“Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles.  We’re here to steal it back”

— Bono, introducing “Helter Skelter” at the beginning of Rattle and Hum.

———-

There aren’t many things in the world worse than someone – especially someone putatively in charge of you – claiming credit for your work.

All of Minnesota should be upset.

Fifty years ago, Minnesota was a sleeping giant.  Blessed with immense natural resources – taconite, lumber, agribusiness – and with huge advantages being the geographic, demographic and communications center of the upper midwest and upper Great Plains, Minnesota had been hampered by the same dynamics that hampered all rural Midwestern agricultural states.

Minnesota had communications – rails and rivers and roads – and a couple of big cities full of people and a huge land-grant university, located smack -dab at the confluence of America’s greatest river and one of her greatest rail nexuses.

Once communication and capital met, really, it’d have taken serious effort to keep Minnesota from prospering.

And Minnesota did, finally, prosper.  In the 1970s, the combination of brains, talent, communications and infrastructure finally moved Minnesota out of the “underachievers” category and onto the “overachievers” list.  Minnesota companies – 3M, Dayton Hudson, Carmichael-Lynch, Target, Sound of Music (now Best Buy), Musicland, Toro, Polaris, Northwest Orient Airlines, Control Data, Honeywell, IDS, Cray, Medtronic and a slew of others became the lynchpins of a regional economy that performed well above its weight.

Around that same time, the Minnesota Legislature – controlled at the time, we are reminded, by the Republican Party, in those days long, long before “Republican” meant “Conservative – instituted a series of programs that redistributed the state’s new, skyrocketing wealth from the parts of the state that had it – the cha-cha Twin Cities – to the parts that didn’t, the poor rural areas in the north and the the economically-lagging Iron Range and Arrowhead.  The reasons made some sense at the time, in a Keynesian sort of way; the Twin Cities, and especially their new, booming suburbs, were awash in money; towns like Virginia and Thief River Falls, presiding over eroding industries and smaller, less resource-rich populations, were sucking pond water.

Rolling in tax receipts as the regional and national economies both boomed in the sixties and very early seventies, the state launched a variety of programs – “Local Government Aid”, which redistributed money from the Cities outward and helped smaller, poorer areas of the state build better infrastructure, which made sense at the time, and an orgy of spending on schools and post-secondary education and infrastructure.

The national media, noticing the story of Minnesota’s booming growth at a time in the pre-Reagan era when people were still liable to attribute all good things in life to government, dubbed the explosion “The Minnesota Miracle”.  It even made the cover of Time Magazine.

Gov. Wendell Anderson

The message was fairly clear; Minnesota’s growth was due to govenrment.

Now, I’m not so dogmatic a conservative as to say that government had no role in Minnesota’s growth.  In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that, given the mentality of the time, Minnesota’s state government was a capable partner with Minnesota’s huge, growing, thriving business and higher education communities.

I’m a uniter, not a divider.

But that was then.

Now?  To the Minnesota DFL, what once were tools are now entitlements.  “Local Government Aid” has switched from being a hand-up for outstate Minnesota into a vehicle for laundering spending for the DFL; the Metro area and Duluth get 2.5 times more money per capita than the rest of the state, and many outstate cities get no LGA at all; indeed, some are opting to do without it altogether.  It’s become a political football and, worse, just another entitlement program.

And the companies, big and small, who were once the key partners in this growth?  Who invested billions in infrastructure to create jobs in this state?  They’re still here – it’s a nice place to live.  Taxes don’t necessarily kill big companies, or drive them completely out of the jurisdiction.  Just as companies remain in high-tax hellholes like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, the Twins’ big-ticket employers, the Targets and Best Buys and 3Ms keep their headquarters’ here – but are sending their new jobs and new growth pretty exclusively elsewhere.

And yet the media, and its DFL-allied shills and cheerleaders like Nick Coleman and Lori Sturdevant, keep pining for the myth of the “Minnesota Miracle”, where (liberal) government leads the rest of society into a great glowing glorious future with everyone Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota.

It’s garbage, of course.  Government, at the most, was a less-useless partner, even then, at a time when there was still such a thing as a moderate Democrat.  Nobody can say the same thing about today’s DFL.

Minnesota needs a new miracle.

We need the kind of miracle that Jersey City, NJ had in the nineties, when a conservative mayor, Brett Schundler, slashed taxes and regulation and focused his city on growth, security and education on a responsible budget.  Jersey City throve.

