North Star Politics

Minnesota delegates react to Murtha's declaration:

Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and top House Democrat on military matters, called Thursday for U.S. troops to come home from Iraq now. Here's what Minnesota's representatives and senators said in response:

come home now from Iraq. Here's what Minnesota's representatives and

senators said in response:

Yeah, that's the entire text of the article. Come on, Strib, we bloggers, voters, and citizens rely on you for our political news.

The Republicans' 2006 campaign strategy has just recieved the official NSP stamp of endorsement.

A Republican NOT guilty of corruption? Oh well. Good for him.

Really, how could any Minnesota liberal blogger not support Amy Klobuchar when she does stuff like this?

It's tough to keep close track of the MN-Gov race and impossible (for this blogger, at least) to decide who's most worthy of support at this point. Mike Hatch, Becky Lourey, Steve Kelley, and Kelly Doran all seem like strong candidates. Hatch clearly leads the pack at this point, but Lourey seems to have a substantial natural constituency, and Doran has the money to make his mark in the contest. Kelley needs to step up his game, as he's getting drowned out by the other three.

Lourey officially announced today. Hopefully the field won't get any more crowded - four major candidates is more than enough for a good race. May the best DFLer win.

I, like so many other Americans, generally hate Congress.

Most of Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, are total hacks. So much awful corporate-written legislation has been passed in the last few years that it seems an inescapable conclusion that most of Congress is owned - legally or illegally - by big business. A few examples of this are the recent bankruptcy bill, the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, and the odious DMCA. These three bills are little or no more than corporate giveaways to the industries which need it least.

A recent issue is the controversy over Sony's rootkits. Basically, Sony has been adding software to its music CDs which causes problems with Windows, creates security threats, reports on what you're doing to Sony, and is nearly impossible to detect or remove. This is the kind of stuff that bad legislators and bad legislation enable. Is what Sony did illegal? Quite possibly. But is it illegal to circumvent the stuff under the DMCA? Also quite possibly.

I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican, conservative or liberal, or what office you're running for. If you're the kind of person who will allow this kind of stuff, you don't deserve your office.

And yeah, it hurts me to know that Pres. Clinton signed the DMCA, and (though I can't find the voting record) I'm sure plenty of Democrats voted for it in Congress. I'd like to be able to chalk most of that up to not realizing how bad that particular piece of legislation would be, but that's not realistic. The Democrats who supported the bankruptcy bill have absolutely no excuse. Corporate hacks from either party have no place in any elected office, much less Congress. If you're a Democratic hack and you're running against a Republican who's not a tool, I'm going to support the Republican every time. Honesty and integrity are worth too much to do otherwise at this point in political history.

The Strib is reporting that Kelly Doran picked up several northeastern state politicians' endorsements over the weekend. For Doran's campaign, that's a pretty big deal: as far as I can tell, these are the only politicans above the local level that have endorsed Doran. Compare this to Mike Hatch's list (warning: Hatch's website is awful) of endorsements. I'm a little bit surprised by this move; it's not clear to me what Doran would offer to northeastern Minnesota that Hatch wouldn't. There's obviously something that went on behind the scenes here to cause this group to endorse Doran.

It's still relatively early in this race - still a year out with at least one major candidate (Becky Lourey) yet to officially declare - but Doran had better move quickly or he's going to lose the endorsement and the primary. His name recognition still seems to be pretty low, and it's not clear how much the ad buy that the article mentions helped (I didn't see a single ad).

C&B says Pres. Bush is coming to fundraise for Kennedy on Dec. 9th. Co-hosting the affair? Gov. Pawlenty, Sen. Coleman, and Reps. Gutknecht, Kline, and Ramstad. Kennedy and the others are once again choosing to associate themselves with Bush, who will increasingly drag them down as we come closer to Election Day. Judging from what we've seen in the year since Bush's reelection, by Nov. 2006 Minnesota voters aren't even going to contemplate voting to continue the Bush agenda.

I'm seeing Amy Klobuchar ads on Daily Kos. I haven't seen these before, and I'm assuming they're new. This signals an interesting move for the campaign in that she's moving to fundraise/appeal to a nationwide audience. Are Klobuchar's Minnesota donors tapped out? Does she feel that the primary election is so well locked up that she can afford to focus on the general?

UPDATE: I'm told that Klobuchar announced an online ad buy today at an energy policy speech at the U; this is obviously it. I'll see if I can get more details on this later.

UPDATE #2: Not much, but here's an article.