But if I were, I’d have a bunch of questions of Mark Dayton, his campaign, and the maze of PACs and organizations that are bankrolling his campaign.

Let’s start at the top:

1. Settle Me This: So how much did you pay in your settlement to Brad Hanson? Since you were employed by the Senate, is it correct to assume that it was originally paid by the taxpayer – is that a fair assumption?  When did you agree to pay the settlement off yourself – specifically, before or after you won the primary?  Why did you litigate this case for a solid half-decade, all the way to the US Supreme Court?
2. Why So Angry?: While Tom Emmer has been almost over-the-top in his civility and positivity – refusing to even call you “The Opposition” in a radio interview last September, on the ideal that we all need to be on the same side eventually – your campaign is distinguished by having been almost entirely negative.  Your campaign has been heavy on witch-hunting (“tax the rich!”, references to Bush and Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty), scapegoating (“the rich”) and the occasional assurance that you are, indeed, part of some sort of Minnesota tradition.   And your campaign’s main mouthpiece, Alliance for a Better Minnesota, has run an absolute slime-fest – lying and/or mangling the context of Emmer’s criminal record, proposed education budget, and voting record.  Do you have a positive vision for your proposed administration?  Please state it.  Take your time, we can wait.
3. What’s A Billion Or So Among Friends?: Your first attempt at a budget came up three billion dollars shy of solving the deficit.  Your second attempt is at least $890 million short, and given that even MPR figured out that you can’t cut $425 million in contractors without changing a lot of laws and regulations, it’s pretty likely to be well over a billion again.  Since you’re already soaking the rich, and you really are committed to not cutting a whole lot (since government is mostly sacred cows that are an integral part of your political base), what alternative do you have to soaking the middle class?
4. Let Them Eat Food Stamps!: Your program looks, at best, to be a minor boon to state workers, and at the very, very best a hit to private employment.  Where and how does your plan facilitate private-sector job creation in Minnesota?  In fact, can you respond to the idea that further hikes on taxes will hamper private job creation?
5. Between The Ears: The hit campaign run by your various PAC supporters has tried to paint Tom Emmer as temperamental.  OK – let’s talk temperament. Six years ago today you closed your Senate office.  You were branded “the Bumbler” by Time Magazine, which normally effuses for liberals.  In the aftermath of the 9/11 commission hearings, you launched a thousand conspiracy theories against the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the FAA for political purposes.  You’ve been treated for depression, and are a recovering alcoholic that’s had two relapses in the past decade.  Given your surrogates’ assaults on Tom Emmer, how can you say you are temperamentally suited to serve as governor?  And by the way, what is the nature of your current treatment for depression?  And while you don’t have to answer, I need to ask; what is your current DSM-IV classification?
6. Paperwork!: You have opposed alternative teacher licensure – and yet your career as a teacher in New York , which you’ve chosen to make a key part of your public-service image, was made possible by alternative licensing.  Please resolve this bit of cognitive dissonance.
7. Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork: Speaking of your teaching career, what coursework did you complete at U of Massachusetts Amherst?  Could you release a transcript?
8. Attendance: Since your surrogates at ABM chose to highlight Tom Emmer’s “absences” from the House of Representatives, please tell us why your “teaching career” in New York only involved 84 days in the classroom during a period when there were at least 240 days when school was in session?
9. More Paperwork!: What were the “personal reasons” for which you left the New York schools?   If someone were to say “because your likelihood of being drafted had dropped”, would you consider that accurate or inaccurate, and why?
10. Staff: Can you announce any prospective staff appointments?  Specifically, is there any truth to the rumor that Mike Hatch is going to be your Chief of Staff?

Now, that’s what I’d ask if I were a reporter.

But I’m not.  I’m just a guy in Saint Paul with a job and a mortgage and a couple of kids.  We have a class of High Priests of Information in this town, people sworn to the arcane code of the “Professional Journalist” whose job it is to ask these sorts of questions.

So will they?

Will Bill Salisbury use his position as “dean of Minnesota capitol correspondents” and his access to the campaign to ask any of these questions?

Will Tim Pugmire and Tom Scheck live up to MPR’s current “No Rant, No Slant” tagline, and get answers from Mark Dayton on these sorts of questions? (Let’s return to discuss Keri Miller, whose contempt for Tom Emmer oozes from every audible pore, some other time).

Will Rachel Stassen-Berger, scienne of a Minnesota family nearly as household-y as Dayton himself, decide that the public as a right to know any of these things – before the election, anyway, while people are paying attention?

Will David Brauer and Erik Black use the stated independence of their platform, the MinnPost, from the DFL and its media-political complex to enquire further?

Will the Minnesota “Independent” , the “Uptake” and “Common Cause”… er, ever have to register as 501(c)4 lobbying groups?

Today is the sixth anniversary of Mark Dayton’s closing of his US Senate office.

Dayton, advised that there was a threat of a terror attack against DC, opted to send his staff home, and fled to Minnesota, leaving the business of government to the 543 other Congresspeople.

The episode sealed his place as America’s Worst Senator.

And it made him a hero to America’s 9/11 truthers:

It seems like yesterday.

Never moreso than today.

With my years of blogging experience and keen blogging instincts, I’ve learned a thing or two.

Maybe three.

One of them is “when you see a bunch of DFL-linked leftybloggers start ridiculing something in the kind of unison that’d impress a synchonized swimming team, you know there’s something they’re trying to get people to ignore.

This is the piece of the video they’re hooting and hollering about:

It’s after a gubernatorial debate yesterday during which Dayton had taken questions about his settlement with Brad Hanson.

Now, he didn’t necessarily answer the questions; even Pat Kessler notes the paucity of detail:

Dayton – the candidate of the party of “champions of the working fella” – had to settle with a former staffer after appealing his wrongful termination case all the way to the Supreme Court.