We need the kind of miracle that Texas – with its conservative government and hands-off approach to the market – is having; most of the jobs that are being created in the entire country are being created in Texas.

We need the kind of miracle they have in North Dakota as we speak, where a conservative government is cutting spending and rebating excessive tax collections.  (“But they have an oil boom going on!”, the lefties whinge.  How many states with boundless oil are sucking budget pond water right now?  What was the bumper sticker in Colorado – “Dear Lord – thanks for another oil boom; we promise not to screw it up this time?”  How many states have squandered limitless oil wealth on entitlements and are begging for more today?  Can you say Louisiana?)

We need the kind of miracle that Indiana is experiencing today, with government tightening its belt and getting out of the way of a market that is growing even as those of its surrounding, Democrat-controlled states, are reeling.

Government doesn’t give us “Miracles”, at least not when it comes to free market economics.  Government, at its very best, screws them up less.

Do I believe Tom Emmer’s plan will lead to another Minnesota Miracle – a miracle of the free market?

If the time is right, yes.  I do.  And at the very least, it will do vastly less harm than the Horner plan, to say nothing of Dayton’s hare-brained “plan”.

Professor David Schultz says it’s time for the DFL to tag it and bag it as re the Tarryl Clark campaign (I’ll add emphasis):

The poll reports that the lead is unchanged from the previous survey. Since then hundreds of ads and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars have poured into the race. Yet nothing has changed. If anything, the poll suggests opinions and voting preferences are fixed and with 5% undecided, there is little in terms of swing votes to move.

The race is over. About a week ago I blogged about how Democrats are wasting money on this race and need to stop pouring money into it and shift it to the Third Congressional District (Jim Meffert) or other races across the country.

I’m gonna suggest that Meffert is not going much further, either.  I’m predicting Paulson will win by at least the same margin Bachmann does.  Granted, I’m less connected to the Third District than the Six, but I’m comfortable in saying Meffert shouldn’t start measuring drapes anytime soon, either.

Mark Dayton flees the cameras of a Sioux Falls station after the last debate:

No plan.  No answers to questions.

Why is he running for office, again?

If you blinked last Monday, you missed Betty McCollum’s “town hall” meeting.  Indeed, if you sneezed at the wrong time, you may have missed the part where she or any of her staff called it a “town hall”, themselves.

I had a prior engagement – but Doug Bass attended.

Not that it was easy:

I actually didn’t know it was advertised as a “DFL Town Hall Rally” until I got to the event.  But doesn’t the phrase “DFL Town Hall Rally” sound contradictory, oxymoronic?  If they said “DFL Rally,” it would be clearly understood as a partisan event.  If they said “Town Hall Meeting,” I believe it would be generally understood as a non-partisan event.  So the very phrase “DFL Town Hall Rally” sounded odd to me.

As I headed to Macalester, I was thinking to myself “Whose idea was it to have a town hall meeting at 5:30 pm?  There are a lot of people who aren’t going to be able to make it.”  I then realized that this wasn’t a bug, it was a feature, a mechanism of keeping inconvenient people away from the event.

Doug noticed something I did not; I’ll add emphasis:

When I got to Macalester College, one of Teresa Collett’s volunteers saw me, and we started chatting.  He showed me the press release for the event, which was issued on Friday, the traditional day where news goes to be buried. And not just any Friday, mind you, the Friday three days before the event, and the Friday the day before September 11, where the nation’s attention is elsewhere.  The only media outlet that covered the event was Minnesota Public Radio, which let the abovementioned “Town Hall Rally” oddity pass without comment.

And this may be the quote of the day:

I thought to myself “This isn’t a Town Hall Meeting, this is a flash mob!  A secret, moonless midnight flash mob!”

And the conclusion?

This event was a Potemkin Town Hall meeting, an event created for the purpose of being able to claim that a Town Hall meeting took place.  The scheduling, the publicity, the audience made it nothing of the sort.  It was a treachery within further treacheries.

Read the whole thing.

So we had the “flash mob”, and we’ll have two more coming up with friendly audiences – a union hall and another.

That’s a lot of “appearances” for Betty McCollum.

Maybe being in a “D+13” district doesn’t feel as secure as it used to…

(And yes, now would be a perfect time to pitch in a few bucks for to Teresa Collett’s campaign.  The CD2 leadership hates me when I write this, but you live in the Second, where John Kline is going to win by thirty on a bad day, it’d be cool if you could peel off a buck or two for Teresa, who actually seems to have a shot.  And/or for Joel Demos, who’s running the funnest underdog campaign I’ve seen since Harley McClain.  And for that matter for Randy Demmer and Chip Cravaack, both of whom have quietly moved into positions to have decent shots against Walz and Oberstar).

