South Dakota Politics

The Dems

Senator Joe Lieberman's former communications director:

When John Kerry ripped defeat from the jaws of victory last November, losing to a wounded president with a failed record, a few of us Democratic outliers took some solace in thinking that his campaign's dismal performance might actually force the party to own up to its mortal electoral weaknesses. Turns out we grossly underestimated the national Democrats' capacity for self-delusion and self-defeat.

The 1960s

Leonard and Felicia Bernstein famously gave a Park Avenue party for the Black Panthers in 1960s which Tom Wolfe famously wrote up as "Radical Chic" in New York magazine.  Ed Driscoll is having some fun with the anniversary.  Tom Wolfe:

"I was openly taking notes", he recently said, "but they just assumed that if I was there for New York magazine it was because I must have approved of what they were doing.":

I just thought it was a scream, because it was so illogical by all ordinary thinking. To think that somebody living in an absolutely stunning duplex on Park Avenue could be having in all these guys who were saying, 'We will take everything away from you if we get the chance,' which is what their program spelled out, was the funniest thing I had ever witnessed.

By the time of the 1972 presidential campaign, the ultra far-left anti-American politics that Wolfe observed in miniature in the Bernstein's duplex would come to dominate the Democratic Party--to varying degrees, right up to the present day. As I wrote last month, that was the year where the wheels really came off the Democratic Party:

Radical chic and punitive liberalism became the norm, to the point where McGovern compared Ho Chi Minh to George Washington in a Playboy interview, and his aides took to wearing upside down flag pins on their lapels.

This was a very different Democratic party from the New Frontier of JFK and LBJ's Great Society which, while was a little too big government for me (particularly as it ballooned under LBJ), had lots of redeeming qualities: they were patriotic; believed in strong defense at home; trying to spread democracy abroad; had a vigorous space program; and at least with JFK, willing to cut taxes.

The River

Rapid City Journal: "Gov. Mike Rounds on Friday called for a summit meeting with other governors from Missouri River states to discuss options for managing the drought-stricken river."

Zell Miller

More people are saying Zell was right.  Surprising people, like Senator Tim Johnson's spokesman during the 1996 Senate race.  Senator Daschle also had lots of run-ins with Zell, who wasn't a big Daschle fan, as Michael Barone notes here.

Ice Fishing

Our intrepid leader has a post this morning on ice fishing, a sport whose charms I have so far been able to resist, despite almost 15 years of Dakota winters.  Its not that those charms have no effect.  I find the site of fish shacks at twilight, their window glowing faintly, to be intensely romantic. 

But two things do occur to me.  One is that it violates one of my simple rules in life: If  Road, then Car; if Water, then Boat.  The second is that the sport would seem to be indicative of a bad marriage.  You turn over in a warm bed at 5 in the morning, look at your wife and think to yourself, "I'd rather be sitting on a frozen lake." 

Maybe one of those mornings after my wife and I have had one of our "discussions", I'll accept an invitation and try it out.

Election Stats at WaPo

Now that the official numbers are in, the Washington Post summarizes a few key facts:

The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate reported yesterday that more than 122 million people voted in the November election, a number that translates into the highest turnout -- 60.7 percent -- since 1968.

This is obviously important because it largely deprives the Democrats of one of their favorite whines, that Republicans win by suppressing the vote. 

It goes on to say:

President Bush officially won 62,028,719 votes, which was 50.8 percent of the ballots cast and 11.5 million more than he won in 2000. Sen John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) took 48.3 percent, or 59,028,550 votes. That was about 8 million more than Al Gore won in 2000. Independent Ralph Nader won 440,513 votes, less than 0.4 percent of the total. In 2000, he won more than 2.8 million votes.

Bush's margin was a bit narrower than at first thought-2.5% instead of 3%.  Both parties managed to substantially increase turnout on their respective sides.  The increase was much larger than the margin of victory.  But the Republican surge simply overwhelmed that of the Democrats. 

For some clues about where that Republican surge came from, see another article slated for Sunday's  WaPo, "The Red Sea," by David Von Drehle.  This is a journey into the heart of redness, which is to say that vast swath of territory that voted for Bush. 

Blogs

From George Marlin, author of a new book, The American Catholic Voter, in Catholic World News:

The Old Media doesn’t get it, and their ratings are plummeting, but the New Media now reacts with lightning speed.

That’s what happened to Senator Daschle. You can beat the propaganda machine of the old party system by just going the blogger route. So it makes a great deal of sense to me, and the phenomenon is going to grow even more.

It's Time

For the cold, that is.  Just took the girlfriend to get a new battery for her car and came home to find this great story by Steve Hemmingsen about that great winter sport of ice fishing.  Now that's a big ice shack.

War Between the States

Tonight is the big game in Brookings between the South Dakota State University Jackrabbits and the North Dakota State University Bison, i.e. the "thundering herd."  Apparently, the head coach of the Bison is from Doland, South Dakota, population 297, which is also the home of Kimberley Thune and Hubert Humphrey (he went off to college at University of Minnesota and stayed there).  Here's an AP story about SDSU and NDSU transitioning to Division I this year. 

When complaining about the cold, remember this...

From the book jacket of The Children's Blizzard:

January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.

By Friday morning, January 13, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.

The Daily Kos comes round to our way of thinking.

The Daily Kos was paid by the Dean campaign for what the Kos calls "technical consuting."  Reponding to the sudden attention that this has attracted in the blogosphere, the Kos insists that this is ok because there was "Prominent disclaimer on [the] website" . 

So let me get this straight: taking money for the sake of political action is perfectly ok so long as there is full disclosure.  Forgive me, but this seems periously close to the conservative position on campaign contributions.  Progress at Kos is progress indeed. 

Welcome!

Please welcome two great new contributors to SDP, Ken Blanchard and Jon Schaff, both political science professors at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota.  Professor Blanchard's specialties include Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy, and Biopolitics.  Professor Schaff's research interests include the Presidency, Politics and Religion, and American Political Thought.  We're looking to expand the parameters of SDP a bit.  While there will still be lots of South Dakota matters covered, it's good to reach out.  Anyway, see Ken's first post below, which discusses PEST, Post Election Selection Trauma, fitting for someone who knows about Biopolitics.  Like Ken, I see, I still subscribe to Harper's and the New York Review of Books and can sympathize with his thoughts.  I remember reading Lewis Lapham's new book last summer (he's the editor of Harper's) and wondering if we were living in the same country.  Here's the post I did at the time: "The Lapham Left, Fascism, and Daschle" (as I recall, Instapundit linked to that post and had much to say about Lapham). Anyway, welcome gentlemen!