So what is he running from?

What about the case is so nasty that Dayton can’t even talk about it with reporters?

And – Kessler’s observations aside – when is the media going to seriously question him?

After all, the “malpractice” suit against Emmer – likely as not just a money grab that uses the election for leverage – got slavering coverage from the regional media.  It was the most important story there was.

And yet we have a gubernatorial candidate who uses his boundless wealth to drag a suit through the courts and…almost nothing?

Kudos to Kessler and WCCO for running it.

Who’ll follow up?

Tom Horner may have been a Republican – 20-30 years ago – but he’s a candidate only a tax-and-spend liberal could love.

His “plan” – like Mark Dayton’s – is chock full of holes, and will need to jack up taxes a lot more than he thought, says the State Department of Revenue:

Since announcing his plan in August, Horner has offered few specifics as to how he’d get another $1.3 billion out of the state sales tax. In addition to extending the tax to other goods and services, he also would lower the rate — now at 6.875 percent — by one percentage point. Counties, however, would be allowed to increase their local sales tax by one-half percentage point to offset Horner’s proposed reductions in state aid.

On the one hand, that’s not a totally bad thing; driving accountability down and de-emphasizing the LGA money-laundering machine is not a bad idea.

Problem is, Horner is still trying to balance the budget largely with tax hikes:

State Revenue Commissioner Ward Einess said his department has never analyzed the Horner plan in depth because it was not given the details needed for such an analysis. But, he said, Horner would have to be “very aggressive” in ending exemptions to reach his goal.

The process “gets real ugly, real fast,” Einess said.

For Horner to accomplish his goal, state revenue officials said the sales tax base would have to be expanded by 34 percent.

Wow.  That’s a lot of new taxes for someone the DFL has been trying to christen a “Republican” for the past couple of weeks…

The DFL – and their national benefactors – went all-in on Tarryl Clark against their bete noir, Michele Bachmann.

Clark is getting clobbered. Hammered. Beaten like a cheap steak. She’s going to lose by 10 points, and I actually starting to think I’m being conservative.

And the regional left is starting to have second thoughts about their monomania.

A few weeks back Dave Schultz – former head of überliberal “Common Cause Minnesota” and reliably lefty professor at Hamline University – bemoaned the imbalance of the spending:

There is virtually no chance the Democrats will defeat Bachmann. I have argued this for months. Bachmann’s sixth district seat is apportioned approximately six points ahead for Republicans. She is a conservative candidate in a conservative district. She is the Tea Party leader in a Tea Party GOP year. She fits her district well and has already survived several attempts to knock her off in previous years (most recently ’08) more favorable to Democrats. Democrats would be better served to wait until 2012, after reapportionment, when new lines may change the Sixth and make it more competitive, or when Bachmann makes the foolish move to run for the senate againt Klobuchar and gets waxed by her.

Yet Democrats cannot resist themselves. Democrats from around the country are pouring millions into this race and yet there is no evidence that Clark is catching up or gaining ground. Yes, Democrats have to challenge her and force her to campaign at home so that she does not travel and fundraise and campaign for others. But from a cost-benefit perspective, pouring millions here makes no sense. Sure there might be a symbolic victory in knocking her off, but with Democrats having to defend so many seats and having to decide where to best spend, resources need to be placed where it makes the most sense. That is why Minnesota’s Third District makes more sense.

Nick Coleman – still writing for the Strib (who knew?)  notes the dearth of attention paid to Shelly Madore, whom John Kline is going to beat by eleventy billion points  in the Second District next month:

The media either go gaga or go to sleep. In the northern suburbs, it’s gaga all the way: Republican Michele Bachmann and her opponent, Democrat Tarryl Clark, have drawn donations and attention from near and far. Still, just 40 percent of likely voters supported Clark in a recent poll, and the New York Times’ influential “FiveThirtyEight” website gives Clark tiny 1.2 percent odds of beating Bachmann.

It’s hard not to conclude that most of the attention to Minnesota’s Sixth District race is due to the flamboyant incumbent, not her worthy challenger. But at least Bachmann has agreed to debate Clark three times. That will allow voters to consider their choices and balance their view of the candidates, evaluating their message and their performance. However the race turns out, that’s good for the voters.

John Kline isn’t about to let that kind of thing happen in the Second District

But then, either is Keith Ellison in the Fifth.  Or Betty McCollum in the Fourth – yet.  Or, as far as I know, Oberstar in the Eighth, or Peterson in the Seventh.   Because candidates who perceive themselves – rightly or wrongly – to have insurmountable leads realize – rightly or wrongly – they have nothing to gain and plenty to lose by debating dark-horse challengers.  It’s a testimony to Bachmann’s love of the scrap and the fact that she just plan destroys Clark on facts (and the fact that both parties perceive the race as at least hypothetically competitive) that she’s debating at all.

At any rate – by November 3, the DFL will have wasted millions trying to unseat the, effectively, un-unseatable Bachmann.

Would the solid, long-term incumbent John Kline have been vulnerable to the skittery Madore?

Would the fringey, netroots-y Meffert have had a shot against an Erik Paulsen that seems to be growing more conservative as his district seems to follow suit?

We won’t know this year.

Cha ching.

…that the avalanche of liberal violence continues with a hulking thug of a supporter for New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone slapping a 68 year old woman supporter of his Republican opponent while placing signs…

(Language not safe for work!)

…or that the 68 year old woman gives a lot worse than she gets.

In case you missed it over the past weekend – an internal poll shows that GOP House Minority Leader Kurt Zellers maintained a 24 point lead over challenger Katie Rodriguez in disatrict 32B.  It also shows that Tom Emmer has gone from a 3 point deficit to a ten point lead.

Just so we’re clear on this.

I’d almost forgotten about this: Mark Dayton is a hero to the 9/11 Truther community.