…the real story was this:  Mark Dayton dropped eight points in the SurveyUSA/KSTP poll.  Emmer was up four.  They’re in a statistical tie.

Leftybloggers point out that the crosstabs changed; this SUSA/KSTP poll had equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, while the previous one polled more Democrats.

Not enough more to completely explain an eight point drop, of course.

Two observations about last night’s SurveyUSA/KSTP poll:

It’s A Miracle! KSTP and a slew of other media played this story like it genuinely showed Tom Horner moving into the race.  As one wag noted, this is the first time in polling history that a candidate under twenty points, getting half the numbers of the second place candidate, has given the media a tingle up their legs.  KSTP breathlessly compared Horner to Jesse Ventura who, they reminded us, had only ten points at this point in the 2002 race.

The comparison ignored two key facts: the Independence Party had had absolutely no traction, anywhere in the country, since Ross Perot (then calling his vehicle the “Reform” Party) threw the 1992 election to Bill Clinton; and, lest we forget, Tom Horner was never a professional wrestler.  He will not draw the bobbleheaded election-day-voter in with his fame, since he has none (other than his years as an MPR commentator), and he’s not talking about sealing any deals by cutting license fees on jet-skis.

The Independence Party is the product of a much more trivial era in politics.  Times were good in 1998, and had been for a long time.  History may not have ended, but it was sure taking a break.  People felt they could afford to spend a vote on a joke.

Horner’s no joke, but he’s no Ventura.  And that’s why neither he nor any other IP candidate will ever win a race.

Debateable: But the debate itself didn’t suck.  I listened to most of it; Rick Kupchella, formerly of Channel 11 and now with “Bring Me The News“, ran a great show.

After years of listening to trite, softball questions that served mainly to let candidates tie their talking points together in sequence, Kupchella went for the guts.  His first questions set the tone; to Horner, “do you matter?”; to Emmer, “are you an extremist?”; to Dayton, “can you handle the pressure?”.

Who’da thunk it? Debates as political journalism.  Never thought I’d see the day.

So I caught the Channel Five news just now.  Channel Five’s 10PM news opened with a stock shot of Jesse Ventura, and asked “could we be heading for a repeat?”

This was how they kicked off their segment on the latest KSTP/Survey USA poll.

I braced myself for another three way race, like back in 2002.

In fact, Dayton was down to 38 (from 46 in the last Survey USA poll); Emmer up to 36 (from 32), and Horner was at…

18.  Up from 9.

And here’s a prediction; he’s peaked.  And if he hasn’t, he’ll be taking voters from the DFL.

Emmer’s proposes cutting $400 million or so from higher ed.

Listening to the left’s caterwauling, you’d think this was all coming out of student’s pocketbooks.

But Emmer also proposes shutting down one of our extra MNSCU schools.  Minnesota is overstocked with them; we could do without one of them.

And a note here – while the media has been carping about Emmer’s need for budget  “details”, the Dayton “plan” includes no details on higher education spending of any kind.   Horner’s plan calls for a tab of nearly three billion, plus abou$360 million in “investments”, minus something in “redesign”.  Government is fun for wonks, isn’t it?

For the past two months, we’ve had the Big Left – the DFL and media – asking “When is Emmer going to come out with the details of his budget plan?  We need details!  Gotta have details!  Where are the details!  He owes us details! The people need details! Bring the details!  Where’d he put the details? Does he have any details? Can’t run a campaign without details! I’ll bet he has no details! The other guys have details!  Cough up the details!”

I pointed out, quite correctly, back in June that it’d be stupid for Emmer to release the details, because it’d merely provide the DFL and media a chance to frame Emmer’s proposals long before the vast majority of voters started to even care about the race.  Emmer is operating at a serious financial deficit compared to the deep pockets of the Dayton family and their union sycophants, so he had to husband his sunday punch – The Plan – until the Minnesota Street actually started to give a crap about the election.

Well, now people are starting to pay attention.  And Emmer has dropped his entire plan.

And Emmer has made public more details than the other two candidates put together.

