Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

TWIN CITIES: Will next governor play ball with Vikings on stadium? Candidates didn’t answer that question at a forum last night — it was canceled so they could watch the team lose.  [St. Paul Pioneer Press]

STATEWIDE: Facebook is a politician’s best friend. Except that in Minnesota, 100,000 households can get only dial-up internet service. [Pioneer Press; Star Tribune]

SIXTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Is Bachmann really Nancy Pelosi’s Most Wanted? Despite her claims, no. [Hot Dish Politics]

BRAINERD: Still too much. A judge reduced her $2 million penalty for sharing music files, but Jammie Thomas-Rasset says she can’t afford $2,250 per song. [Associated Press]

MOTLEY: Minnesota boy to head National Press Club. Alan Bjerga will be sworn in this week, in time for Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s keynote speech at the NPC’s gala. [Forum Communications; PR Newswire]

STATEWIDE: Al Franken, Kirsten Gillibrand go to court. The squash court, that is: The junior senator from Minnesota is helping the junior senator from New York lose weight for her next election. [New York Daily News]

In Minnesota’s special state Senate election next Tuesday, DFLer Jason Engbrecht has the most money, the Independence Party’s Roy Srp has the most experience, but Republican Mike Parry has the most moxie: “I was talking to a husband and wife in Faribault, both recently unemployed, and they said ‘What are we going to do?’ I said the only thing I can think of doing is electing Mike Parry on the 26th, letting me go up there and speak like a businessman and explain that we have to release some of these regulations on our businesses and find a way to lower their taxes.”

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

AUSTIN: City short chiefs. Resignations — amid investigations — leave the fire and police departments without heads. [Postbulletin.com]

SIXTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: She’s once, twice, three times a lady. On radio, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter debated her ladyship. [Early Returns]

ST. PAUL: “Not this time.” An African-American coalition files a federal suit, as the Central Corridor light-rail plan rekindles remorse over how I-94 wrecked the Rondo neighborhood. [Pioneer Press]

LAKE SUPERIOR: A carp summit. Here’s how Tim Pawlenty can get to the White House: by accepting an invitation, along with other Great Lakes governors, to talk about an Asian invader. [Associated Press]

MANKATO: “Do you know how we give Wisconsin the finger now?” Pawlenty demonstrated by holding up all four fingers — for the Minnesota Vikings’ No. 4, Brett Favre. [Mankato Free Press]

HUGO: Brett Favre Drive. That’s the new name for County Road 4, but only temporarily: “We’ve got no money for changing the signs,” explains a county commissioner. [St. Croix Valley Press]

Michael Steele (WDCpix)

Here’s more evidence that the GOP is still struggling to find fitting metaphors to talk about itself. The party was likened to a miffed Eminem by Gov. Tim Pawlenty at the College Republicans’ national confab over the weekend, while at another of the convention’s sessions, RNC chair Michael Steele was coming up with imagery of his own. Steele told the audience that “no one knows what the hell it means” when the GOP refers to itself as a “big tent.”

So he offered another analogy: The GOP is a hat.

Some people wear a hat frontwards, others cocked to the left, he explained. Some wear it backwards, he added, echoing a past statement, “because that’s how they roll.” But “the strength of the party is in this: … the fact that you’re willing to put the damn thing on… The problem we’ve had as a party is: too many of our friends, neighbors, colleagues are taking the hat off, because we’ve decided we don’t like the way they wear it… The GOP is not about how you wear the hat, but the fact that you want to wear the hat.”

A tent large enough to fit all kinds of people seems a more compelling idea than a hat that can be worn as personal preference dictates. But maybe the new metaphor has less to do with how the cap fits than with how the old metaphor doesn’t.

When longtime Republican Sen. Arlen Specter left the party to become a Democrat in late April he used the metaphor: “Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right.” And many news outlets picked up the lingo. The San Francisco Chronicle said the “‘big tent’ shrinks“; The Week ran a cartoon showing an elephant-shaped tent flying a “Conservatives only” flag; and The Hill wrote that the “giant swishing sound you’re hearing is the GOP’s ‘big tent’ being folded up and packed away.”

Hats off to the new branding.

Watch it:

“The stakes have never been this high,” Coleman writes. “Our ability to overturn this flawed recount process — and preserve checks and balances against the near total control of our government by [President Barack] Obama and the Democrats — rests in your hands.”

Funds raised will go toward Coleman’s ongoing legal challenge in the still disputed 2008 race against Al Franken.

