North Star Politics

Posting will be light this weekend. My apologies.

For better or ill, Patty Wetterling is running in the 6th. I just wish she'd done it from the start.

Rep. John Boehner got the nod over ethically challenged Rep. Roy Blunt to replace Tom DeLay.

Link.

...will not be tolerated.

C&B has some new polling on the 6th district race. Wow. Patty Wetterling is very strong there compared to her Republican challengers. I think she has royally screwed up her Senate race and weakened herself if she enters the 6th, but if she can win it, great. What this shows beyond any doubt is that El Tinklenberg, though he may have been promised the chance to run, doesn't have what it takes to make it competitive, and if that's really true then he should let Wetterling take the shot.

I wish Wetterling had read the tea leaves before this whole debacle started and just run in the 6th in the first place. It would have made things a lot easier for everyone.

Does anyone else get the idea that, you know, Republican Minnesota might be a gigantic sexist?

I think that Patty Wetterling has either not made up her mind about what she's going to do, or if she has she's very unsure about it. Why? Things like this.

El Tinklenberg has been quite vocal about how Wetterling has promised not to run for the seat, how she has assured him that she wouldn't. The only two reasons I can think of for this is to pressure her not to run or to weaken her for the endorsement/primary if he knows that she will be running. Tinklenberg wants the nomination, and apparently he's going to do what he can to keep her out of the race.

State of the Union didn't nearly meet expectations, it seemed like. Then again, it seemed like the Republicans were staking their entire year on it. Democrats should capitalize. Republicans confirmed Alito today, but they're still a sinking ship. Tomorrow will have more Abramoff headlines, more DeLay headlines, more administration scandal headlines. They don't have momentum unless we think they do. Their momentum is no larger than it was yesterday, last week, or six months ago.

And hey, for everyone who's upset about Alito's confirmation: you can't win 'em all. We'll win back some seats in November, and we'll start to do better. We'll win back the White House in 2008 and we'll do a lot better.

Dissent will not be tolerated.

2006 needs to be like 2005, not 2004. The DFL needs to maintain the momentum they've built during the past year.

All the evidence points to Mike Ciresi entering into the Senate race, taking on Amy Klobuchar and a strangely renewed Ford Bell. I think this is a supremely bad idea. Ciresi is obviously entering the race extremely late; Patty Wetterling and Kelly Doran have already entered and dropped out, Ford Bell has made a good run and Amy Klobuchar has racked up money and endorsements and is now the clear frontrunner in the race. Ciresi, who will undoubtedly be using a good chunk of his not-inconsiderable fortune, almost has to go negative to have any hope of overcoming Klobuchar's overwhelming advantage in the short timeframe that he has to work with. At this point in the cycle, because it's going to be expensive for the candidates and troublesome for endorsers, his entrance is going to destabilize the race and it's likely that it'll get ugly fast. I would have been excited for his entry had it occurred six months ago, but it's now going to be the bane of DFLers for the next nine months. Ciresi's entrance is going to make the winner of the primary (which the race will likely come down to) less likely to be able to beat Mark Kennedy, and that is absolutely unacceptable. This blog wholeheartedly stands by its endorsement of Amy Klobuchar. The only way I will even consider supporting Ciresi is if he makes an ironclad promise to abide by the DFL endorsement, something we should regard as highly unlikely. Ciresi, a man who has apparently never held elected office, would have been much smarter to have started his campaign now for Sen. Coleman's seat in 2008.

Patty Wetterling, as most know, dropped out of the Senate race 11 days ago, leading to intense speculation (especially today) about her plans for the rest of this cycle. In short, her decisions make me want to scream. She was always a longshot during the Senate campaign, and despite many pleas for her to drop out and run in the 6th, she constantly rejected them until now, when she's on record promising, both to the public and to El Tinklenberg, that she wouldn't run. If she now chooses to run for the 6th, she will set up a probably ugly primary with Tinklenberg, just about the last thing we want in a GOP-leaning district. I wrote before she dropped that I hoped she'd run in the 6th, but I didn't realize she'd repeatedly stated that she wouldn't. At this point, I have to agree with my colleague Northern Debater - I'm mainly hoping that she doesn't run for anything at all this year.

Please, Ciresi. Please, Wetterling. Don't damage what we've built up over the past year.

Good job, Sen. Specter. First Alito, now this. A man of principle and conviction.

I'm not much of a media critic, and I haven't seen Brokeback Mountain. I've heard it's excellent, but what's been pretty interesting is following the mainstream media's reporting of the gay cowboy love story. What just caught my attention is the headline on CNN.com right now (2:17 A.M.): No SAG honors for 'Brokeback'. The byline reads:

Hollywood stars turned out to honor each other with Screen Actors Guild Awards -- and to get a hint of who might take home an Oscar. The SAG awards have a solid record of forecasting Academy Award winners. "Brokeback Mountain" led with four SAG nominations but was shut out entirely. Top SAG acting awards went to Reese Witherspoon ("Walk the Line") and Philip Seymour Hoffman ("Capote"). The ensemble cast award went to "Crash."

Is anyone else struck by this? CNN looks like it's trying to shout 'this movie is crap!' with the headline. Brokeback didn't garner any SAG awards; so what? Why is this a front-page story, even given the relatively-slow news cycle we're coming out of?