In 2005, from the well of the Senate, Mark Dayton claimed that NORAD and the FAA were hiding something big about the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

And the 9/11 Truther movement was a big, happy audience for him:

This excerpt deals with the death threat against Senator Mark Dayton (D) Minn – when he aggressively challenged the Pentagon and FAA lies to Congress.

Mark Dayton: Chicken Little?  No – Former Senator Chicken LIttle.

Supposedly President Obama’s approval rating is far higher in Minnesota than nationwide, according to the Rasmussen poll.

Well see; he’s coming to town to stump for Dayton:

Obama’s confirmed that he’s coming to town on Oct. 23. (Obama’s visit has been general knowledge for awhile, but details have been scant (and still pretty much are).

According to the campaign:

The rally will be the kick-off of the DFL’s Get Out the Vote campaign on behalf of Mark Dayton and his Lieutenant Governor running mate Yvonne Prettner Solon, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, Attorney General Lori Swanson, and State Auditor Rebecca Otto.

From one job-killing, tax-hiking career politician with no real-world accomplishment who was promoted far beyond his what his own natural abilities would normally warrant to another!

Earlier, we talked about the internal poll that shows Kurt Zellers leading Kate Rodriguez by 24 points in a district where the DFL has staked a lot of mojo – with Margaret Anderson-Kelliher going so far as to say that the district was in the bag for Rodriguez.

But there’s more good news.

The Tarrance Group, which polled 250 people and whose poll has a 6.2 point margin of error, also polled the Governor’s race in 32B.

Now, 32B is a part of the Third CD, which is an area that the “conventional wisdom” has been calling “purple” ever since it was represented by moderate Republican and fellow Jamestown ND native Jim Ramstad.  The DFL continues to push the idea that the Third is “purple”, and incipient DFL turf.

More germane? It’s the second poll in six weeks that Tarrance, and the GOP, have conducted in 32B.

And in August, things looked grim for Emmer; indeed, this corner of the 3rd CD was looking pretty dark purple:

In August, Dayton led Emmer 39 to 36 percent.

Scary!

The DFL’s narrative looked to be holding up!

But what a difference six weeks makes:

The same poll shows Emmer’s numbers increasing since August while his DFL opponent’s support has decreased. The October poll shows Emmer overtaking Dayton in the district, 41 to 31.

Crosstabs?  The poll was 38% GOP, 32%DFL and 30% independents, which – given that it’s a likely voter poll in what by all accounts will be a bitchin’ conservative year, seems unlikely to be a gross oversample.   I don’t know Tarrance’s likely voter model, but if it’s valid (and for argument, let’s say that it is;  Tarrance’s memo is included below the jump), it could very well be a sign that the Humphrey Institute and Minnesota Polls’ turnout models are too pessimistic, and that the one-percent GOP ID lead in the latest Rasmussen Poll is more accurate than some may have though.

This, if true, is a huge pickup in a purple district; if it’s being replicated elsewhere in third-tier-land and, if the Cravaack poll and the contributions in the First and Seventh districts can be trusted to indicate any synchronicity beyond 32B, it’s a great sign for Emmer – and perhaps a sign that the Twin Cities Big Media and Big Polling have been too bearish on the enthusasm for voting GOP.

(more…)

One of the state legislative races the DFL’s been hitting hardest this cycle has been 32B, in Hennepin County. It’s Kurt Zellers’ seat.  Zellers is the House Minority Leader – one of the MNGOP’s pack of young conservatives, Brod and Emmer and Seifert and the others that have made such an impact at the State House this past couple of sessions.

So getting Zellers’ head on a plaque would be a huge spiff for the DFL in what is likely to be a trying year.  They’ve been pouring money and time into Katie Rodriguez‘ campaign.  More than that, they’ve been pouring prestige into it; last week at a fundraiser in the district, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher proclaimed Rodriguez had the district tagged, bagged and on the slab.

If true, this would be huge, akin to the GOP knocking off Dean Johnson a few years back.

If true.

But according to a poll last week from the Tarrance Group of 250 likely voters in 32B, it’s just not true (emphases added):

The survey, conducted October 3-4, found Zellers leading his DFL-endorsed opponent by 24 points, 57-33, replicating a lead he displayed in a poll conducted in August. Zellers also shows a sizable advantage over his opponent among independent voters, leading by more than four-to-one.

Kelliher’s got some ‘splaining to do.

This little portion of the Third District seems to be getting redder and redder as we go along.

But wait – there’s more.  Tune in right after noon.

This post was largely written for the national audience at Hot Air’s Greenroom, where it is posted.

My radio colleagues Ed Morrissey (with the A-squad Hot Air) and King Banaian (of SCSU Scholars, also found in the Green Room) will post on occasion about politics in Minnesota, where the three of us live, work, blog and do a bit of talk radio.

And when we do write about Minnesota – especially its freaks of electoral fate, like Al Franken and Jesse Ventura – we get a long string of similar comments; “What do you expect from Minnesota?”,  “That’s those crazy Minnesotans” and, when the Emmer/Dayton gubernatorial race comes up, “I don’t have a whole lot of hope for Minnesota”.  We were the only state that never voted for Reagan – although to be fair, the state voted for Walter Mondale, a native son, in 1984 (a year before I moved here).

If that’s what you feel, you’re wrong, and you need to re-think things.  And I’m going to try to start that rethinking right now.

Don’t get me wrong.  Minnesota is a strange place, in a lot of ways.  It’s an adopted home for all three of us; Ed’s from LA, King was born in New Hampshire and arrived in Minnesota via California among a few other places, and I grew up in North Dakota (and moved here 25 years ago as of this coming Wednesday).  And I think we’ve all scratched our heads, agog, at some of the political weirdness this state has spawned.

