There are two immutable facts on this blog.

1. I make a point to write something every single weekday.   During the election season, it’s very frequently late-breaking political stuff.  Being a modestly reputable blogger, I hear a lot of things.  It’s fun.
2. That being said, I burn out hard by the end of an election season.  Every even-numbered year since I started this blog (except probably 2002), there’s a two-month stretch where I can scarcely stomach writing about politics.

So for the better part of two months, I want – and tryyyyyy – to write about anything but politics.

This year, I thought I’d try something new; plan to write a few non-political things during the swing time between election and session.

A couple of the things potentially on the agenda:

The Accidental Conservative:  It was about this time thirty years ago I seriously started wondering if I really was the liberal I’d always been.  But conservatives?  Those were…those people.  Not like me.  It was a weird time.  I may just dredge some of it up.

Bruce Springsteen:  America’s Greatest  Conservative  Songwriter:  In which I debunk the idea that Springsteen – his public political persona notwithstanding – is really a liberal songwriter.  Complete with music!

Notes To A Young Conservative:  It’s not easy being red.  Especially in a culture that glorifies much of what we disdain, and holds us to absurd standards that they don’t themselves observe.

Rethinking The Seventies:  When I was a teenager and twentysomething, I was an angry snot-nosed punk rocker (in every way but appearance).  And as part of that, I really, really disdained the popular music of the seventies – from the pop treacle on the radio to the superstars.  I spat at the mention of Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, California rock staples frpm Jackson Browne to the Eagles, Arena Rock (think Boston, Foreigner and the like), even the Beatles.  And R&B, I just didn’t get at all.    I’ll be digging through the archives and going over my long, sometimes comical reassessment of the decades music (and what a pretentious little twerp I was back then).

I figure if I mention ’em, I’ll actually do them.

While we get ready to vote for this next Presidential election, it’s good to remember what got us here.

Here’s a look back at the 111th Congress – the “Worst Congress”, the Reid/Pelosi one, the one that left office after Christmas of 2010, after the GOP sweep of the House – that I saved back in 2010.

Americans can give thanks in this Christmas season for an end to the reckless and destructive 111th Congress. This is the Congress that passed Obamacare, against the wishes of a substantial majority of the public, on Christmas Eve of last year. In the dead of night, Democratic lawmakers stuffed the monstrous 2,700-page bill with special-interest goodies and political payoffs like the “Cornhusker Kickback” and the “Louisiana Purchase.” As we have learned since, most members were still ignorant of the bill’s contents three months later, when it gained final passage in the House. No surprise that its immediate results — both intended and unintended — have been almost uniformly bad.

Similarly, odds are that not one member of the 111th Congress actually read the so-called “cap-and-trade” bill before it passed the House in June 2009. Even a speed-reader could not have digested House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman’s last-second, 309-page amendment, which read as clear as mud: “Page 14, strike lines 1 through 3 and insert the following. …” It was filed after 1:30 a.m. just before the vote on final passage. There is also serious doubt that any member of Congress understood the 2,000-page financial reform bill that Congress passed this summer. One of its two main sponsors, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., remarked, “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works. But we believe we’ve done something that has been needed for a long time. …”

And Democrats wonder why Gallup found this Congress to be the least popular in the history of its polls?

After suffering a comprehensive and humiliating defeat in the midterm election, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the unfrocked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led lame-duck congressional Democrats on a last-minute banzai charge for more federal spending, debt, earmarks, taxes and regulations. They unsuccessfully pushed for the biggest tax increase in American history, a yearlong spending bill loaded with pork, and a DREAM Act to award amnesty to certain children of illegal immigrants. We hope that voters will remember these misguided initiatives in two years.

 

As much as anything in the Presidential election, this is what’s at stake next Tuesday.

Yesterday and Monday, we went over the chronology of the last-minute negotiations and back-and-forth leading up to the State Government shutdown, which started seventeen months ago last night.  The abbreviated time-line:

1. On June 29, the GOP made an offer.  It traded giving some ground on revenue for some movement on social issues.
2. On the morning of June 30, the DFL leadership – Dayton, Senate minority leader Bakk and House minority leader Thissen – demanded $1.4 billion in new revenues.
3. Much discussion ensued.  It ensued under the “cone of silence”; the participants really didn’t let on much about what was going on.
4. At noonish on the 30th, Dayton – without Bakk and Thissen – made an offer that dropped most of the revenue demands, and was pretty close – almost dead-on – with the GOP’s letter.  The letter mentioned no social issues – because they were off the table at this time.
5. More discussion.  More cone.
6. Mid-afternoon, the Legislature sent its counteroffer, including revenue from the “school funding shift” and the tobacco bond money.  This should have settled it – and indeed, was substantially the same as the offer that Dayton finally accepted to end the shutdown.
7. Late-afternoon, the DFL ratcheted back to their morning demands.
8. More cone.
9. At 10PM, the Governor essentially claimed that he was shutting down the government because the GOP had rejected the offer in 7, above, and was unwilling to compromise.

And that was that.

———-

In the hour or so after the shutdown, the GOP Caucus released the contents of the letters that had transpired on the 29th and 30th.  The release included pages 2-4 of this document here:

All Offers

No mention of social policy in there.  it was not an issue.

