Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-3PM.

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John are out; Brad Carlson and Kevin Ecker will be on from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I follow from 1-3PM Central.  We’ll be talking with in the second hour with MN Republican Jewish Coalition leader Mark Miller, and with Norann Dillon, GOP candidate for the MN Senate in district 43.  Join us!
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on from 9-11 on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  We’re broadening the franchise; two stations, now!
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(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

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I really dislike political black-bag tricks.  I have little patience for oppo research, and don’t care much for the kind of political pranks that keep politics geeks giggling into the hours.

If there’s one thing I like less, it’s ofay, lie-clogged false-flag sites.  Like “Tom Emmer’s Minnesota”. 

I’m not going to link it here; I’m going to ask you to Google “Emmer For Governor” (I’ve helpfully done it for you here).

If you see, as I do, a “sponsored link” to “Tom Emmer’s Minnesota” at the top of the page, do us a favor and click it.

Don’t read it or anything – or read it knowing that every word on the site is bullshirt (as I’m showing, point by point, in my “Chanting Points Memo” project). 

But whomever put the site out is paying for every person who clicks on the site. 

And every dollar they spend getting people to click in is a dollar they can’t spend on anything useful.

According to a KSTP/SurveyUSA poll, Republicans have passed Democrats among likely voters in Minnesota:

The SurveyUSA poll, commissioned by KSTP-TV, found that 36 percent of likely voters identify themselves as Republicans, while 35 percent say they’re Democrats. Twenty-four percent call themselves independents.

Of course, it’s really a tosser; there’s a four point margin of error.  But I strongly suspect those 24 points worth of indies will erode, and move right, when they get the tax bill that the Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) has dumped back in their lap.  

By means of comparison, a Star Tribune Minnesota Poll conducted a year ago found that 37 percent of Minnesotans called themselves independents, 36 percent said they were Democrats and 20 percent identified themselves as Republicans.

While that sounds like a huge surge, it needs to be tempered by the fact that the Minnesota Poll isn’t so much a “poll” as  “morale-building tool for the DFL”.

But the surge in enthusiasm – especially compared to the dead rooms the GOP faced in 2006 and 2008 – is notable:

The SurveyUSA poll also found that Republican gubernatorial endorsee Tom Emmer is ahead of his three DFL rivals, although the significance of the results is hard to gauge this early in the campaign.

The poll  – which, let’s be honest, is fairly meaningless at six months out – shows Emmer with an eight point lead over Dayton, 11 over Entenza.

In matchup against Margaret Anderson Kelliher, Mark Dayton and Matt Entenza, Emmer was supported by 41 percent of likely voters. The DFLers were each backed by about one-third, while Independence Party candidate Tom Horner was supported by about 10 percent.

Early polling almost always shows the “Independence” Party – the former party of Jesse Ventura, and which has had absolutely zero impact as anything but a spoiler since Ventura left office – with a disproportionate impact; a “Minnesota Poll” conducted the week before the 2002 election, at the twilight of Ventura’s era, showed Palwenty and his opponents, DFLer Roger Moe and Indy Tim Penny, in a statistical tie;  Penny shed close to 40% of his numbers by election day (if you assume, again, that the MinnPoll is anything but a DFL morale booster, and I do not). 

But it seems the time is right for a solid conservative – especially one who is tuned to take advantage of the sticker shock the DFL Legislature is about to dump on the electorate.

If we were to build a Minnesota political time capsule, and needed to capture for posterity the smug sense of entitlement the DFL has today, I’d put in a bunch of carefully-folded Lori Sturdevant columns. 

But to capture the distilled core of the “conventional wisdom”, whatever it is at any given moment, I’d go to Rachel Stassen-Berger, the Strib’s politics correspondent, who has a knack for capturing what Minnesota’s clubby, self-referential political “elite” are thinking at any moment better than anyone else in Twin Cities media today. 

And she shows it in today’s piece on the writeup the governor got in the Wall Street Journal; “WSJ: What’s bad for Minnesota is good for Pawlenty“.

In a piece that turns logic on its head, the Wall Street Journal opines that Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s political ambitions got a boost from the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision that his budget balancing was illegal.

It’s been a bad week for Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. Of course, it’s also been a good week for Republican Presidential Contender Tim Pawlenty.

Well, no.  It’s been a good week for both of them.