And as we saw earlier this week, lots of Dayton’s details just don’t add up – and Horner’s not even going to put his plan through the MN Dept. of Revenue vetting that was seemingly so vital to the Left and Media (ptr) when Emmer’s vetting was still ambiguous.

So – now what?

(Fearless prediction:  “high-level conceptual elegance, and trust in the native intelligence of Minnesotans to understand a plan on their own” will replace “details” as the supreme virtue of budget plans).

Here’s the part I’ve been looking forward to; Emmer plans to fundmantally reform Local Government Aid:

The Emmer plan calls for reforming Local Government Aid to focus solely on public safety and critical infrastructure needs. Over several decades, LGA expanded to an often politically targeted subsidy for many local governments – in the process paying for non-critical services. An Emmer administration will reform local government aid giving certainty to local units of government as they plan their budgets.

An Emmer Administration will immediately sit down with the League of Minnesota Cities, Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities and Association of Minnesota Counties to identify mandate reforms that will elevate unnecessary burdens on local units of government.

The Emmer plan calls for reforming Local Government Aid to focus solely on public safety and critical infrastructure needs. Over several decades, LGA expanded to an often politically targeted subsidy for many local governments – in the process paying for non-critical services.

Where do we start on this one?  LGA has become a vehicle to allow local government to launder their spending through the rest of the state’s taxpayers, avoiding accountability with their own taxpayers. Especially the DFL-addled governments of the Twin Cities and Duluth, which get LGA funding 2.5 times greater per capita than the rest of the state.

An Emmer administration will reform local government aid giving certainty to local units of government as they plan their budgets.

It’d add accountability to local governments (which will be spun as “higher property taxes” by DFL-dominated local governments, terrified of the backlash their own citizens might eventually visit on them when they actually have to be responsible for their own spending).

This reform is long, long overdue.

Make no mistake about it – our K12 education system needs to be reformed on a level that goes way beyond spending.

But most of this state doesn’t know it yet.  K12 education is like social security; criticism has to be very limited if you want to get elected to office.  It’s sad but true.

Here’s Emmer’s proposal on the education budget:

Tom Emmer calls for holding K–12 education funding harmless in the next biennium. Tom Emmer is committed to ensure that this critical spending of the budget is not reduced.

Let’s make sure we remember that Dayton’s budget cranks up the spending – but most of that goes to paying “the shift”.  More on that below.

An Emmer administration will be focused on reprioritizing existing K–12 funding to address critical needs. Changes in priorities can be accomplished without undermining local school districts’. Additionally an Emmer administration will create urban school district empowerment zones and reduce state mandates by allowing school districts to have greater authority to operate their districts and reduce state mandates for all school districts.

The empowerment zone idea is a good one.

Also bear in mind that Emmer, unlike Dayton, is going to leave charter schools alone.  Inner city parents who have fled the district schools will still have a refuge while the state works on re-organizing urban schools.

As far as that shift goes:

An Emmer Administration will begin identifying a repayment schedule in FY2012-13 and plan to begin repaying the shift in FY2014–15. Enacting the Emmer Jobs Agenda and putting Minnesotans back to work, the economy will grow and repayment may be triggered more quickly.

In the meantime, it’s a bill we can pretty justifiably postpone for now.

Compare the budgets

Dayton Says: “Taxing the Rich” will raise four billion dollars.

The MN Department of Revenue says:

This proposal adds a new top bracket at a rate of 10.95% starting in tax year 2011. The 10.95% bracket is set at $150,000 for married joint filers, $75,000 for married separate filers, and $130,000 for single and head of household filers. The new bracket is not adjusted yearly for inflation although the bottom brackets are adjusted for inflation in keeping with current law. The tax year impact is as follows:

And the end result, according to the MNDoR?

Tax Year Impact

______ ($000s)_______

TY 2011 $752,800

TY 2012 $813,600

TY 2013 $879,100

In other words, cranking the tax on “the rich” to a confiscatory 8 to 11% (actually 10.95, but let’s be honest here…) brings in less than half of what the Dayton budget “plan” says it will.

But even that is over triple the tax hike that the completely DFL-dominated Legislature could pass at the height of Obamamania.

Mark Dayton’s budget is DOA.  Electing him – or “Mini-Mark”, Tom Hornery , whose plan is marginally less profligate and, at this point, vastly less-vetted by the in-the-bag media – would be colossal wastes of time.

As this is rolling out, Tom Emmer is releasing the long-awaited Part 3 of the plan for his Administration – the re-engineering of how Minnesota government works.