So the government shut down.  DFL and media narratives aside, it was a disaster for the governor.  Government actually saved money; hardly anyone outside of government missed it; the people largely were apathetic, as the Governor learned on a tour of the state to attempt to rally support that drew nothing but dispirited SEIU goons.   He returned to the  Capitol, and returned to the GOP’s last offer.

And not long after, he gave this talk in WCCO-TV with Esme Murphy – which we’ve featured a time or two:

Dayton lied:

I was unaware on June 30, in fact I was clearly aware to the contrary, that all these social policy issues, from banning stem cell research and everything else, and just really reactionary social policy, was taken off the table.

Esme Murphy let that line pass without comment – as, in fact, she always does, as her mission seems to be to make sure DFL pols get a nice massage on the air.

But nobody else noted the contradiction; of course he was aware.

• The GOP mentioned no policy issues in its June 30 proposal!  As we noted above, it was nearly identical to the governor’s previous offer, differing on a few fiscal tweaks!
• His rejection of that offer mentioned no social policy issues.  Because they were off the table.
• Read the speech he gave as the shutdown started.  Nary a peep about social issues.

Mark Dayton was shot down completely on the shutdown.  And yet the media have allowed him to carry on with the “social policy” canard.

Why?

If I were a cynic, you’d think it was because the media was in the bag for Dayton, and wanted to give him cover.  You’d also think the media were even more in the bag for the DFL – and chanting the governor’s version of the shutodwn is a key part of the DFL’s attempt to retake the legislature, which a good chunk of the media (at least at the management and editorial-board level) clearly wants.

And I am a cynic.

Because the alternate explanation is that the media just isn’t as smart and attentive to details as I am.

And that just beggars the imagination.

So when will the media start “fact-checking” Dayton’s story?  Or their own, for that matter?

So let’s indulge in that most pointless of diversions, trying to predict the Electoral College.

Here – with the help of the good folks at 270ToWin.com – is the media and Democrats’ (ptr) conventional wisdom; Obama holds Ohio and the rest of the blue Great Lakes states, and ekes out 271 electoral votes – in this case, 277-261.

And if Obama loses Ohio?  That inverts nicely:  Romney 279, Obam 259.

(Note that I’m assuming Colorado and New Hampshire vote Romney in both scenarios.  I think they will).

So what about if Obama takes Ohio, but loses Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Colorado?  Romney 271-267.

Now – how about the perfect Republican storm, all full of challenger-breaking independents and cascading preferences?  If Romney takes Ohio and Wisconsin, and somehow hell freezes over and Minnesota goes red?

Romney 305-233?

Well, it’s fun to think about

…that Barack Obama wins this election (more at noon).

But as the situation among reputable polls shifts ever more to Romney, and as more and more hitherto “likely Obama” states flip to “Leans Obama” and “Toss-up” and even “Lean Romney”, it’s interesting to watch Nate Silver doubling and tripling down on his prediction; he’s still giving The Light Worker a 75% chance of winning.

I’m not a statistician – but I can read and reason, and I’ve been dinging on Silver’s polling, methodology and predictions for a couple of years now.  My beef – and I’d suspect the beef of any rational person who isn’t one of the incurious low-information voters at which Silver’s polling is aimed – is that he calculates his results based on weighting existing polls based on some proprietary secret sauce known only to him.

Is the “sauce” valid?  I don’t know – nobody does, really – but as I showed in the 2010 Minnesota Governor’s race, it involved giving exaggerated weight to polls like the absurd “Minnesota Poll”, the so-bad-it’s-out-of-business Humphrey Institute poll and the frankly left-leaning PPP poll, while systematically shorting polls like Survey USA and Rasmussen.

Is Silver right?  Even if I could check his math, I probably couldn’t check his math, if you catch my drift.  Maybe Obama still is a near-sure thing, even after this past three weeks; maybe the Dems and Silver know something we don’t (like how many dead people will be voting).  We won’t really know until next week.

But while there will be many things about a Romney win that I’ll applaud, one of the big ones for me, personally, will be dancing – rhetorically, of course – on Nate Silver’s professional grave.

Seventeen months ago yesterday, in the midst of negotiations about the budget, the GOP-led Legislature sent Governor Dayton a proposed budget.  It offered some concessions on revenue, and asked for some ground on social issues.

First thing the next morning, June 30 – 17 months ago today – the DFL came out with a counter-offer.

Labeled the “Dayton-Bakk-Thissen Compromise Budget Proposal”, it demanded $1.4 billion in new revenues.  It was a further negotiation, just like the Legislature’s letter the day before.

And – this is important – it had all three DFL leaders on board.  Governor Dayton, Senate minority leader Bakk and House minority leader Thissen all signed off on this proposal.

We’ll refer to this as “The Morning Letter” from now on.

And as the government coursed toward the midnight shutdown, that apparently was where things stayed.

The rest of this article uses this Scribd file, originally from Dayton’s chief of staff Bob Hume, as its source.

All Offers

It’s been popping up around the Twin Cities media off and on ever since the shutdown.