Everyone recalls the bizarre 2008 election, where former comedian and failed talk show host Al Franken beat incumbent Norm Coleman in a race that Coleman led by 200 votes on election night – and Franken won by 300 after eight months of recounts and legal maneuvering, exposing many flaws in Minnesota’s electoral system (like the law allowing people to vote without showing ID, but being vouched for by another registered voter).

More infamously, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, running for Minnesota’s “Independence” party, which was essentially a vanity offshoot of Ross Perot’s “Reform” Party, won the 1998 gubernatorial election, beating Hubert Humphrey’s son Skip and…Norm Coleman.

Minnesota has had plenty of electoral weirdness in the past; the Democratic/Farmer/Labor Party (the “DFL”, as we call Democrats here) had long ties to the far, far left; Stalinists were a powerful force in the party until Hubert H. Humphrey managed to purge them in the mid-forties; former Eighth District congressman John Bernard, of the antecedent, radical-left “Farmer/Labor” Party, cast the sole vote in 1938 against embargoing arms to the Stalinist side in the Spanish Civil War. Gus Hall, long-time head of the Communist Party USA and one-time perennial presidential candidate, was a Minnesota native, who cut his teeth as a radical organizing the mines of Northern Minnesota.

There are reasons Minnesota is an odd place:

Culture: Minnesota’s dominant culture in its formative years was immigrants from rural Scandinavia, especially Norway and Sweden.  Both nations have long histories of being poor, and developed communitarian traditions to cope with the grinding poverty of life in the Norwegian mountains, the endless woods of Sweden, and the motti of Finland. These communitarian traditions were easy to co-opt for political ends.

Institutions: Minnesota’s prosperity over the past 100 years has been built around several key institutions:

• Agriculture – Farmers in Minnesota and elsewhere tend to be conservatives, although like farmers in neighboring Iowa, Wisconsin and the Dakotas, they’ve had a willingness to vote for Democrats who bring home the pork.
• Mining – Iron mining was huge business on the “Iron Range”, the taconite-rich area of northern Minnesota, throughout the 20th century.  Miners – largely immigrants from Finland, Germany and eastern Europe – were easy pickings for labor organizers, and formed the hotbed for the radical, Communist-affiliated “Farmer Labor” party that eventually joined with the Democrats.
• The University System – Minnesota has two parallel university systems.  These systems run parallel lobbying efforts in the Legislature.  Lest you wondered, Minnesota faculties are no less far-left than academics in any other states.
• The Media – Minnesota’s newspaper of record, the Star/Tribune, is second to none nationwide in the flagrancy of its editorial board’s pro-DFL bias.  It’s other mainstream media – the Big Three network affiliates, and the programming (albeit not necessarily the News) divisions of Minnesota Public Radio, the nation’s largest public-media network and a pseudo-national network in its own right, aren’t far behind.
• Business – Minnesota’s key businesses – those that survive today (Target, 3M, Honeywell, Best Buy) and those that have gone by the wayside (Control Data, Cray, Daytons, Northwest Airlines) had a long tradition of communitarian philanthropy.  The DFL and their allied network of non-profits was happy to harness this to their ends.

Legend: Minnesota was a sleeping economic giant for decades before the late sixties – when the confluence of resources, an educated populace, infrastructure (the Mississippi, the Great Lakes and the rail system) and booming markets launched Minnesota into prosperity.  The media, Minnesota’s academy and the big-government interests assigned the success to a series of government programs that essentially redistributed tax wealth from the Twin Cities to the poorer outstate regions, christened it the “Minnesota Miracle”, and launched a myth that survives to this day.

Events: Minnesota was 20-odd years late to the Reagan Revolution.  The Minnesota GOP closely mirrored the national Republican Party throughout the fifties and sixties, the years of the Rockefeler/Eisenhower axis of very, very moderate, big-government Republicanism.  The aftermath of Watergate and the rise of the social conservatives in the national party in the mid-seventies caused then-ascendant “progressive” wing of the MNGOP to essentially secede from the national party, rebranding itself the “Independent Republican Party“, which lasted for twenty years and the governorships of very liberal Republicans Wendell Anderson and Arne Carlson (and Al Quie’s single term, during which his mid-stagflation budget-cutting enraged the DFL establishment enough to get him tossed from office).  The Republican grassroots didn’t actually get on board with the rebirth of conservatism until the mid-nineties.

So Minnesota’s got some dodgy history when it comes to politics.

But there are also grounds for hope – maybe immense hope.  Like most “purple” states, Minnesota is really very sharply divided between conservative and “progressive” voting.

Link courtesy Minn-Donkey, a leftyblog that doesn't completely insult ones' intelligence.

The inner cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul – the 5th and 4th Districts, respectively – and the “Arrowhead”, the northeast part of the state, DFL-dominated Duluth and the Iron Range – are traditional DFL strongholds.

And it’s there that we see the encouragement.  Here’s why:

Demographics: The deepest-red districts – the southern and western suburbs of the Twin Cities – are where most of the growth is happening.  Most business and population growth is in these districts, which include the Second CD (John Kline, a staunch conservative who will win his race by at least 30 points this November), the Third (Erik Paulsen, who is growing more conservative in office as his district, once considered “purple”, drifts rightward) and the Sixth (Michele Bachmann, of whom more in a bit).

The Wave: It’s hard to tell, but it seems big things are happening in the hinterland.  First, the First District – the traditionally-Republican, ag-dominated southern tier of counties, represented by second-term DFLer Tim Walz – is considered in play; Walz supported Obamacare, which will gut one of the region’s major employers, the world-famous Mayo Clinic, which is already diversifying its operations outside the state and US to hedge against the worst.

