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The Schultz Report: Why didn’t Obama have any coattails in Minnesota?

In our first post-election installment of the Schultz Report, David Schultz talks about the mixed bag that last night brought for Minnesota Democrats–handing a 10-point margin to Barack Obama on one hand, but failing to net any congressional pickups and falling short of the five-seat increase needed to give the party a 2/3 majority in the Minnesota House.

“For all of those [down-ticket Minnesota] races,” notes Schultz, “you have Democrats coming in on average about 10 points behind where Obama was.” What gives?

3rd CD: Pelosi visits, Madia decries Bachmann, Paulsen attacks and Dillon speaks!

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visits Minnesota today to campaign for 3rd District DFL congressional candidate Ashwin Madia. Republican state Sen. Erik Paulsen’s new TV ad is called “Disturbing.” Independence Party candidate David Dillon held forth for an hour at the Humphrey Institute on Friday, and that night KSTP hosted a debate for all three contenders. Video and audio after the jump.

Millions want to see PalinAsPresident

The number of people who want to see Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as president may have started falling soon after the country made her acquaintance, but the overwhelming number who want to see PalinAsPresident have occasionally overloaded servers since the site started sweeping the Web in the past couple of days.

MnIndy Interview: Doug Henwood on the bailout, the ‘D’ word, and the Great Panic of ‘08

Yesterday afternoon I talked with MnIndy’s favorite business/economics journalist, Doug Henwood of the indispensable Left Business Observer, to see what he’s thinking about the economy and about the panic in credit markets, which so far seems unfazed by the bailout bill or by any of the other measures the Fed and the Treasury have undertaken. “Certainly the risk of something really nasty looks the highest it’s been since the end of World War II,” he tells MnIndy. “Now, if you want to draw some comfort from that, sometimes when people are thinking the world is coming to an end, that can be a sign that we’re close to the bottom. Or that we’re closer to the bottom than we are to the beginning.”

3rd District update: Madia ad swats back, Paulsen plays bachelor card, KSTP gives DCCC mailings an ‘F’

The knives are out in the 3rd District congressional race. A new Ashwin Madia attack ad answers Sen. Erik Paulsen’s, a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee mailing reaches with a strip-club charge, and a Paulsen stand-in plays up Madia’s marital and residential status (single, renter) and calls him “carpetbagger.”

The Schultz Report: Obama, Dems need a compelling alternative to the Paulson swindle

This week in the Schultz Report, we discuss the only issue that matters at the moment–the financial meltdown on Wall Street and the Paulson plan that’s currently being bum-rushed through Congress, which would give the US Treasury secretary absolutely unprecedented power to buy up bad debt with public dollars, and without any public oversight or future public benefit in the form of equity in the companies we’re bailing out.

MnIndy interview: Doug Henwood on Lehman, AIG, Gray Monday, and the economy

After Monday’s dramatic tumble in the financial markets–led by dire announcements about Lehman Brothers (bound for bankruptcy court), Merrill Lynch (absorbed by Bank of America) and insurance giant AIG (desperately seeking bridge loans)–I got in touch with Doug Henwood for some help in sorting out these latest developments and what they augur for the US economy on Main Street.

In a 20-minute interview taped Tuesday afternoon, Henwood–the publisher of the invaluable Left Business Observer newsletter and perhaps our most plainspoken economics journalist–took the measure of “Gray Monday” and the arc of the US economy.

The Schultz Report: The GOP’s Palin bounce; Al Franken’s Barkley bounce

After a couple of weeks on unscheduled hiatus during MnIndy’s coverage of the Republican convention and its aftermath, David Schultz and the Schultz Report are back with us today. In this audiocast, Schultz talks about Sarah Palin, evangelicals and swing voters, and he discusses a surprising turn in the Minnesota US Senate race: Independence Party endorsee Dean Barkley, who most observers expected to hurt Al Franken, seems to be peeling away Sen. Norm Coleman’s more tepid supporters and helping Franken.

RNC in review: A great photo essay by Mike Dvorak

Local photojournalist Mike Dvorak was out on the streets for MnIndy on Monday. Because we were featuring a lot of news photos and galleries that day, we decided to hold this collection of 42 images and showcase it today as part of our RNC week wrap-up.

MnIndy Video: Why gay Republicans endorsed McCain

The Log Cabin Republicans, a national federation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Republicans, met in St. Paul on Tuesday to endorse the ticket of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin. While acknowledging that McCain isn’t perfect on gay rights issues, the group was adamant in its belief that McCain wishes to, and can, [...]