The Morning Letter

Now, much of what went on over the next 6-7 hours is shrouded in mystery; it took place in off-the-record conversations and phone calls and communications that aren’t available to the general public if they’re recorded at all.

Noon: Dayton’s Offer

But the upshot of those conversations – whatever they were – was that at 3PM on the 30th of June, the Governor – alone, without Thissen or Bakk – released a proposal that dropped all tax increases.

There were three significant things about this letter, which we’ll call “Dayton’s Offer”.

One was that Dayton dropped demands for tax increases, in return, Dayton proposed a 50% shift in school funding to the following biennium – the “borrowing from the children” that the DFL and media have worked so hard to pin on the GOP this past year.   It was a major concession by the Governor.  According to sources on Capitol Hill familiar with the negotiations, this was seen by the GOP majority in the Legislature as a key step toward reaching a “lights-on” agreement to prevent the shutdown.

But the other two significant things were actually things missing from the proposal:

1. Bakk and Thissen:  Their names had been on the Morning Letter – but were absent at 3PM.   Sources at the Capitol indicate that that’s because – well, Bakk and Thissen didn’t support it!
2. Any mention of GOP policy proposals:  The Dayton Offer includes no reference to GOP “Social Policy” proposals – because Dayton knew at noon on the 30th that the GOP had taken them off the table.  This is an inference, both by my sources and myself.  It’s also the only logical conclusion.

So as of a little after lunch on 6/30, the Legislature and the Governor – but not Bakk and Thissen – were in basic agreement; no tax hikes, no social policy concessions.

The 3PM Letter

A couple of hours later, at 3PM, the GOP sent a counter-offer.  It involved two tweaks to Dayton’s proposal:

• Cutting the size of the education shift (at the recommendation of Dayton’s Education Commissioner)
• Making up the difference with tobacco bonding

This letter – we’ll call it “The 3PM Letter” – involved accepting the concessions in The Dayton Offer with a few on the GOP’s part.  Otherwise, the two offers were just about identical.

As of 3PM, then, it looked as if the Governor and the Legislature were in agreement, and the shutdown could be averted.

The 4:06PM Letter

Dayton responded about an hour later, at 4:06PM.  Dayton accepted the changes to the education shift – it was his administration’s idea, after all – but tossed the tobacco bonding proposal and renewed the demand for new taxes…

…that he himself had taken off the table earlier in the afternoon!

The GOP’s response expressed dismay at the sudden – I believe the term of art in the Age of Obama is “unexpected” – flip-flop on Dayton’s part – and proposed a “lights-on” bill.

So To Recap…

Just to make sure we’re clear, here:

1. The DFL – Dayton, Bakk and Thissen – demanded $1.4B.
2. Negotiation ensued under the “cone of silence”.
3. Dayton offered to drop the tax demands, and by omission showed that the GOP had dropped their social policy demands.
4. The GOP accepted this proposal, with a few fine tweaks, including one from Dayton’s own administration.
5. Dayton spun on his heels and rejected that offer – ignored it, really – and countered with a flip-flop on taxes.

The “cone of silence” remained in effect for the next five or six hours.  Nobody exactly knows what transpired on the way to Dayton’s big speech at 10PM.

Dayton’s Presser at 10PM

Just in time for the 10PM news, Dayton called a press conference.  Here’s the transcript.

It’s full of prevarications, and one outright lie:

• “Therefore, a $1.4 billion gap remains between our last respective offers.”  But the GOP’s proposal on the 29th offered to compromise with the DFL on revenue.  The conservative base – myself included – would have howled at this, but the GOP was clearly looking to keep the government open.
• “Republicans have offered only to forego their $200 million tax cut and add that amount of spending. While welcomed, $200 million is only a small step toward resolving a $5 billion deficit.”  The 3PM Letter shows that the GOP was willing to go along with some sort of revenue hikes.
• “Today, Representative Thissen, Senator Bakk, and I made two proposals which contained revenues to be raised by increasing taxes only on people who make more than $1 million per year. The Department of Revenue reports that there are only 7,700 of them, less than 0.3% of all Minnesota tax filers.”   Well, no.  Dayton made two offers; Bakk and Thissen only participated in the first one.

The Administration started out demanding tax hikes; the GOP expressed a willingness to compromise.  The Administration then flip-flopped and went back to their first set of demands, ignoring the GOP concessions (for purposes of presenting the media a narrative), with Dayton contradicting himself in the process.

And Here’s Where The Media Tush-Smooching Comes In

The Governor contradicted himself and rejected a proposal that was one minor tweak removed from his own, Bakk-And-Thissen-less offer (“Dayton’s Offer”), leading directly to the government shutdown.

And yet today, 17 months later, the DFL’s PACs and pressure groups refer to it as “the Republican shutdown”.  It’s a Big Lie.  But nobody’s countering it.

I’ve often wondered; what if our society had an institution, maybe even an industry, with printing presses and transmitters, staffed with people whose job and training involves checking up on things that government officials say – and maybe even holding them accountable for the things they say and do?  Heck, even allow this institution to see itself as an aescetic elite who “comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted”, in exchange for, you know, actually comforting and afflicting.

We could use this in Minnesota.