Pleased to be Here

Like Groucho Marx, I am always hesitant to join any association that would have me as a member.  None the less I am delighted to be joining the unindicted co-conspirators at South Dakota Politics.  This more or less amounts to a merger between the existing blog that I and my colleague Jon Schaff ran for all of a month The Jim River Review.  Readers who are curious can look at the archives there, and may expect activity from time to time, at least for a while.  I would like to thank Jon Lauck and Jason VanBeek. 

Readers in the Aberdeen area may have seen the column I occasionally write for the Aberdeen American News.  As my first contribution, I offer the latest sample here:

PEST infects die-hard political losers*

*The title, of course, is the responsibility of my editors and none of my own.

If you happen to be compiling a list of all the things that were wrong with the recent election, jot this one down. George Bush may be the first president whose re-election produced a bona fide mental affliction among members of the disappointed party. So many New Yorkers sought therapy after the grim reality of Nov. 2 settled in on them, that their attending shrinks were able to identify a new neurosis: Post Election Selection Trauma or PEST. A definitive list of symptoms has yet to be worked out, but it will probably include incessant weeping, loss of sleep and a sudden desire to apply for Canadian citizenship.

It's one thing to be a sore loser. It is something else when this is diagnosed as a medical condition. Though psychology is out of my bailiwick, I do know what it is like to watch my party lose an election, and I can agree that medicinal remedies are sometimes in order. But as these are dispensed without prescription at the liquor department in a grocery store, I never thought to wonder whether they're covered by my medical plan.

As a political scientist I can diagnose PEST pretty well. It occurs in persons who were not prepared for the possibility of defeat. Republicans have usually been immune to this condition, owing to the fact that they tend toward pessimism. Of Republicans I know, about half had confidently predicted a Kerry victory while the other half were anxiously unsure. None would have fallen into a clinical funk had Florida or Ohio gone the other way.

By contrast, Democrats clustered in the lower east corner of New York state simply could not believe that George W. Bush would be re-elected. They had swallowed whole Michael Moore's portrait of the president as a malevolent clown, weak of mind and wicked at heart. Bush opposes gay marriage out of a desire to wipe out homosexuals. He opposes the Kyoto treaty on global warming not merely because he's wrong, but because he actually wants to destroy the environment. His war in Iraq was motivated by simple greed. He probably imagines he can load a giant tanker with Iraq's oil and sail away with it. On what planet could such a man be re-elected?

It didn't help that such outlets of liberal opinion as Harper's Magazine and the New York Review of Books did nothing all year but reinforce the Democratic Party line. I have been a loyal reader of both periodicals for a period of better than 20 years. While they were always liberal in bent, they used to be committed to articles that challenged the prevailing wisdom on both sides of the aisle. They were for that reason essential reading for liberals and conservatives alike.

But over the last year Harper's packed each issue with screeds against Bush and the Republican Party, with nary a dissenting voice to be heard. A vague impressionism has always been one of that journal's weak points. It's political writing relies all too often on hints, nods and winks, in lieu of evidence and argument. But of late it seems to have retreated into its own, slightly paranoid world. Editor Lewis Lapham provided proof of this when Harper's published his scathing description of the Republican National Convention days before the convention actually met.

The NYRB is more sober, but it has become just as unbalanced. In its pre-election issue 14 prominent authors were selected to comment on the choice facing Americans. Not one of them was able to imagine how anyone could vote for George Bush.

Small wonder then that New York Democrats were about as psychologically prepared for defeat on Nov. 2 as they had been for the Red Sox's victory a few weeks earlier. Imagine the poor soul with a Kerry button pinned to his Yankee's jacket, and a good case of PEST is hardly surprising. Perhaps the road to recovery lies in trying to understand those in New York, and in the larger country outside it, that went Republican. But just right now New York Democrats don't want to know what kind of country that is.

Neuharth Weighs In

South Dakota native Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today and the former CEO of Gannett Corporation, which owns the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, has weighed in on the CBS affair.  From Captain's Quarters (read the whole post):

Yesterday, Van Gordon Sauter slammed CBS for its "unremitting liberal orientation" that makes its news shows "unwatchable." Today, two new front-line essays reject the whitewash. Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, calls out CBS for its inaction:

Rather absented himself from the newscast Monday evening, the day the independent investigators' report and Moonves' response were made public. Then on Tuesday he was back in his usual role, after issuing a statement to CBS News colleagues that concluded: "I have seen us overcome adversity before. I am convinced we can do it again."

No apology. No acknowledgement that the buck stopped with him.

Rather has had many high points in a distinguished career since he succeeded Walter Cronkite on March 9, 1981. But this low point likely will haunt him forever, unless ...

Unless he quits the anchor's chair now, gives up any thought of continuing on 60 Minutes and helps his former co-workers who took the fall for his fumbling the ball find new jobs.

Interestingly and somewhat ironically, the paid advertisement for Neuharth's screed promotes NBC's Nightly News with new anchorman Brian Williams. Williams strikes a skeptical look for the camera, a hilarious counterpoint to Neuharth's scolding. He gazes out from the page as if thinking, "That's all you got?"

USA Today played its part in reporting the Killian memos, too. USA Today got all six Burkett-supplied documents and posted them on their website along with their interview of Bill Burkett on September 21st. This interview was the first time that audiences heard the tortured explanation of the chain of custody of the memos, the one involving "Lucy Ramirez," a livestock show, and burned originals. USA Today's Burkett interview demolished the notion that anyone not predisposed by bias against George Bush could have found Burkett an "unimpeachable" source:

Burkett's emotions varied widely in the interviews. One session ended when Burkett suffered a violent seizure and collapsed in his chair. ...

Burkett said he arranged to get the documents during a trip to Houston for a livestock show in March. But instead of being met at the show by Ramirez, he was approached by a man who asked for Burkett, handed him an envelope and quickly left, Burkett recounted.

"I didn't even ask any questions," Burkett said. "Should I have? Yes. Maybe I was duped. I never really even considered that." ...

After he received the documents in Houston, Burkett said, he drove home, stopping on the way at a Kinko's shop in Waco to copy the six memos. In the parking lot outside, he said, he burned the ones he had been given and the envelope they were in. Ramirez was worried about leaving forensic evidence on them that might lead back to her, Burkett said, acknowledging that the story sounded fantastic. "This is going to sound like some damn sci-fi movie," he said.

