It was thirty years ago today that Bruce Springsteen released Nebraska.

In many ways it foretold the future not only of Bruce Springsteen, but of the business of popular music – and in both cases, it was a mixed blessing.

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Find out more about Sixty Plus and their efforts.

Like most conservatives, there are few things in the world I like less than standing around, marching or chanting.  Oh, I do like being out in the fresh air with a group of good people that have goals similar to mine in mind – but leaving aside the fact that it seems so group-think-y, hippy-ish and downright liberal, it’s pretty much inevitable that there’ll be something better to do, somewhere in the world, than that.

But I, myself, am getting a little exercised about the Star/Tribune’s ongoing propaganda exercise (AKA “the Minnesota Poll”).  And I’m more than a little tempted to grab an afternoon next week and see if we can’t get some people more or less like us out in front of 425 Portland to try to let them know that not everyone out there is a querulous low-information lemming.

Just saying.

Tempted.

Very, very tempted.

Who’s a better actor; Scarlett Johannson or Donald Rumsfeld?

Now, if you’re a sophisticated polling operation like the Star/Tribune “Minnesota Poll” – a Mason-Dixon joint – it’s an easy question; Ms. Johannson will likely outpoll the former Secretary of Defense.

Of course, you may respond “but measuring a Secretary of Defense in terms of acting skill is meaningless!”

And if you say that, then you’re already too smart to buy the latest Minnesota poll.

———-

The final Star/Tribune Minnesota poll of this long, nauseating week was released this morning – and it has two conclusions:

After two years of budget battles, vetoes and the longest state shutdown in Minnesota history, DFL Gov. Mark Dayton is winning the popularity battle with the GOP-controlled Legislature, a Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found.

A slim majority of 53 percent of likely voters say they approve of Dayton’s job performance, while 31 percent disapprove. Another 16 percent say they are undecided.

For the majority leaders of the Legislature, the poll found 51 percent disapprove of the job they are doing. Another 21 percent approve and 24 percent are undecided.

This poll really needs two responses.

Damnation With Faint Praise

The poll notes that Governor Dayton scored a 53 percent approval rating.

Now, on its face, that’s not a good number.  Under 50%, says conventional wisdom, is trouble – and Dayton is a governor that’s done virtually nothing in two years but make odd, slurred pronouncements before scuttling away into his office under the cover of a fawning media.

But as always, you have to look below “the face”.  Of course, the poll has the same absurd, worse-than-Watergate-level turnout model – Democrats 41, Republicans 28 – as all the other polls this week.

However, for some reason the Strib doesn’t favor us with the full range of crosstabs; while reporter Jim Ragsdale notes the Governor’s geographic strengths and weaknesses, at no point in the article is the approval of Republicans or Democrats explained.

Is this an accident?  Or would showing it reveal something about the poll the Strib doesn’t want us to see?

Because if we assume Democrats are over-polled by 3%, and that they were the vast majority of the “approve” numbers, then Dayton’s approval drops down to right around 50% – and the “disapprove” numbers jump into the high thirties if we assume most Republicans disapprove of Dayton’s job.

Of course, it’s all guesswork until the Strib releases those crosstabs.

Damnation By Packing Peanuts

Of course, the numbers on the legislature are just plain nonsense

For the majority leaders of the Legislature, certain trouble spots stand out: Only 24 percent of voters in the metro suburbs outside of Hennepin and Ramsey — which include strong GOP areas — approve of their leadership, while more than half disapprove. In southwestern Minnesota, 57 percent disapprove. They had slightly stronger showings in Rochester, where 30 percent approve, and in the northwest corner of the state at 33 percent.

This is just a stupid thing to measure.

Grading a legislature, as an entire body, all together, is like asking what a football fan thinks of the NFC Central Division.  You will get a dog’s breakfast of opinions, or no opinion – because the division is not the focus (except for bracketing playoffs).

One startling figure is that the GOP-controlled Legislature only broke even among Republican voters: 31 percent approve, 32 percent disapprove and 37 percent are undecided. Undecided numbers are higher throughout the Legislature’s poll, suggesting many voters do not have a clear opinion on the topic.

Well, dug.

I disapproved of the Legislature’s job!   The GOP caucuses gave away too much money in 2011 and caved on the stadium last year without getting anything useful in return!  I give them a “D”.