Pawlenty has held the line for eight years against a mostly-hostile legislature.  As the article notes, while Minnesota’s budgets rose 21% every biennium from 1960 (the year he was born) until he took office, he’s reduced it to 2% per biennium during his terms in office, and has actually cut spending in this last go-around.

Or did, until the Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) tossed his unallotments from the last session, putting billions in spending back on the table, to be hashed out between him and the Legislature.

So what does Pawlenty, who is a lame duck on the state level and has nothing to lose on the national level, actually lose with this?   A few weeks in a room “negotiating” with DFLers.

What does he gain?

• A cherry on the sundae of his conservative credentials.
• A big, hot potato – actually, several billion of them – tossed back into the lap of his would-be successor’s opponent’s lap.  Margaret Anderson-Kelliher is going to have to spend a few weeks dealing with the fallout of her spending orgy at a time when Minnesotans are starting to get fed up with spending, when Tom Emmer is well-placed to make hay with it.  It’s possible even the customary media blackout won’t be enough to whitewash Kelliher this time.
• Weeks and weeks of DFL puffery to shoot at.
• Finally – and perhaps best of all – the chance to outmaneuver the DFL like a middleweight boxer in his prime taking on a fat athsmatic drunk in an alley one last time. 

No, the only loser will be the Minnesota taxpayer – and only if Pawlenty loses, and then only ’til November.  If they’re smart.

As the SurveyUSA poll hints they just might be.

By the way, Blois Olson – a long-time acquaintance who will one day be the Larry Jacobs of the 2010s – is quoted:

Democrats will counter that there’s no defining Pawlenty achievement, and no significant animating idea behind this record. There’s no “one big thing” that he’s done, says Blois Olson, a prominent political commentator.

Which is a classically-liberal thing to say.  Democrats like to see lots of evidence that they moved the levers and pushed the buttons of government more than most; it’s why Democrats love light rail and big warehouse schools.

To a conservative, less is more.

In sum, this week’s events define what Mr. Pawlenty is: a classic, fiscally conservative Midwestern Republican governor. In a period of voter discontent, Republicans have two years to decide whether that’s the right stuff for the times.

It’s a great start.

OK, yesterday I said Springsteen’s “Frankie” ran on continuous loop through my head.

I wasn’t completely accurate.  “Frankie” runs until I wonder to myself “what am I really thinking right now?”

And then I switch to this one:

It’s another megararity, written for Born In The USA, but never released until Tracks, and utterly unavailable online.  I’m hoping someone posts an eighties’ E-Street Band version someday.

On rainy spring nights…

Tonight, now I see old friends
Caught in a game they’ve got no chance to win
Gettin’ beat and then playin’ again
‘Til their strength gives out or their heart gives in

Now who’s the man who thinks he can decide
Whose dreams will live and who’s shall be pushed aside
Has he ever walked down these streets at night and looked into the eyes of

None but the brave
No one baby but the brave
Those strong enough to save
Something from the love they gave…

…there really is no substitute.

I got this email from Joe Doakes of Como Park, a government employee in Saint Paul:

St. Paul Mayor Coleman issued a press statement April 28 prohibiting City
agencies from traveling to Arizona, to protest the anti-illegal immigration
steps being taken there.  Apparently, Mayor Coleman’s grandmother was an
illegal immigrant from Ireland and he’s taken this stand in her memory, and
urges all of us to do so, as well.

Oh, I will.

Since my six of my eight great-grandparents came here legally, I hereby prohibit all Shot In The Dark employees from going to (flips around finding list of heavily Irish cities) Boston on company money.

I have a week of training coming up in June.  I had my option of going to
Orlando or to Phoenix.  Personally, I don’t cotton to scofflaws.  I think
Mayor Coleman’s position is asinine.

I booked the airfare to my training session yesterday . . . to Phoenix.

Thank you, Mayor Coleman, for making my choice so much easier.

I keep pondering commemorating it by being an “illegal alien” to the DFL primaries.

You’ve heard about it by now; a school sent kids home on Cinco De Mayo for wearing the American flag:

The five teens were sitting at a table outside during their brunch break about 10:10 a.m. when Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez asked two boys to take off their American flag bandannas. The boys said they complied. In the same conversation, sophomore Dominic Maciel said, Rodriguez told the group to “walk with him to the office.”