Now we know, of course, that Burkett even lied while supposedly coming clean to USA Today. Far from the notion of being duped never crossing his mind, we know from the CBS report that Burkett repeatedly insisted that CBS independently authenticate the documents (page 78, among others). In fact, that insistence should have raised immediate red flags for CBS producer Mary Mapes about the validity of the memos. Burkett couldn't tell the truth if he was bleeding to death, apparently.

Filibustering

Thanks to Instapundit, who linked to the "History Carnival," I found this historical background on filibustering.  Excerpt:

With the interpretation that Republican charges of Tom Daschle’s “obstructionism” regarding Bush’s judicial appointments played a key role in the Democratic leader’s defeat, Senate Republicans, led by Bill Frist, are toying with rewriting Senate rules to prevent filibustering against judicial nominees. "This filibuster is nothing less than a formula for tyranny by the minority," the majority leader recently remarked. Conservative theorists, such as John Eastman, director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and Ronald Rotunda of the Cato Institute, have embraced Frist’s crusade. Liberals, just as unsurprisingly, have resisted.

It is unlikely that the 109th Senate will make a more important decision: if Frist gets his way, the President will have a virtually free hand on judicial appointments until 2008.

Though the concept of a filibuster dates back to the 19th century, in the Senate since the Progressive Era, the filibuster passed through four distinct phases. The filibuster was rarely employed during the Roosevelt, Taft, and first Wilson administrations. Indeed, the first Wilson administration featured the opposite extreme, a structure similar to that of the current Congress: the use of the party caucus in a closely divided legislature, with the President passing two reform packages on almost straight party-line votes.

Wilson’s political mishandling of the U.S. entrance into World War I set the stage for ending the tradition of unlimited debate. Although an anti-war coalition had reelected the President in 1916, Germany’s resuming unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917 placed Wilson in an impossible position. Reluctant to recommend outright war, he instead introduced a measure to arm U.S. merchant ships for self-defense. When the Senate’s left-wing contingent, the peace progressives (about which I’ve written elsewhere), filibustered to prevent the measure from coming to a vote, the President fumed, “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.” In the resulting nationalist fervor, the Senate adopted Rule 22 that allowed debate to end with a two-thirds majority vote. The upper chamber then imposed cloture against the armed ship bill foes.

Adoption of Rule 22 ushered in the second, and most famous, phase of the history of filibustering. Southern foes of civil rights legislation consolidated their power by successfully arguing that the Senate, because only one-third of its membership changed with each election, was a continuing body, and therefore rules—including Rule 22—could only be changed by a 2/3 vote. Robert Caro analyzes the Senate of this era, which produced the longest filibuster in American history (Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour-plus rant) but ultimately the crushing of the Southerners’ power with the imposition of cloture for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Media

Glenn Reynolds:

Jay Rosen, who chairs NYU's Journalism Department, isn't impressed with the way media bigfeet like Dan Rather have dissed the bloggers.  Rosen writes:

I kind of resent your attitude toward your numerous critics who operate their own self-published sites on the Web.  They were being more accurate than you were, much of the time.

Yes.  Bloggers aren't perfect, but they don't have to be.  Nobody does.  But Big Media can no longer stand on their credentials; it's track record that matters, and the track record doesn't look that great.

Journalist Dan Gillmor says that CBS, and Big Media in general, should listen to its audience.  I think that's good advice.  I wonder how many of them will take it?

Oh, Canada

Now here's a great combination of journalism/creative writing/analysis showing some actual imagination and on-the-ground research.  An excerpt from a long and interesting piece in today's issue of the Canadian newspaper the National Post--it's entitled "The right road to freedom: In South Dakota, people are wary of radical change, swelled heads and style over substance":

INTERIOR, S.D. - On an unseasonably warm winter day in South Dakota's desolate Badlands, Jeanne Berry walks alone at the edge of the highway.

She waves to the occasional passing car and stares at the twisted spires of rock jutting into the sky. All that seems to grow here is grass and scattered junipers clinging to the eroded buttes.

Like the junipers, Ms. Berry is a survivor. Her husband once worked on a nearby ranch, where they raised 80 cattle of their own, but they were forced into bankruptcy after stock prices plunged in 1996. They had five children at home; the oldest was about to enter college.

In the worst times, Ms. Berrycleaned houses to pay the bills. Her husband eventually found work at another ranch, while she landed a stable federal position at the Badlands National Park office down the hill, where she is an administrative clerk. Her job, she says, is a blessing. Ms. Berry never sought government assistance for all the hardship she endured. A staunch conservative, she and her husband did not want others' help.

Like most South Dakotans, Ms. Berry fiercely defends her independence. The best thing the government could do to help, she says, is leave them alone.

"We like the idea of small government. We like the idea of individualism. We like the idea of small businesses being able to make it," she explains.

"People here are pretty much down-home country people. We just want to work and want to be paid for what we've done. We don't want government handouts. We just want to do what we can do."

The farmland in South Dakota looks much like the vast prairie directly north in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where individualism and small-town values are just as important. But while both provinces are comfortable with the pragmatism of their New Democratic governments -- Saskatchewan is the birthplace of medicare, and gay marriage was recently approved in both provinces without much of a fight -- the notion of a socialist government in Middle America is almost unimaginable.

Conservative values resonate throughout the Midwest. From the Mississippi River to the Rockies, all the way from the Canadian border to the tip of Texas, the U.S. electoral map is an almost unbroken sea of Republican red.  South Dakota has voted for Republican presidential candidates in all but four elections since 1896. Last year, George W. Bush handily defeated Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, winning 60% of the state's votes.

Locals cherish their hard-won personal freedom. They are wary of radical change, swelled heads, anything that smacks of style over substance. They mistrust anyone from Washington who hasn't stuck to their word -- and any politician from their state who no longer seems like a South Dakotan.

Ms. Berry voted for every Republican in the last election and the election before that.  She wears a heavy gold crucifix over her sweater and, like people throughout the state, speaks easily about her Christian faith when asked. She says the gay unions and abortion rights espoused by Democratic party leaders are simply wrong.

"I believe that life begins at conception," she says.

"I'm not prejudiced against gays, but I just feel like if you read the Bible, it's pretty much a given that [marriage] is supposed to be between a man and a woman. I don't ever remember reading anything about two men or two women."