Does that mean I’m going to support Mark Dayton?  Not if you held a gun to my head (not to give the SEIU any ideas).

It’s a meaningless number.

So Why Run A Poll With A Meaningless Number?

That one’s easy; it gives the Strib a nice tidy number – 53-21 approval ratings! – to toss in front of people who don’t pay much attention to what the numbers actually mean.  These voters – the “Low-Information Voters”, people who retain headlines from the Mainstream Media and believe things that appear in the Strib – are the target for this sort of polling, or as it’s known in the world of logic, a “non-sequitur”.  The Strib is comparing apples and axles, just like comparing Donald Rumsfeld with Scarlett Johannsen.

While the individual numbers might be valid (they’re not – remember, the turnout model is absurd), at least in terms of math used to generate the numbers we see – but even if both numbers were in fact dead-nut accurate, what the Strib has done is created a phony horserace.

And why would the Strib splash a phony, non-sequitur comparison on its front page when it only serves to show Mark Dayton with a decisive (if phony) lead…

…oh, wait.

Never mind.

More Monday.

As we’ve been noting this week, the DFL candidate in the 3rd CD, Brian Barnes, may be a heck of a guy – but his campaign has been making some odd choices.

Their campaign signs – one of which I finally saw on the street the other day – still  violate FEC law. which is all nit-picky and anal-retentive, but I sure didn’t make up the law.  They still apparently are either conjuring up polls from the ether, or have found a pollster that’ll do polling for free or, more likely, are using internal push polls to try to convince potential donors to pony up for what will likely be a quixotic bid for office.  And one of Barnes’ “political organizers” has been disparaging small town and suburban people, who make up approximately all of Paulsen’s district.

The Barnes campaign (push-polls notwithstanding) are generally considered a long shot by the Democrat establishment.  And like all long-shot campaigns, Barnes’ has to try to find something to try to get some traction.

Some long-shot campaigns overcome that obstacle via ruthless budgeting, solid  organizing and above all, relentless hard work; see Chip Cravaack in 2010.

Others – the ones who can’t manage the budgeting, work and organizing – have to find some Hail Mary or another, something that’ll give ’em a hook to get them some mindshare, some little slice of the public consciousness.  See the Tim Penny and Tim Barkley gubernatorial race in 1998, which used a former pro wrestler as an elaborate marionette to serve as the face for their campaign.

Barnes’ campaign seems to have chosen the old standby, “have your people relentlessly repeat a set of chanting points” (along with the DFL’s usual “bank on fawning media coverage“).

Wait – that’s no old standby.  That’s because it doesn’t actually work.

But no matter.  The Barnes campaign seems to be focusing on having its people relentlessly repeat a couple of chanting points in hopes that one of them catches on.

• “He’s Not Really A Moderate”:  The theory, of course, is that the “Moderate” voters in “purple” districts like Edina, and “blue” districts like Bloomington, will repel from talk that Paulsen “votes like Michele Bachmann”.  On the other hand in an election cycle where the smart people know that we’re headed for a fiscal cliff, I – an obstreporous conservative – see that as a feature, not a bug.   The real point is, people – outside the wonk class – vote for a person and a record and a number of issues.  Not a wonk’s label.  Paulsen’s conservative enough for me – I wish he represented CD4 (note to self – vote for Tony Hernandez as many times as Mark Ritchie allows you to).  Chanting “you’re like teh Bachmann” is not a policy.
• “Where’s the public debate?”:  This is the latest one.  For months, Barnes’ people chanted “where’s the debate?”  Then, two debates – one at KSTP-TV and one with the League of Women Voters – were scheduled.  The chanting point changed to “where’s the public debate – as if a debate that Barnes’ people and the DFL could flood with DFL lemmings and SEIU droogs with photocopied questions would actually get people to the bottom of the issues.  Quick – where’s Betty McCollum’s public debate?  Keith Ellison’s?

In re this last – the Barnes campaign is reportedly mailing around a video of Paulsen “dodging” a question at a town hall back in 2009.  Unstated; it’s a question from former Minnesota leftyblogger and one-man tracking firm Dusty Trice, and it’s a pointed trap question intended to look bad on Trice’s video.