…

The boys were told they must turn their T-shirts inside-out or be sent home – and that it would not be considered a suspension – but that Rodriguez did not want any fights to break out among Mexican-American students and those wearing American flags. Dariano said other students were wearing American flags but since they were a group of five “we were the easiest target to cause trouble” according to Rodriguez, he said.

Here’s hte part that amazed me:

The boys told Rodriguez and Boden that turning their T-shirts inside-out was disrespectful, so their parents opted to take them home.

I’m kinda shocked that there are kids today who actually know it’s wrong to hide the flag.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Dominic’s mother Julie Fagerstrom. “I’m an open-minded parent, but it’s got to be on both sides. It can’t be five kids singled out.”

A front-desk secretary said Boden was unavailable for any comment on what had happened Wednesday and Rodriguez was busy with testing, the secretary said.

Hint:  Yes, he was, and no, he wasn’t.

More than 100 students were spotted wearing red, white and green as they were leaving school. Some had the Mexican flag painted on their faces or on their arms.

Others have said it was a matter of the school treating the flag like gang colors, likely to cause trouble.

Dear Principal Boden:  Here’s my gang colors, beeyoch:

Better lock down.

The best Springsteen song you’ve never heard – “Frankie”, which was never released until 1998’s Tracks box set – in a fun take from the endearinly-sloppy pre-Darkness E Street Band, in 1976.

Apropos not much, except maybe that this song runs on continuous loop through my head this time of year.

…that if I, or any Republican, goes to a DFL primary to vote for the weakest candidate this August, that none of them had better ask for our “papers”.

Perhaps it’s time the DFL practiced what it preached when it comes to “open borders?”

Hmmm?

Not that I’d vote in the other party’s primary or anything, y’understand.  But if I did…

Back in March, the left crowed with great glee about the arrest of nine members of the “Hutaree”, a self-styled Christian “Militia” group in Michigan.

The left and media (pardon the redundancy) saw this as the long-awaited proof that the American Right, afroth with racism over Barack Obama, was about to launch an “avalanche of violence” to vent its hatred toward the plucky black President.  They wheeled up the big guns; the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose job it is to see right-wing threats under every rock, reported right-wing threats…under every rock.

They needed something, of course; after setting up a prophylactic narrative in the days after the March 20 passage of Obamacare, the Democrats, led by Steny Hoyer, launched a meme about right-wing violence that impugned and defamed nearly every “out” conservative in the country – but has not to date yielded any violence (short of a still-unexplained “cut gas line” that has tellingly diappeared from the media).

So the Hutaree were a lifeline; a tank of rhetorical oxygen for a meme that was on life support.  Obama and the Dems needed to have Nine Redneck Terrorists, and the Feds obligingly provided them Public Enemies One Through Nine.

But over the past few days, a judge has tossed the Feds’ entire justification for holding them without bail, and raised serious questions about the soundness, and indeed the motivations, of the Feds’ case.

Archy Cary at BigJo runs down the case’s history – read it ASAP if you please – and asks the important question (emphasis added by me):

Here’s the question the MSM needs to ask, but won’t: Was this flamboyant raid primarily driven by political rather than law enforcement motives?

Was the arrest of the Hutaree militia Attorney General Eric Holder’s effort to manufacture an imminent right-wing extremist threat for political purposes?

Just asking.

Fearless prediction:  the Feds will drag this through court as long as they can.  They will lean on the Hutaree as hard as they can with the full weight of federal law enforcement, reinforcing the great Federal prerogative, “you can not afford to fight us”, squeezing them into a plea deal that allows the Administration and Media (ptr) to claim with a straight-ish face that of course there’s a threat!  People got convicted!  Nah nah nah I can’t hear you!

Columbia Missouri police SWAT team charges into a house, kills two dogs as the children in the room look on, act like Nazis…

…and find enough pot for a misdemeanor charge.

Two dogs dead, a guy’s house torn apart, and kids traumatized as their watch their pets killed and their parents hauled off in Black Marias cop cars in the middle of the night…

…and for what?   Are “the streets” safer?  No – in fact, I guarantee you the Columbia PD just created two kids who will hate and distrust law enforcement for the rest of their lives.

Are the drug cartels going away?  No – they kill each other off as part of their marketing drives.  A misdemeanor arrest in Missouri isnt’ even background noise.