Better yet?  The Seventh District – the tier of counties along the western border, represented for a generation by blue-dog Colin Peterson – are restless.  Lee Byberg, a Norwegian immigrant and bio-tech entrepreneur, has raised more money in this campaign than all of Peterson’s opponents together in recent memory.  The ag-dependent district is not thrilled about Obamacare, and there is speculation that those red counties could be one major tipping point away from sending a Republican to Washington.

Best of all?  That tipping point may be brewing up in mining country.  Last week, news broke that Chip Cravaack, an Annapolis grad and retired Navy chopper pilot, was within three points of 18-term Representative Jim Oberstar in an internal poll in the Eighth District, the “Arrowhead”, which has sent DFLers to Washington since 1947.  Oberstar hasn’t had less than a 29 point margin of victory in a generation. If it’s even close in the Eighth, anything can happen.  The voters in the Eighth are union voters, largely, and have been voting DFL for several generations – but they are largely pro-life, as was Oberstar, until he threw his lot in with the Administration on flipping the Stupak coalition toward Obamacare last year.  Worse?  Cap and Trade will shred the mining industry, which uses immense amounts of energy whose price spike after passage will put many mines out of business.

The Loyal Opposition: Conservatives in Minnesota are a close-knit political Band of Brothers; we’ve had to fight two wars in the past fifteen years.  We had to win over our party before we could even take on the DFL. And the veterans of those struggles are tough as nails, immune to abuse, and so clear on  principle that debates against DFL opponents usually resemble turkey shoots.  The rest of the nation knows Michele Bachmann as the vice-queen of the Tea Party, at Sarah Palin’s side.

But Bachmann didn’t start in Congress. She started out fighting the Stillwater (MN) school board, a Twin Cities exurb clogged with liberals tired of the DFL’s failed cities, but unable to leave the failed policies behind.  She had to battle her own district’s IR legacy to get endorsed, first for State Senate (where she was a conservative lightning rod for six years) and then against a moderate-leaning establishment in the Sixth District in 2006, even before facing the DFL.

Many Minnesota conservatives have similar stories; years spent fighting the “Independent Republican” establishment before even being able to take on the Democrats.

This has created a grass-roots conservatism in Minnesota that has slowly insinuated conservative ideals and, eventually, policies into parts of Minnesota that would have been inconceivable a few decades ago.

How do we know?  The latest Rasmussen poll shows that while voter ID in Minnesota is very close between the GOP and DFL, that Tea Party sympathy is actually higher in Minnesota than the national average.

Conservative Unity: Minnesota’s “craziness” was as much a symptom of the Minnesota GOP’s schizophrenia over the past forty years as it was to any liberal tradition.  For several elections, Minnesota’s “moderates” duked it out with, and defeated, conservatives; in 1990, while the grass roots endorsed social conservative Alan Quist, Arne Carlson – a man more liberal on many issues than the DFL incumbent Rudy Perpich, including gun control and abortion – ran and won a primary challenge, and spent two terms as a free-spending, surplus-gobbling governor.

Even Tim Pawlenty, who had a reputation as a pragmatist if not an outright moderate during his time as House Minority leader, had to tack hard to the right to fend off a challenge to get endorsed in 2002, against fiscalcon challenger Brian Sullivan, winning the nomination after promising “No New Taxes”.

This years MNGOP convention was distinguished by the fact that the front-runners – House minority leader Marty Seifert and eventual nominee Tom Emmer – while impeccably conservative, had three challengers to their right.  There was no “moderate” in the race (after Norm Coleman declared he wasn’t running).

For the first time in recorded history, the Minnesota GOP is a unified conservative bloc (to the consternation of the regional media, which audibly slavers for a return of the old, “moderate”/liberal “IR”, basically liberals with better suits.

So this is not your father’s Minnesota.  This is not the same Minnesota that voted for Walter Mondale.  This is a hungrier, less-prosperous Minnesota than the one that voted for Jesse Ventura in the cha-cha nineties, when the state was running multi-billion-dollar surpluses.  This is not the Obama-crazy state that delivered Al Franken to Washington – and the conservative movement is not the naive bunch of trusting schlemiels that let the DFL bully its way through a recount process that was designed to manufacture votes for Franken and toss votes for Coleman.  The wave of conservative, anti-Obama sentiment is washing up in Minnesota as well; there is evidence that the regional media has no idea how much so.

But as Ed and my radio colleague King Banaian – who is running for the Minnesota House of Representatives, in the exurban northwestern part of the metro – wrote this morning, there are no guarantees, and even in the best of times conservatives in Minnesota have to work harder than most:

For whatever reason (as discussed on the NARN shows on AM 1280 Saturday) and with Michael Barone at the Center of the American Experiment talk this past Tuesday, “Minnesota is different.” Whether it’s genetics, an isolated view of ‘liberalism’ or something else, in order for our great, conservative candidates to win, we simply have to work harder, dig deeper and make those voter ID phone calls. Yes, they can be a pain but we need to do them. Why? In 48 states, voters declare party affiliation at time of voter registration. They don’t have to spend $$$$ trying to find out who votes how. Any candidate can apply for the list of R or D or all voters and get it. We don’t have outside $$ funding id for us, we have to do it ourselves.

And so we do.

Don’t write Minnesota off.  This race is just getting interesting.

Picture yourself on a snow-covered lake, gliding smoothly on your new snowmobile at 60 mph and about five miles out you begin to feel the growing sensation of pain and regret as your bladder balloons from the two Grain Belt Premiums you pounded at the last pit stop.

Your two buddies are out ahead of you and without a clue as to the escalating emergency you are about to be a party to.

In your distraction, you miss the snowdrift that your buddies navigated around and when your sled hits it you are airborne. As time slows, as it always does in times like these, gliding through the air with the greatest of ease, you think to yourself  “This is going to hurt.”

You land hard and fast, slightly tipped to the left but a second later realize that your forward momentum has continued unabated. All limbs are onboard and your sled appears to be no worse for the wear.

