Every time a poll comes out favoring Tom Emmer, the leftybloggers chime in “But wait! The poll was a phone survey! Phone surveys always miss cell phone users! Nobody under the age of 40 has a land line! The poll underpolls Democrats!”
A poll released today by the tech policy group CALinnovates.org reveals that iPhone users — whom we would have firmly placed in the same consumer class as those who sip lattes and munch arugula — are twice as likely to be influenced by Tea Party ideology as other smartphone customers.
The poll, conducted by the respected Zogby group, found that one in five iPhone users are influenced by the Tea Party — twice as many as users of the Android or BlackBerry. Subscribers to iPhones are also twice as likely to say Sarah Palin “speaks for them,” and 60 percent predict a Republican takeover of Congress this year — a 15 point margin above other smartphone users.
And even the other “smartphone” users are pretty evenly divided.
The Dems have turned up the “heat” on the idea that Tom Horner was a Republican this past week. My theory is that the DFL has internal polling showing that Horner is taking more – a lot more – Democrat votes than Republicans.
First, it was the big endorsement from Obama-voting, tax hiking, free-spending “Republicans” Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger, who are as “Republican” as Randy Kelly ended up “DFLer”.
And yesterday, it was the endorsement by thirteen “Republican” former legislators.
Now, I thought it was fair to guess that these “Republicans” weren’t necessarily the post-Pawlenty, or even post-1980, type – the type that actually try to be an alternative to the DFL, the type that scare the DFL.
But I had no idea how far out of the past the Horner campaign had to dig to find these “Republicans”. Here’s the list, with their respective ages:
Searle (90)
Pillsbury (89)
Belanger (82)
Bishop (81)
Oliver (80)
Scherer (75)
Seaberg (74)
Schrieber (69)
Peterson (68)
Leppik (67)
Ozment (65)
Jennings (62)
Not only were most of these people “Republicans” when “Minnesota Republican” meant “Democxrat with a nice suit”, some of them even date back to when Democrats actually put America first.
Up next – Whigs, Grangers and Know-Nothings for Horner!
I’m just a simple taxpayer; house in the Midway, two kids, a job. I don’t talk big like my Yale-graduate betters. I am just a peasant.
And so when my would-be leader says “I have a plan”, I guess like the knavish dolt I am I assumed that to mean “He has a plan”, rather than “He shall reveal The Plan when it, in its majesty, is ready for us to see it”.
Do you have a plan, or don’t you?
And if you do, how does it make up $890 million (actually more like $1.315 billion) without soaking the middle class?
…I believe the DFL, and the Dems nationwide, are going to hold on this cycle. I believe that if the GOP gains a single net seat pickup, in either chamber, either in Saint Paul or Washington, it’ll be a huge defeat for the Dems at either level.
Republican candidate for governor Tom Emmer is all over the new Republican theme — Democratic candidate Mark Dayton doesn’t have a complete budget plan.
Emmer hammered the point, made by supportive Republicans repeatedly during the past few days, on a Tuesday spot on Minnesota Public Radio.
“Let’s start talking about the elephant in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge. Sen. Dayton has proposed a plan that is billions of dollars short,” Emmer said. He went on to suggest that Dayton will have to increase taxes more folks than he’s specified — couples making taxable income of $150,000 and singles earning $130,000. “How far are you willing to go?”
Let’s extend that thought for a moment: Mark Dayton is not a dumb guy. And he’s got people on his campaign staff who are even smarter. They don’t own a supercomputer – but they don’t need one to put together the broad outlines of a budget. Their campaign isn’t short of staff or funding, obviously.
So if you think the only budget that the Dayton campaign has is the one that’s on the website – the one that grins a big dumb grin and says “we’re $890 million short” with the same seriousness of a junior high kid saying the dog ate his homework – then I have to say with all due respect that you’re beggaring reason. Either the campaign is incompetent, or they know where that extra $890 million is coming from, and would rather the electorate not know.
And if you assume Democrats and Dayton aren’t just plain stupid, that leaves you with only “b”
“Put it on paper, Sen. Dayton,” Emmer said. (Republicans on Twitter and on blogs have taken to accusing individual reporters of negligence for not following suit.)
