Getting around to some old items, here is a great video from the Vets for Franken Rally.
Check out the Vets for Franken site. There are 5 other videos there from the rally featuring Senator Bob Kerrey, Dr. Bob Meaders, Steve Sarvi, Jim Bootz, and State Senator Steve Murphy. Check ‘em out!
Monthly Archive for November, 2007
Page 2 of 7
Pat Doyle has a must read post at the Big Question…
I wonder what MnDOT commissioner Carol Molnau thought about Chinese highways when she visited China for government business shortly before the 35W bridge collapsed.
I recently spent a couple of weeks in that country and was surprised to find an urban highway system in better shape than the stretch of 35W and I-94 in much of Minneapolis and St. Paul…
…The patchwork and indentations that mark the Twin Cities expressways were largely non-existent on highways in four major Chinese cities; their thoroughfares are new and well maintained.
One might expect this in Shanghai, a modern business capital, and in Beijing, which is putting on a good face for the 2008 Olympics. But even Wuhan, an interior city of more than 5 million that few westerners visit, had highways in better shape than those in the Twin Cities.
All of this in a developing nation where per capita GDP is $7,800
Emphasis is mine. Here we are, in one of the richest states in the richest country on Earth, and we still suffer through a transportation system that is decades out of date. Its embarrassing.
My compatriots, for whatever reason moved away. Maybe it was wisdom. Whatever it was you can feel free to project your righteous hostility on them from afar.
Jiminy Christmas it’s cold.
Zack Adds: Believe me, I would trade weather with you in a heartbeat. I miss Minnesota and I miss the winter. This southern state stuff isn’t working for me. Everybody drives slow and they think its cold at 55 degrees. Give me some snow and a real winter, I’m already tired of this summer-without-the-leaves garbage. Though its still far away, I’m already counting down the days to graduation and return to the northland.
Matt Adds: I was back for Thanksgiving in Minnesota and it was snowing. I came back to Philly and it was raining. I don’t mind the cold, in fact, I don’t mind it really cold, but what I dislike immensely is kind-of-cold and rainy. In other words, I’m with Zack, let’s switch because the weather in Philly has been garbage for weeks now.
In this months Atlantic Monthly Andrew Sullivan, writes a laudatory — and very very convincing article on behalf of Barack Obama’s run for President. Read it!
Goodbye to All That
Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America — finally — past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly — and uncomfortably — at you.At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war — not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade — but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war — and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama — and Obama alone — offers the possibility of a truce….
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man — Barack Hussein Obama — is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
Mike Ciresi will be doing a couple of radio interviews tomorrow…
Tomorrow morning Mike will be making two appearances on metro radio stations. At 9:00 am, Mike will spend an hour with Ron Rosenbaum on the Bob Davis Show on AM1500 KSTP. Mike will discuss his decision to run for the U.S. Senate and desire to see a brighter future for all Minnesotans. After stopping at KSTP, Mike will go over to KFAI, which broadcasts from the atrium of the Midtown Global Market, to appear on the Conversations with Al McFarlane radio show. If you can’t access KFAI 90.3FM in Minneapolis and 106.7FM in St. Paul, you can always stream the show from KFAI.
Great chance to listen to Mike if you are on the fence in the battle for the DFL endorsement.
This endorsement will be a major factor in this face.
UPDATE: No one should be surprised by this endorsement, but don’t let that trick you into thinking its not a critical development in this race. In addition to their oft noted fundraising prowess, EMILY’s List is a great resource for campaigns; offering candidate and staff trainings and connecting candidates with experienced staffers and consultants. Bonoff, who is already putting together a well financed and well staffed campaign, got a major boost today with this endorsement.
UPDATE: No one should be surprised by this endorsement, but don’t let that trick you into thinking its not a critical development in this race. In addition to their oft noted fundraising prowess, EMILY’s List is a great resource for campaigns; offering candidate and staff trainings and connecting candidates with experienced staffers and consultants. Bonoff, who is already putting together a well financed and well staffed campaign, got a major boost today with this endorsement.
Continuing with my “things a should have blogged about over the holiday but didn’t” series, SurveyUSA released approval ratings for this month and, once again, Amy Klobuchar scored over 60%. I have to agree with the vast majority of my fellow Minnesotans: Amy is doing a great job.
Minnesota’s other Senator, Norm Coleman, saw his approval rating bump back up over 50%, which is certainly a positive for his camp. But a couple of the poll’s internals should give him pause. Coleman scores a 64% approval in Northeasten Minnesota. For anyone who knows anything about Minnesota politics, that should be a warning sign. There is absolutley no chance that 64% of Minnesotans on the Range and in Duluth approve of Coleman’s performance. My guess is that this number will drop next month by 15-20 points, which would drop Coleman back to about a 45-48% approval statewide (which is what he has been scoring in most polls recently).
