Second-to-last call here; tomorrow is the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers’ Sixth Annual Summer Party.

When:  Tomorrow, 7PM ’til we’re done!

Where:  Keegans Irish Pub, University just west of Hennepin in northeast Minneapolis

Who: Anyone.  Seriously – if you’re a blogger, would like to be a blogger, used to be a blogger, read blogs, don’t read blogs, hate blogs, love blogs, or have no idea about blogs, you’re welcome.  If you’re conservative, liberal, moderate, libertarian, fringe or apathetic, we’ve got a table and a couple pints of fan-dang-tastic Irish brew and booze, and some pretty fine food to boot, waiting for you!

What To Wear: Totally informal.

What To Talk About:  We hardly ever talk politics at the MOB. Our crowd is eclectic, ecumenical, eccentric, extra-fun…it’s totally worth the trip.

Why? Because it’s August, and you deserve a nice low-pressure night out!

Hope to see you – tomorrow at 7PM!  If you haven’t already, kindly drop an RSVP in the comment section, or at “feedbackinthedark” at yahoo dot com, or on Facebook!

I’ve spent a good part of the last month thinking about this next episode.

On August 12, 1940, World War 2 was three weeks shy of a year old.  In those 49 weeks, Hitler’s Germany had conquered all of Europe from the Polish/Russian border to the English Channel.  Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium and fallen.

And finally, Hitler had knocked out the continent’s greatest military power in less than a month, sending its survivors and its British allies reeling across the Channel.

The previous month had been like the fourth round of a major prize fight; after three rounds of furious punching, the fighters probed and regrouped, looking for developing weaknesses and rebuilding their strength for the climactic rounds.  The German Luftwaffe had spent the month plinking at British convoys in the English Channel and probing the Brits’ defenses.

On August 12, the German plan was scheduled to switch into high gear.  The plan – called Adlerangriff (“Eagle Attack”) was…

…put off for a day due to weather.

But seventy years ago today, Adlerangriff started, with the initial assault, Adlertag (“Eagle Day”).

And for all the talk over the past seven decades about the pilots and their planes – the Douglas Baders and Adolf Gallands, the Spitfires and the ME109s – this phase of the Battle, which lasted only ten days, came down to technology and intelligence.

———-

The sky is a big place.  And even small countries by American standards, places like Britain and France and Germany, have a lot of it.  That’s why even back to the earliest days of air to air combat, the hard part wasn’t shooting the enemy down so much as finding him.

Over confined spaces like the Western Front in World War I, it was less difficult; the whole front, with its millions of combatants and hundreds of planes facing off, was only a few hundred miles long, and the actual battles were quite compact.  The odds were that if a World War I ace like a Richtoven or a Rickenbacker or a Guynemer or a Mannock went looking for a fight over an active battlefield, they’d find one.

But Britain suffered terribly from bombing attack during the First World War – Zeppelins and crude two-engined bombers launched from bases in Belgium that’d lob bombs over London and other cities,  sowing more terror than damage, with rough impunity; the Brits had no idea how to find and track aircraft in the dark; they were dependent on ground observers seeing shapes in the moonlight, estimating course and speed, phoning the report in to…someone (because there was no coordinated air-defense command, much less air-defense command center); then, phone a report based on the estimated course and speed to an airbase in the area that may or may not have had fighters ready to take off, to fly in the dark without IFR instruments of any kind to even navigate, much less detect a target, not to mention trying to get their anemic, crude aircraft to climb to the altitude the attackers were at (which could alone take half an hour). And then find a target in the dark based on a crude course-distance calculation made based on eyeball observations from the ground.  And that was even if the famously fickle British weather made flying possible (although the German bombers and especially Zeppelins were fairly immune to the weather; they just had to lob bombs over the general area of the world’s most sprawling city).

It was with these raids in mind that Britain paid very close attention to research in the late 1920’s to the idea of measuring the time it took for a radio signal to bounce off an object and return to a receiver.  In 1936, British researchers were able to bounce a signal from a ground station off a passing Handley-Page Herford bomber that was completely unaware of its place in history.

The British Air Ministry’s research section, led by Sir Robert Watson-Watt, took a course that, seventy-five years later, should endear him to a generation of IT customers who want perfection for no money down; he rushed the production of the radar sets and stations into production long before the system had been perfected or polished; he said “third-best is acceptable when second-best won’t be available in time and best will never be built at all”.  So the first production British radar system, code-named “Chain Home”, was crude even by appearance:

British "Chain Home" radar station

A series of 300 foot tall towers along the British coast, Chain Home was bone simple by comparison to later sets.  Its “user interface” was a scope with a single cathode-ray line, like an old CRT TV that had gone on the blink; a “blip”, or uptick, in the glowing line would tell an operator the bearing and distance to the target.  Usually.  Not all the bugs had been worked out.

But by the time the war started, Chain Home was up and operational, providing Britain with all-round coverage, 24/7, in all weather.

And, most importantly, the stations – around seventy of them, each with a detection range of a little over 100 miles – were connected by phone with RAF Fighter Command’s control room, from which Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, chief of Fighter Command, would run the battle.

Mockup of RAF Operations Room, Stanhope

Operators – mostly women – would take phone calls from the radar stations with the course, height and speed of incoming raids; as signals from more than one station came in, the raid’s location could be precisely fixed, even before it left French airspace.  The location, direction, speed and strength of each raid were laid out with wooden “counters” on the huge map table, moved about with croupier’s paddles by the female airmen, overlooked by the operations staff on the balcony above, who would “scramble” fighters from airbases in the raids’ paths to intercept them, and maneuver squadrons from bases just off the path to pester the raids as they tried to return home.

It was a huge leap forward from 1918.  And the Germans, in the midst of building their own radar chain (in typical German fashion, building the much more sophisticated Freya system, which was coming in late and over budget, with only eight stations ready for action by the time the Battle started), knew this.

And so the target of Adlerangriff was these radar stations, and the airfields near the coast from which the first wave of RAF fighters would scramble.

It sounded simple in concept.

———-

So that was the first phase of the Battle of Britain – the German attempt to bomb the Chain Home stations.

And looking at the picture of the huge latticework antennae above, you’d think that’d be an easy job.  But from 15,000 feet up, the antennae weren’t all that big; the radar operators huts were flimsy, above-ground wooden structures, built in great haste to get the system on the air, but they were also tiny, almost invisible from high up.  And the fact is that the classic World War 2 bomber, whether a B29 or a German Heinkel 111, was not a precision bomber.

In fact, nothing back then really was.

