You got Strom’s predictions. Now it’s my turn.

• Senate: A-Klo probably wins, but it’s going to be a lot closer than the pundits wanted it to be.
• MN CD1: Gutknecht in a tight squeaker.
• MN CD2: Kline is going to beat Rowley like it’s a prison shower-room beat-down. Ten points at least.
• MN CD3: Ramstad by twenty.
• MN CD4: The MFT Betty “Rubble” McCollum will beat Obi Sium by around 20, 15 if we’re lucky. But it’ll be a first step in breaking the DFL’s hegemony in the Four. Will the CD4 GOP be smart enough to get the message?
• MN CD5: Ellison 45, Fine 25, Lee 20, Greens and other hamsters divvy up the rest.
• MN CD6: Bachmann by eight.
• MN CD7: Peterson by a jillion.
• MN CD8: I haven’t followed this one. I suspect habit-prone Rangers will return porkmeister Oberstar for his 200th term, but I’m ripe for a surprise.
• Governor/Loot Governor: Pawlenty/Molnau by four.
• Attorney General: In a tribute to the influence of the media and Minnesotans’ short attention spans, Lori Swanson will win by five. More’s the pity; Johnson’s got my vote. I’m hoping for a surprise.
• Secretary of State: There’s some talk that this could be the upset race, with Kiffmeyer losing to foamy-mouthed Mark “Not Married To Madonna” Ritchie. I certainly hope not.
• State Auditor: Anderson by ten.
• Hennepin County Sheriff: Stanek will swarm on this race – twenty points, I bet. When even the City Pages is on your side, and you’re a Republican, you really have conquered the world. Or at least Henco.
• Ramsey County Sheriff: Tougher call. I give the nod to the incumbent, Fletcher.
• US House: The Dems should gain 15 seats. 20 at the outside, far short of the 50 that would make this the real second-midterm victory they should have expected.
• US Senate: The GOP will retain a 1-2 seat lead, far short of the four-seat deficit they should have gotten, which would constitute the lower threshold for a Dem “victory”.

I’m off to the polls now. See you on the Patriot this evening!

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Last week, the DFL says the Secretary of State website is all but an agent of the Bushitlerite agenda. State DFL chair Brian Melendez:

“The Secretary of State’s website deceives the public about current eligibility requirements for voting in Minnesota elections and doesn’t include all the methods for same day registration.” Source: DFL Party press release, October 30, 2006

Today: With their own pollfinder hosed, to whom does the DFL refer the poor saps who go to their site?

The Secretary of State, natch. So – is the Secretary of State really not so bad, or are the Dems trying to stifle turnout?
(Their pollfinder is apparently back up now…)

…this evening, Gary Miller’s “Kennedy Vs. The Machine” was one of the most important things to happen in the blogosphere in the past two years.

Gary Miller, the Ringer, Doug Williams and Andy Aplikowski showed the world how to outflank a rankly-biased mainstream media, with solid reporting and just-plain-facts that clobbered the “Machine” – the Strib, PiPress, WCCO and MPR – at every turn.

But don’t listen to me – this morning’s letter writer said it better.

It has been your voice that gave hope not just to me but to all who cared when things in this campaign seemed to go south, and not just for Kennedy. It looked bad but you said it would pass, and the Republicans would be stronger for it. You have us hope, even when we didn’t want to hear it.

[…]

The one thing your coverage made me realize that I appreciate the most is the fact that there are still good people in the political realm. My involvement in the political realm has told me the same as well. When I see the image of Mark Kennedy next to Klobuchar, I see truth fighting fallacy. In the tough times I didn’t think we would pull it out, but now, with tomorrow being Election Day, I realize good will win out. People will be driven toward the positive from the negative when the day is said and done.

However the votes tally up – and they’re sure to be much closer than the Machine wants you to think they will – kudos to the guys on a hard job very well done.

So howzabout you take a few months off and then come back with “Coleman Vs. The Machine”?

The City Pages’ review of Borat takes an all-too-predictable turn – which sparked an idea.