Minnesota’s other Senator, Norm Coleman, saw his approval rating bump back up over 50%, which is certainly a positive for his camp. But a couple of the poll’s internals should give him pause. Coleman scores a 64% approval in Northeasten Minnesota. For anyone who knows anything about Minnesota politics, that should be a warning sign. There is absolutley no chance that 64% of Minnesotans on the Range and in Duluth approve of Coleman’s performance. My guess is that this number will drop next month by 15-20 points, which would drop Coleman back to about a 45-48% approval statewide (which is what he has been scoring in most polls recently).
I missed it due to my Thanksgiving travels, but Congressman Keith Ellison won praise from the Star Tribune’s Editorial Board last week for his advocacy for a detainee at Guantanamo Bay:
There’s nothing especially unusual about Sami al-Haj — unfortunately. He’s just one of the hundreds of detainees being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There’s no known evidence of his guilt. He has not been charged with any crime. He has no rights, only limited access to his lawyer and no reasonable hope of release anytime soon. Again: nothing too unusual.
But he does have one distinction: a defender in the U.S. Congress. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., has taken notice of al-Haj’s case and has helped draw attention to it. That the sole Muslim member of Congress would speak up for a Guantanamo detainee might seem to play into the hands of critics like CNN’s Glenn Beck, who challenged Ellison to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”
The editorial notes one of the more compelling arguments for closing Gitmo (aside from the fact that it contradicts many of the core principals upon which our nation was founded): its a recruiting tool for terrorists.
Ellison, though, thinks those enemies are drawing strength from U.S. practices at Guantanamo. “I really am concerned about how killers across the water use this stuff” to recruit suicide bombers, he said recently. “One of the best defenses America has is the good will of the people of the world. … Guantanamo is a stain on America.”
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the al-Haj case is the suggestion that he was detained because he was a journalist working for Al Jazeera.
Another al-Haj advocate, lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, charges that nearly all of al-Haj’s interrogation sessions have focused on his work as a journalist. He told Columbia Journalism Review that his client “is clearly in Guantanamo for one reason only, and that’s because he’s an employee of Al Jazeera.”
Al-Haj, who has a wife and young son at home, seems to share that perception. He reportedly told interrogators, “I am not sure I can ever go back to journalism. It is too dangerous, and I want to be with my family.”
In other words, if al-Haj’s detention really is meant to deter journalists, it’s working.
You don’t have to like what Al Jazeera puts on the air, and their record of accuracy is sometimes suspect, but it is deplorable to detain someone simply because of their association with a news network. In fact, its downright un-American.
Fox News has actually aired commentary that makes sense… I, I just don’t know what to say… take a look for yourself:
Congressional Quarterly joins the ranks of those that think Norm Coleman is extremely vulnerable. They’ve placed the Minnesota Senate race in their “No Clear Favorite” catagory:
Months of grass-roots electioneering have convinced many Minnesotans that comedian Al Franken’s candidacy is serious, and polling shows either he or his main Democratic rival, millionaire lawyer Mike Ciresi, would be a strong challenger to Coleman’s second-term bid. The senator battles tepid support in the state; polling by SurveyUSA indicates that his approval rating has not broken 50 percent at any point since May, although he maintains strong support among Republicans. Coleman was a strong supporter of President Bush early on but has distanced himself since; he criticizes Bush’s handling of the Iraq War but so far has resisted withdrawal timelines.
This catagorization follows “The Fix” moving the Minnesota Senate race up its rankings of seats most likely to switch partisan control from #8 to #6. Clearly the national pundits and prognosticators have recognized that both Ciresi and Franken are in position to beat Norm Coleman next fall.
I’d like to thank Lori Sturdevant for highlighting MNPublius’ report on Roger Moe’s endorsement of Mike Ciresi;
The tee-hee response of the recent college grads at the DFL-leaning MN Publius blog: “Ciresi endorsement letter from Moe (Larry and Curly Yet to Weigh In.)”
Two small corrections for Ms. Sturdevant, unlike my booklearned compatriots I, am not a college grad, recent or otherwise, and I have a very deep belly laugh. None of this tee-hee stuff.
Sturdevant’s column in this morning’s Strib “Ciresi fans say Franken could be the issue” hits at the common argument against Al Franken, that he isn’t electable in November 08.
The argument made Tuesday: A DFL recapture of the late Paul Wellstone’s seat depends on making Coleman, not his DFL challenger, the issue come October. And in his long career as a professional satirist, Franken has given the opposition a potentially damaging stockpile of rhetorical ammunition.