Franken, too, is fundraising. It’s his 58th birthday today, and his daughter Thomasin has sent out emails asking for $58 donations. Last year, her appeal for $57 donations yielded more than $20,000.

“Remember last year when I told you that finding the right gift for dad can be tricky?” she wrote. “Well this year, it’s not really tricky at all.”

Who’s he backing now? “I’m looking for more Democratic members,” he said. “Nothing personal.”

In other news, Specter’s hopes of keeping his committee seniority have been dashed. The Washington Independent reports:

The Senate last night voted to boot Specter to the back bench of four of those panels — Appropriations, Environment and Public Works, Judiciary and Veterans’ Affairs — while he’ll sit second to last on the Special Committee on Aging.

Yet for the last five years, the United Food and Commercial Workers — the largest union in the country representing retail workers — has largely eschewed organizing drives aimed at Wal-Mart workers.

After years of unsuccessfully seeking a toehold within the retail chain, the union simply decided that under current labor laws trying to organize workers in the face of fierce corporate resistance was futile.

“Workers at Wal-Mart have wanted to organize for a long, long time and have made efforts in various places,” says Doug Mork, organizing director for UFCW Local 789. “But there just hasn’t been a real possibility. If their employers have been committed enough and capitalized enough to fight them to the mat on it, workers simply haven’t had the opportunity to organize under existing labor law.”

But the UFCW now vows that its capitulation to Wal-Mart is over. The union has started organizing campaigns in 17 states, including Minnesota, targeting more than 100 stores. The impetus for the organizing drive: the new administration in the White House and the possibility of passing the Employee Free Choice Act. Under the proposed legislation, workers would join a union after more than half of the workers sign a card indicating support. Under present law, an election must be held to determine whether a majority of workers are in favor of joining the union.

President Obama has consistently voiced support for the Employee Free Choice Act. UFCW organizers are utilizing cards with a picture of the popular president to entice workers to sign off on unionization. The cards include a 2007 quote from Obama specifically calling out Wal-Mart. “I don’t mind standing up for workers and letting Wal-Mart know they need to pay a decent wage and let folks organize,” he said at the time.

But the proposed legislation has floundered as the economy has tanked. President Obama has not made it a top legislative priority, and some former supporters, including Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) and Arlen Specter (D-Penn.), have turned against it.

UFCW’s Wal-Mart campaign is part of an effort by organized labor to build support for the Employee Free Choice Act and apply pressure to Congress.

“Every union has been lifting up clear examples of where current law has not worked well,” says Mork. “Wal-Mart is clearly one of the examples for the UFCW. There’s adequate evidence that all sorts of people can look and say, ‘Yes, workers at Wal-mart wanted to organize.’ There’s been clear energy and interest in the past, and they’ve been able to completely shut it down.”

In the Twin Cities, UFCW has had discussions with workers at nine stores, according to Mork. But it’s difficult to say whether the union is gaining significant traction. Mork is reluctant to specify exactly how many workers have so far signed cards indicating support for joining the union.

“I don’t want to give Wal-Mart any information that they don’t have in terms of what’s happening here,” he says. “We’re certainly not a majority anywhere yet. But we’ve got stores where significant numbers of folks have signed.”

Wal-Mart seems unfazed by the campaign. “We have noticed that the UFCW has been working harder in its attempt to get Wal-Mart associates to sign union cards,” says Daphne Moore, a spokesperson for the company. “We don’t think our associates have any reason to be more interested than before.”

However, the retailer is notorious for the lengths it will go to keep organized labor out of its stores. When meat cutters at a Texas store voted to unionize a decade ago, the company responded by eliminating meat cutters from 180 stores in six states. After workers at a Wal-Mart in Canada voted to join a union in 2004, the company shuttered the store.

But less dramatic tactics are the backbone of Wal-Mart’s crusade to keep unions out of its stores, as documented in a 2007 report by Human Rights Watch. Managers are given extensive training in union prevention techniques. New workers are required to watch anti-union videos. There is a union hotline that managers are directed to call at the first hint of organizing so that advice can be dispensed directly from the corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Nelson Lichtenstein, author of the forthcoming book The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business, says such tactics have now become standard for national retail chains. “It’s no longer extraordinary,” says Lichtenstein, who teaches labor history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Now everyone does it. Target does exactly the same thing.”

While these tactics have undoubtedly played a major role in keeping organized labor out of Wal-Mart stores, some observers also argue that unions haven’t made a persuasive case to workers.