More on the idea in a bit; first, the drearily-predictable turn. Apparently, Sacha Baren-Cohen does what is in Hollywood nearly unthinkable – satirizes conservative caricatures!:

That both Barr and Keyes are right-wing moralizers suggests something about the Baron Cohen agenda. It’s hardly coincidental that the antique store he trashes specializes in Confederate memorabilia. Interviewing “veteran feminists” or Atlanta homies, Borat baffles them with his chauvinist stupidity. But picked up by a van of South Carolina frat boys or chatting with the owner of the Imperial Rodeo, he has alarmingly little difficulty getting them to articulate the idea of reinstituting slavery or making homosexuality a capital offense.

Wow. I guess rednecks and fratboys are stupid! Especially after their japes, y’know, get through an editing process!

Baron Cohen has gleefully involved the government of Kazakhstan in a campaign against Borat—showing up at the White House on the day President Bush hosted Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev. But his target isn’t really an imaginary version of Nazerbayev’s nation (nor its enemies, the “evil nitwits” of Uzbekistan); it is rather the domain of the “great warlord Premier Bush,” red states in particular. “I think the cultural differences are just vast,” the Mississippi matron hosting Borat for dinner at her Magnolia Mansion (on Secession Drive) confides to the camera while her guest is away from the table. Those differences become unbridgeable when Borat returns with a stool sample, and then with the arrival of his indescribably inappropriate date—recruited from the back-page ads of the local alt-weekly.

The City Pages have managed to make Borat sound as interesting as a poli-sci masters dissertation.

The review makes much of Baren-Cohen’s “agenda” – and how eagerly many conveniently-lampoonable right-wing middle Americans queue up to serve as comic fodder for it.

But I have to wonder – given that:

• Americans love to be on TV, and
• there’s nobody in the world as smug and personally-overweening as a Twin Cities’ liberal,

…I think that if a film crew from “People’s Television of Berkeley” (or perhaps a French TV documentary crew) showed up at Macalester or Nordeast or in Merriam Park, you’d get at least as much comic fodder.

Hmmmm.

I say again – Hmmmm.

Anyone got a camera?

David Strom and Margaret Martin’s Our House blog is back in action, after a spamalanche gutted their old WordPress (oh, great) blog.

And David kicks things off with his predictions, which look fairly good (although I think he gives Hatch too much credit).

Check out Our House daily for all your politics, bird and gardening news.

(And don’t forget Margaret’s Minneapolis-St. Paul Crime Watch blog seems to be picking up steam. We all miss Rambix, but Margaret and her growing posse of informants and contributors seem to be starting to fill the space. And check this story out…).

42 years ago, Ronald Reagan gave his classic “A Time For Choosing”:

The speech articulated what it meant to be a conservative in perilous times:

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face–that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand–the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he would rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin–just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said that “the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits–not animals.” And he said, “There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

Change commissars for mullahs, and it still works just fine.

Remember it at the polls today.

Ward Sutton – of whom it can be charitably said “he’s better than Ken Avidor” – on this year’s campaign:

Two gay jokes and a portrayal of Christians as idiots (And please don’t bother saying “noooo – that’s what Republicans are thinking”). Has anyone noticed that there’s been vastly more gay-bashing “Humor” from Democrats than credible Republicans lately? How must that play at “Stonewall DFL” meetings? “We’re doing it for your own good?”
The Dems may “win” this election (although anything less than a forty-seat pickup in the House and ten in the Senate is a defeat, really, given the way this election should have gone for them), but I think this shows why they’re going to lose the nation, sooner or later.

I’m not someone who thinks that voting, in and of itself, is the greatest virtue. Too many “Get out the vote” efforts involve getting half-informed or uninformed people to go to the polls and vote for people and issues they know little or nothing about.

But if you know what you’re doing, by all means check out the Minnesota Election Poll Finder and find your polling place.

I’m not one of those bloggers who goes through the charade of “endorsing” for the election. Duh. I’m a blogger – a schlemiel who works a 9-5 job and raises a couple of kids. Who cares what I think?