I had a discussion with a prominent former DFL officeholder that centered around that argument. That when push came to shove the most important thing was ensuring a DFL victory in November, and the easiest way to get the W was by making the race about Norm Coleman and 8 years of uninterrupted Republican stupidity — and not about the things that Al Franken said as a performer and satirist.
I was going to spend this weekend contemplating who would get my support, both in the Presidential race and in the Senate race. I think I decided on my Presidential pick, but I’m still no closer to deciding if Al Franken can beat Norm Coleman, or if Mike Ciresi (or even Jack Nelson Pallmeyer — aho!) is the right pick for the DFL.
*Sean’s Note: This is my opinion, and my opinion only*
Mark Ritchie should have taken personal responsibility for the use of a public list by his campaign from the very first day.
OMG! That’s right. I said it.
But here’s the deal; it’s not illegal. It’s a big great gray area. Should he have done this? Obviously not. Should he be penalized for this? Only if it’s found that he broke the law, and as the Star Tribune story this morning points out, it doesn’t seem like he did.
“There must be a wall between constituent information compiled at public expense while representing the public and the transfer of that information for use in campaigns,” said Steven Clift, a digital democracy expert based in Minneapolis. “Ideally, secondary use would be prohibited. Or, if an incumbent can use it, then everyone should be able to access it, including challengers.”
(emphasis mine)
Secondary use isn’t prohibited currently (I’m not a lawyer, but I did check with the pertinent parts of state election law on this, and I’m pretty sure this is the case, if I’m not let me know), but I think that it should be. Secretary Ritchie was wrong to do this in this case and he should spearhead the attempt to make sure it can’t happen in the future, and that there are tough penalties for those who do mix information compiled at public expense with political activities.
But finally, don’t think that this is about what Mark Ritchie did wrong. Republican operatives could care less about what he did wrong, what they want to do is to attack a very outspoken liberal whose views they don’t like, because they think of it as payback for perceived aggressiveness against she who likes to disenfranchise.
Republican’s got embarrassed by the vicious beating laid upon Kiffmeyer by someone they derisively call a communist (that’s so 1980 you guys!) and now they want to make his professional life a living hell. Thats okay, and the proof is going to be in the pudding; the preparation for the elections next year and their success, and the functions of the Secretary of State’s office regarding Minnesota businesses.
This isn’t the last Republican attack you’re going to hear about Mark Ritchie.
Occasionally over the past few weeks, I have received phone calls or emails asking me about a rumor going around that Ash Madia was (gasp!) a Republican in college.
I am continually amazed by people who refuse to support good DFLers because they used to be Republicans. We should welcome converts, not shun them. I mean, c’mon, how else are we going to grow our party and win elections?
The hyper-partisanship that spawns this “once a Republican, always a Republican” mentality is not only bad political strategy, its bad for the country. It assumes an unbridgeable partisan gulf, or, to borrow from a certain former Senator from North Carolina, “two America’s” - one blue, one red, and never the twain shall meet.
Anyway, the rumor broke out into the blogosphere today when Michael Brodkorb published a couple of posts “exposing” Madia’s previous affiliations with the GOP. As an aside, I have to admit that I am tickled by the series of recent Brodkorb posts revealing that some DFLers used to be Republicans. I think Michael’s blog is becoming an authoritative history on the decline of the Republican moderate.
I wanted to give Ash an opportunity to defend himself against the scurrilous charges leveled against him and I just received this email from the Madia campaign. It’s kinda long, so some of it is after the jump.
Today, a Republican blog noted that I volunteered for John McCain for President in 2000 in an attempt to question my Democratic credentials.
I want this election to be about our country’s future, rather than about my past. However, if people are curious about my political evolution, here is my response.
When I was younger, I considered myself to be a moderate Republican, and I volunteered for John McCain in the race for President in 2000.
But even back then there were signs that I wouldn’t be a Republican for long. In 2000, a student newspaper wire service reported the following when they interviewed me at a Bill Bradley for President rally:
“Noting that he would work for the Bradley campaign before he would work for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Madia said he believed it’s never too late for a committed candidate to make a run for the finish. ‘Bill Bradley has so much integrity, he has so much heart, I wouldn’t count this race over until he withdraws from it,’ he said.” (“Younger voters still stick by Bradley,” by Michael Gannon, March 3, 2000, Medill News Service/Y Vote 2000, University Wire.)
Then, in the election season of 2002, when the Republicans stampeded the Iraq war resolution through Congress and shamefully attacked Sen. Max Cleland, I left the Republican Party for good and began to consider myself a Democrat. I haven’t looked back since.
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