Our police are becoming more militarized every day – largely to fight a “war” where the fact we can never win is the least of the problems, compared to civil liberties that our idiots overlords are destroying every day to fight it.

Over marijuana.

Billions for fighting real wars.  Not one more penny for this bullshit.

 If you’ve read anything about education in the past 20 years, you’ve heard that the school systems are crushingly short of science and math teachers.

If you’ve had kids in the public school system, you’ll know that the system is even shorter of good math, science and technology teachers. 

It’s not a wonder, of course; people with degrees in math, hard science and technology have a lot of opporunities in the private sector, right out of school.  And as a career wends its way, the disparity gets starker; while a career in science or technology offers boundless opportunity for advancement and even entrepreneurship, a career in public education offers decades of unionized, union-style plodding up a public service pay scale, in a system where no matter how hard you work or how good you are, you will always have less money, seniority or recognition than some ticket puncher who gave up on teaching a decade ago, but is five years away from her pension.

But for all that, there are people, especially people in Math and Science, who spend a decade or two in the field and want a change of pace, or develop an altruistic streak, or become alarmed at the lack of math and science preparation they’re seeing in their own school-age kids; people with ample skills, the real world experience that impresses smart kids, and enough zeal for educating kids that they opt to leave a well-paid field in mid-career to teach! 

And it’s with an aim toward alleviating that shortage that the Emmer Campaign is pushing alternative licensure – to allow these highly motivated people, the ones that have the chops to convince a school board to hire them, to get into the classroom without having to repeat two years of college to get a state license…

…that in the end ensures nothing about a teacher’s competence, but shows that they’ve sat through classes on pedagogy and child psychology.

But to listen to the left’s chanting points industry, you’d think what Emmer and the conservatives mean by “alternative licensing” is bringing in unqualified teachers from Guatemala and putting them in the classroom.

This particular chanting point is such a gross torture of context that it qualifies as an outright lie. It actively disinforms the public.

Remember – every single  burned-out teacher currently punching their ticket in a Minnesota school until retirement is “certified”.  The state’s minority achievement gap – which, in the Metro, is among the worst in the nation – was accomplished by “certified” teachers.  But our math and science classes remain catastrophically short of qualified instructors.

What is more important – maintaining a bureaucratic status quo, or getting our state’s kids the education they need?

To Education Minnesota and the DFL, the answer is painfully obvious.

Next time you’re standing barefoot in the TSA line getting a rectal probe and watching them toss your toothpaste and shampoo, just remember – the system sort of barely works, if everything goes right and everyone is lucky as hell:

The Obama administration played down the fact that Shahzad, a U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, made it aboard the plane. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wouldn’t talk about it, other than to say Customs officials prevented the plane from taking off. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the security system has fallback procedures in place for times like this, and they worked.

And Attorney General Eric Holder said he “was never in any fear that we were in danger of losing him.”

But it seemed clear the airline either never saw or ignored key information that would kept Shahzad off the plane, a fact that dampened what was otherwise hailed as a fast, successful law enforcement operation.

I’m going to start a website where people can find when Dutch documentary filmmakers are travelling, and on which flight.

But thank heavens for small favors; Secretary Napolitano didn’t order her investigators to drop the search for Taliban sympathizers to focus on the NRA.

…because “it’s all in your head that anyone outside of a couple of whackdoodle leftybloggers calls Tom Emmer extreme!  Why, the fact that you bring it up implies some sort of mental condition on your part!”

Yeah, I guess he’s right.  And anyway, my place is not to question my media/DFL overlords (ptr), is it?

There may be a literal link to an incandescent lightbulb flashing on, and creativity:

The researchers first wanted to see if light bulbs actually were unconsciously linked to enlightenment in people’s minds. In a preliminary experiment, 73 college students watched as words were flashed across a computer screen. They viewed 10 words associated with insight – such as create, conceive, and envision -10 other words and 20 non-words. They were then asked to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible if what they were shown was a word or non-word.

 Then they controlled for the bulbs themselves:

The students had either a bare, unshaded incandescent 25-Watt light bulb or an overhead fluorescent light turned on in the room. Volunteers exposed to the light bulb responded quicker to words linked to insight than other words, supporting the notion that light bulbs were indeed connected to insight in their minds.