It didn’t work; in fact, Paulsen’s performance at that particular town hall (not a debate, mind you) drew this compliment from conservative talk show host Jack Tomczak:

Ok, I was kidding. I’m a kidder, I kid. It wasn’t Tomczak. It was leftyblogger “Two Putt” Tommy Johnson, the Twin Cities’ foremost leftyblog journalist, who is generally conceded to be the  DFL’s  intellectual standard-bearer.

And if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

———-

Someone asked me the other day – “why are you burning up so much time on the Barnes campaign.

As usual, two reasons.

• If you’re a Republican toiling away in SD67, or CD5, just know that there are DFLers that are having just as much fun – and spending a lot more money than your candidate in doing it.
• And if you’re a Republican in the 3rd CD?  Don’t believe the hype.  Oh, turn out to the polls; there are so many things that we need to crush with an epic turnout this November; Obama, Obamacare, the DFL’s drive for majorities in the Legislature, the Strib poll and so very very very much more.   But this is not the speed bump they’re looking for.

And a note to the Barnes campaign; instead of badgering Paulsen about debates, try running a coherent campaign that gives the voter an actual reason to vote for you.

Hope I’m not giving too much away, there…

On Tuesday, I wrote a letter to the Star/Tribune’s politics editor, Patricia Lopez.  Here it was:

Ms. Lopez,

I’m Mitch Berg. I’m a talk show host at AM1280) and a blogger at “Shot In The Dark” (www.shotinthedark.info). I was referred to you by Rachel Stassen-Berger.

I’ve been reading and writing about the Strib’s coverage of the Minnesota Poll.

Question: How does the Strib justify a DFL 41 / GOP 28 (D+13) split? Even after Watergate – the worst election for Republicans in the last 50 years – the split in Minnesota was D+12.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

(etc etc)

There’s been no response.

Nor did I expect one; the media’s petty nobility rarely troubles itself with the noisome fretting of the peasants.

UPDATE:  I did in fact hear back from Ms. Lopez.  More tomorrow.  Or Monday.  We’ll see.

It’s my contention that the Star/Tribune “Minnesota” poll is, and has been for two and a half decades, less a “public opinion” poll and more an instrument of DFL propaganda.  I’ve supported that contention with a raft of circumstantial evidence; proof that the Minnesota Poll underestimates GOP turnout – especially in races that are perceived to be close; it showed Mark Dayton with an absurdly huge lead over Tom Emmer, and Al Franken with a four point lead over Norm Coleman, while guessing the Klobuchar/Kennedy race fairly accurately.

It’s my contention that this is to leverage the “Bandwagon Effect” – to discourage Republicans and conservatives from going to the poll.

But this year’s race presents a dilemma for the editors who – I’m being half-hyperbolic here [1] – plan the results of these polls.  On the one hand, you have the Voter ID initiative which is likely to win in a blowout.  To skew that poll enough to encourage Democrats and opponents of the amendment, the Strib would need to skew the poll to an absurd extent.  As in, assume conditions that are the same as in 1976, after Watergate.

On the other hand, you have a Senate race between Amy Klobuchar and Kurt BIlls that is widely perceived to be a pretty safe race for the incumbent.   Skewing the sample too far to the left would make the results look completely implausible.

The answer, if you’re the Strib?  You see it in this weeks’ Minnesota Polls; this is their old buddy Jim Klobuchar’s daughter we’re talking about here!  Of course they’ll do what it takes to make her re-election as epic as possible – why, everyone on Editor’s Row remembers Amy when she was just this tall, dagnabbit!

Beyond that – and more germane to the propaganda organ – they know that the voters the DFL needs are the “low-information” voters. The ones that rarely get past the headline, much less the lead – forget about looking at partisan breakdowns.  The ones that still believe the Strib is anything but DFL shills, or don’t care either way.

The Strib is showing a 57-28 lead for Klobuchar, with 15 percent either undecided or voting for someone else.  As we’ve been showing every day this week, this is based on a sample that includes 41% Democrat/28% GOP turnout.

Now, if we assume it’s more like 38/34 – which is more in line with Rasmussen’s figures, which have been traditionally vastly more accurate – and multiply the changes by the support each candidate gets within their party…

…well, that’s bad for Bills, if you believe the Strib.  While 90-odd percent of Dems say they’ll vote for A-Klo, the Strib claims only 2/3 of Republicans will vote for BIlls.  While the nomination battle was a bruising one in the GOP, and left a lot of bad blood, Republicans are much more suck-it-up-and-support-our-guy than that.  This strikes me as dubious – the “stink test” is crying “BS!” – but I’ve got no hard evidence to the contrary just yet.  Absent that, let’s run with the Strib’s numbers.

