this state hasn’t seen since Watergate to be interepreted as anything other than an elaborate voter-suppression scam?