 To see if light bulbs could actually promote insights, Slepian and his colleagues next gave college students spatial, math and verbal problems to solve and had either a bare light bulb or an overhead fluorescent light turned on in the room partway into the problem. The volunteers either solved the problems faster or more often with the light bulb than with the fluorescent light.

Thus the left’s push for compact fluorescents literally is dumbing down America.

It’s an old joke among conservatives; when faced with an epidemic, a liberal will just pass a law banning illness, with draconian punishments for getting sick.

It just goes to show you – with liberals, today’s jokes are tomorrow’s bills:

“This amendment that I offer would be mandatory rather than permissive,” said [North Dakota’s soon-to-be ex-senator Byron] Dorgan. “If you have risen to be judged to have been ‘too big to fail,’ which would cause a grave financial risk to our entire economy … the best most direct and most effective approach will be to have those institutions divest those activities and those portions of their business that have made them ‘too big to fail.’”

I wondered if it might not be a fiendish spoof for a moment – one of those hoaxes that sweeps the internet.

According to Dorgan, his amendment will stop the future risk of taxpayer bailouts on Wall Street. The amendment will appoint the Financial Oversight Council to identify companies that pose a high risk to the financial stability of the U.S. and restrict their business activities until they are no longer a concern.

“It is another approach that is far superior, much more direct, more decisive and one that will produce better results,” said Dorgan. “It is the only one I think that effectively will end ‘too big to fail.’”

It’s galling to have to keep repeating to liberals; under a free market, no company ever gets “too big to fail”. Only the government declares companies “too big to fail”; under the free market, they just fail.  And that failure is a good thing.  It rids the economy of failed businesses, and makes room for new ones.

What we need is legislation to prevent Congresspeople from being too ignorant to serve.

(Rob Port at Say Anything also has the story)

I’ve never cared much for Michael Savage.

And so I’ve never gotten one of his “liberalism is a mental disorder” T-shirts.

But the left seems to want so badly to presume that the right in America – especially the obstreporous, color-outside-the-lines right that’s making so much hay these days – represents some sort of depravity that I think some sort of diagnosis – clinical Narcissism? – might just apply.

Back as far as 9/12 (or maybe 9/13) I remember liberals chanting “the real danger is still home-grown militias”.  And every time there’s an incident these days, that wistful hope – that their fellow Americans are really a bunch of murderout animals – comes back to the front.

Over the weekend, before the arrest of the TImes Square bomber, we had Mayor Bloomberg   fairly hyperventilating at the possibility that the suspect would turn out to be a tea partier – a representative of a moment that has never had so much as a face slap attributed to it:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared on Katie Couric’s show Monday night to discuss the attempted car bombing in Times Square. Between reassuring viewers at home that New York was safe and praising the city’s resilient spirit, Bloomberg wondered aloud if the culprit behind the Times Square car bomb was “a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health-care bill or something.”

Hizzoners’s wishful thinking was brutally let down when t Faisal Shahzad didn’t turn out to be a Tea Partier at all.

So intense is the left’s lust for this blood libel that left publications from The Nation to  the Daily Kos to tony leftybloggers to wannabee journalists citing “anonymous sources” that just knew that every liberals fantasy was going to come true, the left, fresh off of eight years of demanding that the right stop its (nonexistent) threats to their patriotism, seems to have developed an affirmative need to slander half of this nation.

So when are that tiny film of responsible liberals going to demand better of your leaders?

What started out as a case seemingly designed to impugn the Tea Party and all dissent against government…

…is turning, so far, into a sign that Janet Napolitano really, really needed a diversion:

Federal authorities touted the arrests of nine members of a Michigan militia as a pre-emptive strike against homegrown terrorists, declaring at an initial court hearing that the suspects with “dark hearts and evil intent” wanted to go to war against the government.

Five weeks later, prosecutors are scrambling to regroup after a judge questioned the strength of their evidence by ordering the so-called rebels released until trial and saying they had a right to “engage in hate-filled, venomous speech.”

“The government is falling short,” said David Griem, a former federal prosecutor who’s not involved in the case. “The message that’s been sent to the community is there are problems with this case.”

During two days of hearings last week before U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts, prosecutors tried to show how dangerous they perceived the Hutaree militia to be by playing secretly recorded conversations. Those talks, however, revealed no specific plot. Under questioning by defense attorneys, the FBI’s lead agent on the case seemed unprepared.