German Heinkel 111 bombers - the workhorse of the Luftwaffe during the Battle

And it’s here we get into another technological area – in this case, a lag rather than an advance.  In our age of precision-guided cruise missiles and Predator drones shooting missiles through windows of buildings, it’s hard to recall that in 1940, attacking people from the air was incredibly imprecise.

High-altitude daylight level bombing, even as practiced by the Americans later in the war (with much-advanced technology) usually did well to get fifty percent of the bombs to drop within 1000 yards of the target from 20,000 feet.  German technology at the beginning of the war was incredibly crude even by that standard.

“Precision bombing” in World War 2 was the art and science of getting a bomb to land on something the size of, say, a moving ship, to say nothing of a tank or individual building.  It was the province of two different kinds of planes and sets of tactics; the “Dive Bomber”, and the low-level fighter-bomber.  And they had to do it using the most primitive instruments; simple geometric and reflector sights, and the pilot’s  own intuition and experience.

Junkers 87 "Stuka" dive bomber.

Later in the war, of course, both were elevated to high crafts;  American Thunderbolt and British Typhoon fighter-bombers would plink at troop units, trains and indivdual tanks with bombs and rockets; German Stukas armed with rockets and automatic cannon shredded through Soviet tank formations; US Navy dive bombers sank Japanese battleships and carriers; British Mosquito light bombers developed the craft to its apogee, dropping bombs on Gestapo jails precisely enough to free prisoners without killing them, mostly by constant refinement of math and experience.

Hitting radar sites was particularly difficult; even a huge antenna like a Chain Home station is a small target from the air; as the war progressed, they got much smaller (within a year, night fighters were carrying air-interception radar into the air to hunt night bombers); even twenty years later over Vietnam, attacking radar stations was such a hit-and-miss proposition that the US invested millions in building missiles and bombs that could home in on radar signals.

Messerschmitt 110 "heavy fighter". A failure as a fighter, it served mostly as a light bomber in the Battle. Fitted with radar later, it became a scourge of British night bombers in 1943-44

In 1940, none of that existed yet.

———-

So seventy years ago today, the Luftwaffe embarked on a three-point plan of attack:

1. Their high-altitude bombers plastered RAF airfields – first along the coast, and then moving inland.  The intention was ot make it impossible for the RAF to base its planes close to the Channel – important, since the British Spitfires and Hurricanes had very short ranges.
2. Their fighters roamed about southern England (to the extent that their also-limited range allowed), looking for targets to attack.  Called Frei Jagd (“Free Hunting”), it’s the kind of stuff fighter pilots love even today.
3. The German “precision bomber” force – the Stukas and a special fighter-bomber group, ‘Research Group 210″, at that time perhaps the most highly-trained group of low-altitude precision attack pilots in the world – went after the radar stations.

The attacks on the airfields had little effect – but well get back to that.

The fighters?  They occasionally “bounced” flights of Spitfires and Hurricanes, on their way to attack bomber and Stuka formations, causing casualties (and losing plenty in the process), breaking up some interceptions.  However, the British – using radar and the simple math, vectored the RAF interceptors away from the small  “blips” that were moving at 250-300mph – obviously fighters – and toward the big plodding, 180mpg bomber blips.

The initial attacks put four radar stations out of commission for a m atter of hours – less than a day or so in all cases.   The crude simplicity of the British equipment made repairs fairly easy.

But the Stukas, flying with little to no fighter escort, were shredded by the British defenders.  By August 23, the planes that had so terrorized the Poles, and had blasted the decisive holes in the French lines three months earlier, were withdrawn from combat.  They were never used in significant numbers against significant enemy aerial opposition again in the war.

Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring saw the casualties among the Stukas and the Me110 crews – which cut him deeply, as the 110 had been his pet project before the war – and decided after ten days to change tactics.  We’ll get to that in about ten days.

And it’s there we get to the failure in intelligence.  The Germans saw the casualties, and saw that for all the effort only four radar stations had gone offline…

…and missed the opportunity that made the Brits genuinely nervous; to keep hitting the sites until spares ran out; to hit the generator stations that provided the crude, power-hungry sites their electricity; to hit the civilian telephone exchanges that, incredibly, Chain Home used to call its reports back to Stanhope.

And so after ten days, Göring switched the attack, never knowing how close he came to giving the RAF a handicap that they might never have been able to surmount.

It wouldn’t be the last, of course.

But we’ll talk about that in about ten days.

Read this rather long analysis by Ace, about the media’s love of “neutral” story lines (which, timed as needed, become biased)…:

The media loves these story lines, because facially they appear neutral — “money in politics is a danger” has no on-its-face, explicit partisan import — but the timing of when to deploy a particular story line is highly partisan, and always made with the Democratic Party’s best interests in mind.

Thus, when Bush refused the campaign spending limits, and spent only private money, it was nearly a constitutional crisis; when Obama did the same, it was a triumph of people-powered politics.

Are conspiracy theories bad? Well, right now, when the Republican base is vulnerable to buying into conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace or sabotaged deep-drilling oil rigs, conspiracy theories are bad, and examples of the Paranoid Style of American Politics.

On the other hand, when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright confessed to Mort Kondracke she feared Bush had actually captured bin Ladin and was secretly holding him only to publicize his capture on the eve of the 2004 elections, a party’s trafficking in conspiracy theories wasn’t even worth noting.

Certainly such conspiracy theories weren’t worth noting when Bush and Cheney (and their deadly cabal) were accused of sabotaging a plane in order to murder a sitting and popular liberal US Senator.

…and fill in “Target” and the “Minnesota Federation of Teachers” in the appropriate slots.

In 2008, Wall Street backed The One.

They were, according to my double Jim Cramer, before they were against him:

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Wall Street’s political contributions have shifted from 70 percent Democratic in March 2009 to nearly 70 percent Republican as of June 2010.

I bet we really start hearing a lot about the poisonous affect of money in politics pretty quick here.

After a month in which groups paid for largely by his family and cronies ran more smear ads than were run in the entire 2006 governor’s race, Mark Dayton suddenly wants to play it clean:

Just a day after he declared victory in the DFL gubernatorial primary, former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton called for an end to all negative ads — including those from outside groups supporting him.

“I mean it,” he said.

He doesn’t mean it.

He’s posturing; trying to take the high road.  None of the groups supporting him (and paid for by him) are under the faintest obligation to obey.

Most importantly, the unions – who control their own political spending and don’t take orders from Dayton, nudge nudge wink wink – can do anything they want, spend as much as they want, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it (but heaven forfend that a business might be able to do the same thing).

Dayton is, at the very least, posturing.  At the most, perhaps, he might want to forestall future exposures of dirt in his record; the GOP’s “Erratic” ad is, truly, just the beginning.

