Photo: Paul Demko, MnIndy

TPM’s Josh Marshall, sparked by a photo of Sen. Al Franken at Obama’s health care speech this week, digs up an anecdote from early in his career when he was covering President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. The year was 1999 and Marshall found himself, somehow, sitting beside Franken in a Senate press room in the Capitol. Franken attended the hearing as a guest of an unnamed senator, but when he found himself at a press briefing with Sen. Phil Gramm, he piped up as if he was there as a journalist — and was ultimately kicked out.

Marshall recalls what he calls “maybe the funniest impeachment moment”:

Sen. Phil Gramm had just bounded into the room to do a little damage control about Sen. Robert Byrd’s proposed motion to dismiss … Franken raised his hand and asked Gramm whether he would have voted for the articles of impeachment if he were in the House, knowing what he now knew. Gramm seemed to have no clue who Franken was and proceeded to ignore the question and pipe on about justice being a process, not a verdict.

Franken and I chuckled about Gramm’s refusal to answer the question, and suddenly two spindly arms reached across me and grabbed Franken and started to pull him out of his chair. It was a woman from the Senate press office, barking, “You have to leave. You’re not press.” Franken pointed to me and said, “But I’m with someone from the press” as he was being rushed out of the room. But he stayed in character through the whole thing, laughing as he got tossed out. That really drove the woman crazy. She mustered up her schoolmarm best and scolded him: “It’s not funny!”

I rushed out of the press room after Franken got the boot. But by the time I got out into the hall, he’d already slipped back into the Senate gallery — where celebrities, but not the press, are allowed to roam free.

As a Fargo artist renders one local symbol of press freedom in stencils — journalist Roxana Saberi, who was accused of spying and jailed in Iran — another pair of American reporters remain imprisoned in North Korea. But there’s a new development in their case.

Artist Matt Mastrud — aka Punchgut — turned his focus from rock bands to images of Fargo-born journalist Saberi in a pair of recent works, but he says he has little political intent behind them: He just likes Saberi’s smile. Saberi, accused of spying by Iranian officials, was freed after spending four months in a Tehran jail. Said Mastrud, “It was pretty much just a nod to a fellow northside Fargoan, you know?”

Saberi’s fellow reporters — Euna Lee and Laura Ling of Al Gore’s news project Current TV — haven’t been as lucky: In June, they were sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp for “hostilities against the Korean nation and illegal entry.”

But today there’s a new development: Former President Bill Clinton has made a surprise trip to Pyongyang to plead for their release.

“This is a very potentially rewarding trip. Not only is it likely to resolve the case of the two American journalists detained in North Korea for many months, but it could be a very significant opening and breaking this downward cycle of tension and recrimination between the U.S. and North Korea,” Mike Chinoy, author of “Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis,” told the AP.

This morning White House press secretary Robert Gibbs released a statement on the trip: “While this solely private mission to secure the release of two Americans is on the ground, we will have no comment. We do not want to jeopardize the success of former President Clinton’s mission.”

Mastrud’s art in on display at Fargo’s Upfront Gallery through August 15.

OpenSecrets.org found that Sotomayor hasn’t made a political donation since joining the federal bench in 1992, while others on Obama’s shortlist — especially those who aren’t judges — made lots of them.

Elena Kagan, for example, gave Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign the maximum allowed: $4,600. She was dean of Harvard Law School before Obama appointed her U.S. Solicitor General this year.

Diane Wood made $1,250 in political donations during the 1992 election cycle, the lion’s share going to Bill Clinton, who appointed her to the federal Court of Appeals in 1995. Wood’s current husband has given $5,000 in the past six years, almost half of that to Obama.

Records of political giving haunt several of Minnesota’s sitting high-court justices. Three of the five Minnesota Supreme Court justices who will hear oral arguments in Coleman v. Franken on Monday have made donations to current or past candidates for the seat that’s in dispute. All gave before they were named to the high court.

Two are from past election cycles: Justice Helen Meyer gave to the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone’s 2002 re-election campaign, and Justice Lori Gildea donated to Coleman’s unsuccessful 1998 run for governor as a Republican.

Justice Christopher Dietzen gave $250 to the “Coleman for Senator 08” campaign committee in 2004,  11 months before Gov. Tim Pawlenty appointed him to the state Supreme Court.

None of the three has recused himself or herself from judging Coleman’s appeal of the election contest court ruling that showed Franken won the U.S. Senate race by 312 votes.

Chief Justice Eric Magnuson and Associate Justice G. Barry Anderson have not participated in any of the high court’s proceedings or deliberations related to the Senate election. They served on the State Canvassing Board late last year, which found that Franken had won the statewide hand recount of 2.9 million ballots cast.