“Why is it that workers that everybody acknowledges are not really that well paid are also not willing to vote to put a union in place at Wal-Mart?” asks Charles Fishman, author of the The Wal-Mart Effect. “That’s the $12-an-hour question. … What it says is people don’t think the union has more to offer them than Wal-Mart.”

Fishman points out that if every Wal-Mart worker received a $2 an hour raise, it would eat up all of the company’s $12 billion in profits.

“If Wal-Mart were to be unionized, the stores might look the same,” he says. “The prices wouldn’t be the same, and the way the place operated wouldn’t be the same. Because there’s no room in there to be quote-unquote more generous to people on benefits or pay or staffing without changing the operation.”

After years of unsuccessful battles with Wal-Mart, the UFCW has been content in recent years to concentrate on bloodying the company’s image. The main vehicle for this effort has been the “Wake-Up Wal-Mart” marketing campaign. Through a Web site, protests and other communications tools, the UFCW has tarred Wal-Mart as a corporate behemoth that treats its workers like dirt and routinely violates labor laws.

There is some evidence that the campaign has been successful in affecting consumer behavior and instigating changes in Wal-Mart’s personnel policies. For example, the company has twice in recent years altered its health-insurance policies to make them somewhat more affordable for workers. And in December it settled 63 lawsuits alleging that Wal-Mart failed to pay employees their rightful wages for $352 million.

“They’ve had a positive impact, particularly on health insurance and particularly on the notion that somebody’s watching Wal-Mart,” says Fishman, about the “Wake Up” campaign. “We all know how we do the dishes, clean the kitchen, fold the laundry, rake the leaves if someone’s standing there with their arms crossed watching us.”

Now the UFCW hopes to capitalize on that groundwork by organizing workers.

Peter Rachleff, a labor historian at Macalester College, believes the time is ripe for the UFCW to take another run at Wal-Mart.

“Their anticipation of EFCA getting passed and their estimation of a changed political and economic climate all make this a time — not necessarilly a good time or an easy time — but a necessary time to shift their strategy and try to organize Wal-Mart,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean he believes they’ll be successful. “There‘s a lot at stake,” he says. “I’m not optimistic.”

Lichtenstein is even more blunt in assessing the UFCW‘s chances. “They know it will fail,” he says. “It’s designed to fail.”

But even failure can have an upside. “Demonstrating that failure shows we need something new,” Liechtenstein says. “We need a new law.”

As with Franken’s description in the book of Limbaugh as “national precinct chairman for the Republican party,” his take on Specter’s place in the GOP seems prescient now.

The “hopeless” tag comes just before the Specter chapter, in a list of “fun” search-term phrases he entered into the Nexis internet database:

Gingrich AND grotesque     432 [stories]

Specter AND hopeless    452

Pat Robertson AND crazy OR nutty OR lunatic    677

Limbaugh AND fat    1,084

Buchanan AND racist    1,089

In his brief chapter “Arlen! Arlen! Arlen! and Other Thoughts on the ’96 Election,” Franken mostly ridicules Specter’s bid for the top of the GOP ticket:

When I hear pundits handicap the ’96 Republican race, I’m always surprised that they leave Arlen Specter out of the first tier of candidates.

He has so much going for him: he’s from a big state with a large number of delegates and electoral votes. He’s been a U.S. senator for fourteen years. He got a lot of name recognition from the Clarence Thomas hearings, where he attacked Anita Hill for making accusations about sexual harassment.

Speaking of the women’s vote, he’s pro-choice! And best of all, he’s Jewish, with access to a lot of pro-Israel money.

If I were Arlen Specter, I would assign a transition team right now.

But first things first, I guess. Planning his coronation at the Republican convention. I’ve been trying to envision it since Specter announced his candidacy, and I’ve decided it will look something like this:

First of all, lots of signs. But they won’t say “Specter.” Focus groups will show that the name “Specter” scares people. So the signs will read “Arlen.” And when Wyoming puts him over the top, there’ll be thousands of grassroots Republican loyalists who have worked years just for this moment, all chanting at the top of their lungs, “Arlen!” “Arlen!” “Arlen!”

The theme of the Arlen Convention, as it will come to be known, will be “The Big Tent.” Or perhaps, “The Huge Tent.” Or maybe, “The Extraordinarily Large Tent.” There’ll be a big Christian Coalition press conference on the eve of the convention, where Ralph Reed will back off from his threat to oppose any ticket with a pro-abortion nominee. Instead, Reed announces he’ll support any Republican ticket that doesn’t include a nominee who has actually performed an abortion.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. As I see it, there are two possible scenarios that could lead to an Arlen Convention. The first is a plane crash. A 747 carrying Dole, Gramm, Buchanan, and Alexander crashes … on top of Newt Gingrich and Colin Powell.