The call comes weeks after the Democrat-supporting Alliance for a Better Minnesota released an ad smacking Republican Tom Emmer for past drunk driving charges and a day after the Minnesota Republican Party smacked Dayton for his past Senate history.

Minnesota has seen similar calls before — and seen absolutely nothing happen as a result.

And nothing will happen this time.  After months of paying for “independent” PACs to slime Emmer, Dayton’s current narrative is “I’m Being Swiftboated!”

In October of 2008, Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman decided he would pull all his negative ads (they are no longer available on YouTube) and asked his supporters to follow suit. None of his supporters listened and they continued to rip Democrat Al Franken on the air. Franken ended up winning that Senate election by 312 votes.

Unlike Dayton, Coleman was sincere.

Michael Brodkorb, deputy chair of the Republican Party, said Dayton’s calls was hypocritical and the party would only consider pulling its ad after it had run as much as the Alliance ad had. Right now, it appears the GOP doesn’t have the funding to run it that often.

Given that unlike A4aBM’s largely fallacious spots the GOP’s commercials are true, the spending gap may not tell the whole story.

It was a bruising, ugly primary season.  Minnesota – especially all of us of the chattering classes – could use a break, a respite to get together over the things that matter; beer, companionship, beer, cigars, beer, food and beer.

That respite is here!

Saturday is the Sixth Annual Minnesota Organization of Bloggers Summer Party!  We’ll be at Keegans at 7PM!

Come on down, enjoy what promises to be a glorious, not-quite-so-hot evening in Keegans’ brand-new cigar patio, and hang out at the coolest party in town!

You don’t have to be a blogger; you just gotta love hanging out with fun, interesting people.  And the MOB is strenuously non-partisan; we specifically invite all our DFLer friends who especially need to heal up from this past week’s trench warfare!

Join us!

Viper Motorcycles is going into production!:

The company, which began limited production of motorcycles in 2009, said it expects to begin manufacturing in Auburn in 2011.

Viper will occupy a new 63,000-square-foot facility that it will lease from the city…The company has 10 employees but expects its workforce to grow to about 100 in the next two years.

That’s ninety new manufacturing jobs!  The kind of jobs that are the absolute measure of an advanced economy!

Er…

Viper Motorcycle Co. plans to move from Hopkins to Auburn, Ala., this year.

I guess they weren’t happy to pay among the highest business taxes in the country for a Better Minnesota.

…but one poll is going very well indeed for Emmer.

In the DFL “Unity” rally yesterday, Mark Dayton – who has funded, along with his family, the most expensive orgy of attack advertising in Minnesota history, unprecedented in both its cost and its fallaciousness –  complained:

“I expected the smears to start right away, and they have.”

He was complaining, of course, because after a month of carping on Emmer’s 20 and 30 year old careless driving arrests (and lying about his legislative record), the GOP – not the Emmer campaign – took out an ad highlighting Dayton’s genuine and recent erratic behavior.

Leaving aside that the MNGOP’s ad buy will be a tiny fraction of what “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” spent smearing Tom Emmer (on the Dayton family dime), one must ask; is reporting facts – something A4aBM never tried in re Emmer’s record – a “smear”?  How does Dayton feel about the “smearing” that his family-funded PAC has been funding for the past month?

This is the beginning of the latest chanting point from the left.  On Tuesday night, Jeff Rosenberg of the leftyblog MNPublius – a good guy, but as reliable a barometer of the direction of DFL spin as exists in the Twin Cities lefty “alternative” media since Dusty Trice exited the blogging stage in a welter of snark-splat – tweeted his vision of the upcoming discourse:

Dayton/DFL: “We should really solve the budget problem.” Emmer/GOP: “MARK DAYTON IS A POOHEAD.:

Which is an interesting take, given that while Dayton, his family and cronies have funded more attack ads in the past month than ran in the entire 2006 campaign against Pawlenty.

So let me ask you this, Jeff Rosenberg and, by the way, every single other lefty commentator: name and document one single attack that has come from Tom Emmer in this cycle, against anyone; against any of his convention opponents, or Kelliher, Entenza, Horner or Dayton.

You can not, of course.  Emmer has taken an utterly scrupulous high road – as has his main political action committee, MNForward, funded by Minnesota businesses.

But expect this narrative over the next week or two; that Dayton is a victim!

Indeed, I’m going to go out on a thick, strong limb and say Dayton will issue nothing substantial for the next week; he’ll whing about being “Targetboated”, and he’ll redouble the efforts of  his goons at A4aBM.

Enjoy this, Minnesota.  This is your 2010 model DFL in action.

I’ve been saying that Michele Bachmann will win re-election in the Sixth Congressional District by eight points.

After seeing Tarryl Clark’s performance in the primaries – getting just under 2/3 of the vote against an opponent that dropped out two months ago – I’m thinking I was too pessimistic.

I’m predicting Bachmann by 10.

OK, DFL.  You wanna bag on Tom Emmer from behind the cover of your little smear group?

Here you go.  It’s from that shadowy, mysterious group, the Minnesota GOP.

So here you go, DFLers.  After three months of flinging poo at Emmer’s 20 year old careless driving conviction, at his utterly accurate statements on the cost of minimum wage law  to both restauranteurs and lower-income food-service workers, and the free speech rights of corporations to combat the uncontested free speech rights of unions and plutocratic DFL supporters, we’re finally down to a real campaign here.

The astroturf campaign against Target really is emblematic of this campaign; like Target, Emmer is a home-grown guy whose mission is to bring people better stuff – bedding and appliances and groceries or government, respectively – for less money.  Like Target, the DFL and its big-money supporters, the unions and the Dayton family, need to destroy the notion that a homegrown company or guy can do that without government’s explicit blessing.

And you, plural, the DFL establishment, need to destroy Emmer (and his supporters, from Target all the way down to the regular schmoes in the street who speak out in his favor), because at the end of the day you are all now married to…:

A candidate with only one message: Raise taxes:  He (and, mostly, his supporters) gussy this up with talk of “fiscal responsibility” – but at the day the only responsibility it refers to is your “responsibility” to keep government fed, fat and happy.

A candidate who is lying about “The Rich”: If you’re in a two-income household with a successful auto mechanic and a nurse, or a cop and a store manager, or a computer programmer and a pharmacist, or a mid-level teacher and a project manager, or a successful salesman and an executive assistant, you may not think of yourself as “the rich” in the same sense as, say, Mark Dayton.  But according to Mark Dayton’s plan, you are.  You are the ripe sucks for his tax plan.

And to make matters worse, as we will explore in coming weeks, there is no way on earth taxing “the rich” – households making over $150,000 a year – will close the deficit; partly because there isn’t that much money in that pool, and partly because taxing that pool will drive down the revenue received.  And so Dayton will, inevitably, have to drive down the definition of “rich”; in a few years, it’ll be households making $100K.  And then $85K.  You get the picture.