I cast the first ballot of my life for the Republican congressman, a native of my hometown, Peoria, Ill., 10 years ago; he was then and still is a very popular Republican. The reaction of some of his former constituents — residents of Central Illinois — was positive as news spreads of his new job. Progressive and conservative political junkies agreed: LaHood is pragmatic and generally well liked.

LaHood has had a close working relationship with Obama, and especially with Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel. “Rahm Emanuel and I are very good friends,” he told the Galesburg Register Mail last week. “He and I had six or seven bipartisan dinners this year that I invited some Republicans and he invited some Democrats… Sen. Obama and I worked very closely together when we were putting the transportation bill together a couple of years ago… I think I have a great relationship with both of them.”

One relationship that might be strained around the cabinet table is with Secretary of State-to-be Hillary Clinton. LaHood was selected by the U.S. House to preside over the impeachment hearings of President Bill Clinton, mainly because of the trust he engendered in both parties. But he voted for all four articles of impeachment. Perhaps ten years is enough time to let bygones be bygones, but the figures that loomed large in one of America’s tawdriest times will likely be sharing a table in Obama’s administration.

While much more conservative than his Obama-cabinet contemporaries, he has been a staunch supporter of federal funding for Amtrak and is generally friendly to public transit.

“I think if we’re going to have a pot of money where we subsidize airlines and we subsidize the funding of highways, that we certainly ought to continue to subsidize Amtrak,” LaHood told a local paper in 2004.

LaHood voted with the Democrats to expand Amtrak over the objections of Bush and House Republicans in 2007. And it wasn’t the first time LaHood has bucked his party.

Notably, he rebuffed Sarah Palin’s racially charged campaign rallies saying that they didn’t “befit the office that she’s running for.” (LaHood’s parents were Lebanese and Jordanian, and as few outside Peoria know, a large number of Lebanese Christians settled in the Illinois River valley in the 1890s to avoid religious persecution).

Although he was first elected during Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994, he refused to sign the “Contract with America.” He did not agree that cutting taxes during a time of high deficits was a sound idea.

What little is known about about his transportation policies is fairly moderate in nature.

In 2005, he told the Peoria Journal-Star he opposed turning public transit over to private entities. “We’ve got a good Amtrak system in Illinois and I don’t think we want to destroy it by talking about privatization.”

He voted for the bipartisan Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act of 2008 that promotes public transit and earlier this year he sponsored the Commuter Act which offers tax breaks to public transit commuters similar to the breaks already afforded to automobile commuters. He bucked Republicans and voted for the Big Three automakers bailout last week as well.

But transit supporters have expressed concern over his statements on high-speed rail: “I think it’s a bad idea, mainly because we don’t have the money to fund the routes that currently serve Illinois,” he said in 2004. Illinois at the time faced a $3.6 billion budget deficit. “I don’t think we can afford at this point, with the kind of deficits we’re running.”

As the old saying goes, “Will it play in Peoria?” Residents there, both Democrats and Republicans, find Obama’s pick a pragmatic one.

For a liberal take on LaHood, DailyKos is probably the best place to gauge opinion… and most commenters there are irate that Obama picked a Republican. But those who know LaHood and live in his district share little of that outrage.

“Though I haven’t ever voted for him because of his party affiliation, I think he’s generally been a fairly effective representative and about as good a Congressman as I could get in this strongly Republican Central Illinois district,” wrote contributor modemocrat. “In the times I’ve met him I’ve found him to be a fairly good guy, especially as Illinois politicians go.”

Modemocrats continued, “And I have to admit as an Illinoisan, as a Downstate Illinoisan, I’m delighted by this pick. Not just for regional pride but because I feel like my interests as an Illinoisan will be well-served while at the same time I don’t have to worry so much about political fallout for Obama that would come from him appointing some Chicago Democrat with shady connections or questionable dealings.”

For a take from a local conservative, I gave my mother a call. After years of sparring with her over politics, I know of no one more thoughtful — or more conservative — than Kathy Birkey.

“I’m very conservative. I’m a ‘dittohead’ and you can quote me on that,” she says joking about her taste for conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

She says Obama made a good pick. “I think he is hard working, he’s honest, and I think he’s very fair,” she says of LaHood. “He’s a little more moderate than I prefer and he has disagreed with me many times.” But he is bipartisan, she says.

“He’d rather build bridges than die for ideology.”

Obama’s done okay with his cabinet selections so far, she adds.

“LaHood’s a little more middle of the road like the others Obama has selected. I’m impressed with it and I’m going to wait and see what happens.”

In addition to Clinton, the rally included a who’s-who of Minnesota DFL politicians: State Sen. Taryl Clark and Rep. Mee Moua, State Auditor Rebecca Otto, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Rep. Keith Ellison, Mayors Chris Coleman and R.T Rybak, former Vice President Walter Mondale and House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher.

They asked the crowd to volunteer their time and money to Franken and Obama.

Kelliher: “Our biggest enemy right now is being too complacent. We need to work like we are 10 points behind.”