Indeed, nobody needs to care one iota. But for what it’s worth, on reading the Ramsey county ballot (danger – PDF file!), here’s where I’m going:

• US Senate: Mark Kennedy, obviously. Amy Klobuchar has been a dismal failure as Henco Attorney, is utterly wrong on the war, second amendment rights, and pretty much everything else. Robert Fitzgerald, of the Ventura Independence Party, is basically a DFLer with better hair.  Greenie Mike Cavlan – who cares?  And Constitution Party candidate Ben Powers’ radio ads make him sound downright unhinged.
• US House, District 4: My support for Obi Sium is a matter of public record, not just to defy the DFL’s almost-traditional hegemony over this district, but against the GOP status quo in the Fourth.  The Fourth CD GOP has always been run by an establishment run by, for and of people living north of County Road D.  And while Minnesota is going to turn red one of these next few elections, we will never prevail for real in this state until we make a real go of it in the city.  And the fact is, the city is populated by people who should be Republicans – they just don’t know it yet.  Black Minnesotans lead the rest of us in working for school choice and accountability; Latino culture is, at its heart, socially conservative in a way that the DFL spits on; Asians value education and the  meritocracy in ways that the Anglo mainstream seem to have forgotten about; the Eritrean community from which Sium hails (as well as much of the Ethiopian) community have fought too hard for freedom to take it as much for granted as too many Americans (especially DFLers) do.  Sium is a much-needed blow to both establishments.  On the other hand, when the Minnesota Federation of Teachers says “Jump”, Betty “Rubble” McCollum says “off what?” without evidence of cognitive thought.  I’ll be voting for Obi early and often.
• MN State Senate, District 66: In the past ten years, I’ve voted for exactly four DFLers – Norm Coleman (before the DFL booted him out), Jerry Blakey, Randy Kelly (and I’d vote for him again), and…Ellen Anderson.  Oh, she’s one of the shrillest liberals around, utterly irredeemable on more issues than I can count.  But in that particular election, there was no GOP candidate, and she does have good constituent services; every time I’ve ever called her office, I’ve gotten a polite, courteous and thorough response, even though my status as an objector to the DFL is well-known (I once interviewed her husband Andy Dawkins on my old KSTP talk show, so it’s no secret).  So never let it be said I don’t give the devil her due.  But since the GOP did endorse perennial candidate Warren Anderson, I’ll vote for him.
• MN House District 66B: As good as Ellen Anderson is at constituent relations, Alice “The Phantom” Hausman is bad.  If it weren’t for photo ops, teachers union meetings and fundraisers, nobody in the district would know Hausman existed.  Saved from being the most worthless member of the MN House only the the existence of Larry Pogemiller, Phyllis Kahn and maybe half a dozen others.  I’m voting for Joyce Bevins.  I’d vote for anyone without a felony record, just on principle.
• Governor: Pawlenty/Molnau.  No question.  Tim Pawlenty is one of the most successful governors in Minnesota.  He led the solution of a budget deficit some pundits said would take a decade to resolve.  And he spent some precious political capital pushing the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, which tells you something of the guy’s character.  Even though he’s scampered away from the No New Taxes pledge, he’s basically held the line, against a phalanx of caterwauling.  There is no rational reason to vote for anyone else – especially the rancid Mike Hatch (paired with the vacuous Judi Dutcher), the irritating Peter Hutchinson, or the psychedelic Ken Pentel.
• Secretary of State: Mary Kiffmeyer.  I need say no more; there’s nobody else on the list who deserves more than a passing chuckle.  Mark Ritchie?  Gank.
• State Auditor: Pat Anderson, going away.
• Attorney General: Jeff Johnson.  Years of working for Mike Hatch can only made Lori Swanson into one of two things; Mini-Mike, or a hopeless Stockholm-Syndrome sufferer.  She can get her therapy on her own time.  Johnson’s the man.
• Transportation Amendment: Not a chance.
• Ramsey County Commission: Incumbent Toni Carter is a big light-rail advocate.  As a result, I’ll be writing in “Mitch Berg” for this seat – primarily so that if I ever worry about the integrity of the counting process, I can check to make sure that my vote was counted.
• County Sheriff: This is going to be a tough one.  It’s a non-partisan position – and while Bob Fletcher has done a good job, Bill Finney was also an excellent police chief for Saint Paul.  Since Finney’s been linked with the DFL, and many local DFL activists are exercised about Fletcher, I think I’ll vote for the incumbent.
• County Attorney: Susan Gaertner treats citizens who defend themselves with firearms like criminals first and foremost.  Her Child Support Enforcement division is rapacious and dubiously ethical.  And she runs the County Attorney’s office like a make-work program for underachieving lawyers.  I’ll be writing in Clu Berg – my dog – for this office.
• Soil and Water, District 1: I don’t know either candidate.  I’ll be writing in Candy Berg (the younger of my two cats).
• Soil and Water, District 4: On the other hand, I do know some candidates here.  I’ll be voting for Jack Krenik, a local conservative firebrand, and I urge you to do so as well.  For the other seat, I’ll vote Mary Jane Reagan, because anyone who changes her name to Reagan to win public office in Saint Paul deserves praise.
• School District Levy: I will vote “No”.  I’ve had enough of the Saint Paul Public Schools’ alarmism, social agenda, and systematic political indoctrination.  And I’d vote “no” even if either of my kids were still in the district – which they are not.  Consider it my protest.
• Supreme Court: Barry Anderson.
• Court of Appeals: Christopher Dietzen.
• District Court: I’ll be voting for all of the incumbents (especially Elena Ostby, against former ultraliberal City Council member Jay Benanav), except for Diane Alshouse, against whom I’m writing in Nosemarie Berg, my elder cat.