The Republicans' focus on traditional values is certainly part of their success here. Though Democrats portray their party as the champion of the people -- insisting Republicans are the party of big business -- Ms. Berry sees Democrats as a threat to ranchers like herself, and thus to her family.

Bill Clinton was president when her family lost everything. Cattle prices have been higher under Mr. Bush than they have ever been in her life, she says.

"I'm 46 years old. All my lifetime, it seems like whenever there's a Democratic president, agriculture suffers," Ms.

Berry says. "It's better under a Republican, it seems like. I don't really know the reason why."

Despite their rugged individualism, farmers on both sides of the border are heavily subsidized. Under the Bush administration, U.S. farmers and ranchers receive US$17-billion in direct subsidies, or one-third of net farm income. Nearly half of all farms get some form of aid.

But they tend to be the larger ones. Ms. Berry, for one, has no interest in asking for help. "Government is us, when it comes down to it," she says. "It's supposed to be, anyway."

Want to read the whole thing?  It discusses Daschle and Thune too.  If so, here's a Word version: Download national_post.doc

Media

Charles Krauthammer:

First comes the crime: Dan Rather's late hit on President Bush's Air National Guard service, featuring what were revealed almost immediately to be forged documents.

Then comes the coverup: 12 days of CBS stonewalling with Dan Rather (a) calling his critics "partisan political operatives," (b) claiming falsely that the documents were authenticated by experts, (c) claiming he had "solid sources," which turned out to be an anti-Bush partisan with a history of prolific storytelling.

Now comes the twist: The independent investigation, clueless and in its own innocent way disgraceful, pretends that this fiasco was not politically motivated.

It does note that the show's producer called the Kerry campaign's Joe Lockhart to alert him to the story and to urge him to contact the purveyor of the incriminating documents. It says this constitutes an "appearance of political bias." What would producer Mary Mapes have to do to go beyond appearance? Show up at Kerry headquarters? CBS pursued the story for five years. Five years for a minor episode in the President's life? The story had been vetted not only in two Texas gubernatorial races, but twice more by the media, in 2000 and earlier in 2004.

Beef

Rapid City Journal: "A feud over whether the state of South Dakota should operate an animal ID database as part of Gov. Mike Rounds' South Dakota Certified Beef program erupted Wednesday during the first day of committee hearings in the 2005 Legislature."

Mailbag

A number emails like this have come in:

If you must ask, no, I was not bothered by you and Jason being paid by the Thune campaign. And frankly, I was not surprised to hear Markos Zuniga (KOS) got paid as well. Heck, one could have intelligently guessed that Zuniga was a paid hack simply by looking at his online CV.

But what really amuses me about this is how many in traditional media want to jump on the "paid hack" criticism bandwagon. First David Harsanyi, in today's Denver Post, takes a swing at Armstrong Williams; then Nick Coleman, Mr. Unfirable-with-the-Strib, flaps his gums about it.  I just wonder if Harsanyi and Coleman (among others) really want to go there.  There is a well-known practice among media pundits derisively known as "buckraking."  First coined by Alan Simpson in his book, it describes how pundits/reporters such as Bob Novak, Sam Donaldson, Judy Woodruff, and others give speeches to various trade and industry groups on various topics of the day. While there is no specific quid pro quo (as in the Armstrong Williams case), wouldn't you like to know how a speech by Sam Donaldson (at $20K-50K a pop) to the, say, HMO trade group, would affect how Sam Donaldson and ABC News would cover mis/mal/nonfeasance in, say, the HMO industry?  Media power is political power, after all.

How is this any different from what you, Kos, and Armstrong Williams have been doing?

_____

Denver, CO

There are a thousand different twists and turns in this debate, but the fundamental point is this:  blogs never claimed to be objective, and they aren't.  CBS News, the Argus Leader etc claim to be objective, and they aren't.  Having said that, the Dakota blogs were awfully dedicated to simply relaying information, i.e. 'did you see what the Washington Post reported today but that was ignored in South Dakota?' or 'take a look at this Daschle quote from 1990' etc...  And the fact that nobody has said the Dakota blogs got anything wrong says all you need to know. 

Kos/Williams etc

Instapundit reports on an email from Daily Kos:

And Kos emails to say that I'm wrong, and that he wouldn't jump on me if the situations were reversed -- in fact, he doesn't think there's anything wrong with what the DaschlevThune bloggers did.

Well, that's interesting, and I can't really get worked up about Kos, either.  If one couldn't tell Kos was pro-Howard Dean then, well, that person needs more than disclosure.  Insty thinks there should have been disclosure, but, while there's nobody in the blogosphere I admire more than Insty, he needs to know that it was reported in a front page top-of-the fold expose on bloggers in July in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, which the blogs had been jousting with for a couple of years (long before any consulting was going on).  I'm not sure Insty knows that.  And everyone already knew who the Dakota blogs favored.  For what it's worth, here's something I posted back when CBS, of all sources, started calling for blog regulations:

Anyway, the broad issue is the continuing plausibility of MSM's claims to be "objective" when they are obviously not.  Bloggers, on the other hand, have opinions.  It's what we do.  And that's why SDP started this site a long time ago--to criticize the Argus which, let's face it, favored Daschle in the last race.  Nobody is even contesting that, even the critics of the Dakota Alliance.  Nobody is presenting a series of arguments saying 'here's why the Argus should be considered fair and why the claims of bias are wrong.'  Want to get a sense of the Argus filter?  See this list of 66 stories in national newspapers and magazines that weren't helpful to Daschle that SDP put together in October.  The Argus didn't find them newsworthy, even though the WaPo, the NYT etc did.  I see Captain Ed has noted that CBS has started criticizing bloggers now that they're about to get nailed for "memogate" and noted some in the commentariat didn't like the fact that I was a consultant to Thune, but I did a long post explaining the many problems I saw at the Argus long before I was a consultant.  And SDP and Sibby and others (there was criticism going back 20 years, as it turns out, pre-blog, as the blogs discovered and revealed to those who didn't know about it) were criticizing the Argus a year-and-half before any consulting was going on.  And the Argus reported I was a consultant on the front page the month after I agreed to be one.  Kos and Atrios and maybe other liberal bloggers are consultants too.  They have opinions.  Good for them.  Other bloggers take partisan advertisements, and good for them too.  Blogs never claimed to be "objective" as CBS did.  Anyway, if one read the blog for more than a post they would know it was pro-Thune.  And nobody ever wrote in and said 'what you wrote about Daschle/Argus was wrong.'  I would have posted a correction immediately.  It was mostly stuff that the Argus simply refused to report.  The posts included links and/or text with citations for people to review the information for themselves.  Sometimes a pdf of the articles/information was posted.  It would have been easy to critique or debunk what was written on the blog, but let's face it, the evidence was strong and there wasn't room for debunking.  That's why Daschle and the Argus didn't try.  If they have counter-arguments, let's hear them, at long last.  As for the FEC, this is absurd.  Who is actually in favor of the FEC "regulating" the blogosphere?  CBS?  Captain Ed says it best:

So now CBS favors regulating political speech? Will CBS, with their vaunted credibility in shreds after the Memogate debacle, agree to allow government regulators pre-screen their content in order to make it more credible? I suspect that ABC and the New York Times may decline to go that far in propping up CBS against the blogs.