Stassen-Berger links to my Twitter account, as well as my “AWOL Media” piece yesterday. I wouldn’t use the phrase “accusing of negligence”, really – it’s got a legalistic tinge to it that’s a little unseemly for free speech.
It just seems that the media, which six weeks ago were hot to get all the details of the Emmer budget, has suddenly gotten incredibly incurious. And yet now that Dayton’s budget has a large, suspicious hole – and there really is no solution but to jack up taxes on the middle class – suddenly it seems that the people don’t have a “right to know”, accorinding to our regional political media.
I mean, did you see Esme Murphy?
She might as well have been giving the Senator a massage. “Do you have any plans?” Er, nope. And it ended there!
Did you hear Keri Miller’s interview with Tom Emmer? Back before Emmer released his budget? She went after him like a barracuda after Charlie the Tuna.
Does the public – especially us middle-class schnook taxpayers – still have a right to know now that it’s the favorite son of Minnesota’s political “elite?”
I mean…:
Dayton has acknowledged that his budget plan comes up nearly $1 billion short. That’s in part because his income tax plan won’t bring in as much money as he had hoped. He has specified how he would make the cuts he’s found, although some are estimates and others have been deemedunrealistic. But he admits a “gap,” which leads opponents to believe he’ll raise more in taxes.
…I’m a complete schlemiel as a “reporter”, and even I see that these are some huge, valid questions!
So David Brauer – who’s never covered up his lefty sympathies, but seems to try to do a decent job anyway – asked via Twitter:
He links to a this Rachel Stassen-Berger story in the Strib, and a Doug Grow piece in the MinnPost. Stassen-Berger did, indeed, note that Dayton’s budget comes up short – but there’s no evidence that I’ve seen (I’m willing to be corrected!) that she’s gotten up at a Dayton presser and said “OK, Chauncey Fauntelroy, if you don’t have to hit the middle class, who do you have to get the $890 million? We’ve got all day, Yale boy” (Those might be my words rather than Stassen-Berger’s).
Grow makes the valid point that…:
…no governor, no matter how popular, will be able to zip a budget package through the Legislature without major changes. In this case, whoever is governor likely will not be elected with a majority of the vote, meaning there will be little chance to claim any mandate, so you can expect nasty legislative fights.
…while basically claiming a pox on all their fiscal houses.
And, most importantly, both of these pieces were two weeks ago. Juuuuust about the time that the non-wonk class – all those actual voters – started thinking about the election.
@mitchpberg Fair question. Would venture Dayton’s gap is well-known, covered and acknowledged. For many weeks, Emmer seemed to be ducking.
Well-known to whom? Political reporters and political junkies and fire-breathing political bloggers? Sure!
The average voter – especially the ones who start paying attention to politics sometime between the first and fifteenth of October?
Hell – I’ve talked with candidates for the State House who haven’t read anything about this yet.
So while I’m not going to say that our assembled mass of journalists are “negligent” for not asking, I’m still curious; when the public has a right to know, does it imply they’re supposed to exercise that right by developing a jones for research?
Look, journos; if your line is “all three of the candidates’ budgets leave questions”, then ask them. That’s what you get the big bucks for. Hell, I’d do it, if any of them (but Emmer) returned my calls! And since neither of them do, I – and, more importantly, we, the entire body politic – have to depend on y’all, Tim Pugmire and Tom Scheck and Bill Salisbury and Rachel Stassen-Berger and Pat Kessler to do it.
Thing is, so far in the race, it’s Emmer that’s been getting the questioning; Dayton seems to be the only one who can get away with saying “I’ll get back to you on November 3”.
Am I wrong?
What say you, Tim and Rachel and Tom and Bill and Pat?
While there are plenty of individual Democrats who are perfectly fine human beings, the simple fact remains that the Democratic Farmer Labor Party values power first and foremost; integrity, to them, is a luxury that you can fuss with once you get the power. The only thing that separates the DFL from the Illinois Democratic Party is geography.
They will fight like hell for every vote they can get; they will fight like hell to deny every vote they think might be against them; if playing by the rules won’t work, they will cheat. The DFL in Minnesota, at its upper levels, is a group of deeply depraved people who would throw The Rights Of Man on the bonfire if it’d get Tarryl Clark into office.