It would seem that my skills at prediction have been endorsed by at least one insider.

We shall see, of course.
But just in case, we’ll try my hand at election predictions tomorrow. And my record there is pretty darn good, too.

Stay tuned.

I’m currently waiting (on pins and needles, no less) on word for a darned-near perfect job. Interview was last week, final word is (supposedly) today.

If you would, please keep your fingers crossed in whatever way you are metaphysically inclined.

Thanks.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that the Northern Alliance is going to be broadcasting election results tomorrow evening, live from 8PM until things seem to be relativelly settled or until we pass out, whichever comes first.

King and I will be in the studios (along with a number of people who’ll be helping us with research); the Volume I guys (John as well as Chad and Brian from the Fraters and Michael Brodkorb) will be at the GOP party at the Sheraton.

Tune in on AM1280 after you’ve voted – or, if you’re outside the Patriot’s broadcast radius, check out the live webstream.

Update: Just for laughs, I may listen to this in my spare time.

Or I may go for the real and flush out some ear wax.  I’m still undecided.  It’s the only thing I’m undecided about, of course.

The Strib wants you to quit saying things that hurt their feelings:

The phrase? “Cut and run.”

Anyone advocating immediate or even sometime-soon withdrawal of American troops from Iraq is apt to be accused of wanting to “cut and run,” meaning they advocate a dishonorable, cowardly retreat.

OK. Let’s be ruthlessly clear and accurate, here:

Leaving Iraq now would allow Iraq to fall even deeper into a civil war that the central government is, so far, unable to handle. We are the only power in the world that can do anything useful about this.

“Cutting and jogging” – moving our troops to Kuwait, or Okinawa, or (as the hapless, terminally-dim Amy Klobuchar posits) Afghanistan – would have the effect of taking Omaha Beach, and then withdrawing to England while we let the French sort the rest of their liberation out.

Counterinsurgency warfare is a slow, ugly grind – but it can be won, or at least resolved favorably. It takes skill. More than that, as every successful counterinsurgency in history shows us, it takes patience.

But calling for an end to a fruitless, bloody conflict to which this nation has devoted itself for 3½ years, and which shows no signs of ever ending on terms favorable to the United States, is in no way cowardly. It’s a reasonable, even brave, perspective.