So if we subtract 3% from the Democrat split, multiplied by 90%, we get a net loss of 2.7% for Klobuchar, taking her down to 54.3%.

Adding 6 to Bills – times the 66% support in the party, naturally – leads to a four point rise, to 32.

54-32 still isn’t close.  But it’s not the 2:1 humiliation…

…that, I contend, the Strib wants Republicans to believe is coming, on top of all the other “bad news” they’ve brought us this week.

So what does all this mean?

More tomorrow.

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Last week I blogged about the idea of having dinner at Mai Village on University this evening.  Mai Village, of course, is in the news because after spending nearly 20 years investing in the community around it – including upgrading from an almost-literal hole in the wall to a big, gorgeous room eight years ago – they are on the brink of extinction thanks to the Central Corridor.

I got sucked into a political thing this evening – so I’m thinking Sunday night instead.

I’ll be shooting to be there around 6:30 or so.

Apropos not much.

On paper, the Minnesota Third Congressional District is “purple”.  And by “on paper”, I mean “In the Strib“.

Yes, for decades the district was represented by moderate, IR-era Republicans like Jim Ramstad, Bill Frenzel and Clark McGregor.

And Erik Paulsen has had to work with a lot of different constituencies to win in the Third; he’s done it by showing ample respect to the parts of his district that aren’t, perhaps, solidly GOP – places like Brooklyn Park, Edina and Bloomington…

The MN 3rd Congressional District

…even as he’s worked hard in conservative strongholds like Maple Grove.

And it’s worked.  Paulsen beat Ashwin Madia by something like eight points to succeed Ramstad in 2008 – a lousy year for Republicans – and destroyed Jim Meffert in 2010 by over twenty.

This year’s DFL candidate is  Brian Barnes.  We’ve talked about Barnes before; he claimed the Minnesota police unions were “extreme right-wing” (they’ve endorsed Amy Klobuchar) and his campaign misrepresented Representative Paulsen’s position on a controversial bill.

So far, Barnes’ campaign has “opportunities for improvement” – even compared with the non-entity Meffert, to say nothing of fhe relatively savvy Madia bid.

More bizarre, perhaps, have been some of his back-office choices.

We’ll come back to that.

——————

If you come to the big city from rural America, you get used to the cool city kids sniffing down their noses at you.

And so seeing a tweet like this (which has since apparently been deleted from Twitter)?

@JenE4rmTheBlock
Small town ppl seem to not understand how the real world works
8/31/12 7:54 PM

Pretty run of the mill provincialism – right?

Sure, why not?

Now, how about this one?

This I’d be more prone to call “bigotry” – pretending to know the hearts and souls of people she’s apparently decided to disparage, or just filling in her own stereotypes, based on perhaps the least dispositive trait a person can have; where they live.

Of course, it’s Twitter.  And if there’s a medium with a lower barrier of entry than blogs, it’s Twitter.  The format lends itself to breezy generalization and letting out one’s inner douchebag.  I’ll cop to it; it sometimes brings out the worst in me, too.

But if you’re a candidate running for office in a district that includes towns like St. Michael,  Loretto, Albertville, Rockford and other exurban holdouts as well as burbs like Edina, Bloomington, Minnetonka and the like, you might think it’d be bad form to  employ someone who practices active bigotry toward a big, poitically-active chunk of your constituency.

But Barnes does.  This is “JenE4rmTheBlock”‘s business card:

(I’m not going to post the Instagram link to the photo under the same name as the Twitter feed. It includes an email and what appears to be a personal phone number. If someone wants to claim “it’s not teh same person” by way of trying to impugn the story, I’ve got it. It’s her).

But I’m not doing this to kick dirt on Ms. “4rmTheBlock”.  This is aimed squarely at Brian Barnes. campaign

Candidate Barnes:  is it your position that the people of Saint Bonifacius or Luverne “don’t get how the world works”, or that the folks in Minnetonka, Maple Grove and Bloomington are “Racists” and ‘Homophobes?”   Your “political organizer” has just insulted two groups of people who, together, make up roughly 100% of the district you’re running for.

Does this seem like a good campaign plan?