Were the Hutaree a group of convenient “usual suspects” rounded up at a time the Administration needed to discredit all dissent outside the Beltway – Tea Parties, bitter gun-clinging Jesus freaks and Republicans all at the same time?

America’s big advantage in the Revolution, says popular American history, is the American tradition of marksmanship.  The British, marching in their red coats through the woods, were hapless targets for backwoodsmen with Pennsylvania and Kentucky rifles that could score aimed hits on man-sized targets from four times the effective range of the British smoothbore muskets. 

While the conventional narrative is simplistic (the average Continental Army soldier was not a backwoodsman or a marksman), it’d seem that the Brits have managed to even things out; a British sniper has scored the longest-ranged kill in the history of the rifle:

Corporal of Horse Craig Harrison fired his consecutive shots from such a long distance that they took almost three seconds to reach their targets.

This was despite the 8.59mm bullets leaving the barrel of his rifle at almost three times the speed of sound.

The distance to his two targets was 8,120ft, or 1.54 miles – according to a GPS system – and about 3,000ft beyond the weapon’s effective range.

The 35-year-old beat the previous sniper kill record of 7,972ft, set by a Canadian soldier who shot dead an al Qaeda gunman in March 2002.

Not one hit at a mile and a half; three consecutive ones:

Speaking about the incident, Cpl of Horse Harrison said: “The first round hit a machine gunner in the stomach and killed him outright. He went straight down and didn’t move.

“The second insurgent grabbed the weapon and turned as my second shot hit him in the side. He went down, too. They were both dead.”

The serviceman then fired a third and final round to ensure the machine gun was out of action.

Can America put up with this usurpation of our heritage?

President refers to Tea Partiers as “Tea-Baggers”:

Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations.

In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

Tea Party activists loath the term “tea baggers,” which has emerged in liberal media outlets and elsewhere as a method of mocking the activists and their concerns.

I guess this means calling half of America “bitter gun-clinging Jesus Freaks” wasn’t an out-of-context mis-step?

Question for my liberal readers:  Does that fact that I’m writing about this make me racist, seditionary, or merely extremist?

HD25 Representative Laura Brod is retiring after eight years in the Legislature:

With your support and encouragement, I focused my efforts on the issues that impacted our daily lives. My efforts were directed to policies that I believed fostered an economic climate that was conducive to job creation and economic growth. I fought against excessive regulations that choke investment in our state and undermine the innovation and creativity of our private sector to generate the type of economic climate we need and demand.

Without your support, I could not have enjoyed the opportunity and the honor to serve that I have had for the past 8 years.

My belief has always been that we are a state that values a citizen legislature, and that there comes a time for other citizens to serve their community.

It is my belief that the time for others to serve in the Legislature for our district has come, and my time to find other challenges and ways to contribute is upon me.

It is in that spirit I announce that I will not be a candidate for re-election in 2010 for the State Legislature in District 25A.

There is a real change going on right now across the country. Finally, perhaps for the first time in thirty years, government is once again hearing from “We the People.”

Well, that’s a drag; Brod has been leadership material in the House’s conservative caucus, and that caucus is sure to be both growing and needing leaders in the next session.

But all the best, Laura!  And thanks for you service!

For a while, I wondered if “Tom” wasn’t the MNGOP’s gubernatorial candidate’s middle name.  Listening to the Minnesota media, one might think his first name is “Right-wing-Extremist”.

In the meantime, they christened his opponent and erstwhile sparring partner in the House, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, as a “moderate”. 

But Rachel Stassen-Berger, writing in the Strib, notes that I if Emmer is an “extremist”, then so is Kelliher; their voting records almost perfectly mirror one another:

Check out how various organizations rated the two House colleagues. The scores below are based on 2009 votes, unless otherwise noted:

AFSCME Council 5 (The state employees union)

Emmer — 0 percent

Kelliher — 100 percent

Clean Water Action (These are based on 2008 votes. The groups rates lawmakers votes for “our water, our health and our environment.”)

Emmer — 0 percent

Kelliher — 100 percent

Conservation Minnesota ( “We help you and other Minnesotans protect the lands, lakes, and way of life that we all cherish. We do so by helping Minnesotans evaluate the performance of your elected representatives.”)