It’s called “Living Within Our Means”, and it’s a tall order.

Here are the basics:

Minnesota Government Needs Fundamental Reform: Government must start to live within its means, rather than claiming a share of all income as an entitlement.

Economic Vitality And Fiscal Sustainability: Keeping government fat and happy at the expense of the entrepreneurs, the business community and the state’s hardest workers is no way to keep an economy running.  This needs to be a multipartisan effort.

Emmer Will Balance The Budget: Unlike Dayton, who swings and misses by over half a billion dollars (or maybe much, much more), Emmer’s budget is balanced and, as noted in Part 1 of The Plan, cuts taxes.

From the press release, here’s the plan:

Budget Plan Details:

1. Hold state spending in FY2012-13 to projected revenues minus job-creation tax relief.

I. Current state general fund spending (FY2010-11) is $30.7 billion

II. State revenue projections expect revenue to grow to $32.9 billion in FY2012-13

III. State government can perform its necessary functions within $33 billion over the next two years.

2. Reprioritize unsustainable, run-away human services spending to focus on the most vulnerable.

i. Refocus spending on programs for children and seniors which have been historically underfunded.

ii. Work with the legislature to reform programs for adults.

iii. Health and Human Services will total $9.6 billion; a $500 million increase in state funding.

3. Reform the relationship between state and local governments.

i. Reform Local Government Aid to focus solely on public safety and critical infrastructure needs.

ii. Give local governments relief from state mandates.

Put state government bureaucracies on a diet.

I. Cut bureaucracies and programs which are not fundamental to state government’s mission.

II. Reduce the government workforce through attrition and early-retirement.

III. Merge agencies to streamline decision making and reduce costs.

More – very, very much more – coming tomorrow.

But the important part is this;  the Emmer Budget does what Mark Dayton doesn’t have the guts or institutional wisdom to do; it cuts spending.  It pushes government to do better with what it can afford – meaning “what we the people can afford in these miserable economic times”.

Emmer attacks the disease.  Dayton merely throws other peoples’ money at the symptoms.

This is a game-changer.

Tomorrow in Shot In The Dark: The Emmer Budget Plan in detail, suitable for passing on to your friends, family and co-workers.

…Emmer’s budget plan is going to be impacting.

I won’t be able to write about it live – but I’ll have details tonight/early tomorow.

For two months, the DFL and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) asked “Where’s the Emmer budget plan?”  They knew, of course, that it’d be stupid for Emmer to launch his plan at a time when nobody but reporters, wonks, partisans and political junkies cared about it – but that’s not how the Frame Game is played.

But then Emmer came out with a plan, on Labor Day.  And it was a good one.  And it made the DFL’s chanting point look pretty stupid.

Then the gears switched; Emmer “didn’t give details” for his plan.

Wouldn’t the DFL feel stupid if Emmer suddenly dropped a pile of details?

Hm.

More soon.

If you look on the leftyblogs and on Twitter, you will see another surge of people referring to Tom Horner – the Independence Ventura party candidate – as “Republican Tom Horner”.  Especially since he was endorsed yesterday by “Republican” (albeit in name only ) former governor Arne Carlson.

In fact, I think it looks like a huge surge of this sort of spin-mongering.

I’m going to bet that means the Dayton camp has seen another poll showing Horner drawing vastly more DFLers than Republican likely voters.

I had the honor and pleasure of MCing a fundraiser for the District 45 GOP last night, at The Lodge in Robbinsdale.  The Lodge is, by the way, owned by the same people who own “Bill’s Gun Shop”, right next door.  Guns ‘n booze; God  Bless America.

I got to meet SD45 candidate Nick Peterson, HD45A’s Mark Martin and HD45B candidate Reid Johnson.

Full disclosure; I got some appetizers and – this is fun – a $20 Holiday gift certificate!  In all my years of blogging and doing political speeches, this is the very first bit of portable, spendable consideration I have ever gotten.

Watch for the leftyblogs to start writing about the scourge of conservative bloggers getting gas cards.

The appetizers were delicious.

Expect a photo-essay – probably tomorrow.

Betty McCollum (DFL, MNCD4)  does her best to insulate herself from dissent.

Tonight is your chance to show her anyway.  She’s got a “Town Hall” going on at Macalester tonight, at the Macalester Chapel, 1600 Grand Avenue in Saint Paul.  And the good guys are rallying against her.

Get there at 5:30.