———-

So we’ve got editing problems, some magical invisible freebie polling, and a “Free-spirited” staff.  What else could go wrong with Barnes’ campaign?

More tomorrow.

The came via email yesterday:

In Greece, rioters are throwing Molotov cocktails at police. The cops who are not on fire are responding with tear gas.

Force continuum fail.

CNN calls setting cops on fire “minor scuffles,” and the rioters/attempted murderers “protesters” and “demonstrators.”

Journalism fail.

A “student” throwing a molotov cocktail at a cop halfway around the world is a “protester”.

Someone throwing one at, say, CNN headquarters is, I suspect, a “terrorist”.

US no longer at war with Mideast film critics: Obama Spokesman Jake Carney “self-evident . . . terrorist attack.”

Wrongfully accused filmmaker last person on earth still awaiting Obama apology.

I’ve lived in Saint Paul for most of the past 25 years.

And in that time, the half-life of a GOP campaign sign in my neighborhood is roughly five days.  They – every single one of them – gets stolen or destroyed.

“It’s just kids out pranking” say the local DFLers.  “There’s nothing political about it”.  But my DFLer neighbors’ signs remain blissfully undisturbed.

(And at least one source reports to me that they’ve seen a middle-aged woman in a mini-van stealing Tony Hernandez signs.  Pranking kids?  I think freaking not).

Whomever it is, it means either…:

• The DFL in Saint Paul runs a perennial campaign to silence dissent, or…
• DFL-leaning “Kids” (and “moms”) have no respect for difference of opinion.

Neither of them is a particularly flattering verdict of the Saint Paul DFL.

I got this email earlier this week:

This is a burned Vote Yes sign in the Macalester Groveland neighborhood of St. Paul.

There are several Vote No signs up and down our block. All unscathed.

This needs reporting.

This is not the first time this has happened.

More of that respect for diversity, I guess.

The Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” has declared Minnesota tied on the Obamacare issue:

About 46 percent of the state’s likely voters say they support keeping the Affordable Care Act, whose main tenets were largely upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court this summer, while 47 percent believe the law should go.

As always when dealing with any polls – especially polls with records of dishonesty as long as the Strib’s -http://www.startribune.com/local/171271561.html.  The Strib’s, in case you’ve forgotten,  is 41% Democrat, 28% Republican – which, as I showed yesterday, is more Democrat-leaning than the 1976 post-Watergate, post-Nixon-pardon election, the post-war nadir of GOP fortunes.

As a bipartisan sampling – liberal Hamline poli-sci professor Dave Schultz and I – both agree,  the sample is more like 38% DFL, 34% GOP.   Since 80% of DFLers (according to the Minnesota Poll) support the amendment, that means you deduct 80% of 3 points – 2.4 – from the “support” column.  Likewise, 90% of the six additional points of Republicans – 5.4% – support repeal.

With those assumptions – a more realistic turnout model and those levels of support – the “repeal” case is really more like 52-44.

It looks like the MInnesota Poll is building up to the Senate Race.

This week, we’ve been looking at the DFL-endorsee Brian Barnes and his campaign for the MN Third Congressional District seat held by Erik Paulsen.  Yesterday we noted they bobbled a niggling but, er, Federal regulation on their new batch of lawn signs.

Today?  We’ll get serious.

Earlier this week, the Barnes campaign sent a fundraising email to their mailing list; they just spent a ton of money getting a Minneapolis creative agency to produce a TV ad, and those don’t come cheap.

That’s fine.  Everybody does it.

But here’s where it gets interesting.  The third paragraph in the email says (I’ve added the emphasis):

Every dollar at this point goes toward getting our message to persuadable voters. We have been steadily closing the gap on Congressman Paulsen. We started with voters supporting Barnes 24% and Paulsen 39% in May, and we’ve gained 20 points to his 8! In fact, he is beginning to lose voters since we’ve been successfully showing voters he only talks like Jim Ramstad, but he votes more extreme than Michele Bachmann.

Let’s back that up for a moment; amid the awkward phrasing (are they claiming the race is 47-44 or not?), there are some questions.

What polling?

According to sources familiar with the history of the race, Barnes’ former campaign manager, Tom Beckfield, last month said that there had been no polling in this race.  That’s as of August.  And we know that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Dems’ national campaign organization and warchest, had done no polling in the 3rd CD – or at least they’d not released any into the public domain.  So if Barnes has national polls, they’re illegal.

