The bluecollardaughter household was on the receiving end of the mother of all telephone push polls tonight. Actually, it was more of a sledgehammer or cudgel or bludgeon poll. The pollster started off with typical questions, such as how I felt certain MN elected officials were doing (ranking), but quickly moved into the following questions which I can only describe as "janky business" (it's late, we're just celebrating my husband's birthday, and my vocabulary is slimmer than usual):
--If you knew that Mark Dayton had fired an employee while he had a heart condition, and the employee sued him, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, would that affect how you feel about Dayton as a candidate?
--Mark Dayton gave himself an "F" for failure for his performance as a senator--does that affect how you feel about him as a candidate?
--Mark Dayton has said if elected he will raise taxes on the rich and on the middle class. That would mean he would raise taxes on a couple that were for example a police officer and a schoolteacher. Does that effect how you feel about him as a candidate?
My answer was "this would not affect my opinion" to all of these (cause ain't no skeevy phone poll going to), then I stopped the pollster and told her I don't participate in push polls. When I then asked the pollster who was sponsoring the poll, the woman would not give information due to "confidentiality."
Zing! I love technology. My caller ID read "opinion poll" at a Las Vega, Nevada number. A return call reached "McGuire Research" and reverse phone look-up at dexonline.com showed MCGUIRE RESEARCH Services LLC, Address: 5818 SPRING MOUNTAIN RD, LAS VEGAS, NV 89146-8711. A short time later, another pollster from the McGuire firm called back to "verify" I had been polled. She did not give her name, but the phone number of the call was from the same firm in Vegas. When I again asked who was the sponsor of the poll, I was told "no one knows that because it would influence how we ask the questions."
Guess we'll see what the MN Campaign Finance Board has to say...
While Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has gained much media attention at the forefront of the teabagger movement. However, all is not well in Teabaghanistan. Prominent teabaggers have been backing some candidates that the rabid followers do not like.
The following list of Tea Party organizations, from across the state of Missouri, have NOT endorsed Roy Blunt in his campaign for the U.S. Senate seat. When we received a notification that Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a strong supporter of Tea Parties nationally, and the originator of a "Tea Party Caucus" in Washington last week, will be coming to Missouri on July 31st to make phone calls with Roy Blunt from the St. Louis GOP headquarters, and to be a featured speaker at a Blunt fundraiser that night, we were shocked. We believe she has been grossly misled if she understands him to be a Missouri Tea Party candidate.
Tea Party participants believe the spending in Washington has to STOP. Roy Blunt voted for TARP and Cash for Clunkers. For Michele Bachmann to come to Missouri and give the impression that all the Missouri Tea Parties support Roy Blunt is an abomination of everything we have been standing up for. "Most Tea Party supporters I know will be baffled by Michele Bachmann helping someone with a record like Roy Blunt before the primary vote," said Jedidiah Smith, a Tea Party leader in Franklin County, Missouri.
This isn't the first time Bachmann has "betrayed the Tea Party movement." She backed the non-teabagger in a NJ primary and helped out by recording a robo-call.
Republican MN-GOV candidate Tom Emmer didn't waste any time commenting on Judge Bolton's ruling blocking the implementation of Arizona's "papers please" law. Unsurprisingly, Emmer restated his belief that states should be able to overrule federal laws with which they don't agree.
Every state has the constitutional authority, even the obligation to protect it's citizens from any threat to the safety of their person or their property.
The Court in this case ignores the real constitutional question in an attempt to justify the federal government's failure to secure our borders and create a realistic, consistent, easy to understand path to citizenship. We need to encourage immigrants who still desire the freedom and opportunity the United States is supposed to offer to enter this country legally and, further, to become productive and contributing members of the community.
How is asking any brown-skinned person for their papers related to protecting the citizens? Teabaggers and other racists have tried to claim that "illegals" have brought disease and crime into the US, but violent crime is way up in Maricopa County where the ever-vigilant Sheriff Joe Arpaio is cracking down on the illegals.
Emmer doesn't believe in providing any path to citizenship -- it's just doublespeak. Emmer understands his teabagger base wants to crack down on "illegals" and not provide any "amnesty" which is their way of saying any path to citizenship. The problem is he needs to sound less crazy than he sounded a few months ago:
"I think what Arizona has done is a wonderful first step," [Emmer] said.
It seems that he's relying on his attorney doublespeak skills.
Whether the story broke here on MPP or over at The UpTake.org, clearly videographer Bill Sorem's YouTube of Randi Reitan's personal boycott of Target Corp has gone viral. Personally, it seems to me that it was Mike's Blog Roundup that lit the firestorm:
MN Progressive Project: A Minnesota grandmother cut up her Target Card to protest Target giving $150,000 to RightWingNut candidate for governor Tom "I don't believe you can be a freedom-loving American and be a Democrat" Emmer.
Traffic was heavy here all day while more and More and MORE places picked up the story and linked to the YouTube (many embedded it); at last check the YouTube has been viewed 59,089 times. The story has gone far beyond local, like the and been picked up all over; from ABCNews.com and CBSNews.com.
MN Governor Tim Pawlenty is not on the road right now, that I know of, but there's enough stuff for a post. He is scheduled to be in Iowa for several days, beginning Saturday.
While mouthing off in DC earlier this week, he called the stimulus package "largely ineffective." A former McCain economic adviser, among others, published a reality-based, and therefore very different, view.
Also in DC, he said that the Republicans need to shed their elitist, country-club image, and strongly implied that he's just the man to pull it off. Former US Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) took issue. Timmy and Ricky are both regarded, in some circles, as 'future-of-the-GOP' types. It's unlikely that these two sorry stiffs will seriously start trash-talking each other, but it stands to be hilarious if they do.