If it’s not close, Hugh Hewitt says, they can’t cheat – but this election is going to be close. No two ways about it.
One of the ways the GOP gets screwed on elections is via the DFL’s stranglehold on the administration of elections. From Secretary of State down to the myriad election judges, counters, poll watchers and challengers that keep “order” (of whatever type) at the polling stations and in the counting process, the DFL has its fingers on your ballots from the moment they slip out of your hands. And while the majority of them are, no doubt, honest, the one-party control of the electoral machinery is a temptation that, I suspect, the MNDFL can not resist.
Janet Beihoffer – former CD2 GOP chair – has been running the effort to recruit and train more GOP election judges, poll watchers and challengers.
And she needs help:
MNGOP has the most R election judges ever (but not enough and many of the new ones were not placed b/c of _____________- fill in the blank). We can take poll challengers and have a proven system for training and assigning them. They can register here: www.mngop.com/edo and must go through training. We will assign them based on the risk ranking of precincts (which I did and distributed to CD chairs in May/June). We also have [a team of lawyers] in place but will take more.
This is something you can do to help clean up this state’s potemkin electoral system. Please volunteer if you can.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie rallied conservative activists in Iowa late Monday, saying his success in a Democratic state shows his tough-talking, smaller government message resonates with all voters.
Fanning speculation that he’s considering a 2012 presidential bid, the Republican spoke to about 700 people at a fundraiser for former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who is challenging the Democratic incumbent for his old job back.
Christie said Republicans must deliver on their conservative promises if they gain power during the November elections. If they don’t follow through, he said voters will send the GOP “to the wilderness, and they are going to send us there for a long, long time.”
I’d like to see him make Jersey a huge success first – but so far, we could do worse…
Joe Doakes from Como writes about the latest round of presidential/vice-presidential campaign junketeering:
What would you say is the most liberal place in Wisconsin? UW-Madison?
How about Iowa? Drake University?
What would you say is the most liberal place in the Twin Cities? Macalester?
Where did the President go last month, and Vice-President today, just four weeks before the election, in prime campaign time?
Why those tiny oases of liberalism rather than larger middle-of-the-road locations? Why spend the entire day on the campaign for Governor of a fly-over state, and not stumping for Congressional candidates in close races around the country?
No other Democrat wants to be anywhere near them.
Desperation.
And fear.
No, not just the “ooooh, you conservatives are motivated by fear!” BS Dems throw out as a substitute for intelligent argument.
It’s the fear that their base is eroding. A confident movement strikes out into territory it hasn’t conquered before – like Reagan into the Rust Belt, or Obama into the suburbs, or like Chip Cravaack into the hinterlands of the Iron Range.
A movement on the defensive hides out in places like UW/Madison and Macalester and tries to keep the less koolaid-sotted droogs from sitting the election completely out.
Over the past five weeks, Tom Emmer has released a budget plan that balances the budget, and lays the groundwork for the kind of economic growth that actually sets economies up for the kind of long-term prosperity that makes budget fiascoes like the past four years dim, comic memories.
In the meantime, Mark Dayton’s first budget cratered – came up $3 Billion short – and his second attempt is well over a billion off the mark, and Dayton is now saying budgets don’t really matter that much anyway until he’s elected.
So I’m wondering – where are the media who were so strident about having a budget to fact-check last summer?
Rachel Stassen-Berger? Tim Pugmire? Tom Scheck? Pat Kessler? Bill Salisbury? Eric Black? David Brauer?
Where are all the great journalistic instincts of one of the nation’s putatively top-twenty media markets?
Or don’t the people have a right to know anymore?
Let’s start counting up days until someone in the regional mainstream media – MPR, the Strib, the PiPress, WCCO-TV, anyone covers the vaporous vacuity of the Dayton “budget plan”.
I participated in a conference call with Chip Cravaack and his campaign yesterday; it was where he officially released the news that his internal polling shows him in a statistical tie with 17-term representative Jim Oberstar.
And Cravaack quipped that while he’s trying to run a local campaign with local activists, he noted that all of the bloggers on the call – Ed Morrissey (CD2), Derek Brigham (CD3), Gary Gross (CD6) and I (CD4) were from outside the district.