Ellison: “Don’t you feel history coursing through your veins?”

Klobuchar: “Are you tired of that sub-prime leadership in the White House?”

Mondale: “I can feel victory in the air, and here we are just a few days away from what I consider one of the most fateful elections in American history, and it is close and we must fight complacency.”

Franken: “I am privileged to say the Clintons are my friends. But more important, they are friends of the middle class, of working men and women in this state and this country I’m running to represent.”

Clinton: “Unless the wheels come off, Barack Obama’s going to be elected next Tuesday… It’s never too late to get more votes for Al Franken and Barack Obama. You should not give up on that.

“If you elect Obama and you don’t elect Franken, the Republicans in Congress will say ‘Wow, we dodged a bullet.’ You need to understand that if you want the most to come out of this election.”

Vance Opperman has been a major player in Democratic politics in Minnesota for four decades. In 1968, after helping lead opposition to the Vietnam War in Minneapolis, he was elected chair of the Hennepin County DFL. The recent law school graduate was just 25 years old.

Opperman went on to found a highly successful law firm, McGovern, Opperman & Paquin, amassing millions in the process. In 1991 the National Law Journal named him one of the 100 most influential attorneys in the country. But the majority of Opperman’s fortune came from the 1996 sale of West Publishing, the legal publishing behemoth, to the Canadian firm Thompson Corp. for $3.4 billion.

His success translated into huge amounts of cash for Democratic candidates and causes. In 1995 and 1996, Opperman and his wife Darin gave the Democrats at least $350,000 to bolster the re-election prospects of President Clinton. A 1998 City Pages cover story referred to Opperman as “the most powerful man you’ve never heard of.”

“When I was growing up, service in public office was a high honor,” Opperman told reporter Britt Robson at the time. “And people said, ‘I am giving up something of my life to give to the community. I have chosen this as a public service.’ And they meant it when they said that, and I think other people believed it.

“Now, you have to be crazy to run for office, and if you do, most of your neighbors immediately assume you are a crook. And that should make all of us a little bit sad.”

Opperman’s apparent disgust with the cynicism of modern politics, however, has not dissuaded him from continuing to play an outsized role in DFL campaigns in the ensuing years. According to a 2003 report by the Institute on Money in State Politics, he contributed $243,640 to Democratic Party committees between 1998 and 2002 — making him the second largest political donor in the state during that time period. So far this election cycle, Opperman and his wife Darin have contributed $46,000 to federal Democratic candidates and causes, placing the couple in 27th place on the list of Minnesota’s most generous political patrons.

The top 100 givers in the state have made $4.1 million in federal political contributions since the beginning of 2007, or more than $40,000 per household. Republican donors have cut checks for $2.3 million, while their Democratic counterparts have handed out $1.8 million. To get a better understanding of the state’s most generous political patrons, the Minnesota Independent commissioned a study by the Center for Responsive Politics looking at the top 100 contributors.

In the first four installments of this series we looked at the bottom seventy members of the list, those contributing between $23,000 and $44,000. Today we examine places 21 through 30. Donors on this section of the list contributed a total of $477,523 to federal political candidates and causes during the first 18 months of this election cycle. Republican contributors dominated this section of the list, with the GOP getting roughly 70 percent of their donations.

Robert Cummins is in many ways Opperman’s GOP counterpart. He has long been one of the most conspicuous GOP rainmakers in the state. The notoriously media-shy CEO of Plymouth-based Primera Technology has helped pad the coffers of groups across the conservative landscape. He’s given more than $300,000 directly to the state Republican party in the last decade and is a key donor to influential advocacy groups like the Taxpayer’s League of Minnesota and the Freedom Club PAC, which he helped found a decade ago.

Cummins has also been the leading financial backer of efforts to ban gay marriage in Minnesota. In recent years he has contributed more than $400,000 to Minnesota Citizens in Defense of Marriage and Minnesotans for Marriage. Both organizations have advocated for a Constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex unions.

In the first 18 months of this election cycle, Robert Cummins and his wife Joan have contributed $53,600 to federal GOP candidates and causes, placing them 21st on the list of Minnesota’s top political patrons. They’ve both written checks to all credible Republican Congressional contenders, including maximum $4,600 contributions from each of them to Sen. Norm Coleman. The couple have also chipped in $20,000 to the state GOP’s coffers this election cycle.

Another name on the GOP side of the ledger that’s no surprise is Glen Taylor. The Minnesota Timberwolves owner grew up on a farm in Comfrey, Minnesota. In 1975 he purchased a Mankato printing business that he’d worked at since graduating from college and transformed it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise known as Taylor Corporation. Earlier this month Forbes estimated his current wealth at $3.3 billion. The Mankato businessman served as a Republican state senator from 1980 to 1986, rising to the post of Minority Leader.