Beyond that?  The campaign included no polling expenditures in their FEC reports through July.

But the fundraising email claims to have tracked results from May through the present.  Via what polling?

The source notes that the Barnes campaign is doing intermal push-polling.  Are these the results that the email is trumpeting?

Since the campaign reports no polling expenses, and the DCCC hasn’t done it, what else could it be?

If you see Brian Barnes, ask him if you could.

(There are times I wonder – what if we had a group – perhaps a whole industry, with printing presses and transmitters and stuff, whose job it could be to check this sort of crap out?)

Tomorrow:  If you live in Waconia or Minnetonka, one of Barnes’ staffers has something to say to you.

Police investigating a “bias crime” against five churches in Buffalo:

Police believe the same person broke into St. Francis Xavier and destroyed a number of windows at the 7th Day Adventist Church. The other churches were plastered with signs making reference to Jesus being gay and other offensive comments.

“When we arrived on Sunday and saw this poster with a lot of inflammatory language about Jesus, we took it down and called the police,” Jarvis said.

Buffalo Police Chief Mitch Weintzel said the signs contained homosexual overtones and derogatory comments that any Christian person would find offensive as relating to Jesus.

Victims say it’s clear whoever left the signs was trying to send a message. Now, investigators are trying to find out what that message is.

The vandal(s) hit five churches in Buffalo:

• St. Francis Xavier
• Zion Lutheran
• 7th Day Adventist
• Buffalo Presbyterian
• Hosanna Lutheran

Surveillance footage shows a “person of interest”…

Courtesy Fox9 News

(churches have surveillance cameras?  Who knew?)

…and, I guess, a minivan of interest:

Courtesy Fox9 News

Back to the news report:

 So far, officials say there is no clear link between the vandalism and the controversial marriage amendment. The churches that were struck differ in their stances and there was no mention of voting on the signs.

“At first, I thought it might have because there was some homosexual language and overtones on the poster — but as I’ve been hearing a little bit more and talking with police about it, we’re doubting that might actually be the issue,” Jarvis said.

Any side bets on which Twin Cities leftyblog the vandal reads?

Ahem.

1. My God, who cares.  It’s a %#$@#^@! game.  Get a @$#@^@ grip.  Life goes on.
2. This is what you get for changing the national pastime away from Baseball.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park wrote last week:

On this day in 1778 – The Continental Congress passes the first budget of the United States.

The last budget of the United States was proposed by the Senate on April 29, 2009.

So have generally accepted accounting principles become obsolete or are they simply being ignored and if so, by whom and why?

Joe Doakes,
Como Park

Once it goes past “Quicken”, I’m lost…

As I wait for the latest “Minnesota Poll” to release its results for the Senate race, I’ve been turning the poll’s D+13 (their sample of respondents was 41% Democrat and 28% Republican) number around in my head.

After all, as the Strib tells us, “Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, which conducted the poll for the Star Tribune, said those numbers are consistent with what he has seen over the years”.

But as we noted yesterday, the 2008 election – an epic Democrat win – was D+6 or so.  The 2010 election had turnout of D+2, roughly, and turned out to be a GOP rout nationwide and in the MN Legislature.

So what about the worst election in the past 50 years for the GOP – the post-Watergate presidential election of 1976?    Where the GOP got shredded in DC and in Saint Paul, sending the MNGOP running to their “Independent Republican” label?

I can’t find the partisan split – but does it seem unreasonable that in a year when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Fold by 12 points in Minnesota that the partisan split was, maybe in the neighborhood of D+12?

In other words, maybe somewhere around the D+13 number the Strib would have you believe today?

Protect My Vote finally has an ad up:

Today, we’re told, is “One Hit Wonder Day”

Yes, today is One Hit Wonder Day, perhaps the only “Hallmark holiday” in which the honorees are denigrated as much as celebrated, victims of that peculiar human tendency to put folks on a pedestal and relish knocking them down.

As if any of us could make a song — just one — embraced by millions.

Well, it’s fun to think about.

I’ve always loved one-hit wonders – little snippets of musical history cast out into the ether, there to rattle around on late-night AM airwaves and trivia contests and “where are they now” shows.

Below the jump – some of my favorites.