I can’t make it – I have a prior campaign-related commitment.  But if you go – and I hope you do! – leave a comment.

Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring does the job the Twin Cities media juuuuust can’t seem to get around to (emphasis added by me):

During his mini-infomercial with Esme Murphy, Mark Dayton admitted that the highest income tax rate he’d propose would be less than 11 percent.

Based on Minnesota Department of Revenue guidelines, which I wrote about here, that means Dayton’s budget wouldn’t come close to balancing. Here’s what the guidelines say about revenue projections:

So how much money would boosting income tax rates actually deliver? According to the revenue department, each tenth-of-a-percent increase would currently bring in an additional $27 million annually, or $54 million each biennium.

Dayton said that he wouldn’t raise taxes more than 3 percentage points, meaning his tax the rich scheme would generate approximately $1,600,000,000 in additional revenue. Dayton also said that he’d raise property taxes on homes valued at more than $1,000,000.

Based on that information, and assuming that Dayton would essentially approve of the spending increases from last session’s budget bills, Dayton’s ‘detailed budget’ would fall at least $3,000,000,000 short of balancing.

It’s time that Minnesotans realized that Dayton’s supposed detailed budget isn’t a budget blueprint. It’s a tax increase. PERIOD. END OF DISCUSSION.

It is, literally, nothing more than throwing money at the deficit.

The Dayton “plan”…:

• Does not solve the deficit: As Gary notes – but Esme Murphy for some reason won’t – Dayton’s budget comes up way short on its promise to “solve the deficit”.
• Shifts the burden to the legislature, which could barely pass a $400 million tax hike in the 2008 session, will not be passing any huge tax increases in the next session, with the likely blood-letting among tax-and-spend DFLers
• Will required Dayton to push the definition of “the rich” well down into the middle class:  if jacking up taxes on couples whose adjusged gross income is $150,000 a year leaves Dayton’s “plan” billions short, how far down will the definition of “rich” have to get pushed?

Here’s the biggest question of all:  Gary Gross asks some excellent questions.

Why the hell didn’t Esme Murphy ask any of this?

The simple fact is this – the media isn’t going to ask Mark Dayton any of the tough questions.

Just so we’re clear on this:  Mark Dayton’s education “plan” calls for three things:

1. Gutting charter schools
2. Ending federal-mandated testing
3. Giving the teachers union a bunch of money.

To contrast with this, Tom Emmer is releasing his own plan, as we speak.

His education plan is focused on a few simple, key things:

• ensure that K-12 funding is held harmless in the next biennium.
• improve school results through broad reforms.
• cutting mandates on schools

There are also reforms including  initiatives related to teacher effectiveness, kindergarten readiness,and – this oughtta be interesting – the redesign of teacher preparation programs.

And – this should play interestingly on the left – the state will repay the education shift to local school districts in accordance with state law.

Expect the DFL to respond “we really need a huge increase”, and for the union to say the only “reform” needed is more union teachers.

More later today.

Mark Dayton is to money like John McCain was to houses:

Luke Hellier explains Dayton’s South Dakota trusts – which save him a ton in taxes – and asks some questions:

1. In your “Deficit Solution” plan (item #3), you criticize snowbirds who maintain residences outside of Minnesota for six months and a day to avoid certain taxes, but why is it okay that your trust funds maintain residence outside of Minnesota 12 months a year?
2. Have you ever asked your family members or the executor of your South Dakota trust funds to move these trusts to Minnesota? If not, why not?
3. Have you ever asked your family members or the executor of your South Dakota trust funds whether you can divest? If not, why not?
4. Will you ask for the release of the tax returns for your South Dakota trust funds?
5. What tax benefits do you derive from your South Dakota trusts in comparison with the tax liability you would have were they in Minnesota?
6. How much in Minnesota taxes have you avoided paying the state in your lifetime because of these arrangements? If you cannot answer this question, would you be willing to allow an independent referee to calculate it before Election Day?
7. Can you explain your holdings in the well-known tax havens of the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands that are listed on your Senate Financial Disclosure reports?
8. Would you be willing to gift to the state of Minnesota all monies you would have been required to pay had your trusts been established in Minnesota?

I’m picturing a Scrooge McDuck kind of vibe here:

Vanity starts with an ‘M’ in Alaska’s senate contest.