Beginning next year, the F.E.C. will institute new rules on the restricted uses of the Internet as it relates to political speech.

“I think those questions are going to have to be asked and answered,” said Lillian BeVier, a First Amendment expert at the University of Virginia. “It’s going to be an issue and it should be an issue.”

Under any other circumstances, that would prompt screams of outrage at Black Rock, but now CBS wants the government to protect them from the big, bad blogosphere. 'Free speech for me but not for thee' must have become the new mission statement at Viacom.

I suppose that, as a strategy, going on attack against the credibility of bloggers at least makes them look like they're trying. If nothing else, it will keep the rest of us laughing until the Memogate report reminds us what a lack of integrity really looks like.

Shrum: "defeat has a hundred fathers"

Bob Shrum was on Chris Matthews' show tonight.  He said "We live in an era which is hostile to nuance."  That reveals a lot about the Kerry campaign, it seems to me.  Lucky for Shrum, they like nuance at NYU.

CBS

Hugh Hewitt:

Ask yourself what you know this week that you didn't know seven days ago? That Mary Mapes has been fired as opposed to would be fired? That she was an obsessed and fanatical Bush-hater? That the story was rushed to air?

We knew all of these things, and we know nothing new of significance post-report. We don't know who Lucy Ramirez is. We don't know the extent of the Kerry campaign coordination with Mapes and her team. We don't know who cooked up the scheme to use forgeries in an attempt to influence a presidential election. We don't know how many more Mary Mapeses are embedded within CBS. We

don't even know if Dan Rather uses email or a blackberry. There has been no release of original documents, and no comprehensive release of transcripts of the panel's interviews with leading figures in the scandal.

WWII

UPDATE: This problem happened before. Who is the fellow who helped me fix this before? Are you still out there??

If you're from South Dakota and you haven't bought a copy of Greg Latza's book Blue Stars: A Selection of Stories from South Dakota’s World War II Veterans (

Sioux Falls

, Peoplescapes Publishing, 2004), you should. 

One of the people profiled in the book is Harold Thune, the Senator's father, who volunteered for the Navy during World War II, became a fighter pilot in the Pacific and was such a basketball fan that he organized basketball games on the deck of the carrier Intrepid.  He shot down four Japanese zeroes, just missing becoming an ace, which requires five.  One time, when the Intrepid was set ablaze by kamikazes after takeoff, his squadron was forced to land at

Leyte

.  When taking off from

Leyte

the next morning, a blowout on Thune’s plane wrenched if off the runway, scraping a boulder and bursting into flames.  Some of the other pilots in the squadron said “Hey, we’ve gotta go back for Thune!” but the skipper said “He didn’t have chance; that thing was in flames the minute he went off the runway.  There’s no use going back.”  Harold finally managed to get back to the Intrepid for more carrier-deck basketball.  When Harold saw the skipper “his mouth dropped open.”  Both Thune and later Senator George McGovern, whose seat became Daschle's and now John Thune's, won the Distinguished Flying Cross.  Anyway, that's just a sample from the book.  You should buy it. 

McGovern

From the Daily Kos comment section:

George McGovern speaking in San Francisco tonight

on "The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy". It's free but small venue requires a ticket. I have a spare - my email address in profile. He's speaking at University of San Francisco at 6 p.m. 

Star-Trib Columnist

Ryne McClaren:

El Piñata

Nick Coleman, Power Line's personal punching bag, takes South Dakota bloggers to task in this column. (Registration required. U: username; P: password)

In many ways I think it ought to be tough for MSM types to actually put on a straight face and write a column about disclosing biases in the wake of this, but what do I know.

Excerpt:

During last fall's election campaign, South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle was regularly thumped by two Web sites whose operators -- it was revealed after the election --were paid by the campaign of Daschle's Republican opponent, John Thune. Neither of their blogs disclosed that they were being paid by Thune, who is Senator Thune now. And the episode should raise a huge red flag.

If by "after the election" he means August of 2004, when news of Lauck's employment with the Thune campaign ran in a story featured on the front page of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, then I see what he's getting at. Jon has e-mailed Coleman twice to try to shed some light on this, but hasn't received a response to either message.

Also, please note that Coleman is more or less talking out of the wrong orifice in a lot of ways here by not mentioning that the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, Tom Daschle's best friend during the campaign, didn't "disclose" any of their biases either. David Kranz, the dean of South Dakota political reporters, wasn't exactly in the habit of mentioning his connections to the South Dakota Democratic party, but this info doesn't raise a peep out of Coleman. If you'd like to see real examples of nondisclosure, then see the four world famous SDP bombshell memos here, here, here and here.

The Minnesota Front

UPDATE:  A reader in the know says that Shrum will be teaching at NYU next year but that the other members of his firm will be helping Dayton.  UPDATE II:  Here's The New York Times story.  Shrum won 26 Senate races and lost 8 Presidential campaigns. 

With all the talk about North Dakota and Nebraska of late, we've neglected Minnesota, and the heir to Daschle v. Thune, i.e. the Dayton v. Kennedy blog, which is noting that Senator Dayton has hired Bob Shrum.  Note to Dayton: ask McGovern, Kerry, Gephardt etc. how that worked out:

check out this thread at Daily Kos:

Dayton Hires Shrum Firm to Advise Campaign
by pontificator
Wed Jan 12th, 2005 at 19:36:38 PST

I sure hope Kos and Jerome are coming along quickly with that book on the Democratic party's conflict-of-interest riddled consultant class, because the longer they wait, the more clueless Senate candidates that will sign up Shrum, Devine & Donilon, as well as the rest of the Democratic party establishment consultacracy, for the 2006 elections.