The second is a bus crash. It plays out kind of the same way.

WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS ARLEN SPECTER THINKING?

REALLY. What is he thinking?

Forgetting he’s pro-choice in today’s Republican party. Forgetting that the women for whom that would be attractive mostly remember him as the man who accused Anita Hill of committing perjury. Forgetting that he’s humorless and pasty-looking. He’s Jewish!

See, I’ve been following the whole Colin Powell phenomenon, and it’s led me to one indisputable conclusion: The first Jew to be elected President of the United States will have to be a four-star general.

Sens. Arlen Specter and Patrick Leahy (WDCpix)

After announcing that he’d be switching parties, longtime Republican Sen. Arlen Specter met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to discuss committee powers, according to the Washington Independent.

Democratic leadership, Specter told reporters Tuesday, will allow him to be seated on committees as if he’d entered the upper chamber in 1980 as a Democrat rather than a Republican. That means Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy would remain at the helm of the Senate Judiciary Committee (where Specter was the senior Republican until today) and would also outrank Specter on the powerful Appropriations Committee. No deal has been struck over whether he’ll assume the chair of the Appropriations Committee’s subpanel on labor, health and education, which Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa now holds.

But David Waldman at DailyKos suggests another message to Specter’s former party:

Seat Al Franken and give him his committee assignments now, or we’ll block a new organizing resolution that would let you reassign Specter’s previously Republican committee seats to one of your own.

Five state Supreme Court justices begin reading briefs this week in Coleman’s appeal of a lower court’s finding that Franken won the 2008 election by 312 votes.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty is responsible for issuing the election certificate required for being seated in the U.S. Senate — and he has made statements indicating he might apply his own decision-making to the situation, even after a state Supreme Court ruling.

Here is the full statement by Specter (note that his position against the Employee Free Choice Act won’t change):

I have been a Republican since 1966. I have been working extremely hard for the Party, for its candidates and for the ideals of a Republican Party whose tent is big enough to welcome diverse points of view. While I have been comfortable being a Republican, my Party has not defined who I am. I have taken each issue one at a time and have exercised independent judgment to do what I thought was best for Pennsylvania and the nation.

Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.

When I supported the stimulus package, I knew that it would not be popular with the Republican Party. But, I saw the stimulus as necessary to lessen the risk of a far more serious recession than we are now experiencing.

Since then, I have traveled the State, talked to Republican leaders and office-holders and my supporters and I have carefully examined public opinion. It has become clear to me that the stimulus vote caused a schism which makes our differences irreconcilable. On this state of the record, I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate. I have not represented the Republican Party. I have represented the people of Pennsylvania.

I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary.

I am ready, willing and anxious to take on all comers and have my candidacy for re-election determined in a general election.

I deeply regret that I will be disappointing many friends and supporters. I can understand their disappointment. I am also disappointed that so many in the Party I have worked for for more than four decades do not want me to be their candidate. It is very painful on both sides. I thank especially Senators McConnell and Cornyn for their forbearance.

I am not making this decision because there are no important and interesting opportunities outside the Senate. I take on this complicated run for re-election because I am deeply concerned about the future of our country and I believe I have a significant contribution to make on many of the key issues of the day, especially medical research. NIH funding has saved or lengthened thousands of lives, including mine, and much more needs to be done. And my seniority is very important to continue to bring important projects vital to Pennsylvania’s economy.

I am taking this action now because there are fewer than thirteen months to the 2010 Pennsylvania Primary and there is much to be done in preparation for that election. Upon request, I will return campaign contributions contributed during this cycle.

While each member of the Senate caucuses with his Party, what each of us hopes to accomplish is distinct from his party affiliation. The American people do not care which Party solves the problems confronting our nation. And no Senator, no matter how loyal he is to his Party, should or would put party loyalty above his duty to the state and nation.

My change in party affiliation does not mean that I will be a party-line voter any more for the Democrats that I have been for the Republicans. Unlike Senator Jeffords’ switch which changed party control, I will not be an automatic 60th vote for cloture. For example, my position on Employees Free Choice (Card Check) will not change.

Whatever my party affiliation, I will continue to be guided by President Kennedy’s statement that sometimes Party asks too much. When it does, I will continue my independent voting and follow my conscience on what I think is best for Pennsylvania and America.