Remember where we started yesterday – with Esme Murphy giving Mark Dayton her usual deep-tongue-kiss on her Sunday Morning Show:

Notwithstanding the contradictions in Dayton’s own proposals that are part of the public record timeline of the negotiations on June 29-30, Dayton runs with the “Social Issues” canard.

The Strib also served, then as now, as Dayton’s de facto stenographer in their “coverage” of the chain of events.

The Star-Tribune also bought Dayton’s line – that the “requested concessions” brought on the shutdown – completely uncritically, without noting the evolution, and then abrupt de-evolution, on Dayton’s position.  The Strib mentioned not a word about the “flip-flop”.

Tomorrow – appropriately, Halloween – the way the shutdown went down, and conclusions about “journalism” and Governor Dayton.

So after I wrote my piece on my suggestion that Bruce Springsteen’s “This Hard Land” was the song that best symbolized where America is at today, I actually got a call from ’em – they liked my submission, and interviewed me for the show.

It ran last night at 9PM – and it was a fascinating listen throughout. The MPR people did – and I mean no offense by this – a more balanced job than I expected. And the production job of getting my ten minute interview cut and pasted to slot into gaps in the song itself? From one radio production geek to another, well done.

Here’s the whole thing. I’m early in the second half of the show.

I’m around 34:30 into it, although the whole thing is worth a listen.

Two meta moments over the weekend.

1:  Walking through the guns, ammo and hunting section at Fleet Farm as “Left of Center” by Suzanne Vega (the least guns/ammo/hunter/Fleet-Farm-y singer in recent musical history) played on the overhead speaker.

B: Listening to NPR New covering the approach of Hurricane Sandy live from…

…the boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

(more…)

I saw “Argo” over the weekend, on Saturday night.

It was really, really, really, really good.  That’s a rating of four “Reallys”.  That ain’t chicken feed.

Why was it so good?

Time Machine:  The movie gives you a good sense of what life was like in the US the last time one of our Presidents left our diplomats out to dry in an “unexpectedly” hostile country – the hopelessness, the impotence, the craven politicization of the White House’s response (Carter’s chief of staff Hamilton Jordan comes off especially weaselly), and the way this nation responded – good and bad – to the “students'” outrages against decency.

And the clothing and hair styles of the seventies, in all their claustrophobic porn-movie-o-liciousness.  Yuck.

It’s an excellently-acted true story that plays like a great suspense thriller.

But perhaps most surprising of all…:

You forget it’s Ben Afflect in the leading role.  He isn’t awful!

Totally worth seeing.  Before the election, even.

The DFL – and, more accurately, its’ big-money PR operation “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – have been trying to repeat a couple of Big Lies often enough that, over the course of the next two years, a plurality of Minnesotans agree with them.

Again.

One of them is the myth of the “do-nothing legislature”.  But I think even the least-informed Minnesotans are starting to figure out that over the past two years, the talk, even from the DFL’s noise machine, has turned from “We have a $6.6 Billion Dollar Deficit!” to “the surplus isn’t really all that surplus-y”.

Another?  The idea that the GOP is “extreme” and “focused on social issues” – as if the party can’t fiscally walk and chew social gum at the same time.   Please, people; we’re not DFLers.

But today?  We’ll be talking about the other Big Lie; that the GOP “shut down the government”.

———-

Next week’s election is going to have a lot to do with setting the stage for the state’s next budget battle. It’ll be a fork in the road; the GOP path, leading to prosperity, and the Mark Dayton/Tom Bakk/Paul Thissen path, leading to California, Spain and Greece.

Today and tomorrow are also the vital seventeen-month anniversaries of the key dates in the final negotiations leading to the shutdown [1].  I’m going to walk through the events leading up to the shutdown.

The inevitable conclusion is that the DFL’s line is a complete fabrication, designed only to leave the uninformed with a sound-bite to take to the polls with them.  Even Alida Messinger knows that she’ll need more than 43% in 2014.  

We’ll start the whole thing out with a Mark Dayton quote from Esme Murphy’s show. Murphy was doing her usual job – painting the toenails of DFLers on the air – when she asked the governor if he had any regrets about the shutdown:

MURPHY:  The proposal that you ended up agreeing to was basically the one that was offered up on June 30, before the shutdown.  Do you have any regrets now about not taking that proposal and trying to work that out on June 30th that would have prevented the shutdown?

DAYTON:   Well, very significant difference, I was unaware on June 30, in fact I was clearly aware to the contrary, that all these social policy issues, from banning stem cell research and everything else, and just really reactionary social policy, was taken off the table.  That just was not part of my understanding on June 30th it was a very important part of the consideration after the shutdown…

The Governor is lying.  (The governer is also borderline incoherent).

On June 29, 2011, the GOP- controlled Legislature sent Mark Dayton an offer.  Sources on Capitol Hill tell me that this proposal did involve some give and take on policy issues both fiscal and social; in exchange for compromise on revenue, the governor would give some ground on some social policy issues.

It was a negotiation.  That’s where both sides bargain their various chips with each other, to try to get the end result they want.  This, the GOP did.

In other words, the GOP Legislature did what they had been elected to do.  And given that there were some sort of tax hikes – even indirect ones – in the proposal, it was politically risky for a bunch of Republicans who’d been sent to office promising to hold the line on taxes and spending.