…and then you feel the warmth.

At first you are pleased because your manbrain usually associates warm feelings down there with great anticipation.

…but when the warmth moves down your thigh and starts to creep out back? Not…so…much.

And so it goes with the liberals among us.

Having peed their pants with stimulus, government make-work projects, census jobs and the like, the only remedy is to keep peeing your pants so as to fend off the chills that come when your wet snowsuit becomes a cold wet snowsuit.

…and George Soros is chief Pisser.

Billionaire investor George Soros said the U.S. economy should pursue more fiscal stimulus instead of joining international efforts to reduce budget deficits.

Soros said spending cuts are the “wrong consensus” in the current economic environment. He said the global economy is still not at equilibrium, even though financial markets are functioning again, and U.S. fiscal restraint is limiting the recovery.

My neighbor, a liberal, thinks the government is spending too much and getting too big. My liberal colleagues (as few as they are) also associate “stimulus” with “failure”. Even democratic legislators are disassociating themselves with Obama and stimulus spending to save the shredded remnants of their political careers.

But George Soros persists with this notion of a continued flow of urine as a prescription for restoring our financial future as a nation.

Why?

The U.S. has been “driven to quantitative easing because the political debate has been won basically by the Republicans, who argue for balancing the budget and no more stimulus.”

…because it wasn’t his idea.

Piss off George.

My back and forth with David Brauer.

The Minnesota Conservative Party website.

Krysia Weidell is running for Mee Moua’s old seat in the MN State Senate.

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.  We’ll be talking with Keith Fjelstad of teh Minnesota Conservative Party about a benefit golf outing, with Krysia Weidel (GOP candidate for SD67, and David Brauer of the MinnPost!
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on hiatus from AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  But after he wins his race in 15B, he should be back broadening the franchise; two stations, now!
• 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!

The latest Rasmussen Poll confirms what many of us conservatives have suspected; the gubernatorial race is way too close to call:

Democrat Mark Dayton and Republican Tom Emmer are still in a virtual tie in Minnesota’s gubernatorial contest.

The latest Rasmussen Reports statewide telephone survey of Likely Voters shows Dayton picking up 40% of the vote, while Emmer draws support from 38%. Independence Party candidate Tom Horner remains a distant third with 15%. One percent (1%) prefer a different candidate, and five percent (5%) are still undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

This race remains a Toss-Up in the Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 Gubernatorial Scorecard.

The cross-tabs are starkly divided; among people who think the economy is improving, Dayton wins a huge plurality of bobbleheaded “voters”; Emmer prevails among realists.

There’s a nod in the polling toward Minnesota’s wierd tradition of giving hapless third-party candidates who don’t wear feather boas way more credence than they deserve in its methodology:

In the Minnesota governor’s race, Rasmussen Reports has made a decision not to use our traditional leaners model. Normally, that model shows support falling off for a third-party candidate. However, in Minnesota, third-party candidates often defy that trend, and a look at the initial preference data suggests that may be happening this year.

And I suspect the leaners will give Emmer another point or two.  We’ll see.

One thing’s for sure; looking at the favorable/unfavorable numbers…:

Emmer is viewed favorably by 46% of Minnesota voters and unfavorably by 48%, including 19% Very Favorable and 31% Very Unfavorable.

For Dayton, favorables are 50% and unfavorables 47%. This includes 26% with a Very Favorable opinion of him and 35% with a Very Unfavorable one.

…I guess the Dayton Family investment in “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”‘ smear campaign was money well spent, at least in the short term.

Read the whole thing.

But that may not be the last polling news we see today.  Just saying.  Stay tuned to SITD.

The regional leftybots are a-buzz over…

…some really, really mundane news.

Tom Emmer is  the subject of a legal malpractice lawsuit by a former client.

Given the typical leftyblogger’s understanding of the law, many of them are making a lot of this “story”.

However, the facts are these:

• Legal malpractice suits are far from uncommon.
• The vast majority that are filed are filed against lawyers that have malpractice insurance; while legal malpractice suits are quite difficult to win (because lawyers defend themselves pretty strenuously), most cases that actually are sent to trial involving lawyers that are insured get settled out of court.
• That’s presuming it gets to trial.  Most such cases, being filed over sour grapes over cases gone awry, or even just weak cases, are dismissed on summary judgment without ever seeing a jury.
• Many plaintiffs will use the threat of a malpractice suit to try to induce a quick settlement to avoid a public relations snag for the defendant and his/her firm.  This is especially true with higher-profile lawyers.
• And there is no more high-profile lawyer in Minnesota right now than Tom Emmer, attorney at law and, as the MNGOP’s endorsed candidate for governor in a very tight race, a guy with a lot of skin in the public relations game.

And, gosh golly, look at when the summary judgment hearing is scheduled (emphasis added):

OTHER EVENTS AND HEARINGS

09/17/2010 Summons and Complaint

09/17/2010 Certificate of Representation

09/17/2010 Notice and Acknowledgement of Service

09/17/2010 Notice of Motion and Motion

09/17/2010 Memorandum

09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/17/2010 Affidavit of Mailing

09/21/2010 Notice of Case Filing

09/21/2010 Schedule Pre-Trial

09/24/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/24/2010 Affidavit of Service

11/08/2010 Motion Summary Judgment (10:00 AM) (Judicial Officer Halsey, Stephen M.)

Right after the election.

While there is no reason to believe that this case was filed by a political enemy of Emmer’s (the plaintiff is a businessman; businesspeople don’t care which party their customers are from, as long as the checks cash), it’s not unreasonable, given how legal malpractice cases work, to speculate that the timing makes perfect sense to the plaintiff.