A candidate who is going to destroy Minnesota’s already-ailing business climate: Minnesota’s business tax rates are already hurting Minnesota business.  Businesses have stayed here, more or less.  But most of the big corporations, your Targets and Best Buys and 3Ms, have been building most of their actual production facilities outside Minnesota for decades; our tax rates have been a boon for Texas, Mississippi, Mexico, and the Dakotas.  And many smaller business are on the bubble; they’re looking at this election and pondering moving to Texas, Arizona or the Dakotas if things get any worse than they are.  You haven’t heard of most of these companies; they’re little operations that employ dozens, maybe a hundred or two.  But those are jobs, especially outside the metro, that are slowly bleeding away and aren’t coming back anytime soon.

We’ll have more on this in the next week or so.

A candidate whose behavior has been, to say the least, erratic over the years: Mark Dayton has admitted to suffering from Depression.  So did Winston Churchill.

Dayton has admitted to being an alcoholic.  So were Ulysses S. Grant and George W. Bush.

Depression and alcoholism clearly don’t disqualify people from political office.

But the erratic behavior that accompany depression and addiction certainly need to be considered.

When one of history’s greatest terrorists threatened to bomb London (and followed through in spades), Winston Churchill didn’t shut down Parliament and flee to Kenwood.  He stuck a cigar in his mouth and threw Hitler a rhetorical middle finger and fought, and won, the war.

When the Union cause got incredibly difficult, and the equation came down to trading horrific casualties for the wearing down of the enemy – a commander’s worst nightmare – Ulysses S. Grant didn’t relapse, throw his hands in the air, and walk away from the job.  He gritted his teeth and won the Civil War.

So as Minnesota faces its biggest budget challenge in almost eighty years – maybe ever – can you honestly say you see that kind of response in Mark Dayton?  In any facet of his thirty-odd year record as a dissolute playboy political hobbyist?

Is it fair to even bring up alchoholism and mental illness?  Irrelevant; I’m not.  I’m talking only of Dayton’s long history of just plain strange behavior.  And since the DFL saw fit to make Tom Emmer’s two careless driving convictions from a generation ago into election fodder, it’s only fair that Dayton’s behavior be on the table as well.   Of course, Emmer’s last problem was 20 years ago; he’s gone on to become a pillar of the community in every sense.  What’s Dayton done?

What has Dayton done?

We’ll be talking about that for the next three months.

I stand by my prediction: after all of the Dayton family money is spent, and the unions have stomped and squealed, and all is said and done, Minnesota will atone for the madness of 1998 and 2008  and put Emmer into the Governor’s office by a four point margin.

Because I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it at least weekly until this election is tagged and bagged; when you meet Tom Emmer, even if you’re not fundamentally disposed to agree with him, you at least walk away liking the guy, and thinking he’s got something going on.  When you meet Mark Dayton, you feel…just a little off.

Go ahead, DFL.  Start defending the guy.

This oughtta be good.

The whole point of the astroturf campaign against Target’s donation to pro-Republican PAC ‘MNForward”was to try to make it too painful for corporations to exercise their right to donate money to campaigns (which, need we add unions and the Dayton family are doing pretty promiscuously already).

It isn’t working:

Graco Inc., headquartered in Minneapolis, contributed $50,000 to MN Forward at the end of last week. Graco Inc. is “a world leader in fluid handling systems and components,” according to the company’s website.

Now that we have an actual campaign, the fact that Dayton will be a disaster for business should start to play a role.

Conservative have been claiming for decades that the press is biased toward the left.

It’s hard to look at the Twin Cities’ media’s record of mangled context, selective reporting and generalized ennui this past three months and reach any conclusion other than this; the Twin Cities media has an agenda.

Let’s go over the past few months’ campaign events and the coverage – or lack of it – from the regional mainstream media.

Lies?  What Lies?:  Factcheck.org determined that Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s entire ad campaign is essentially untrue.

Not a word in the Twin Cities media.

Bad For Business: Last week, the Sorosphere began claiming that Target was suffering financially due to its support for Emmer’s campaign.

A simple check of the Dow Jones for that week showed that all mid-to-upper-range retailers had trouble that week, contemporaneously with a bad consumer confidence report.

No Lie Left Challenged: the Entenza campaign tried to make hay over Emmer’s “support for No Child Left Behind”.

Emmer was opposing NCLB before it was cool – not that you’d know it from our media.

The “DUI”s:  The media dutifully reported twice that Tom Emmer had two “DWI” convictions – once in close conjunction with a smear ad from Alliance for a Better Minnesota.  They also ran with ABM’s claims that this was directly connected to Emmer “sponsoring legislation to reduce punishment for drunk drivers”, at the alleged behest of “DWI Defense Attorneys”.

The media couldn’t be bothered to fact-check the story.  The facts are:

• Emmer was never convicted of DUI.  It was “Careless Driving” in both cases.  Emmer openly admits that both cases were alcohol-related; he’s quite publicly taken responsibility for his mistakes which were, let’s recall, 20 and 30 years ago, when Emmer was in his teens and late twenties.
• Emmer’s main piece of legislation was to eliminate prior consent hearings – the civil procedure by which accused drunk drivers get their licenses returned while going through the criminal system on the DWI charge.  These cases add a huge burden to the legal system, especially in the metro area; former Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Judge Magnuson supported the bill, as did groups within the Attorney General’s office.
• Emmer’s other piece would have allowed convicted DWIs to get some of their rights back after ten years of good behavior.  Neither bill would have “lessened punishments” in any way.
• The “DWI Defense attorneys” were also prosecutors, who also did personal injury and wrongful death litigation against convicted drunk drivers.  Nobody in the Twin Cities media could be bothered to note that the claim was absurd; a DWI defense attorney should want stricter penalties, which would generate more markets for their services!

“The Corrosive Effect of Money in Politics”: In mid-July, I posted some findings from research into campaign finance records that showed that the Alliance for a Better Minnesota was largely funded by a PAC called “Win Minnesota” – which, in turn, was largely funded by contributions from the Dayton family, and especially Dayton’s ex-wife Alida Messinger, an heir to the Rockefeller fortune.

This happened about a week before the Target flap – at which point the narrative turned to hand-wringing about the corrosive effect of (corporate) money in politics.

Although MPR’s Tom Scheck noted the findings obliquely at the time, and WCCO’s Pat Kessler ran a story on the subject this past week, the mainstream media in the Twin Cities has been largely uninterested.

Perhaps they’re too busy reporting on Target to note that Alida Messinger alone has given three times more money than Target, and almost as much as the entire MNForward PAC.