Like a horror movie villain, the candidacy of Sen. Lisa Murkowski keeps returning from the dead.  Despite losing on election night, losing the absentee ballot fracus, and even conceding the GOP primary, Murkowski’s political ego has shown staying power the envy of Jason Voorhees.  Even the failure of Murkowski’s latest attempt to woo Alaska’s Libertarian Party apparently hasn’t dampered her efforts to return to D.C. short of buying her own ticket.  Instead, Murkowski’s newest bid is to prove the pen is mighter than the ballot with a longshot write-in candidacy:

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is expected to mount an independent campaign for senator after losing her primary, much to the dismay of her Republican colleagues, who won’t back her, according to a senior GOP leadership aide. 

“The entire Republican leadership has endorsed and would continue to support Joe Miller,” a the aide told Fox News on Wednesday…

A National Republican Senatorial Committee official made it clear that more money would be on the way to Miller, and suggested that Murkowski might be going through “the seven stages of grief.” 

“You know, first they concede … then there are the rumors of a write-in candidacy … then you get the acknowledgment that they’re done,” the official said.

If Murkowski does go through with a write-in effort, than she truly is “done”; which may suggest that she’s not Freddy Krueger, she’s Bruce Willis in the “Sixth Sense.”

Murkowski doesn’t appear to be gaining any options as the window for her to make a decision narrows.  The Libertarian option isn’t offically closed as long as endorsee Brian Haase continues to entain the notion of removing himself from the ballot.  But the LP’s executive committee has already voted against nominating Murkowski short of Haase presenting them with a fait accompli with his withdrawal.  And given some of the statements by the LP’s committee, even that scenario might not produce a Libertarian-endorsed Lisa Murkowski.

Only Strom Thurmond has ever won a general election write-in candidacy for the U.S. Senate.  Thurmond’s 1954 candidacy was far stranger than Alaska’s current senate tift.  The death of the Democratic incumbent, the Democrat Party’s decision to not hold a primary election, and former Governor Thurmond’s backing by the major players in the party were the only reasons why the endless South Carolina Senator prevailed.  Considering only one candidate was on the ballot – St. Sen. Edgar A. Brown for you political junkies out there – Thurmond’s candidacy was unique in the extreme.  Nothing approaching it awaits Murkowski on the frozen electoral tundra.

No pollster has yet demonstrated the effect of a Murkowski write-in campaign in Joe Miller and Scott McAdams minor league showdown.  While others polls show Murkowski with a narrow lead over Joe Miller (and Scott McAdams trailing badly), all were done with the assumption that Murkowski would actually be on the ballot.  A Murkowski coalition of moderate Republicans, independents and assorted anti-Palin voters could have propelled her to victory in a three-way race.

But a strategy that relies on such deep candidate committment to write-in her name – regardless of the hundreds of thousands of dollars Murkowski still has available to encourage voters to do so – is bound to attract only the hardest of hardcore Murkowski supporters.  It’s also one of the few strategies that could provide a victory to Democrat Scott McAdams.  While Murkowski’s holdouts certainly won’t be the 50% of the Republican electorate that voted for her on primary day, any votes for her will almost certainly be coming out of Miller’s side.  Couple that with even one poll showing Murkowski pulling low double-digit write-in support and the DNC might change it’s mind about bypassing the 49th State.

Murkowski could still be a viable force in Alaska politics – possibly even challenging first-term Senator Mark Begich in another four years.  But the longer Murkowski openly flirts with continuing a candidacy out of a cocktail of ego and spite, the less likely she’ll successfully seek office again.  Much like Charlie Crist, Murkowski’s unwillingness to suffer a present political setback has endangered (or in Crist’s case, likely ruined) her political past and future.

Ever since May, the DFL – via their closely-knit band of media and “alternative” media mouthpieces – have been spending time and money trying to paint Tom Horner as “the reasonable Republican”, to try to soak votes away from Tom Emmer.  The conventional wisdom is that, in this year of revulsion with government spending and overreach, there is a huge reservoir of seventies-vintage “Independent Republican” liberal Republican fossils out there pining for the days of Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger.

Of course, the last few polls have shown that Horner is drawing more DFL votes than MNGOP votes.  Considerably more.

So suddenly it’s OK for leftybloggers to bag on Horner.

Couldn’t see that coming.

The GOP is having a press conference at 10AM:

Republican Party of Minnesota leaders Garofalo, Sutton, and Brodkorb to call on Mark Dayton to come clean on all financial holdings outside of the state of Minnesota.

Hm.

Wonder if the GOP is just a “lazy-ass activist?”