Emmer — 13 percent

Kelliher — 88 percent

Legislative Evaluative Assembly (“LEA bases its evaluation on the traditional American principles of
constitutionalism, limited government, free enterprise, legal and moral order with justice and individual liberty and dignity.”)

Emmer — 98 percent (94 percent, career)

Kelliher — 0 percent (13 percent, career)

Minnesota Association of Professional Employees  (“Our issue priorities include: achieving fair compensation for state employees, fixing our broken health care system, preventing outsourcing and privatization of state services and protecting our pension and retirement benefits.)

Emmer — 13 percent

Kelliher — 100 percent

AFL-CIO (These are lifetime ratings through 2008. “The mission of the Minnesota AFL-CIO is to improve the lives of working families—to bring economic justice to the workplace and social justice to our state and the nation.”)

Emmer — 1 percent

Kelliher — 97 percent

Minnesota Chamber of Commerce (“Our voting records represent the most important votes on the issues that impact Minnesota businesses and jobs – they are not intended to endorse or oppose any candidate for office.”)

Emmer — voted with the Chambers position on 10 of 13 issues. He was absent on two votes and voted against the Chambers’ position on one issue.

Kelliher — voted with the Chambers’ position on 2 of 13 issues.

Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (“MCCL compiles the voting records of lawmakers on key pro-life issues that come before the legislature”)

Emmer — 100 percent

Kelliher — 0 percent

Minnesota Family Council (The Council rates lawmakers on what it considers “pro-family” votes)

Emmer — 90 percent (He was absent for one scored vote.)

Kelliher — 0 percent

NARAL Pro-Choice Minnesota (“We highlight the choice votes that occurred during the 2009 legislative session.”)

Emmer — voted against the NARAL position on three out of three issues.

Kelliher — voted with the NARAL position on three out of three issues.

National Federation of Independent Business (These are 2007-2008 ratings. Legislators got high scores if they “supported legislation important to small business.”)

Emmer — 89 percent

Kelliher — 11 percent

Organizing Apprenticeship Project (The project gives its “assessment of the state legislature’s and governor’s efforts to move policies that strengthen opportunity, racial equity and American Indian tribal sovereignty.”)

Emmer — D grade

Kelliher — A grade

Taxpayers League of Minnesota (“The Taxpayers League of Minnesota is a nonpartisan, nonprofit grassroots taxpayer advocacy organization which fights for lower taxes, limited government and full empowerment of taxpaying citizens in accordance with Constitutional principles.”)

Emmer — 100 percent (92 lifetime)

Kelliher — 0 percent (11 percent lifetime)

So which is it?  Is Kelliher an “extremist”, too?  Or are they both merely partisans who get routinely praised and/or slagged by their special-interest friends/enemies?

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

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

That is all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The DFL and Media were in full dudgeon over the weekend, as Tom Emmer “missed” a gubernatorial candidates forum attended by the three DFL candidates and the Independence Party schlep.

It seemed so clear-cut coming from the Strib:

Emmer was invited but did not show for the event. But former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton and former House leader Matt Entenza, both DFLers, made sure that he wasn’t forgotten.

“I think it’s instructive who’s not here today, the endorsed candidate of the Republican Party,” Dayton said. “Environmental protection should be and used to be in Minnesota a bipartisan or nonpartisan concern, shared by everyone.”

Unexplained in the Strib piece:  Emmer had declined to attend because of an even that had been in the works for a very long time; his youngest’s first communion.  Emmer had respectfully declined to appear due to this rather important commitment in the life of any committed Catholic family.  Reporting this out of context would be like tittering about Keith Ellision’s refusal to eat pork as a slur against the Minnesota Pork Producer’s association, without mentioning that Islam forbids eating pork.

In fact, according to a source close to the party, Emmer respectfully declined the appearance, citing the reason, months ago; “My understanding is that the first communion was on the schedule for months and the campaign simply declined the forum due to the family event” said the source.  This was not news, and had nothign to do with whatever views Emmer has on the environment.

But the Strib article, the DFL candidates and the leftybloggers who wrote about the subject portrayed it as if he just blitzed on it, or was afraid.  Of Kelliher, Dayton and Entenza.

This portrayal is misleading and based on a mangling of context and selective omission of fact.

The Strib should be ashamed, and would be, if their role as a lackey for the DFL wasn’t pretty clearly set.