ABM’s Lies: By early July, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota was kicking its epic ad buy into high gear.  Their first rounds of ads was found to be almost completely devoid of fact – although that apparently never rated a mention in the regional media.

Emmer’s Legal Record – Or At Least The Parts Of It That Make Good Smear Material:  On June 28, the Strib’s Pat Doyle ran a piece about a few episodes from Tom Emmer’s legal past; an office manager what swindled Emmer’s law firm, a suit over a disputed car crash (which Emmer won), another in which Emmer had been injured, and a suit against a landscaper.

Doyle’s “reporting” was notable for the meticulousness with which it omitted any shred of information from the record that might have portrayed Emmer as anything but a heartless pushy bully.   Nobody in the Twin Cities’ media reported that…:

• ….the office manager, who took a plea deal that involved an apology and restitution to Emmer in exchange for not being prosecuted for much more serious charges, violated the terms of her plea bargain by talking to Doyle.
• That the legal wrangling in Emmer’s accident litigation was the norm rather than the exception
• That the landscaper who sued Emmer only did so because he had no case against Jacquie Emmer, and tried to sue Tom Emmer under a novel and ultimately specious theory that Emmer had “unjustly enriched” himself – in a suit that was thrown out with prejudice, with the judge requiring the landscaper to pay Emmer’s legal bills; the case had no merit whatsoever, although neither the Strib nor any other Twin Cities media outlet apparently felt the need to set the story straight.

The Detailed Plan – For a brief few weeks in June, the media and chattering classes asked almost as one “where is Emmer’s plan?” This, of course, without asking the same of any of the Democrats, whose primary race was just starting to (ahem) “heat up”.

Oddly, this would have been right during the planning phase for Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s biggest-in-history smear campaign against Emmer;  I’ll speculate that someone was trolling for material.

“He Wants To Cut How Much?”:  Much of the Twin Cities media and the leftyblog chatterbots beneath them ran with the “story” that Emmer said he’d cut the state budget by 30%.

This was, of course, based on a brief “mis-speak” during a live radio interview, which Emmer corrected immediately. This, however, remained largely unreported.

Nonetheless, radio spots for Matt Entenza after last week were still claiming that “Emmer would cut the budget a devastating 30%!”.  Perhaps nobody cares because Entenza was DOA from week one – but one needs to ask “do facts matter at all?”

“Emmer Hates Gays”:  The crux of the meme that the Dayton campaign has used to nationalize the governor’s race is the fallacy that “Emmer is rabidly anti-gay” – based on his support for a gay marriage amendment supported by a majority of Minnesotans, and I suspect a majority of legislators on both sides of the aisle – and his alleged “support” of punkdamentalist preacher Bradlee Dean and his controversial “You Can Run But You Can Not Hide” street ministry.

Nobody in the Twin Cities media bothered to fact-check the claim at the root of this meme – a story by Andy Birkey at the Soros-bankrolled Minnesota “Independent” that, a cursory examination by an amateur hobby hack showed, was built on clumsily-mangled context and some circumstantial gossip fodder.

“Local Government Aid Cuts Are Destroying Minnesota!”:  When Alliance for a Better Minnesota launched a campaign claiming that Governor Pawlenty’s cuts to Local Government Aid had caused huge problems, nobody in the Twin Cities media seemed to have the time to fact-check the claims.  It took a lowly blogger not one, not two, not three, not four, but five articles to do the sort of fact-checking that we ostensibly have a regional media that gets paid to do fulltime.

“Uncertified Teachers“:  One of the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s first claims was that Tom Emmer favors “uncertified teachers”.

A fairly detemined search didn’t show that any regional media fact-checked this story which,  of course, was a lie – Emmer favors alternative licensing, so that we can actually get enough teachers in fields like science and math where our humanities-glutted Educational-Industrial Complex isn’t producing enough candidates.

“Extreme“:  The left’s chanting point from the very beginning was that “Emmer is Extreme”.

To Rachel Stassen-Berger’s credit, she did report that Emmer’s record, at least on a range of key selected issues, is a virtual mirror of that of Margaret Anderson-Kelliher – who, Kelliher reminded us in the debate, is more centrist than Dayton.

The Big Green Stiff: Right after the convention, the DFL candidates gathered to hold a “Green Issues Summit”.  Dayton and Entenza gamboled about the fact that Emmer never showed up at the event-  which the media duly carried.

Unreported:  That Emmer had quite publicly declined to attend because it was his youngest child’s first communion.

Primaries are today.  If you’re a Republican, find your polling station here.  If you’re a DFLer, Mark Dayton will tell you where to go.

It’s important to go if you’re a Republican today.  Emmer should be safe from the Leslie Davis juggernaut, but our Attorney General candidate Chris Barden faces a familiar challenge – Sharon Anderson.  Back in 1994, she beat the endorsed GOP candidate Tom Neuville.  Part of it was the “Anderson” name; part of it was that there was at the time a TV talk show host in the Cities by the same name.

This year, the worry is Sharon Anderson will get votes intended for endorsed State Auditor candidate Pat Anderson.

So  while this blog never ever endorses anyone – it’s Barden for AG.  Not Anderson.

I’ll be voting after work.

Luke Hellier at MDE notes that  Time Magazine seems to have scrubbed its’ 2006 “The Blunderer” story, in which they declared Mark Dayton one of the five worst Senators in the US:

In 2006, Mark Dayton was named one of America’s Worst Senators by Time Magazine.  The story was featured in the magazine and online.

But now, the story can’t be found any where.  The story can’t be found on Time.com and can’t even be found on Lexis Nexis.

One has to wonder if Time Magazine decided to pull down the article to prevent more people from reading the story.

I found a copy on an internet archive site that was linked from Dayton’s Wikipedia page.

It doesn’t seem to be available on Google anymore; about a month ago when I wrote about the story, it was top front and center.

Yet another chapter in the media’s shameful record of being in the bag for the liberal canddiate in a local election?

(more…)

I caught most of the DFL goober debate on MPR last night.  For the benefit of those of you who did not, I’ll sum up the gestalt of the three candidates’ positions:

DAYTON:  “I’m gonna raise taxes!  And I”m gonna keep on raising them until things improve!”

KELLIHER: “Hey, lookit how relatively responsible, sane and conservative I seem compared to Dayton!”

ENTENZA: “We don’t call it spending, we call it an inves…hey, I just spent five million dollars and every  nickel of it went to bashing Tom Emmer, rather than explaining to Minnesota why I’m a better DFL nominee than the other two candidates!  Why, it’s almost as if my spending did nothing but benefit Mark Dayton!”

The latest polls show Dayton up by eleventy-teen bajillion points.  Stick a fork in Entenza.  As re Kelliher, the DFL endorsement remains the kiss of death.