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The other day, I took a rare drive thorough the western suburbs.  I don’t get out there much, so it’s always fun to drive through a place that’s been good Republican territory – or at the very least, a place with a vigorous two-party government (which most of the “safe Republican” districts in this state are, in stark contrast to the one-party DFL gulags of Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth). 

And I gotta say – I love the smell of a Republican-dominated district in the morning.  It smells like…prosperity.  And competence.  And hope.

It’s campaign season, so I noticed a lot of campaign signs.  There were lots of DFL signs sprinkled with healthy clusters of GOP signs in Bloomington.  The balance shifted decisively the farther north and west I got – Minnetonka, Maple Grove and the like.  Lots of signs for city council, Henco Commission and of course Erik Paulsen.

One that I completely missed?  Third District DFLer Brian Barnes.  40-odd days before the campaign, I saw not a single Barnes sign.

Now, we’re told that’s about to change.  Candidate Barnes tweeted this, last Wednesday:

Lawn signs are in! Get one this Saturday at one of our Day of Action events: facebook.com/events/4455344…#MN3#stribpoltwitter.com/BarnesForMN/st…

— Brian Barnes (@BarnesForMN) September 19, 2012

(Say what you will about Barnes’ politics – whatever they are – but that is one adorable baby).

But let’s not focus on babies.   Look at the sign.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Now, I don’t know much about Federal Elections Commission law – other than that it’s incredibly intrusive, and that Sheldon from “Big Bang Theory” isn’t anal-retentive enough to follow it.  I’ve seen campaigns for federal-level office – Senate, Congress – have to completely redesign entire literature pieces, signs and other products to fit some picayune codecil or another in FEC law.

But here’s the book – literally – for Congressional Candidates and their committees.  All 180-odd pages of it.  It’s the sort of stuff campaign managers and communications people make the big bucks to know.

And tucked away on page 66 is this little bon mot:

A disclaimer notice must be clearly and conspicuously displayed. A notice is not clearly and conspicuously displayed if the print is difficult to read or if

the placement is easily overlooked. 110.11(c)(1)…In printed communications, the disclaimer must be contained within a printed box set apart from the contents of the communication. The print of the disclaimer must be of sufficient size to be “clearly readable” by the recipient of the communication…

So where’s the “Paid for by…” whomever disclaimer?

In this photo, it’s that little squiggle of white tucked into the lowest of the stripes on the “flag”.

Aesthetically, it works for me – I mean, I didn’t write that FEC crap – but that’s no box,, and “inside the stripe” is the very definition of not “set apart from the contents of the communication”.

The FEC goes on:

…and the print must have a reasonable degree of color contrast between the background and the printed statement. 110.11(c)(2)(ii) and (iii). Black text in 12-point font on a white background is one way to satisfy this requirement for printed material measuring no more than 24 inches by 36 inches

While FEC regulations make me look for fiber supplements, we’re on my turf now.

Thin white type on a red background is a fairly low-contrast combination, especially on a sign that ‘s supposed to be viewed from a distance.  Indeed, for the 10% of men who have some degree of red-green color-blindness and depend on contrast to see reds and greens, it is to some degree or another nearly unreadable at all.

If these are the signs they handed out last Saturday, then they’re going to have a problem.

(And I’ll solicit feedback from my readers in the Third.  Are you seeing these signs out there?)

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Now,  this is pretty niggling stuff.  True, it’s the stuff campaigns pay “consultants” the big bucks to know – and Barnes’ campaign has certainly ponied up for consultants.  Like, thousands and thousands of dollars worth.   And it does have the salutary effect of infringing federal campaign regs – so even if I think it’s no big deal, there’s a building full of intensely anal-retentive people in DC who likely do.

It’s just the first – and, let’s be honest, the most understandable and least not-ready-for-prime-time – of a series of flubs the Barnes campaign has put out in recent weeks.

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As a complete side issue, I’m going to make the first of my fearless  predictions;  Barnes may do better than Jim Meffert in 2010 – but not much.  I say Paulsen wins in November by 16.

On the off chance you haven’t seen this: Sir Ian McKennen doing Sir Mix-A-Lot’s, er, classic “Baby Got Back”.

It made me laugh.

As we look at the abusive travesty that is the Minnesota Poll – in this case, the ludicrously skewed, 3:2 pro-DFL partisan breakdown in this weekend’s polling on the two Constitutional Amendments – let’s take a trip back through history.