And so the proposals went to the governor on June 29.

The next day?

We’ll talk about that that tomorrow.

(more…)

If it’s not the greatest parody ever, it’s right up there:

Over the weekend, the Strib announced…

…that Minnesota is pretty dang close.

As the presidential race tightens across the country, a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found that it is narrowing here as well, with President Obama holding a 3-point lead and Republican Mitt Romney making gains in the state.

The poll shows Obama with support from 47 percent of likely voters and Romney earning backing from 44 percent — a lead within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The piece – by Rachel Stassen-Berger – notes that this is a real tightening from the poll last month:

Last month, Obama had an 8-percentage point advantage in the Minnesota Poll. Romney has apparently cut into the Democrat’s advantage among women since then and picked up support from Minnesotans who were previously undecided or said they would vote for a third-party candidate.

Independents, on the other hand, are leaning more toward Obama. Barely a third supported him last month, but that number has grown to 43 percent. Romney’s support among independents remains virtually unchanged, with 13 percent of that group remaining undecided.

That very well may be the change over the past month.

But here’s the other:  the partisan sample changed.  It changed a lot:

The poll comes as more Minnesotans identify as Republicans, which could add to Romney’s support. A month ago, the poll’s sample was 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 31 percent independent or other. In this survey, 38 percent of respondents identified themselves as Democrat, 33 percent Republican and 29 percent independent or other. Minnesota does not have voter registration by party, and party self-identification fluctuates as events sway voters’ opinions.

Voter opinions certainly can cause the change.  Lots of that seemed to happen.

And officials from Mason-Dixon – which has taken over the MInnesota Poll since the Strib’s comically inept performance in the 2010 race – are pretty adamant that last month’s poll was D+13 not out of pro-DFL perfidy, but because, well, that’s how many Democrats they found as a percentage of the population.

Does it make sense that it dropped 8% in a month?

Good question.  One I’d love to ask the good folks from Mason Dixon.  After the election, naturally.

But for now?  D+5 is more or less in line with the state’s turnout in 2010.

My big question:  will the Strib run their traditional “Sunday Before The Election” poll? I’ll try to find out.

P.S.:  Our friend and regular commenter Kermit pops up in the article!:

Republican Kermit Hauge disagrees.

“Barack Obama has been an absolute disaster as president,” said Hauge, 54. He cited the unemployment rate, rising use of food stamps and Obama’s positions on taxes and health care among his reasons for supporting Romney. The clerical worker from New Hope said he didn’t start out a Romney fan but will now vote for him as a better alternative.

From your mouth to God’s ears, Kerm.

I’ve been doing this series of “Thirty Years Ago Today” anniversary posts about great music of the eighties for quite a while now.

Here’s the thing I’ve discovered in writing this series; for many of the records I’ve covered – The RIver, Shoot Out The Lights – it hardly seems like it’s been thirty years, since the records seem (to me, anyway) so very timeless; they’re no less a soundtrack in my forties than they were in my teens and twenties.

With others, though?  They’re definitely archaeological artifacts; Boy, U2’s first album, hinted at greatness and timelessness to come, but it was very much a time capsule for an idealistic post-punk do it yourself world of music I craved being in at the time.  Zenyatta Mondatta and Blizzard of Ozz seem like museum exhibits showcasing one of those rare times in music when pretty much anything went.

 

• an inflection point in R&B between the funk of the seventies and the hip-hop-inflected R&B of the nineties, 1999 was a key turning point.  While there was no hip-hop on the album – the term was still on the fringe of pop music culture in 1982 – 1999 linked the big-funk-band ’70s with the technology-driven groove that has dominated R&B for the past twenty-odd years.  Listen to “DMSR”, and tell me that’s not made for sampling.
• an era driven by unprecedented change in music technology:  In spades.  There’d been synth-pop albums before 1999; there’d be many after.  But when it came to integrating bleeding-edge technology (synths, a top-of-the-line Linn drum machine) with tradition (Prince’s signature Hofner guitar, a cheapo knockoff of a Fender Telecaster), 1999 was the gold standard.  Listen to “Let’s Pretend We’re Married”, or the title cut, for two of the most glorious melanges of style…ever!
• a period of glorious intermingling between “black” and “white” music:  There’s a story – possibly apocryphal, although I remember it came from a decent source back (koff koff) years ago – that John Mellencamp, who was just starting to wiggle his way toward critical respectability, came out to do an encore at a show, carrying a boom box.  As the story goes, he said “This is a great rock and roll song”, held the boom box up to the mike, and played “Little Red Corvette” for the audience.   This was kind of a big deal for me; you didn’t get exposed to a lot of “black” music in rural North Dakota in those days.  And learning from Mellencamp (for whom I didn’t much care at the time) that there was  in fact a link between R&B and R&R kicked loose a brick in my mind that got me thinking, and sent me – thirty years ago this coming winter – into the back room at the radio station I was working at, to dig out some old Motwn records and start piecing together the great rock and roll tradition for myself.
• Minneapolis’ musical glory days:  this was the album that blasted the Twin Cities onto the musical map.