Bring on Wednesday, baby!

The only surprising thing about this story…:

…is that it didn’t happen in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Anoka or Edina first.

In fact, I’m not sure that it didn’t; stories like this pop up every few years somewhere in the US.

What is new is the promise by “lemonade stand activists” to launch a lemonade-stand-in at a street fair coming up soon.

I’m liking this whole “fallout from the Tea Party” thing, myself…

Last winter, there was a leftyblogger conference in downtown Saint Paul.

Someone must have run a session on how to play investigative reporter. “Minnesota Observer”, writing at “Cucking Stool”, thinks she’s onto something.

Let’s read the story…

D’oh.  Not that link  It’s a dead link.  Because MNob had to pull the story down and retool it just a tad.

But retool she did – and it finally ended up at this link…I think.

Yes!  It’s there!

Spot [leftybloggers have trouble using their real names]  has often jousted with St. Cloud State University professor of the dismal science King Banaian over matters of economic policy here at the Cucking Stool.

Spot “jousts” with King in the same way the Washington Generals “joust” with the Globetrotters.  But I digress.

What I want to talk about today is something a bit different, and a bit more personal to the professor: the Communications Act of 1934. Specifically section 315 of the Act and its equal opportunity requirement on a broadcaster, say a radio station. The Act requires that

If any licensee shall permit any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcasting station, he shall afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates for that office in the use of such broadcasting station

I remember having to learn this bit of law ,when I first started in radio (um, 31 years ago this month); it means that radio and TV stations have an obligation to provide the same access to the air to candidates from all parties.

Of course, not every candidate;  otherwise, stations would be so busy broadcasting screeds from the Grass Roots party and the Natural Law party that they’d sound like AM950, and have the ratings to match.  No, candidates have to be officially-endorsed candidates that are legally on the ballot.  Which means they’ve been endorsed and the convention or, if there’ a primary, the election winner.

The equal opportunity requirements contained in section 315 of the Act have been described as “the closest thing in broadcast content regulation to the ‘golden rule.'”

In the same way that I’ve been described as “Original Gangsta”.

The law – or at least the Cliff Notes version of it – aside, MNob cuts to what passes for the chase:

Professor Banaian is running for the Minnesota legislature, seeking to serve the people of House District 15B…He has a website up, he’s on Facebook and the Twitter. He’s pretty obviously a “legally qualified candidate” these days under the Act.

And, as MNob noted (it was apparently why she took down the original post) the DFL doesn’t have a legal candidate yet; they’re duking it out in the primary tomorrow.  King will take the winner on in November (and, I suspect, win by 5-10 points).

But he also has a media presence that his opponents do not, one that brings us back to section 315 of the Communications Act of 1934. You see, he also has four hours of air time every single week in the form of the “King Banaian Show” on 1570 AM, some “Business Talk Radio” station here in the Twin Cities…

Remember that phrase – “here in the Twin Cities”.

Candidate Banaian has had hours of air time at his disposal. I don’t see that anyone else in the race appearing on the KYCR schedule.

Well, no.  Economist Banaian has had the hours “at his disposal” to do a show about economics.  And it is “in the Twin Cities”; not in Saint Cloud, part of which is in 15B.

But MNob is – to a point – correct; he’s a candidate.

On his candidacy website, Facebook, and Twitter he makes no mention of his radio show, and the radio show’s website doesn’t mention his candidacy, which makes me think he knows that all is not entirely according to Hoyle in this scenario.

Not sure how MNob’s crack research skills missed the fact we’ve been plugging King’s show every week for ten months now; King’s been on the air on one Salem Twin Cities station or another for six and a half years, now.  I’m not a lawyer, so I’m obviously not mentally equipped to ponder the workings of the law-school-trained mind, but if “according to Hoyle” means “publicized”, King’s pretty much got it covered.

I’m not completely detached from the discussion; I was there for part of it.  When Salem Communications switched King’s program from AM1280 to AM1570, to give it one of the most solid, credible local voices in the market for discussing business and economic  issues, everyone knew that there was a possibility that King would run for office.  The question went up the corporate food chain and came back down positive.  King could do his show, but he couldn’t talk about being a candidate; his focus was the same as the station’s; business, not politics.

Still, MNob’s right, so far – since King is a candidate…

…under the law, his care in avoiding discussions of his candidacy doesn’t won’t matter. Most likely, once he received a party unit’s endorsement and certainly once he filed his paperwork, his presence on the air triggered the equal opportunity provisions of the law.

Well, sure, once the Democrats endorse an opponent.

Or it would; if KYCR were heard under any normal, reasonable circumstances, in House District 15B.

Here’s HD15B (warning: PDF file!): it’s eastern Saint Cloud and its southeast environs in Stearns county.

Here’s KYCR’s listening area:

The red circle is the “Local Coverage” pattern – the area where the station can be reliably picked up. it ends a good half a county short of the nearest tip of District 15B.  The lavender line is the “Distant Coverage” pattern – where the signal catches a bare corner of 15B, but only if you’re pretty darn motivated and have a good radio or a big antenna.  The blue line is the “fringe coverage area”, where you have to be more or less lucky to be able to find the station even if you want to try really hard (and I’m here to testify – it’s real hard to get a station in the fringe area, and harder still to get a meaningful signal).

As you can see, over 90% of the district is in the “Fringe” overage area (Coverage maps explained).  Experience says even the red circle is optimistic.  Oh, and at night – when half the “equal time” would occur – the range is about 2/3 of what you see on the map above.

I’m not bringing this up for the wonky radio-geek-olicious fun of it; the “Equal Opportunity” rules have limits.  One of those limits, as far as the FCC is concerned, is “does a voter in an area have a reasonable chance of being able to pick up the candidate’s broadcast?”   If a candidate in Fargo has a show on a station in Louisville, Kentucky, the Kentucky station would not likely be forced to give up equal time; nobody in Fargo will ever hear the candidate’s broadcast, so it can’t influence the election even indirectly.

And, according to a source familiar with this situation, that’s why Banaian’s show continues – because it is impossible for anyone in HD15B to hear it under normal circumstances, except via the internet – and the FCC doesn’t require Equal Opportunity on the Internet, because candidates can produce their own webcasts as easily as Salem can.  Probably easier.

So while the Equal Opportunity rule might apply to the race in 15B, it’s a real stretch.