TBag managed all of 3% in yet another poll of New Hampshire Republicans. Even the Minneapolis Star Tribune, normally a Pawlenty cheerleader, called his poll numbers so far "consistently dismal." I've been taking for granted that he'll officially declare for the race early next year. In the face of numbers like these, I'm a little less sure, but still pretty sure, that he will.
From 2020Hindsight, a former conservative educational policy advocate, closely aligned with Tea-Paw, in the state Department of Education is facing investigation. The post continues with great stuff like this:
Conservative public policy's chief goal is minimizing wealthy Minnesotan's tax burden. With public education occupying a substantial chunk of Minnesota's state budget, undermining public confidence in public schools mitigates public outrage over state funding cuts. National conservative educational policy, expressed in the federal No Child Left Behind Act, facilitates the anti-public agenda by creating a impossible performance standard. By 2014, every Minnesota school will, under NCLB standards, "fail." As Deputy Commissioner, Ms Anderson had been an enthusiastic supporter of NCLB and other conservative educational policy initiatives.
It's bad enough that conservative policy advocates work to unravel Minnesota's prosperity, anchored in our strong public education institutions. Cashing in at Minnesota school children's expense is uniquely distasteful. These allegations merit prompt attention from the Minnesota Management and Budget Office and the Office of the Legislative Auditor.
Below the fold is the Minnesota House district hPVI list.
As with the Senate district list the most democratic districts are significantly more partisan than the most republican districts. This is not surprising; as the house districts are further segmentations of the Senate districts we would expect them to retain some of the same partisan tendencies. You can see this in the graph, which looks very similar to the Senate hPVI graph.
And I've said it before, but I'll say it again, SD61 is really, really liberal. Really. For reals.
Last night I caught up with Katie Rodriguez, who's running for the State House of Representatives in district 32B (Maple Grove). A public finance expert and involved community member, she's brought a ton of energy to recent DFL campaign efforts in the west Metro, and this cycle she's taken the leap into running her own.
Bottom line: K-Rod rocks. She has a tough row to hoe -- Maple Grove has historically not been fertile ground for DFLers at the state level, and her opponent is incumbent Rep. Kurt Zellers, who will probably have the House Republican Caucus working hard for him in September. But Team Rodriguez has officially completed their "first pass" through targeted voters in their doorknocking efforts, having visited 11,000 households across the district so far.
There's already been a few political games being played -- in a recent Facebook post, she noted that "the MN GOP sent a Freedom of Information [request] to my previous employers to snoop around" ... in cases like this, it's almost too bad that FOIA requests don't force the requestor to publish all information they receive, so Katie's previous employers could send back great stuff about her expertise in public budget management and ensure that those missives were published in their entirety by the GOP.
In any case, the party opposite is clearly taking her challenge seriously. Nevertheless, Katie told me the response she's been getting from voters has been great, and that's good news both for her campaign and for Maple Grove.
The link to her campaign site is above -- if you're in the area, I strongly encourage you to get connected to and involved with Katie's campaign.
- Credit cards may create an 'implicit money transfer' from the poor to the rich, from The Huffington Post. Do you think credit cards would be widely available in this country, if they didn't?
- A reality check on the infinitely tiresome 'tax increases on the rich kill jobs' right-wing falsehood, via Blue Mass Group.
Republican MN-GOV candidate Tom Emmer was in Bemidji to listen. I'm guessing it won't help. He has no idea what's going on in MN if it isn't a Tea Party, MCCL or Taxpayer League issue. And even sometimes like this one when it is.
For example, he's recently gotten in trouble for claiming servers make $100,000 plus, proposing a tip penalty on servers and saying he wants a MN GI bill that was already enacted into law (he voted against it).
So listening to the guy from a rural MN telecommunications company explain all the cool stuff they could do if they got some Obama stimulus money should anger him, right? The teabaggers and Taxpayers League oppose the stimulus, right?
Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-MN) Tea Party Caucus is up to 49 members. But the party leadership are nervous. Today, Minority Whip Eric Cantor indicated he wanted nothing to do with it.
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) told the Richmond Times-Dispatch today that he would not be joining the caucus, because the tea party is "better left with the people," and not Washington politicians:
Cantor explained in an e-mail interview that the tea-party movement is "certainly not of Washington and in that respect it's better left with the people." [...]
"Part of what is so inspiring about the tea-party movement is that it is not structured like a political party and, instead, is a truly organic, grass-roots effort," Cantor said. "The movement was born outside of Washington and includes people of all political stripes - Republicans, independents and Democrats - who have come together out of frustration with their government in an effort to force it to change."
Minority Leader John Boehner and Cantor have to be nervous about another litmus test for the Republican party. Personally, I think it's great. The earlier we can identify a candidate as a teabagger, the earlier we can associate them with nutjobs like Bachmann.
Michele Bachmann founded the Congress' new Tea Party Caucus this month, July 2010. On the day it was announced, somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty five members of Congress had joined. (The number was indeterminate because some of the representatives that Bachmann identified as members of Congress--hadn't actually joined.)
The list of members was revised and Bachmann now identifies 47 congressional representatives as members of the Tea Party Caucus--more than ten per cent of the Congress want to be identified with the Tea Party movement.
But it's tricky. On her website and in this article, Michele Bachmann makes it very clear that she wants to benefit from the support of the tea party--but she won't "vouch for them."
"We don't want to be the mouthpiece for the tea party, we want to be the earpiece for the tea party. We don't want to control it or run it out of Washington. We don't want to vouch for the tea party."
MN Governor Tim Pawlenty is not on the road right now, that I know of, but there's enough stuff for a post. He is scheduled to be 