NAACP

Argus Leader: "NAACP might pull its chapter based in Sioux Falls." 

The End of the Monopoly

Peggy Noonan:

The Rathergate Report is a watershed event in American journalism not because it changes things on its own but because it makes unavoidably clear a change that has already occurred. And that is that the mainstream media's monopoly on information is over. That is, the monopoly enjoyed by three big networks, a half dozen big newspapers and a handful of weekly magazines from roughly 1950 to 2000 is done and gone, and something else is taking its place. That would be a media cacophony. But a cacophony in which the truth has a greater chance of making itself clearly heard.

Kos

Ever wonder why Daily Kos and others haven't freaked out because a couple of the Dakota Alliance blog members were also consultants to a campaign (a fact that was in the newspaper and in the FEC reports)?  Well, it's because Daily Kos and others were political consultants to campaigns too!  And good for them.  So much for Nick Coleman's view of bloggers as people who "pretend to be family watchdogs but they are Rottweilers in sheep's clothing... pursuing a right-wing agenda cooked up in conservative think tanks funded by millionaire power brokers."  Via Instapundit.

Judges in Last Congress

Senator Hatch:

During the 108th Congress, Senate Democrats defeated ten majority-supported nominations to the U.S. Court of Appeals by objecting to every unanimous consent request and defeating every cloture motion. This tactic made good on then-Democratic Leader Tom Daschle's February 2001 vow to use "whatever means necessary" to defeat judicial nominations. These filibusters are unprecedented, unfair, dangerous, partisan, and unconstitutional.

A Political Crisis

These are the first filibusters in American history to defeat majority supported judicial nominations. Before the 108th Congress, 13 of the 14 judicial nominations on which the Senate took a cloture vote were confirmed. President Johnson withdrew the 1968 nomination of Abe Fortas to be Supreme Court chief justice the day after a failed cloture vote showed the nomination did not have clear majority support. In contrast, Democrats have now crossed the confirmation Rubicon by using the filibuster to defeat judicial nominations which enjoy clear majority support.

Even More on ND

From the mailbag:

As well, I'll second the notion that ND politics is not very interesting.  I
lived in Fargo for one year and any sort of political discourse was absent.
Having moved from SD, I was used to interesting and lively politics, from
our detestation of Daschle, to Janklow's color. Nary a word was uttered or
printed in the Fargo's daily.  North Dakota's delegation is mediocre, but
thrives due to a lack of opposition.  Aside from Hoeven, who is hardly a
heavy weight, the ND GOP lacks any figure head or candidate of stature.

The Nebraska Blog Front

Remember the Grand Forks Herald reporter who said he didn't know of any blogs in North Dakota?  Here's another report from Western Nebraska from the best Nebraska blogger out there (and an expat from South Dakota):

As far as Nebraska blogs go, I can really only think of one that anyone has probably ever heard of, and that's Geitner Simmons. http://regionsofmind.blog-city.com/ Simmons works (still? I don't know) for the Omaha World Herald.

I think that there are a couple of reasons for this, actually.  For one, Nebraska is a Red state in a way that most states aren't.  We're ALMOST as red as Utah, but not quite.  To be honest, there's not really a viable Democratic party here.  Sure, Democrats have held office, and will continue to do so, but they're as transparent as they can be.  For one, they've avoided the Daschle trap (Democrats in Washington, conservatives at home).  But largely our Democrats resort to running sacrificial lambs in the majority of elections.

An interesting anomaly here is that the Omaha World Herald is, for most people, still a reliable news source and they don't appear to support a party or candidate at every turn.  While I don't agree with all of their reporting, they seem to be fair (generally speaking).

And here's another thing that may separate Nebraska from many other states: the East/West divide in this state is so huge that many western Nebraskans don't, well, feel much like we're part of the process.  Where I'm at, we don't even receive a television station FROM WITHIN THE STATE.  All of our cable networks are piped in from Colorado!  Everyone tells you that Omaha and Lincoln are the centers of our universe, but we feel quite removed from all of the big action.  Blogs frankly can't exist in a vacuum, and that's what this state is.  There's just too little political combat to cover, much less get excited over.  All of the dynamics that existed in South Dakota during the 2004 elections are missing here.  We did get a nice little spark with the Nelson/Johanns AgSec action, and Hagel seems to be indicating that he'll run in 2008, but given the political apathy of Nebraska I have no idea.  2006 will be interesting to people who live here, but definitely not to the nation as a whole.

Embattled Star-Trib Columnist Goes After Dakota Blogs

Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman has taken a beating from Time's "Blog of the Year" Powerline, which broke the Rathergate story leading to the firing of 4 CBS/"60 Minutes" producers.  You may remember his famous column.  If not, here are comments on it from Jim Gerhaghty:

THE BLOGGING EQUIVALENT OF TYSON BITING HOLYFIELD'S EAR

I read this this and was surprised by... how small Minnesota Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman is. What a nasty little man.

Powerline, as readers of this site know, is one of the hottest right-of-center blogs, declared "Blog of the Year" by Time magazine. Apparently the Powerline guys have, in the past, dismissed Coleman's column as the work of a "partisan hack."

Coleman's volcanic response? The Powerline guys "pretend to be family watchdogs but they are Rottweilers in sheep's clothing... pursuing a right-wing agenda cooked up in conservative think tanks funded by millionaire power brokers... They should call themselves "Powertool." They don't speak truth to power. They just speak for power... They go by "fantasy names" that are apparently "compensating for" something.

(I'm sorry, did a mainstream media columnist just allege that his blogger critics are... deficient in their reproductive organs? This guy makes Dan Rather and Bill O'Reilly look like the epitome of class and cool.)

There is tons of stuff about this in the blogosphere if you're interested.  Anyway, Coleman goes after us today in his column.  Thus I sent him the following email twice--this is the second version:

Mr. Coleman:

Did you know that the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported I was a Thune consultant in a front page/top of the fold article last summer?  How's that for "disclosure"?  Can you name ANY example in which the South Dakota blogs got something incorrect or were somehow abusive or is your column simply meant as a general attempt to discredit and dismiss blogs given that blogs like Powerline have, well, documented so many problems with your work?  You know, just generically attacking someone is not a substantive response to an argument.  It's an admission you have little to say.  It's a concession.  Now if you have specific criticisms of what the blogs wrote, I'd be glad to hear them.  If you don't have specific criticisms, well, that says it all.