Frank Newport, the president of the broadly-respected Gallup Polls, savaged the Minnesota Poll in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 midterm and gubernatorial elections.

Let’s make sure we’re clear on this.  Pollsters attacking pollsters in public is a little like magicians publicly heckling other magicians.

Is there any evidence the Strib has polished up their methodology?

No.  Indeed, the two polls released over the weekend on the Marriage and Voter ID amendments show quite the opposite – or that some copy editor took a poll of Ramsey County voters and mislabeled it a poll of Minnesotans.

The Strib “Minnesota Poll” is doing what it’s paid to do:  create a pro-DFL bandwagon effect, and suppress GOP voter turnout.  It’s calling Minnesota at Obama with 48% and Romney with 40%.

But the poll uses the same absurd D41/R28 breakdown that the Marriage and Voter ID polls.  This polling would have you believe that while in 2008, with a messianic media darling running against an unpopular two-term candidate (McCain was irrevant) and the war the DFL had a six point advantage in partisan turnout (D39 R33), this year, mirabile dictu, we have a 13 point Democrat advantage in this state?

If you use turnout numbers from somewhere in between 2008 and 2010 – say, D36 R34 – and multiply the changes by the percent of each party that the poll itself says plan on voting for their candidate (93% of Democrats plan to vote for Obama, vs 96% of Republicans), then you wind up lopping off roughly .3% of Obama’s numbers, and adding a whopping 5.8% to Romney’s.

That makes the real split 47.7% Obama, 45.8% Romney.  

Question – especially for you libs in the audience:  In what way is a widely (one might say “lavishly”) publicized poll using a partisan split that this state hasn’t seen since Watergate to be interepreted as anything other than an elaborate voter-suppression scam?

Yesterday, the Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” also delivered its mid-cycle tally of support for the Voter ID Amendment.

And coming barely a week after the generally-accurate Survey USA poll showing Voter ID passing by a 2:1 margin, the Strib would have you believe…:

Slightly more than half of likely voters polled — 52 percent — want the changes built around a photo ID requirement, while 44 percent oppose them and 4 percent are undecided.

That is a far cry from the 80 percent support for photo ID in a May 2011 Minnesota Poll, when the issue was debated as a change in state law. Support among Democrats has cratered during a year marked by court battles, all-night legislative debates and charges that the GOP is attempting to suppress Democratic votes.

Republicans and independents continue to strongly back the proposal, which passed the Legislature this year without a single DFL vote.

Wow.  Sounds close!

Sort of; if you accept the validity of the numbers (and unless the DFL is headed for a blowout win, you must never accept the validity of the “Minnesota Poll’s” numbers), and every single undecided voter today voted “no”, the measure would pass in a squeaker.

But are the numbers valid?    And by “valid”, I don’t mean “did they do the math right”, I mean “did they poll a representative sample of Minnesotans?”

To find that out, you have to do something that almost nobody in the Strib’s reading audience does; look at the partisan breakdown of the survey’s respondents.  Which is in a link buried in the middle of a sidebar, between the main article and the cloud of ads and clutter to the right of the page, far-removed from the headline and the lede graf.  Which takes you to a page that notes (with emphasis added):

• The self-identified party affiliation of the random sample is: 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 31 percent independent or other.

That’s right – as with the Marriage Amendment numbers we looked at this morning (it’s the same survey), the Strib wants you to believe…

…well, no.  I’m not sure they “want” anyone to believe anything.  I’m sure they want people to read the headling and the “almost tied!” lede, and not dig too far into the numbers.

It’s part of the Democrat’s “Low-Information Voters” campaign; focus on voters who don’t dig for facts, who accept what the media tells them, who vote based on the last chanting point they heard.

Fearless prediction:  On November 4, the Strib will release a “Minnesota Poll” that shows the Voter ID Amendment slightly behind, using a partisan breakdown with an absurdly high number of DFLers.   It’ll be done as a sort of positive bandwagon effect – to make DFLers feel there’s a point to come out and vote against the Voter ID Amendment (and for Obama, Klobuchar, and the rest of the DFL slate, natch).

And it will be a complete lie.  Voter ID will pass by 20 points, and this cycle of polling will disappear down the media memory hole like all the rest of them.

Question:  Given that its entire purpose seems to be to build DFL bandwagons and discourage conservative voters, when do we start calling the “Minnesota Poll” what it seems to be – a form of vote suppression?