And I thought – wow. Could it be there are no conservative bloggers in the Eighth District?
If so, that needs to change.
If you are a conservative blogger up in the Eighth District, and you’ve been covering the Oberstar/Cravaack race, drop me a line, either in the comments or on my email address.
And if you’ ve ever wanted to start a conservative blog up there in Duluth or Two Harbors or Virginia, there’s no time like the present. Go to Blogger.com, and take two minutes to set up your blog, and devote twenty minutes a day to writing something about politics in the Eighth District, and when you’ve got a week or two and half a dozen articles in, let me know; the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers and True North will set you off in style.
Perhaps you can become that alt-media elite. (There are more than a few leftybloggers up there. You should do juuuust fine).
Olson quickly made it clear that he is a Minnesota resident, moving to the Twin Cities area two years after he lost re-election to Democrat George Sinner. He is best known, in Minnesota, for his years running a community bank association.
Olson, a Republican, said he never has endorsed a Minnesota governor candidate before. He joins former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson in Horner’s camp.
That whole “Carlson” thing really tells you all you need to know about Tom Horner.
As to Olson? Perhaps the Horner campaign is trying to lock up the ‘Ex-North Dakotan” vote. We are about 40% of Minnesotans, after all – the smart 40% who know how to drive and had better educations for less money.
But Allen Olson presided over some of the most miserable years in North Dakota history. They weren’t his fault, per se – but any North Dakotan over the age of forty remembers the Olson years for the farm foreclosures, lousy grain prices,and high unemployment.
By all means, Hornerites; dig into that Allen Olson record!
According to the DFL and their buildup of minimum wage leftyblog minions, the fact that Tom Emmer hadn’t released a detailed budget plan was a finger in the eye of The People. They had a right to knoooooooooow!, after all. And they had to knooooooooooow it right then and there, dagnabbit!
Then Emmer released a budget plan – one that balanced the budget without raising taxes, lowered taxes on job-creating activities, and left K12 education untouched.
And then it turned out that Mark Dayton’s first attempt at a budget plan fell three billion dollars short on balancing the budget.
And then his second attempt fell 890 million dollars short (or maybe more!).
And now, suddenly, having a budget plan in place just isn’t that big a deal!
He even said on WCCO on Sunday morning, amid Esme Murphy painting his toenails…
Can you imagine what Esme Murphy would have done had Tom Emmer ever called his plan a “work in progress?”
Now, Mark Dayton’s a smart guy. And he’s got a lot of smart people working for him. And while they don’t have access to a “supercomputer” to figure out budget numbers, they don’t need one. A fairly complex Excel spreadsheet will get you the big-picture numbers; some not-cheap software (certianly avaiable to the compaign) can work out the fine details. Just like Emmer did.
And yet they didn’t.
Wait. Do you really believe that, after two go-arounds, that the Dayton camp doesn’t have a budget?
Rubbish.
They do. They just don’t want you to see it.
Because the real Dayton Budget Plan – the one they don’t want you to see yet – socks it to the Middle Class. There is no other way. To think that Dayton doesn’t know this beggars credulity. To think that there is any other politically-palatable answer is pollyannaish and just plain stupid.
There are huge questions to be asked about the nonexistant “Dayton Budget Plan”.
Lori Sturdevant’s column Sunday was really nothing but an ad for Walter Mondale’s new book:
Former Vice President Walter Mondale speaks both for and to people of that mindset in his new autobiography, “The Good Fight,” published by Scribner and due in bookstores Tuesday. (It was written in collaboration with an Editorial Board alumnus, Star Tribune health team editor David Hage.)
“I came of age in an optimistic America, a society that believed in opportunity and the value of common endeavor. Today, two generations have grown up in a flinty and anxious America,” Mondale wrote, citing the ills of increasing poverty, unaffordable health care, ineffective schools and widening inequality. “I wonder what happened to that other America, a place of empathy and hope.”
In other words, the book is what Sturdevant’s entire history of print work has been; an uncritical hagiography of an era of big government that we can’t afford anymore, wrapped up in a collective slander (“flinty”? “Anxious?” Really?) of those who want something more rational.