THIS IS THE SECOND TIME I'VE SENT THIS EMAIL.  IF DON'T PLAN TO RESPOND, PLEASE JUST LET ME KNOW AND WE'LL GET ON WITH OUR LIVES.  THANKS.

Coleman didn't respond.  Again, that says it all. 

Clark

Chris Matthews was going about Wes Clark as a possible DNC Chair tonight.  If memory serves, the Daschle supporters were high on Clark, especially as compared to Dean.

Mailbag

From a North Dakota reader:

In response to your post on North Dakota politics and why this conservative state keeps sending three Dems to Washington. First our politics may not be as exciting because our newspapers probably haven't been as biased as the Argus Leader thus inciting bloggers to tell the "rest of the story". Second we just haven't challenged them with great candidates. Third,  our return on tax dollars is better than most states which the delegation successfully uses in their campaigns. Maybe what we should do is have each resident read the chapter in Hugh Hewitt's book about voting for your party even if your candidate is not exactly what you like because it's majorities that get things done not single candidates. I also don't think many people have "discovered" blogs yet. I followed the Dakota Alliance blogs during the run up to the election. About a month or so before the election I stated during a conversation on politics that I believed Sen. Daschle would lose, they asked how I could say that. I told them about your blogs and none of them had heard of the word blog. We have a ways to go. These are just a few of the reasons for the Dems to be successful.

Newsweek on Politics and the Press

Howard Fineman:

Jan. 11 - A political party is dying before our eyes—and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying  journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history. Now the AMMP is reeling, and not just from the humiliation of CBS News. ...

Still, the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things. The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded in good measure (and ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS's star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon's fate as the first president to resign.

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born.

It was not accident that the birth coincided with an identity crisis in the Democratic Party. The ideological energy of the New Deal had faded; Vietnam and various social revolutions of the ’60s were tearing it apart. Into the vacuum came the AMMP, which became the new forum for choosing Democratic candidates. A "reform" movement opened up the nominating process, taking it out of the smoke-filled backrooms and onto television and into the newsrooms. The key to winning the nomination and, occasionally, the presidency, became expertise at riding the media wave. McGovern did it, Gary Hart almost did (until he fell off his surfboard); Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton rode it all the way.

Canadian Border

The Rapid City Journal reports: "More mad cow found in Canada."  Excerpt:

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., again urged the USDA to delay the border reopening. "I remain concerned Canadian feed mills are not 100 percent compliant with the feed ban, and this recent case backs that up," Thune said.

Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., said the new case shows the need to keep the ban in place and to institute mandatory country-of-origin labeling on meat. "Close the doors until we put COOL in place," Johnson said. "Quite simply, the U.S. cannot allow the integrity of our food supply to be compromised, including consumer confidence."

Rep. Stephanie Herseth, D-S.D., said USDA has no reasonable rationale left for reopening the border in March. "The safety of our food supply and the livelihood of our cattle producers are at risk," Herseth said.

Pierre

The Argus Leader reports on the Governor's priorities during this legislative session:

Four initiatives

Budget: State Game, Fish and Parks will work to provide hunting access for state residents and training for game wardens, Rounds said. He and governors of other western states hope to rein in the use of the federal Endangered Species Act.

Wind: The governor's staff is working on incentives to lure two $1 billion coal-fired power plants to the state, which could be used to market wind power.

Research: A full 146 of the proposed new state positions are for research graduate students. That and doctoral-level programs would work with the bid to have the Homestake gold mine become an underground lab.

Education: Rounds said he won't be able to give schools the $7.3 million outside the state-aid formula that he provided each of the past two years.

Tax Fight

A cell phone company is in front of the South Dakota Supreme Court now arguing that the state cell phone tax adopted in 2003 is unconstitutional. 

Still More on North Dakota

A reporter for the Grand Forks Herald writes in to answer the question about the existence of North Dakota bloggers:

Not that I've heard of. We (the Herald) should start one but we all feel kind of busy...

That's a shame.  C'mon North Dakota!  You're missing out.  The reporter also comments on Senator Conrad:

Interesting. I hadn't seen that Roll Call item. It's hard to imagine that Conrad would be anywhere near as vulnerable as Daschle was. He hasn't had to stick his neck out the way Daschle did and he's been known to jump across the aisle once in a while. I think he supported Bush's energy bill, for instance, and maybe that Medicare prescription drug bill? Also hard to imagine who the Republicans would put up to challenge him, since I think Roll Call's right that [Republican Governors] Schafer and Hoeven aren't likely candidates.

Yes, I think Conrad did vote for those bills (here's more on that).  Anyway, keep us posted Nodakians.  And please start blogging.  Of course, if the GOP controls state government and the Democrats are firmly entrenched in the federal offices, maybe there's not much to blog about.  No offense, NoDak, but SoDak politics is much more interesting. 

Mercer

Bob Mercer, a Pierre-based reporter for a consortium of newspapers, on the reporter shortage in Pierre:

When I moved to Pierre in late 1986 to open the first year-round statehouse bureau for the Aberdeen American News, news coverage of the Capitol was at a peak. The two wire services each had two full-time reporters year-round. Two commercial TV stations, South Dakota Public Radio, the Rapid City Journal and the Sioux Falls Argus Leader each had a reporter.

Today, we're down to four: the two AP reporters, Chet Brokaw and Joe Kafka; Terry Woster of the Argus Leader; and me.

State government news isn't much of a TV story, it seems. Consolidation of resources led to the pullback by Aberdeen after I left the paper in late 1992, and to a similar pullback by Rapid City after I left that paper in late 1998. Public radio chose to redeploy its resources. UPI basically disappeared from South Dakota amid its financial struggles.

Mercer has also discovered the origins of the secret pardon law:

I contacted four reporters who covered that session, all top-notch journalists at the time, two from the newspapers and two from the AP and UPI wire services, and none recalled the bill. But several suspected Janklow probably was behind it.

It turns out that he wasn't. By searching through legislative records, some long ago relegated to microfilm, the facts emerge. The legislation was sponsored on behalf of the old state Board of Charities and Corrections, the constitutionally empowered panel that ran the state prison system back then.

The records showed testimony on the bill from several of the board's professional staff. I contacted former warden Ben Dearduff and central office official Brian Wallin to get their stories. In separate interviews, they told me the legislation was their idea. Their concept was that if a person had been pardoned, then the record should be wiped clean.