“Truth is lies, Winston”.

It might be reasonable, under some circumstances – if you assume that taking a hill from the enemy and then giving it back, to be taken back again, is “reasonable”.

“Brave?” No. It is the very sort of armchair-generalship and parlor leadership that the left sniggers about when they yap about “fighting keyboardists” and “chickenhawks”. The troops – and the Iraqis that come out to vote, volunteer for the Iraqi Army and Police, and live their daily lives amid the horrors concocted by the “insurgents” – are brave. The Strib editorial board and other advocates of cutting and running are merely stating an opinion. In our nation, this is not “brave”, it’s merely par for the course, thank God.

That honorable point of view actually fits well with the original meaning of cut and run, lost now on most who use the term. In nautical battles among sailing ships, when enemy vessels were bearing down on a navy caught at anchor, the ropes to the anchors would be cut and the ships would run with the wind, thus surviving to engage the enemy on more equal terms. An admiral who cut and ran was more likely to be praised for saving his fleet than criticized for cowardice.

Since the Strib wants to invoke picayune, irrelevant bits and pieces of trivia, let’s go further. In 1973 the US – at the behest of leftists like (or, in some cases, including) the people who run the Strib’s editorial board, “cut and ran” (by whatever definition) from Vietnam. Oh, we did it with a promise – we withdrew “over the horizon” to Okinawa and our bases in the US (had Amy Klobuchar been in office, one wonders if she might have suggested we pull back to Honduras or Cuba), with a guarantee to Saigon that we wouldn’t leave them in the lurch.

And then, with full control of Congress after Watergate, they cut off both the funding and any other hope for rescue to the South Vietnamese. The killing fields, the boat exodus, and seven figures’ worth of carnage ensued.

While that example isn’t as picayune and meaningless as the Strib’s nautical excursion, it’s the best I could come up with – and it happens to be front and center on the conservatives’ conscience right now.

A case can be made for not considering withdrawing from Iraq until the conflict somehow is redeemed. But that case should be made with real arguments, not with sleazy accusations that those who advocate a different course want to “cut and run.”

We’ve given you the former, Strib Editors. And you’re going to continue to get both.

I did this two years ago (and on the air two weeks ago); people seemed to like it. Time for a reprise.

This bit isn’t aimed so much at the undecideds, or at those of you who are planning to vote DFL/Democrat. No, this is aimed at those of you who are Republicans who are thinking about staying home because of one imagined slight or another. I’ve talked with all of you over the past year. I’ve heard your complaints, in person, in this blog, and on the NARN show. Most of them are valid; Bush did spend too much; If John McCain and his urge to drag the party back to the seventies is gaining traction, then this party does have problems; I think Coleman and Kennedy were wrong to oppose ANWAR drilling and support ethanol subsidies; Harriet Miers was an incomprehensible choice for the SCOTUS; there should be no compromise on securing the border, if nothing else (the complaint that Michele Bachmann played excessively hardball in winning the CD6 GOP nomination is not valid, but that’s OK – I’ll work with you anyway).

But whatever you’re angry about, it doesn’t rise to the level of the consequences of your action (whether it’s staying home on election night, or voting for some inconsequential third party, or just hoping the GOP “learns a lesson” by getting ushered from power.

The consequences to Minnesota, the nation, the world, and yes, even the GOP are too great to risk this. Since 48% of this nation’s population doesn’t have the common sense to run Bemidji much less the world’s only remaining superpower and the world’s great rampart of democracy, it’s up to each of us to think bigger than Miers, Anwar, Ethanol or whatever.

The party, state, nation and world depend on you doing better than that

So I present 100 reasons to change your mind, starting locally, moving globally.

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After a few months of mucking about with the idea, I figure the best way to get the site switched, once and for all, to WordPress is to up and switch it to WordPress.

I haven’t gotten the import process to work yet, unfortunately, so I’m going to have a link to the old site until I can get that figured out.

Update: At present, the system makes you “log in” to leave comments. I may be re-evaluating this.