Of course, “stretch” doesn’t mean “impossible”.  So if I were KYCR’s program director (and I am not!), I’d say something like this:

MANAGER MITCH: Sure, Zach Dorholt or Carol Lewis, whichever of you wins the primary!  You want equal time?  You got equal time!  You roust yourself up at 7AM on Saturday, and get on the road by 8:30.  Get yourself from Saint Cloud to Eagan by 10 or 10:30, because you’re going on the air at 11!  You have two hours (the same length as King’s broadcast; we’ll rebroadcast it on Sunday night, just as we do King’s.  Oh, unless you’d rather come down here on Sunday night!).

The law requires us to give you two hours of airtime and a microphone.  I’ll throw in an engineer to run the board for you, naturally.  But making yourself sound good and credible when you’ve probably never done any radio – that’s your job!  So you can sit in that room for two hours – it’s actually 88 minutes after commercials – and try not to sound like a cottonmouthed stammering fool.  Unless, of course, you’d like to have one of the hosts in the building lead you through a discussion of the district’s issues…oh, wait.  All conservatives.  Sorry about that.

And you can do that 88 minutes on the air knowing that not a single person in your district will ever hear what you’re saying, unless they really love tinkering with radios, which, let’s be honest, on a summer Saturday in Minnesota, nobody does.

(D’oh, sorry – you might be dimly audible in the southeasternmost tip of the district – the Republican part.  Time well spent, folks!)

You’ll be off the air at 1PM, which leaves you back in St. Cloud by about 2:30, if there’s no construction.

So you go ahead and tell your campaign manager “Hey, I’d like to take six hours of prime Saturday campaigning time to drive to Eagan to do a broadcast that absolutely nobody in our district will hear, except maybe a few people who are rock-ribbed Bachmann supporters anyway; nobody from Saint Cloud, the only place we’ll be getting any votes, will be able to hear it even in the unlikely event they’d try”.

And then, you tell that manager you’re going to be doing it every single week until the election is over, or until Banaian decides to take a break from it.

C’mon down!  Mi airtime es su airtime!

Perhaps Mr. Dorholt and Ms. Lewis’ campaign managers might want to be in touch with MNob to ask her to quit doing them favors.

Look – it’s entirely possible that King will put his show on hiatus has the campaign switches to its final push for November, and hand it over to guests hosts or do a few months worth of “best ofs”.   Campaigning is hard, and I’d imagine King could use a few extra hours a week when the end-of-cycle grind really kicks in.  And if he gets elected – and I think he will, and I think the smart money would think so even if King hadn’t been one of Smart Money’s friends for over six years – we’ll have to see what happens, then.

But it’ll have nothing to do with the FCC – for the radical reason that everyone involved in the show at Salem and KYCR thought about all these possibilities well in advance.  Equal Opportunity might apply to the DFL candidates in 15B; they might just be really dumb to try to use it.

But if all you leftybloggers want to get equal time, pass the word to Dave Walz, Keith Ellison and BettyMcCollum that my repeated invites to appear on the Northern Alliance still stand.  Of course, nobody at any of those offices has the manners to respond, much less the seeds to take us up on it (even though RT Rybak found Ed and I perfectly respectful and civil interviewers; McCollum and Ellison apparently need interviewers who’ll paint their toenails on the air for them)…

…possibly because there’s no FCC law that requires them to accept the offer.

Pity.

Speed Gibson has probably the best summary I’ve seen of the DFL’s endorsed slate in the primaries tomorrow.

Granted, Speed’s a conservative – but even with that understood, he’s not impressed:

In a game of poker looking at these five jokers, I’d draw five.

Margaret Anderson Kelliher (Governor):  “Margaret” as she seems to be calling herself now is just plain inauthentic.  She certainly didn’t learn her big city liberal values from that farm upbringing she keeps mentioning and that’s the point.  She doesn’t want us to think she’s a big city liberal.  Neither does Matt Entenza, whose campaign is following the same theme, poor boy from Worthington.  Mark Dayton is also a big city liberal, but at least he doesn’t deny it, in fact, doubling down by promising the largest tax increase by far of these three Primary contenders.

Finally – a pundit who correctly uses the phrase “doubling down”!

Dayton has two other advantages, family money and superior political skills.  Margaret is a big city liberal, but not quite yet at least, a big city liberal politician as she’ll likely find out this Tuesday.

John Gunyou (Lt. Governor): You’ve met this type of individual many times I bet even if you haven’t met Mr. Gunyou or seen his presentations as I have.  These people make lists of problems, then sit back and wait for you to solve them.

No kidding.  Watching John Gunyou talk reminded me of watching former Saint Paul mayor Jim Scheibel, after he’d left office to become a “housing advocate”.  I sat for half an hour watching him speak; his message was “the poor need attractive, comfortable housing near mass transit”; when asked “Um, how do we afford it?”, his response was basically “If you care, you’ll figure it out”.  The audience cared deeply enougn, naturally, to universally endorse spending other peoples’ money on it.

Mark Ritchie (Secretary of State): In just one term, Mr. Ritchie has undone this office’s sterling national reputation built by Joan Growe (1975-1999) and Mary Kiffmeyer (1999-2007).  He was soon caught lying about misuse of his office’s resources, then went on to be materially involved in swaying a tight election toward now Senator Al Franken.  Mind you, former Senator Norm Coleman deserves full blame for losing this election.  It shouldn’t have been this close against an arrogant buffoon like Franken.  But most damning for Mark Ritchie is that he has done absolutely nothing since then to tighten up the many lapses and inconsistencies that left many on both sides concerned about our state’s ability to run fair elections going forward.

The next liberal hamster who chants “our electoral system is the best in the nation” is going to wish they hadn’t.

Rebecca Otto (State Auditor): Let me put it this way: if Rebecca Otto can competently perform these duties, the office should be abolished.

Hah!

Lori Swanson (State Attorney General): The sudden opening with then incumbent Mike Hatch running for Governor in 2006 probably thrust the decision to run upon Lori Swanson sooner than she wanted and it has certainly showed these past 3+ years.  The staff was unhappy day one.  She had to bring Hatch back initially because she so obviously couldn’t handle the job initially.  Those things have settled down, but she remains a Hatch clone who envisions her office as primarily consumer protection bureau.  It’s easier work and you get to fawn before the media, right or wrong.

I used to think our DFL constitutional officers were underachievers.  I was wrong, of course; they were just overpromoted.

This is the weakest slate of state office candidates the DFL has put up that I can remember, all of them people who can’t or won’t competently do those jobs.  I’ll include Dayton and Entenza when I further clarify that raising taxes in this economy alone is job-killing inc

Wednesday morning is going to be Day One of the golden age of Minnesota conservative blogging.

Just thought I’d kick back and remind you all that after two months spent feverishly debunking the many, many lies of “A Better Minnesota”, and pointing out what the regional mainstream media wouldn’t – that A4aBM is largely a front for Dayton family money – the word is finally getting out.