If you’re a conservative who’s interested in this election, and hasn’t quite gotten the full grasp of the media’s perfidy in this election, I’m going to direct you to Sheila Kihne’s ‘The Activist Next Door” blog, which has turned into a daily must-read this past few weeks.

More new blogs like this, please.

We didn’t grow up with a lot of “black” music in North Dakota.  Part of it was that North Dakota is, well, about the whitest place in America.  It was even moreso back in 1980.

So one just didn’t run across a lot of R and B in North Dakota back then.

Still, every once in a while you’d get little whiffs of it.  Kids from the college would bring music from other parts of the country.  Something like R and B would get on the radio once in a while.

And every once in a while, something would turn things upside down.

30 years ago today Prince’s Dirty Mind was released.  And it probably wasn’t until the next year, when I was at college, that I actually heard it.  But it changed everything.

I’ve written in the past – the period from about 1980 through about 1986 was one of the best in pop music history precisely because the traditional racial barriers in pop music dissolved; it was a stretch of time when white hard rock got spun by street-corner DJs into beats for rappers; where white musicians pillaged R and B for influences, and black guys played rock and roll…

…and nobody blurred music’s traditional distinctions better than Prince.  22 years old when Dirty Mind came out, it was a grab bag of things; one of the better rock and roll records of the year (pardon the atrocious dropouts in the video below) – like any “new wave” record of the era, but with soul…:

…while also doing R ‘n B in the same tradition as, say, Sly Stone, but accessible, but still very, very R’nB…

… while still turning on the funk, by way of showing that he did, in fact have…

…the album’s eponymous dirty mind.

28 years before Barack Obama’s fans started talking about “post-racial society”, Prince’s band was the real thing.  Actually, the album featured Prince playing every single instrument – but the touring band, on a tour that really put Prince on the map as a performer, included Bobby “Z” Rivkin on drums, Matt Fink and Lisa Coleman on keys, and Andre Cymone and Dez Dickerson on bass and guitar, respectively.

I’m trying to picture that happening today; a great, half-white funk band; a great half-black rock and roll group; a group that just plain makes it all work, and does it memorably.

Remember the mid-summer of 2009?  When people first started talking seriously about the gubernatorial campaign?  When Republicans just started talking about the race, and when Mark Dayton started pawning his Renoirs?

You remember the phalanx of moderate candidates who came out to the various party get-togethers, like the SD54 picnic in August of 2009, and who tried to give their stump speeches, calling for the return of the policies of Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger, poo-poohing the Reagan legacy and demanding we balance the budget through “responsible” tax hikes?

And the way that they  were rudely booed from the stage by the small conservative minority?  And their supporters, 3/4 of the audience, who stalked away after their candidates were snubbed, leaving the events looking like the after-party at a Vanilla Ice gig?

And the way those same moderates took their campaigns to the State Convention, and fought it out to eight ballots to get on the ticket, flaunting their platform of “Responsible Revenues” and “Getting On Board With Hope And Change”, only getting beaten after a tiny minority of conservatives jiggered the rules to exclude them from the votes?

Of course you don’t.

Because there was no such movement.

And yet to hear the media discussing it, there’s a huge mass of “moderate Republicans” floating around out there, feeling all “disenfranchised” by Tom Emmer, caterwauling about how far the party has fallen, pining for the glory days of Al Quie and Arne Carlson.

But if there were any such movement actually within the party, you might think the would show some sign of, I dunno, existing in the party.  By fielding candidates and making their presence known.

And yet look at the field of serious, and even not-so-serious, candidates that started out the campaign back in the late summer of 2009.  I met them all at the aforementioned SD54 Picnic; all nine of them spoke!  There were…:

1. Tim Utz – who is from the libertarian side of “conservative”.  Not a “moderate” at all.
2. Phil Herwig – who makes Tom Emmer look like Christopher Dodd.
3. Paul Kolls, a thoroughgoing conservative
4. Dave Hann, a solid conservative
5. Pat Anderson, who may have been the closest thing to “moderate” in the field, and I mean that only in the most hair-splitting sense of the term
6. Leslie Davis, who may be a lot of things, but isn’t “moderate”. Or Republican.  Or the leader of a movement.
7. Dave Haas, a former legislator from Bemidji with a strongly-conservative pro-business platform
8. Marty Seifert, who has been a conservative throughout his career, and reiterated that pretty sharply during the campaign
9. Emmer.

That was it!  Among the nine of them, Emmer, Seifert and Anderson may have been the closest to the “Center!”

There was no “moderate conservative” movement in the MNGOP, begging to be heard.

None.

“Well, that’s because the conservative drove them out and marginalized the party!”

Er, did you take a look at caucuses this year?  Or looked at the enthusiasm numbers?  The GOP is blowing the records off the stops.  Congressional races that never raise over $30,000 – the 7th and 8th Districts – are raising ten to fifteen times the usual amounts, with no end in sight.  Even in the DFL gulag, the 4th and 5th, there are active State House camapaigns in districts that have had “warm bodies” (inactive place-holder campaigns) or nobody at all on the ballot for a generation.

So if there was a big mass of “Moderate Republicans” out there that are sitting out this election because Tom Emmer is too conservative, they’ve been concealing themselves for a long, long time.

Oh, there are “moderate Republicans” who are disenfranchised and angry about it, all right.  Arne Carlson.  Dave Durenberger.  Tom Horner.  People who committed themselves to the pre-1980 version of the GOP (that held sway in Minnesota Republican circles well into the nineties), the “moderate”, pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-tax-and-spending “GOP” that gave us the biggest tax and spending hikes in Minnesota history.   People who got left behind when the party moved to the right, and are endlessly bitter about it.  People who are taking out their anger by stabbing the new GOP – the one that had done with them – in the back, condemning their candidates, assaulting conservatism, voting for Barack Obama, making a public spectacle of breaking with the current GOP.

