Three things happened Tuesday in the race for Minnesota’s 3rd District congressional seat: News broke that the National Republican Congressional Committee had canceled ad buys for state Rep. Erik Paulsen’s campaign. The seat’s current occupant, U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad, a Republican, assailed Democrats for “gutter politics” in the race to succeed him. And Republican candidate Erik Paulsen released a new TV ad that says of his opponent, DFLer Ashwin Madia: “Madia lies a lot.”

See the video and read a full transcript after the jump.

Here’s the new ad from Paulsen’s campaign, called simply “Liar.” A full transcript is below.

Transcript of new Erik Paulsen ad:

PAULSEN: I’m Erik Paulsen and I approved this message.
NARRATOR: The negative campaign for Ashwin Madia. KSTP says false, outrageous, given an F for lying about Erik Paulsen.
REPORTER VOICE: Did you actually vote for Bush in 2000?
MADIA VOICE: No.
REPORTER VOICE: You didn’t. You voted for Al Gore?
MADIA VOICE: Yes.
NARRATOR: But Madia was lying. Madia now admits voting for Bush. He even got caught lying about taking campaign cash.
Ashwin Madia lies a lot. But he would …
MADIA VOICE (LOOPED RECORDING): Increase taxes, increase taxes, increase taxes.

UPDATE: Curtis Gilbert confirms in a Wednesday morning post on MPR’s Polinaut blog that his is the reporter’s voice in the ad eliciting Madia’s statement that he voted for Gore for president in 2000. The ad’s citations have MPR reporting six days later that Madia voted for Bush that year. Gilbert writes that an Eric Black MinnPost piece in which Madia said he voted for Bush had appeared in the interim; the Madia campaign’s explanation was that the candidate, distracted, had “flubbed” his answer to Gilbert.

A second charge in the ad arises from Madia’s claims to have refused campaign donations from corporate PACs. The ad shows a Federal Elections Commission filing that lists a gift from Sterns & Weinroth, a New Jersey law firm organized as a corporation. Calling the move “symbolic,” the Madia campaign returned that check in August after Republicans cried foul. Other Madia contributors identified by Republicans as corporate PACs appear to be law firms organized as partnerships, whose gifts Madia doesn’t disavow.

The source of the ad’s third charge that “Madia lied” are mailings from the Democratic Congression Campaign Committee linking Paulsen to a fundraiser at a Las Vegas strip club that was held by a PAC that also donated to his campaign. Madia has said that he condemns any inaccuracies in the ads but that federal law prohibits him from communicating that or any other message to outside groups like the DCCC. MPR’s Gilbert has pointed to a Madia campaign press release that made the same claim, but in a Tuesday interview posted at Polinaut, Madia said he wasn’t aware of it.

The DCCC’s ads on TV and in mailings have been savaged for their inaccuracies by KSTP-TV’s Tom Hauser, and the new Paulsen ad makes use of Hauser’s independent evaluations. But in sorting out the campaigns’ misstatements on Tuesday for his own report on the “Madia Lies” ad, Hauser made a (minor) flub of his own. Until late Tuesday, when it appears a corrected version was posted at KSTP’s Web page, the report matched this audio …

MADIA: Every ad that I put on TV that says I approved this message, I approved every word of it and I stand behind it. And all of those are positive messages.

HAUSER: That’s not exactly true. Some of Madia’s ads harshly criticize Paulsen.

… with an excerpt of an ad that does indeed attack Paulsen — but clearly states it was paid for by the DCCC, not Madia.

KSTP’s corrected version now shows the latest Madia ad, which does criticize Paulsen:

But everyone can make mistakes: The original headline for this post was “New Paulsen ad: ‘Madia loves lying.’” That’s because that’s what the spoken words “Madia was lying” sounded like to my ears in KSTP’s report, which appeared online before the full Paulsen ad was posted.