Last week Pat Kessler basically reached the same conclusions that I did over A4aBM’s funding.

And late last week, Factcheck.org – a production of those conservative tools the Annenberg Foundation – basically agreed that you can tell Alliance for a Better Minnesota is lying when their lips are moving, in an article that excoriates the PAC for its mangling of the truth.

When you want actual facts, who ya gonna call first?

…I’ll be on AM1100 The Flag with Rob Port at 6:35 or so to talk about the Governor’s race.

You can listen in here:
Live video by Ustream

Bill Reichert’s website.  He’s running against Geoff Michel for State Senate in Edina/West Bloomington.

Andy Noble is GOP-endorsed candidate for Ramsey County Commission.

Ted Daley is running for State Senate in District 38 – Eagan, MN.  He’s been endorsed by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, by the way.

Chris Barden for Attorney General.

The story on Factcheck.org that says everything Alliance For A Better Minnesota is a lie.

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

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John or some combination thereof kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I follow from 1-3PM Central.  Big day today – we’ll be talking with Attorney General candidate Chris Barden, and Minnesota Senate candidates Ted Daley and Bill Reichert. As well as all the rest of the news of the week. 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!  The show is not political, by the way – it’s business.  A whole ‘nother realm of material!
• And for those of you who like your constitutionalism straight up with no chaser, don’t forget the Sons of Liberty, from 3-5!

(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:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream).
• Podcast at Townhall, usually by Monday
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• And make sure you fan us on Facebook!

Join us!

(Title via The Ramones)

I’m a fiscal conservatve.  Along with that, I’m a legal constructionist and a social libertarian, and a personal Christian by the bye.

And I generally take that “libertarian” side pretty seriously.  I don’t much care what other people do with their lives; I’d much appreciate it if they felt the same and let me live my personal life the way I want to; I’m happy to return the favor.

So my approach to “gay rights”, as a rule, is driven by all these factors.  All people must be equal before the law.  Nothing else should modify that statement – not race, gender or religion, not orientation, nothing.

My faith sees marriage as a guy and a gal getting together to start a family.  My libertarian side says that government should allow people to sign contracts, including civil “marriages”, and enforce them (and since goats and children can’t sign contracts, the “human-animal marriage will be legal” argument is something of a red herring, and it should be a fairly simple thing to legislate that groups can’t get the same rights as inter-personal “marriage” contracts without violating anyone’s right).

I happen to see marriage as a religious institution, not a civil one.  In the event I ever get married again, I’ll endeavor to avoid the state bureaucracy, to the point of eschewing the government  license if possible, and sticking with the church ceremony. And, by the way, since I see marriage as a religious institution, I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t add that a church might be perfectly within its theological purview to find a scriptural justification for same-sex marriage.  It’s difficult, of course; no major religion anywhere in the world believes any such thing – but never say never.  If theology were engineering, the Episcopals in particular could build the Panama Canal.

And I’ll exercise my right not to get married there!

I’m a Tom Emmer supporter.  While I kept quiet about it, I’ve been supporting him since last summer.  There were several moments that tipped it over for me; I’ve written about one of them on this blog before.  When an audience member asked him about gay marriage, Emmer responded without skipping a beat that while he was a Catholic who shared his church’s beliefs on what marriage is, that the only real issue in the upcoming election is jobs and the economy – and the governor would have absolutely nothing to do with any legislation on gay marriage, anyway.

And I thought “there’s a guy with the right priorities”.  And I still do.

———-

The “MNForward” flap has been a classic case of astroturfing.  Now, a writer for a “Gawker”-class snarkblog wrote me last week taking umbrage at my calling it “astroturf” because…well, apparently because his publication had written about it and they just don’t do astroturf, nosireebob.  I wasn’t entirely clear on that point.

(I was thinking about writing about how the biggest thing standing in the way of acceptance of gay rights has been gay activists – but The Onion said it better.  And they’re liberals, so they can get away with it).

But the fact is that the issue took off when the Alliance for a Better Minnesota started pushing it as a wedge; gay groups ran with it, with the able help of the regional and finally national media, trying to portray an action by very, very few people as an epic groundswell (that was going to harm Target financially, no less) even though gay issues are pretty much a nonentity for Emmer…

…and all three of the DFL contenders, none of whom has ever wasted a moment of their precious time introducing any bills to legalize gay marriage in Minnesota or speaking at all outside safe DFL districts about the issue.  Paper statements on how important it is, sure – but they have yet to put their bills where their mouths are.

The writer pointed me to the DFLers’ paper positions, as well as Emmer’s support for a constitutional amendment favoring traditional marriage, and asked me if I actually knew anything about Minnesota politics, or “am I wasting my time?”

In retrospect, I should have responded “I have virtually nothing against gay marriage outside my own personal religious observance.  Ask me about subject I care about, or consider it a waste of time and leave me be”.  I made the mistake of reading his writing about Emmer to that point – the sort of ad-hominem context-smashing that fits in in places like “Gawker” or “Dump Bachmann” – and just threw him in my spam folder.

Here’s the ironic part; if Tom Emmer were genuinely “rabidly anti-gay” and the gay community is genuinely concerned about a constitutional amendment against gay marriage, they  would be better off with him in the governor’s mansion (or, obviously, out of the House, although that wasn’t gonna happen by electoral means until Emmer felt like retiring) – since the governor has nothing to do with Consitutional Amendments.  Nothing.

At any rate, this issue exists for only one reason, as far as the DFL spin machine and Dayton’s personal smear shop are concerned; to get moderates to think “Emmer is intolerant”.  Which is absurd; he, like most of us, has strong, personal beliefs on the subject, as is his right.  It does not make him “anti-gay”, in the sense of “hating gay people”; it merely means he, like over 2/3 of the American people even in liberal cesspools like California and Oregon, opposes one policy plank of the gay agenda.

That is all.

The Dems need to turn this campaign away from what will be the key issue, and the issue that should matter to Minnesotans; what is going to do the most to bring jobs, prosperity and fiscal sanity back to Minnesota.  Because while DFLers may or may not cAare, moderates and swing voters need jobs too. And even the DFL knows that Mark Dayton loses that debate.

And so the DFL, the media and the smear machine need to make this about emotional side issues – to distract the distractible.

As far as this blog is concerned, this election is about jobs and the economy.   And I, like the parts of Minnesota that this election will affect most – workers, taxpayers, regular schlemiels – will be paying attention to that, rather than the cynical, astroturf side issue from now on.

Oh, yeah; Emmer’s going to win by 2-3 points.

(Disclosure:  I don’t work for the Emmer campaign, and never have.  I don’t get anything from them, other than what I get out of my sources on the campaign.  It’s called “reporting”).