The day of reckoning for these programs has finally arrived. Unfortunately, the designers of the bills didn’t mix cost containment with their compassion. Unfortunately, we elected a radical who thinks he can spend unprecedented and unsustainable amounts of money without consequence.
Now the thoughtful people of the TEA Party are telling government what they already know: that you can’t keep putting expensive item after expensive item on the credit card without it catching up with you. You don’t have to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier to figure that out.
The other thing that happened is that, in Minnesota at least, the DFL said yes to their special interest allies so often that they came to think of our wallets as their ATM. It’s difficult for people to be magnanimous when they’re either unemployed, underemployed or worried if they’ll have a job next week.
The Mondale legacy is a society that, for whatever reason, believed that a happy government made for a happy society.
The Eighth District has been dominated by the DFL since 1947 (indeed, has only been held by Oberstar and, before him, DFLer John Blatnik since that time.
Reading through the history of the Eighth District is a whole lot less tedious than the last 53 years of its history, though:
J Adam Bede, a Republican, a journalist and teacher (?) and former US Marshall, known as one of the best stump speakers of his day, from 1903 to 1909
Clarence B. Miller, a Republican, from 1909 to 1919
William Karss, a locomotive engineer from the “Union Labor” Party, from 1919 to 1921 and as part of the “Farmer-Labor” Party from 1925 to 1929.
Oscar Larson, a Republican, served two terms between Karss’ terms, from ’21 to ’25
Here, it gets complicated: William Pittinger served on three different occasions: from 1929 to 1933, from 1937 to 1937, and again from 1939 to 1947. He was the last Republican to hold the seat.
John Bernard, a native of Corsica, an iron minor, and “Farmer-Labor” member who later came out as a member of the Communist Party and who cast the sole vote in Congress against an arms embargo against the Stalinist side in the Spanish Civil War, held the seat from for the 1937-’39 term.
Pittinger turned the seat over to one John Blatnik, a DFLer who held the seat from 1947 until Oberstar’s election in ’74.
The Eighth District has been dominated by the DFL since 1947 – indeed, has only been held by Oberstar and, before him, DFLer John Blatnik for the past, ahem, sixty-three years.
Reading through the history of the Eighth District is a whole lot less tedious than the last 63 years of its history, though. Before Oberstar, only seven men have held that seat, going all the way back to the foundation of the Eighth District back in 1903:
J Adam Bede, a Republican, a journalist and teacher (?) and former US Marshall, known as one of the best stump speakers of his day, from 1903 to 1909
Clarence B. Miller, a Republican, from 1909 to 1919
William Karss, a locomotive engineer from the “Union Labor” Party, from 1919 to 1921 and as part of the “Farmer-Labor” Party from 1925 to 1929.
Oscar Larson, a Republican, served two terms between Karss’ terms, from ’21 to ’25
Here, it gets complicated: William Pittinger served on three different occasions: from 1929 to 1933, from 1937 to 1937, and again from 1939 to 1947. He was the last Republican to hold the seat.
John Bernard, a native of Corsica, an iron minor, and “Farmer-Labor” member who later came out as a member of the Communist Party and who cast the sole vote in Congress against an arms embargo against the Stalinist side in the Spanish Civil War, held the seat from for the 1937-’39 term.
Pittinger turned the seat over to one John Blatnik, a DFLer who held the seat from 1947 until Oberstar’s election in ’74.
An internal poll shows Chip Cravaack – the GOP-endorsed candidate for Congress in the Eighth Congressional District, within three points in his race against 17-term Representative Jim Oberstar.
The poll – by Public Opinion Strategies – was of 300 likely voters in the Eighth District. It has a five point margin of error.
It shows the race at 45-42 Oberstar, with very few undecideds.
Even if Cravaack were to finish in November within twenty points against Oberstar – who has been winning races by 40-odd points in recent memory – it would have been a huge moral victory.
Even if it’s only partly true – that Cravaack is even close – that’s going to be a huge kick in the head for the DFL.
But it gets better: with messaging thrown in at the end of the poll – Cap and Trade (which will devastate mining in the range), regulation (which has kept a couple of big precious metals mining projects from starting digging) and Obamacare, the numbers switch to 47-41 Cravaack. And the “re-elect” number – “would you reelect Oberstar” – is 40%, versus 48 for “someone new”.