More on North Dakota

Some readers were interested in the Roll Call article on the potential North Dakota Senate race in 2006, when Senator Kent Conrad (D) is up for re-election.  They sent in this column from the Fargo Forum from a Conrad supporter which argues that ND will be different from SD:

Pundits and Republican campaign consultants in Washington, D.C., may think Conrad will be an easy target in 2006, but they are overlooking the obvious. Conrad has steamrolled every one of his opponents. These out-of-state "experts" don't know this man's mettle. They're apparently unaware of his record. And they obviously haven't seen his campaign ability and they're foolish to overlook it.

I have no sense of how things are different in ND, but keep the comments coming.  BTW, are there bloggers in ND?  BTW II, do you know the strange history of Conrad's second term in the Senate?  See this:

In the 1986 election, Conrad defeated the Republican incumbent, Mark Andrews. During the campaign he gave a pledge that he would not run for re-election if the Federal Budget deficit had not fallen by the end of his term. By 1992 it became obvious that this would not be the case, and although polls showed that the electors would have welcomed him going back on his pledge, Conrad considered it binding and stood down. Byron Dorgan won the primary election to succeed him as Democratic candidate.

He got an unusual opportunity to retain his senate position when the other North Dakota senator, long-serving Democrat Quentin N. Burdick died on September 8, 1992. Burdick's widow Jocelyn Birch Burdick was appointed to that seat temporarily, but a special election was needed to fill the rest of the term. As this was not running for re-election, Conrad ran for and secured the Democratic nomination. He won the election and was sworn in December 5, 1992, resigning his other seat the same day.

FYI, here are Larry Sabato's thoughts on 2006 in ND:

ND-Kent Conrad (D): This is probably a long shot for the GOP, but how long is North Dakota, a strong Republican state, going to send three Democrats to Congress when the Republicans have strong majorities in both houses?

The Hotline on Dean's Chances

From a comment on Daily Kos:

Its got to be Dean.

It may well be Dean.  According to an email update I received this afternoon, the Hotline (aka the insider's political bible) seems to think so.

Ho-Ho-Ho

Howard "Ho-Ho" Dean is now officially a candidate for DNC chair (and apparently the first potential WH '08 candidate to withdraw from that race).

• For some close observers of the VT doctor, this actual announcement is a mild surprise as many folks believed he wasn't going to run unless he was darn sure he was going to win. While Dean is the frontrunner (as our late Dec. poll of DNC members showed), that same poll showed he could be vulnerable to a candidate that is viewed as the consensus anti-Dean.
• However, the various potential anti-Dean candidates have failed to consolidate support behind themselves. Of the two major potential anti-Dean candidates, ex-Reps. Martin Frost and Tim Roemer, both seem more focused on disqualifying the other, than focusing on Dean. As for the other DNC candidates (Webb, Rosenberg and Fowler) none can be called "anti"-Dean since their supporters would likely be open to Dean's message.
• What's somewhat surprising is the lack of WH '08 candidates supporting Dean's DNC bid? Don't they all benefit by Dean getting out of the '08 race?

Is Howard Dean now officially the 'Comeback Kid?'

The Legislature Opens

From The Miller Press:

Notes from the Senate Senator: Tom Hansen, District 22

The city of Pierre has again put out the welcome mat to the people of South Dakota as another legislative session begins. Economic development comes in many forms. For Pierre, economic development is being the seat of State Government. They play their role well. For the next eight weeks they will be home away from home to the legislators and the lobbyists who watch over the legislative process. Pierre will also be a destination for many citizens of the state who choose to make trips to watch the process.

Dean

He's running:

WASHINGTON (AP) Former presidential candidate Howard Dean, once the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination whose candidacy stumbled, has decided to seek the party’s chairmanship, several Democrats said Tuesday. ... Dean joins a field that includes former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, former Texas Rep. Martin Frost, Democratic activists Simon Rosenberg and Donnie Fowler, former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb and former Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Leland.

His opponents don't seem like real heavyweights.

North Dakota

A reader sends in the following correction to the Roll Call story we mentioned yesterday about a potential North Dakota Senate race in 2006:

I know this isn't your doing, but the excerpt you list on your page from Roll Call, about Sen. Conrad's re-election race, has a goof.

It says Schafer's first wife, from whom he is now divorced, is Conrad's sister. It's the other way around. Conrad's first wife was Pam Schafer,
Ed Schafer's sister. They got divorced some years ago, and Conrad is now married to Lucy Calautti, who is the top lobbyist for Major League Baseball.

CBS II

Will Collier:

So, when is CNN's Johnathan Klein going to apologize and admit that the guys in pajamas were right, and CBS News was in the wrong? More to the point, does anybody at CNN have the guts to ask him that question?

No, of course not.

Some more dogs that won't bark:

1. Neither Peter Jennings, nor Tom Brokaw, nor even Brian Williams will utter a peep of criticism in Rather's direction. Ditto for Bill O'Reilly, who'll blame the whole thing on Mary Mapes and dismiss anybody with a modem but not a TV show as being 'nuts' for questioning the credibility of a news anchor.

2. The Columbia Journalism Review ("America's Premier Media Monitor") will not issue a retraction of Corey Pein's ridiculous attempt to acquit Rather, Mapes, CBS News, et al.

CBS

Jonathan Last:

Where did the documents come from? We are told Bill Burkett informed CBS that a woman named "Lucy Ramirez" arranged a drop of the documents to him. We are also told that Burkett declined to cooperate with the panel. And that's that. But what of Lucy Ramirez? Who is she? What was her role? Does she even exist? We don't know. Ramirez is referenced seven times (on pages 35, 210, and 211). Here is the report's final mention of her: "[CBS News, after the story aired] sent personnel into the field to attempt to find Ramirez and thus possibly to confirm the new account. This effort proved unsuccessful." Exit Lucy Ramirez, stage left.

Unlike the New York Times, which painstakingly re-reported Jayson Blair's stories and aired all of the factual dirty laundry, the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel seems to have done little investigating of its own.

Powerline Called It

From Powerline:

You Heard It Here First

I can't resist pointing this out:

Power Line, update #13 to The Sixty-First Minute, at approximately noon on September 9, 2004:

60 Minutes is toast.

Gil Schwartz, head of the Communications Group at CBS, at approximately 1 p.m. on September 10, 2004:

We need two things:

1. We need our expert available NOW to speak to all those who are reporting this story. We need the expert. Now. We need him now.

***

#1 is essential RIGHT NOW. We NEED THAT EXPERT. [W]ithout him, we're TOAST.