They are a non-factor in the GOP.  If they were not, they would make some kind of showing someplace other than as part of the anti-conservative chanting points of the in-the-bag-for-the-DFL mainstream media.

They don’t.

Mark Dayton’s sons are “tired of the negative attacks” on their father.

It’s touching.

It’d be a lot more touching if the two of them weren’t giving money hand over fist to “Alliance for a Better Minnesota“, which has been running the most fact-free smear campaign in Minnesota history against Tom Emmer.

Sheila Kihne, writing at Activist Next Door and True North, is one person who wasn’t been cowed into silence about Dayton’s, er, spotty record as a high school teacher.

Far from being a “lazy-ass activist“, Sheila’s been digging through old microfilms of the various metro papers – of which there used to be many more – and finding some interesting stuff about Daeyton.

Remember – Dayton has said “…teaching was the toughest job he ever had”; he even said it on MPR yesterday.

And yet he worked 80-odd days out of the 240 that a real teacher would have worked in the “year and a half” that he worked as a “term sub” before resigning for “personal reasons” way back when.

Sheila notes that Dayton kept himself busy:

Back to the picture … which in the 1982 piece which paid homage to Dayton’s “youthful experiment with radical politics” as all of the Minnesota media establishment has “branded” it for thirty years now. Sure, fine. Whatever.

But guess when that picture was taken? April 28, 1970. Mark Dayton was supposed to be in the classroom that day– it was a Tuesday. Remember, he commenced his service with the NYC Schools in February, 1970.

Instead of being in class, he jetted back to Minnesota to protest Honeywell Corporation with his best bud Charles “Chas” Pillsbury (yes, that Pillsbury) who was making a bold statement as a shareholder of Honeywell stock to demand that the company get out of the manufacturer of weapons-systems. (They didn’t– they eventually turned into Alliant TechSystems which the weirdo-hippies still protest here in Eden Prairie today.)

Dayton proudly boasted in a 2006 Interview:

I was opposed to the Vietnam War—I participated with Marv Davidov in the very first demonstration of the Honeywell Project, at Honeywell’s annual meeting in 1970, and voted to remove my father from the board of directors of Honeywell. I wasn’t arrested but was teargassed. I went to Washington and opposed the war

What a punk. For more on these obnoxious-types check out the new book “The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America”, which features Mark Dayton and Charles Pillsbury’s escapades.

SO- not only does Mark Dayton continue to lie that he taught for two years….not only did he lie in his Congressional record that he taught for three years….not only was he part of an organization who crossed the picket lines during the NYC Teacher’s strike…not only did he quit in the middle of a school year for “Personal Reasons”…he actually SKIPPED SCHOOL to protest himself? And he protested (yet again) not on the side of the union workers who were INSIDE the building? (But the unions love this guy?)

Apparently Sheila never got the memo; one must not inquire into anything in Dayton’s past.

The bad news:  While I got through the screener for Mark Dayton’s chat with Gary Eichten on MPR this morning, I never got on the air.

The good news:  It was probably because Eichten stole my thunder on the question I gave the screener, and even the followup I had if they’d still put me on the air.

The worse news:  Dayton’s answers weren’t any better than I expected.  Minnesota is truly, madly, deeply screwed if he gets elected.

The mild consolation prize; by the time I got to the nearest wi-fi coffee shop, ordered a coffee and unpacked my laptop, this post was completely written in my head.

I’ll run through my questions (channeled more-or-less capably by Eichten):

Your budget is $890 million short. How do you plan on closing the gap?

Dayton had an answer.  I could try to reconstruct it, but at the end of the day this classic cartoon really captures it.

Dayton’s the guy in the glasses.  The equation is his “budget plan”.

No, really.  His answer wasn’t a whole lot more detailed than this, and a whole lot less funny.

His answer mentioned revenue forecasts; he’s hoping that the economy closes the gap via increased tax revenues.  Read: “Then A Miracle Occurs”.

I silently constructed a followup question.  Eichten actually hit on this one too:

Your budget plan will have to go through a Legislature that used to be overwhelmingly DFL, but might well flip one, maybe both chambers this fall.  What then?

The answer was a long one – but it basically came down to “I have many years of experience working across the aisle”.

I almost did a spit-take.

Dayton served as Auditor and Economic Development Director during the Perpich administration, when the DFL was at its extended post-Watergate high and the then-“Indpendent Republican” party was at its collaborationist nadir.

Oh, and he was a Senator during the Bush Administration.  Seriously, he used his time there as an example of his “bipartisanship”.

His “bipartisanship” included accusing NORAD, and by extension the Bush Administration,  of lying about its responses on 9/11, among a list of other greatest hits.

The quote of the hour, though?

“I want to appoint people who believe in government“.

The MNGOP should make up T-shirts with that quote on ’em.

The Uptake is a regional “videoblog”, featuring contributions from left-leaning “Citizen Journalists”.

I’ve written about them before; on the one hand, I know some of the people involved with The Uptake, and they have in the past sworn up and down that they want The Uptake to be a legit news source; they’ve put in some efforts in the past to try to accomplish that.  On the other hand, they’ve had a lot of bobblehead contributors and employees with strange ideas of what journalism is, or who want to use it as a vehicle for grinding personal or social axes.

They’re at it again:

The Uptake is pushing a video that they were denied access into a press event with Newt Gingrich today.

The Uptake “reporter” said to a MNGOP staffer they had spoken to MNGOP Communications Director Mark Drake and were credentialed for the event.  According to sources this is untrue.  The Uptake never contacted the RPM for access and thus were never credentialed for the event.

My own sources confirm; the conversation never happened.

There are some grownups at the Uptake.  Are they going to step up, one of these days?

This one’s been on non-stop shuffle through my head all this past week:

That’s Warren Zevon, with Eddie Shaver on lead guitar.