If this is true – if Cravaack upsets Oberstar in the Eighth, one of the most traditionally, reliably Democrat-voting districts there is outside of Berkeley, Manhattan and Minneapolis – then all bets are truly off in this election.
I’ll be following this very closely.
Because you can bet the mainstream media will not.
There’ve been some interesting dynamics in the race this past few weeks.
And, like the inner workings of most political campaigns, the reasons for some of these dynamics are hidden.
Which doesn’t mean we can’t take a swipe at them.
The below is a narrative of the past few weeks in the Minnesota gubernatorial campaign. I will clearly label events “Fact” or “Theory”; you can file the results under “prognostication” or “science fiction”, or “wishful thinking”, or whatever you want. The only evidence – so far – is purely circumstantial.
While I will not assign hard dates to any of my “Theory” entries, the rough time-frame should be clear enough for county work, read in sequence with the context of the real events.
BEGIN: Roughly two weeks ago.
THEORY: DFL internal polling shows that Mark Dayton’s lead is eroding (as reflected in the Rasmussen poll – see below) and that Tom Horner is taking more DFL than GOP voters. A lot more. And DFL enthusiasm numbers are lagging badly, while GOP enthusiasm is exploding.
FACT: Dayton’s entire campaign staff drops what it’s doing and come to HQ for an all-staff emergency meeting. THEORY: The main subject was this putative internal polling.
THEORY: Key DFL staffers discussed this polling with their friends, colleagues and contacts at the Strib, and elsewhere in the Twin Cities’ left-leaning media, academic and non-profit community (to the extend that “Key DFLers” and those other groups are actually separate and need to be distinguished at all), indicating that Dayton is in trouble. The message just wasn’t working. The leadership decided that a) they needed to try to push Horner down, and b) the message needed more than just a little tweak; they were going to have to try to sell a “class warfare” platform as something…almost conservative and responsible.
THEORY (and a conspiratorial one at that): For reasons all their own – liberal bias, the urge to sell papers, the imperative to keep clients – the various polling organizations jiggle the “likely voter” numbers to show Dayton with a commanding lead.
FACT: MPR/The Humphrey Institute and the Strib/Minnesota Poll almost simultaneously issue polls showing improbably large Dayton leads, using samplings and turnout models that don’t pass any stink test this side of Baghdad Bob.
THEORY: DFL campaign staff contacted key Minnesota leftybloggers, and ordered them to do what they do as their primary reason to exist best; pass along a meme for them, to stanch the bleeding toward the Horner campaign.
FACT: Nearly every leftyblog in Minnesota runs “Tom Horner is really teh Republican” stories, all with very similar wording and thought structure. The Alliance for a Better Minnesota releases a “Tom Horner Is Teh Republican” website – on a domain rented back in January of 2010.
FACT: Lefties have been talking jobs, jobs, jobs. Yesterday was a good example; Javier Morillo of the SEIU debated Laura Brod. Gary Gross covered it:
Let’s start with Morillo’s pathetic performance during the Face-Off segment of @Issue With Tom Hauser. Morillo said the words middle class and jobs so often, it was like he was trying to win a repitition competition. He repeatedly argued that Mark Dayton was “the only candidate who would protect the middle class.” How will Dayton help the middle class by chasing employers from Minnesota with the 2nd-highest income tax rate in the nation?
It’s painfully obvious that the DFL got the news that their message isn’t working and that their message has to shift from their tax-the-rich scheme to creating jobs. People’s first priority is getting the economy humming, not whether the rich are paying their fair share.
Dayton’s “message” has gone from “Tax the Rich” to “We love you, middle class” in a matter of weeks.
My scenario is admittedly and gleefully fictional.
Last August, Joe Stone – the son of Ron Stone, the general manager at AM1280, who is kind enough to give me two hours of air time a week – had a very serious parasailing accident in Montana.
He was a lucky as one could be in a situation like that; although he fell nearly 150 feet, there happened to be an off-duty paramedic parasailing right behind him; he was able to land and stabilize Joe until help could arrive.
