James  B. Hovland, the Republican mayor of Edina, will be switching to the DFL and is seriously contemplating entering the race for the Dem nomination for the open Third District congressional seat.
Hovland will be meeting with representatives of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee shortly (possibly tomorrow) to get acquainted and talk about the race.
I haven’t spoken […]

Good Friday morning Fellow Seekers,
Media Matters for America is calling attention to a Rush Limbaugh rant from his show this past Wednesday in which he dismisses U.S., troops, including those now serving in Iraq, who disagree with President Bush’s stay-until-victory strategy as “phony soldiers.”
And my colleague Jeff Fecke at Blog of the Moderate Left wonders whether those, including […]

The unwelcome news of Susan Albright’s forced departure as editorial page editor of the Star Tribune prompted her former deputy, Jim Boyd to write a crisp, blunt piece for the Minnesota Monitor, where he works as a mentor and where most of my work is also cross-posted. The money section:
“The issue, however, goes beyond unfairness to an […]

Good Thursday morning Fellow Seekers, 
A few grim findings from the past five years of international polling by the Pew Global Attitudes Project:

Between 2002 and 2007, the percentages of Turks who said they had a positive attitude of the United States dropped from 55 percent to nine. Yes, nine. This in a country that is often […]

Fact #1:Everything about the mood of the country (we want change!), the partisan identification trends (Dems, 50- Repubs, 35), and the issue environment (for example, he said, polls show a spike in concern about rising levels of economic inequality) favors the idea that 2008 should be a very good year to run for office as a Democrat,says pollster […]

Wow. Every time I’m told someone has a really good shot at the Dem. or Repub. nomination, they take themselves out of the running the next day.
Here’s the full text of State Sen. Geoff Michel’s (Republican of Edina) email:
“Last week a great Congressman announced that he would not run for reelection next year.  Jim Ramstad […]

Good Tuesday noon, Fellow Seekers, 
Sorry, I’m a couple of days late providing a link to reporter Dan Eggen’s piece in Sunday’s Washington Post following up on the Office of Special Counsel investigation of Rachel Paulose’s management of the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota.
Eggen reviews l’affaire Paulose in general, confirms the ongoing special counsel investigation, and comes up […]

Good Tuesday Morning, Fellow Seekers of Wisdom and Truth,
The 1957 integration crisis at Little Rock Central High School (the 50th anniversary of which is this week) contains within it a little-remembered tale of journalistic heroism.
The larger story created many heroes. If you don’t know the basics here’s the two-paragraph version followed by the forgotten tale […]

Sen. Norm Coleman tells esteemed colleague Fred Frommer of the Associated Press that he will discuss the latest set of allegations about Rachel Paulose, U.S. attorney for Minnesota, with Judge Michael Mukasey, Pres. Bush’s nominee to be the new attorney general.
Coleman says he wants to make sure the allegations that Paulose mishandled classified material, retaliated […]

I claim not the tiniest portion of the scoop on this one, but in case you read it here first, Sullivan sent out an email unequivocally removing himself from the race, citing both family and business reasons. My former colleague Mark Brunswick has the text on my former blog, the Big Question.
Sullivan may have been […]

Just spoke to Andy Luger, who confirms that he has decided not to get into the race.
“I decided very late last night, I’m not going to run for Congress,” he said. 
Lugar said he found he couldn’t disrupt his law practice on such short notice after having done the same thing two years ago to run for […]

Hubert H. (Buck) Humphrey IV, who has been widely identified as a likely frontrunner in the race for the DFL nomination for the open congressional seat in the Third District has decided not to run.
“I will verify that,” Humphrey just told me when I called him to check out the rumor.
Humphrey, grandson of a vice […]

U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison of Minneapolis and House Judiciary Chair John Conyers have moments ago sent a letter to the acting U.S. attorney general demanding all communications from the staff of the Minnesota U.S. attorneys office to the Justice Department about Rachel Paulose’s management of the office, documents relating to the evaluations of her predecessor, Tom Heffelfinger that […]