It’s all of that.  And it was anything but timeless; how many albums give themselves a shelf-date?   The world didn’t end in 2000; everyone had a bomb but we all didn’t die any day, not yet.   “Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999” is a statement of ironic nostalgia.

But as an artifact of a long-gone time?

What an artifact.

And what a time!

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talkradio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• Ed is and I are on today from 1-3.  We’ll be talking with candidates Ted Daly and Bill Glahn, and author Evan Sayet!
• Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – is on from 1-3 on Sunday.

(All times Central)

So tune in to all four hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. 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) .
• New – send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• Podcasts are now available on the AM1280 page!  (Ed and I are #2 – Brad is #3).
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

I mean, seriously.

“No matter how bad your day is going, just remember, you’ve won just as many Tour de France races as Lance Armstrong.”

— Kevin Ecker, from Facebook

I think this is going to be a humdinger of an election.  Alongside my predictions from this morning – GOP holds both chambers of the Legislature – I think Chip Cravaack will stave off Rick Nolan, setting the stage for what could be an epic realignment in Minnesota politics.

Beyond that?  I think Lee Byberg has laid the groundwork for what could be – let’s be conservative, here – a result that is unexpectedly good, and disconcerting for Collin Peterson.  And I think it would have happened even without his improvident slander of pro-lifers.

And while I think it’ll take a complete economic collapse and mass civil disorder to make Minneapolis anything but a DFL playground, I think Chris Fields is going to surprise people with his results on November 7.  He’s run a masterful campaign; in a just world, there would be no contest; in a district that wasn’t a one-party thug-ocracy, the statesmanly Fields would make short work of the whiny, petulant Ellison.

As to the 4th CD?

Here’s where we need your help.

Redistricting shaved Betty McCollum’s advantage down, but it didn’t gut it.  The 4th Congressional District was as blue as the Oceana Ministry of Truth’s uniforms before redistricting, of course; and it absorbed a lot of purple territory in Stillwater and Woodbury (as well as a few bright-red districts full of Real Americans up in Grant Township).

Which is a huge improvement, don’t get me wrong.

And so Tony Hernandez has been fighting this campaign to win.  And along with that, there’s been a solid effort by a lot  of candidates at the legislative level.  I think we’ve got a solid shot at four or five new seats in the legislature, either flips or open seats, as well as defending the seats we already do have.

And – this is huge – I think Blake Huffman, Dennis Dunnigan and Sue Jeffers have a solid shot at getting on the Ramsey County Commission.  And if that happens, the Ramco Commission will have a conservative majority!

If there’s a habit from the Old Fourth that we need to put to rest, it’s the idea that Saint Paul and Ramsey County Republicans only turn out when they think it matters – competitive Presidential, Gubernatorial and Senate races.  The media has done a painstaking, and fraudulent, job of trying to convince them that the Presidential and Senate races are foregone conclusions; they do it to try to convince Republicans not to show up at the polls.

This is where you come in.

The Hernandez Campaign is organizing a phone bank – along with several other campaigns and BPOUs in the 4th CD – to Get Out The Vote, starting tonight and running up until the election.

And we need people to sign up by clicking here and picking a time

Whether you’re a Paleocon, a Neocon, a Ronulan, a LIbertarian, or even an old-school Eastside Kennedy Democrat who’s had enough of the current regime, this is your chance to help convince people that this election makes a difference, and to help cajole them to the polls.

The fact is, Romney has a chance.  Tony Hernandez has a shot at shocking the world – perhaps by winning, perhaps by showing the state that the Fourth is not a safe sinecure and convincing Betty that a nice cushy six-figure gig with a non-profit is a lot less work in 2014.  And if we stick the landing on all five (or more!) of the legislative opportunities and the Ramco Commission, this will have an immediate and lasting effect on politics at the state level.  .

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The cover story in the Minnesota Bar Association’s Bench and Bar magazine this month is “Felony Disenfranchisement, Why 5 Million Americans Can’t Vote This November.” The cover art is a Black man in a jail cell. The authors are two criminal defense lawyers. The article raises all the usual DFL points but with one jarring note. Note this claim:

“Many believe felony disenfranchisement became a popular idea when it was clear the Constitution granted the right to vote to all of its citizens, regardless of race, since this was a method of preventing many blacks from voting. There is strong evidence, arguable rock-solid proof, that the laws were in fact intended to target and ultimately eliminate the black vote.”

And compare it with this complaint:

“Minnesota is not among the states that have made felony disenfranchisement laws less oppressive. In fact, Minnesota has not changed its law since it began disenfranchising felons in 1857.”

Now wait one minute. Minnesota was a territory in 1857, it didn’t become a state until 1858. The 15th Amendment was adopted in 1870, AFTER the North won the War. But felons were disenfranchised in Minnesota 10 years earlier. Early legislators somehow knew that one day the state would send men to fight in a War to gain independence for Blacks and that eventually we would need to lock up those same Blacks to take away their voting rights, so our prescient ancestors quickly adopted this law first!

Since that piece of “rock-solid” proof is obviously false on its face, the rest of the arguments in the article are so suspect as to be unpersuasive. I’d need a lot more convincing before I’d vote to overturn 150 years of unbroken precedent to give convicted felons more rights.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

The anti-Voter-ID movement started by pulling ever-growing “cost impacts”, to put it in the classical Latin, de anus.  Why would wholesale manufacturing of history be a stretch?