Obviously, Joe was hurt bad, and is very very very lucky to be alive. He’s recovering at a hospital in the Twin Cities, where he’s got a lot of physical therapy and just plain healing up to do.
Anyway – there’s going to be a benefit for Joe, and to help the Stone family defray some of the medical expenses, tonight at 6:30 or so at the Fine Line Music Cafe in downtown Minneapolis.
I went into a neighborhood store the other day. The guy behind the counter is someone I talk politics with on occasion; he knows I’m a Republican, he is too (we all know each other in Saint Paul), and knows that I do a talk show.
“So how bad is it?” he asked. “Emmer down by 12 points?”
I spent about twenty minutes talking him off the ledge, explaining all the methodological problems in the “Minnesota Poll” and the “Humphrey Institute” polls. By the time I left, he’d put the sharp objects back in their places.
But as I walked back to the car, I thought if you’re one of the DFL’s opinion-manipulation technicians, that’s gotta be music to your ears. Good Republicans losing heart in the month before an election that, by all rights, we should win and win big.
And all because of lies, and a couple of polls that, in a just world, would be called push polls, or just-plain propaganda.
So my mission is clear. Dispel the DFL’s and media’s (pardon the redundancy) lies, one at a time.
It’s been a couple of years since elements of the regional left finally copped to the fact that key lefty propaganda institutions like the Center for “Independent” Media and the Minnesota “Independent” are funded by, among others, misery-profiteer George Soros.
It’s catching; lefty Jewish lobby “J Street” is on the Soros gravy train as well:
J Street has acknowledged substantial donations from billionaire George Soros, reversing years of claims by the group that it had nothing to do with the liberal financier, and apologized for making misleading statements about his role.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the director of the dovish pro-Israel lobby, confirmed to JTA a report that first appeared in The Washington Times that it had received $245,000 from Soros and his children in 2008, and added that it had received another $500,000 in subsequent years — altogether, about 7 percent of the $11 million that J Street says it has taken in since its 2008 founding.
Given the stupendous success The Police achieved by the mid-eighties, it’s hard to remember that they started out as a very fringe-y band.
Outlandos D’Amour in 1978 was a hoot – a demented lashup of punky reggae or reggae-y punk, infectious and madcap fun and impossible not to dance to. Reggatta De Blanc was more of the same, but more confident and less elliptical.
And so we – my music-geek pals in North Dakota, and music buffs in general – waited eagerly for The Police’s next effort, Zenyatta Mondatta.
And thirty years ago today, it came out.
And I reacted with a “huh?”
I had loved the first two albums.
And I would eventually like Ghost in the Machine, and especially Synchronicity.
But Zenyatta Mondatta, then as now, leaves me completely cold.
I was one of few, of course; the album made them superstars. “De Doo Doo Doo De Daa Daa Daa” and “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” were their first top forty hits in the US.
And it wasn’t because it didn’t showcase some really cool musicianship. Andy Summers was an amazing guitar player; Stewart Copeland was a tight, propulsive drummer. Sting was…
…well, Sting was a decent singer and a capable bass player. But he bugged me.
Now, the things that bugged me, the tics and voice and arrogance, would go on to make Synchronicity a great, great album four years later.
But on Zenyatta? It just bugged me.
And so I sat out the next year or two, Police-wise.
This week was still a great one, by the way. Stay tuned.
Last August, Joe Stone – the son of Ron Stone, the general manager at AM1280, who is kind enough to give me two hours of air time a week – had a very serious parasailing accident in Montana.
He was a lucky as one could be in a situation like that; although he fell nearly 150 feet, there happened to be an off-duty paramedic parasailing right behind him; he was able to land and stabilize Joe until help could arrive.
Obviously, Joe was hurt bad, and is very very very lucky to be alive. He’s recovering at a hospital in the Twin Cities, where he’s got a lot of physical therapy and just plain healing up to do.
Anyway – there’s going to be a benefit for Joe, and to help the Stone family defray some of the medical expenses, this coming Monday at the Fine Line Music Cafe in downtown Minneapolis.
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
The King Banaian Show! – King is on hiatus at AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities, until he hopefully comes back as Representative Banaian in five weeks!
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:
