Intrade puts chance of Obama win at 90 percent

These days, putting your stock in stocks is like placing bets on betters. The stock market’s shaky ground has been more like an earthquake as of late. Yet much like the speculation that fuels the stock market, the prediction…

270 electoral votes, 282,038 pundits and a party at 331 Club

You voted, so now where do you go to celebrate or drown your sorrows on Election Night? Minnesota Independent, along with Drinking Liberally and Twin Cities Daily Planet, is sponsoring a party at the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis…

Crystal ball: The future looks (extreme) right

There’s little doubt Sarah Palin is poising herself to become the new voice of the Republican party. As she campaigns for McCain, going rogue has not only become her norm, it’s become her platform. Her pro-”redneck” America, her “real”…

Pumpkins for Obama: ‘Yes We Carve’ artists sculpt pumpkins for change

Today people from all over the world (yes, even the neutral Swedes) are sending in their pics of Obama pumpkins to “Yes We Carve,” a web site devoted to collecting the trend of pumpkins going political. The pumpkins below…

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie: ‘Misrepresentation and voter initimidation will not be tolerated by this office’

In a video released today by the UpTake, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie outlined allegations of voter intimidation by Minnesota Majority. Ritchie revealed during a press conference on Wednesday that someone working for Minnesota Majority president Jeff Davis was phoning voters and posing as a representative of the Secretary of State’s office. We wrote about the group’s tactics last week, exposing how their attempts at questioning the integrity of Minnesota’s voter rolls was, according to Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, one of the ways the conservative organization was trying to suppress votes in Democrat-leaning counties.

Learn more about the lawsuit here, and watch the video by the UpTake of the press conference and Minnesota Majority’s ties to former SoS Mary Kiffmeyer after the jump.

McCain attack ads if they were written by Jason Reitman, Diablo Cody and David Lynch

McCain tells Bristol to “keepsies” the pregoisimo in this Juno spoof, goes all Twin Peaks tweaked in a David Lynch spoof, and then does something that’s a surprise twist, of course, in an homage to M. Night Shyamalan. Looks like…

Kids say the darndest things: ‘You Can Vote However You Like’ video

An homage to democracy and T.I’s “Whatever you Like,” a group of 7th graders at Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta performed this awesome and totally catchy song, “You Can Vote However You Like,” on CNN. Vote now: Which kid’s your…

Chamber of Commerce funnels money to Norm Coleman to protect banks, thwart unionizing

National businesses and banks have been feeding Norm Coleman major sums of cash this last quarter, despite the fact that corporations and, especially the financial sector, are withering in a crippling economy and asking taxpayers for bailouts. According to a story in L.A. Times last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $30 million on lobbying in the third quarter of this year, more than twice as much as it spent for the same purpose in the previous quarter. And a chunk of that change is going to Minnesota senator Norm Coleman.

Be careful where you ‘video your vote’ on Tuesday

Having Election Day jitters? Problems with touch-screen voting have already been reported in West Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, and Texas, and a video (after the jump) of an election official in West Virginia demonstrating a machine that just so happens to be seriously malfunctioning and flipping votes while he’s trying to showcase its validity is circling the web today. Now voters want to take action by documenting their own experiences at the voter booth, and a joint project with PBS and YouTube called “Video Your Vote” is starting to gain serious attention.

But can you film at the polls here in Minnesota? Sort of.

How did “spreading the wealth” become a dirty deed?

Of all the criticism lobbed at Barack Obama over the last week, the one that gets the biggest hoots and hollers from John McCain supporters is that Obama wants to, in McCain air quotes, “spread the wealth.” Crazy, right? Crazy that a candidate would invoke, as the New Yorker notes, the godfather of free-market capitalism, Adam Smith, who wrote in “The Wealth of Nations” that, “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”