Wednesday, I gave my seat-by-seat picks for the Minnesota House.  Yesterday, I took a shot at the Senate.

Today?  We wrap everything up into what pass for my “predictions” for this race, with thanks to Tony Petrangelo at Left MN, whose district-by-district ratings provided the food for thought that led to this particular bit of rhetorical meringue pie.

Disclaimers:

• I claim no scientific methodology behind my picks.  Their rationales vary – from word on the ground in various districts to gut feelings about others
• I also put no personal weight behind them
• Please do not wager actual money base on these predictions

However, while I admit the pure subjectiveness of this exercise, there’s method to the madness.  While Petrangelo, in his original exercise on the subject, noted that he’d kept his race-by-race rating entirely tied to empirical measures like money raised and voting history, there are some other currents involved that led me to make some of my predictions that deviate from Petrangelo’s conclusions:

• Redistricting invalidated a certain amount of history, or at least put an asterisk by it. 
• Some campaigns are running very strong, aggressive races in districts where, historically, their party has not in the past.  History would show a lack of results for the party that this election, I think, may belie. 

But of course, there’s no such thing as a “toss-up” in real-world elections. Those “toss-up” votes have to go somewhere. Petrangelo rated many more districts “toss-ups” than I do. I rated – very possibly erroneously – a number of districts as leaners or likelies, but with others, there was just no obvious way to make the call.

So how do the “toss-ups” break out?

While I thought of simply dividing them up according to the current enthusiasm gap, that’d just be wishful thinking; I already accounted for that, to some extent, in the races I converted from “Toss-ups” in Petrangelo’s ratings to “leaners” in my own.

So I’ll try three different approaches, and pick one at the end:

• Best Case:  This turns into a Romney wave that sweeps into Minnesota.  I’ll say 75% of the current “toss-ups” go GOP.
• Middle Case:  The toss-ups split; in addition, I’ll assume that 20% of the toss-ups that I converted to “lean GOP” will go DFL
• Worst Case:  All the toss-ups go DFL. (I’ll leave my conversions in place to provide an arbitrary fudge factor, since the “all DFL” scenario seems unlikely).

I’m going to take my middle case, and fudge the GOP numbers down one.  Just because.

That makes my prediction:

• Senate: 35 GOP / 32 DFL
• House:  70 GOP / 64 DFL

It’s unscientific.  Heck, it barely qualifies as free verse.

But I’ll run with it.

These things always pick up around election time:

The ReTHUGliCONs in the Legislature did teh terrible job; shutting down teh state government and not doing anything other than teh culture war!:   Yep.  Nothing!

Oher than eliminating the “deficit” without raising taxes, of course. Or keeping the state’s unemployment rate a point or two below the national average, or enacting some key regulatory reforms in the face of a dilatory and disingenuous governor?

FYI, Dayton chose the shutdown, not the GOP, which was negotiating with him ’til the last second, and observed that there was really nothing they could say or do that’d prevent Dayton from shutting down except completely caving in.  Which, for all of you who remember Dayton’s palaver during the campaign about “reaching across the aisle” and “bipartisanship”, should ring a bell or two (and don’t even think about saying the GOP didn’t give; the GOP gave on between two and five billion dollars in spending, depending on the budget proposal  you look atl.

And it was only when the “Governor” went to “rallies” in Albert Lea and St. Paul, sparsely attended by dispirited government union employees, that he retreated to Saint Paul and dealt on the deal.

Of course, his PR cover – from the Strib all the way down to Minnesota Progressive Project – has been running cover for those facts ever since.

Didn’t you say you thought Obama would win?:  Until recently I figured it was fairly certain he would.  Incumbency is a tough nut to crack.  Incumbents who have the entire mainstream media serving as their Praetorian Guard are even worse.

But the full statement, remember, is “I think the President will win; in fact, if the President doesn’t flip twenty seats in the Senate and 75 in the House, it’ll be a pretty humiliating exercise”.  It’s at least partly smack-talk, partly commentary on the dreamy millenarianism of Obama’s original support.  After four (?) years, our economy sucks worse than ever, our standing in the world is diminished (except among chuckleheaded media and social elites, in a few cases), and our society is on the brink of a fiscal cliff I’m not sure Calvin Coolidge could ward off.  So yes, “light worker”; work your freaking magic!

You Are Teh Heppocreet! When Polls were showing Democrats ahead, you said “look at teh partisan breakdownz!”  But now that Mittens is leading, you are quiet about them!:  Have you looked at the partisan breakdowns?  They still have Dems in the majority.  Not “Bigger and badder than 2008” majorities, like the Minnesota Poll, but majorities.  And yet Mitt is closing in on all the polls where he’s not ahead.

Tell you what – you don’t like the polls, you go ahead and do the analysis.  Note:  “Rasmussen is teh ReTHUGliCON, ZOMG” is not “analysis”.  I don’t care what the Daily Kos says.

