Posts by Eric Black

Here’s a tiny glimpse into the current state-of-the-art media campaign.

As the Mitt Romney campaign tries to slow down Mike Huckabee’s surge in Iowa, they have long since begun issuing harsh criticisms of Huckabee’s past actions and statements. On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Romney called on Huckabee to apologize for describing President Bush’s foreign policy as [...]

This post relies on reporting by my Minnesota Monitor teammate Joe Bodell as well of my own.

There’s a fresh wave of discussion in Washington and Minnesota of the possibility that U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad may change his annnounced plans to retire and seek another term. A very good source of mine has stated that this [...]

The latest poll of likely New Hampshire primary voters, published this morning by the Concord (N.H.) Monitor has it Barack Obama 32, Hillary Clinton 31, John Edwards 18, Bill Richardson 8, everyone else less than 5 percent.

If you look at the list of the last 10 or 20 polls taken in New Hampshire, as compiled [...]

The staff of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann is in the midst of a significant shakeup, with major departures from both the Washington and Minnesota offices, and a controversial social conservative taking over Bachmann’s Minnesota operations.
Rich Dunn, the chief of staff from the Washington office, told the Minnesota staff Friday that former state Sen. Sean Nienow, [...]

A Newsweek poll out Friday afternoon had the GOP race among likely Iowa caucus goers:

Mike Huckabee: 39 percent
Mitt Romney: 17
Fred Thompson: 10
Rudy Giuliani: 9
Ron Paul: 8
John McCain: 6

If this is right, it’s mighty impressive. This poll had a large sample, was taken Wednesday and Thursday by the most tried and trusted methodology (human telephone interviews) [...]

As I see people compiling lists of things President Bush and Vice President Cheney said about Iran — after they had been alerted by their intelligence chief of new evidence that an Iranian nuclear weapons program had halted in 2003 — I’m noticing recurrent choices of words and phrases that may signal that they were [...]

Sen. Norm Coleman sponsored the appointment of U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose, who recently announced her resignation from that post after a very rocky tenure. He now acknowledges that her lack of experience or ability as a  manager undermined her effectiveness, and that she did the right thing by resigning. But Coleman expresses few  regrets about [...]

President Bush seems to be saying that yesterday’s big news that U.S. intelligence now believes Iran is not actively developing a nuclear bomb doesn’t affect his policy. I didn’t hear anything specific that might signal whether the bellicose “World War III” rhetoric, which seemed to be laying the groundwork for possible U.S. military action against [...]

The  Al Franken for Senate campaign put out a two-paragraph response yesterday afternoon to the Coleman campaign’s video attacking Franken for his changing positions on various aspects of the Iraq War. Here’s the full text of the Franken rebuttal (it’s actually attributed to Andy Barr, Franken’s communications director):

The National Intelligence Estimate on the subject, representing the consensus of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, is that Iran halted weapons development in 2003, probably couldn’t process enough fuel for a bomb until the middle of the next decade, if it were to resume efforts to make such a weapon.

I don’t want to get ahead of [...]