In these “Frequently Asked Questions” posts, you frequently show your as pre-literate trolls with bad spelling.  Why?  I blame Twitter.  It’s exposed me to way too many lefties who are not only wrong, but both depraved and illiterate.  The best thing the Democrat Party can do is bar its members from being on Twitter unless they pass an intelligence and literacy test.

Don’t believe me?  I invite you to a day in my Twitter world.

Joe Doakes emails:

I know modern elections are poll-driven, Barak Obama’s more than most. And I get that the Benghazi attack is a black eye. But can it truly be the case that more Americans would prefer to elect Sergeant “I-Knew-Nothing” Schultz instead of Harry “The-Buck-Stops-Here” Truman?

Joe Doakes

This was the episode where Sgt. Schultz got promoted above his Homeland Security Director Klink, right?

Apparently Mitt Romney’s big flaw is that when asked for his honest opinion about a company at the time of a divorce trial between a CEO and an insane woman, he didn’t purjure himself. .

UPDATE: “Purger?”  Wow.  I did need coffee.

Yesterday, we teed up with the House.

Today – using Tony Petrangelo’s district by district ratings as a jumping off point – I’ll take my whack at the Senate.

As noted yesterday, my predictions are largely – but not purely – subjective.  That being said, my subjective predictions, when they’re not woefully off (Mark Kennedy in 2006) are usually pretty dead-on (I nailed the 2004 presidential election within eight electoral votes).

As always, you get what you pay for.

Tomorrow, the breakdown for the next round in the Legislature.

Son of Virginia congressman busted by Project Veritas.

Er, I missed what party he’s from. Did anyone catch that?

Nate Silver at the NYTimes has been widely respected for his ability as a statistician.

His reputation, though, seems to stem largely from his facility at what amount to rhetorical parlor tricks (he once earned a bit of a living counting cards at poker, and he made a name for himself with baseball stats), and his calling of the vast majority of the 2008 election slate correctly (with the help of an epochal wave election and lots of access to Obama campaign internal polling), leading to his hiring at the NYTimes in time for the 2010 race.

Silver’s method at the NYTimes involves…:

• Taking regional polls – from polling services as well as media polls – and…
• “weighting” them according to some special sauce known only to Nate Silver, Registered Statistical Genius.

Now, I wrote about Silver’s method two years ago, when he spent much of the race predicting Mark Dayton would win by six points (with an eight-point margin of error).  As I pointed out, Silver’s “methodology” involved giving a fairly absurd amount of weight to  polls like the long-discredited Star Tribune “Minnesota” Poll and the since-discontinued Hubert H. Humphrey Institute poll (for whose demise I sincerely hope I deserve some credit, having spent a good part of the fall of 2010 showing what a piece of pro-DFL propaganda it has always been).  During the middle of th 2010 race, Silver gave the absurdly inaccurate-in-the-DFL’s-favor (especially in close elections) HHH and Minnesota Polls immense weight, while undervaluing the generally-accurate Rasmussen polls and, to a lesser extent, Survey USA.

I said Silver’s methodology was “garbage in, garbage out” – he uses bad data, and gets bad results.  I was being charitable, of course; his methodology, untransparent and proprietary as it is, processes bad data into worse conclusions.

That was in 2010.

Today?  NRO’s Josh Jordan reaches the same conclusion:

While many in the media (and Silver himself) openly mock the idea of Republicans’ “unskewing polls” (and I am not a fan of unskewedpolls.com by any means), Silver’s weighting method is just a more subtle way of doing just that. I outlined yesterday why Ohio is closer than the polls seem to indicate by looking at the full results of the polls as opposed to only the topline head-to-head numbers. Romney is up by well over eight points among independents in an average of current Ohio polls, the overall sample of those same polls is more Democratic than the 2008 electorate was, and Obama’s two best recent polls are among the oldest.

But look at some of the weights applied to the individual polls in Silver’s model. The most current Public Policy Polling survey, released Saturday, has Obama up only one point, 49–48. That poll is given a weighting under Silver’s model of .95201. The PPP poll taken last weekend had Obama up five, 51–46. This poll is a week older but has a weighting of 1.15569.

So it wasn’t just Minnesota!

And remember – PPP polls, while leaning a little left, are not generally flagrantly inaccurate in the sense that the Strib is and the HHH was.

And it’s not a fluke…:

The NBC/Marist Ohio poll conducted twelve days ago has a higher weighting attached to it (1.31395) than eight of the nine polls taken since. The poll from twelve days ago also, coincidentally enough, is Obama’s best recent poll in Ohio, because of a Democratic party-identification advantage of eleven points. By contrast, the Rasmussen poll from eight days later, which has a larger sample size, more recent field dates, but has an even party-identification split between Democrats and Republicans, has a weighting of .88826, lower than any other poll taken in the last nine days.

Jordan reaches a conclusion that even I didn’t:

This is the type of analysis that walks a very thin line between forecasting and cheerleading. When you weight a poll based on what you think of the pollster and the results and not based on what is actually inside the poll (party sampling, changes in favorability, job approval, etc), it can make for forecasts that mirror what you hope will happen rather than what’s most likely to happen.

Well, you can – if your goal isn’t so much to measure the nation’s zeitgeist (and report on it) but affect the election.

Which has, of course, been my contention all along.