Taylor and his wife Becky have contributed at least $48,900 to federal GOP candidates and causes so far this election cycle. That total includes $17,200 for the state GOP.

Taylor is not the only prominent Minnesota businessman writing big checks to Republican candidates. John Goodman, CEO of the Goodman Group, a Chaska-based development firm that specializes in building nursing homes and retirement communities, clocks in at 25th on the list. The Goodman household has doled out $48,150 so far this election cycle, almost exclusively to Republicans. The one exception? A $2,300 contribution to state senator Terri Bonoff, who unsuccessfully sought the DFL endorsement earlier this year in the Third Congressional District.

In 2002 Mark Davis expressed his disgust at electoral politics in an interview with Connect Business Magazine. “I am losing faith in our political system and political parties,” he said. “Now that our society has dug itself into thinking government can solve its problems, it will be hard for us to dig our way out.” But this lack of faith in government hasn’t stopped the president of Le Sueur-based dairy products company Davisco Foods International from giving generously to Republican politicians. Davis and his wife Mary have doled out at least $46,200 to GOP candidates since the beginning of 2007.

Despite the preponderance of Republican donors on this section of the list, one other Democratic name pops out: Mike Ciresi. The attorney gained notoriety for helping negotiate the state’s $6 billion settlement with tobacco companies in 1998. He has twice run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate, most recently seeking this year’s DFL endorsement to take on Coleman. Ciresi and his wife Ann have given $45,273 to DFL candidates so far this election cycle, including donations to every Minnesota Congressional contender except for Collin Peterson.

Here’s the complete list of donors occupying slots 21 through 30:

21. Robert and Joan Cummins, Deephaven, Primera Technology, $53,600

22. Tim Owens, Wayzata, Voyageur Financial Services, $50,550

23. Daniel J. Starks, St. Paul, no employer listed, $49,100

24. Glen and Becky Taylor, Mankato, Taylor Corp., $48,900

25. John and Sidney Goodman, Minnetonka, Goodman Group, $48,150

26. Mark and Mary Davis, Saint Peter, Davisco Foods International, $46,200

27. Vance and Darin Opperman, Minneapolis, Key Investment, $46,000

28. Bruce Dayton, Wayzata, retired, $45,400

29. Mike and Ann Ciresi, Mendota Heights, Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, $45,273

30. John and Mary Wren, Stillwater, Lakeville Motor Express, $44,350

Previously in The Crunch:

Minnesota’s top 100 political givers: 31 to 40

Minnesota’s top 100 political givers: 41 to 50
Minnesota’s top 100 political givers: 51 to 75
Minnesota’s Top 100 political givers: 76 to 100

The view on the floor last night in Denver (Jason Kosena/Colorado Independent)

In this edition of the Schultz Report audiocast–and we’ll have another tomorrow, after Barack Obama’s Democratic convention-closing speech in Denver tonight–we examine developments at this week’s DNC. Hamline University political science prof and Minnesota politics analyst David Schultz gives the Democrats mixed grades for their handling of the party’s quadrennial infomercial. “The convention in some sense is just a media event anyway,” says Schultz, “a big long advertising campaign, and the theme they’ve been trying to stress is unity uber alles — that somehow, despite all the disagreements, there is actually a marriage between Clinton and Obama.

“On a superficial level, they’ve achieved that. But once you go beneath the rhetoric, what they haven’t said is much more interesting. Hillary Clinton’s speech on Tuesday said she would support Obama and that it was important to defeat McCain. But at no point did she ever recant the criticisms she had made earlier in the year about foreign policy. Bill Clinton’s speech last night, while he did say that Obama is ready, there was still the sense that it was kind of a pro forma endorsement. I listened to Bill Clinton and thought we could have filled anyone’s name into that speech. It was very generic.

“As I listened to both Clintons speak, there was a sense that the convention was still about them. There’s still this backwards tug, and Obama hasn’t yet made it about the future. Perhaps the speech tonight will do that. But for now I still feel this sense of dissension, and that Obama hasn’t yet taken control of the party.

“What the Democrats need to do at this point is remember something that the first George Bush was criticized for when he dismissed the vision thing as just ‘the vision thing.’ Vision matters, but especially this year, specifics matter. No one likes where the Republicans have taken this country for the last eight years. Everybody concedes that. I think what the American public is listening for is, what are the Democrats going to do? Do they have a specific blueprint? That is the challenge for Barack Obama tonight. He has to articulate not just the vision, but to get below that vision and say, here’s what I’m going to introduce, here’s what I’d like to work for. The Democrats need that to succeed. What’s fascinating is seeing how Obama’s greatest asset–being an orator, an inspiring speaker–is being turned against him. He needs to address issues and get specific now.”

Also in this edition: Joe Biden’s speech; is Dean Barkley hurting Coleman and helping Franken?

Listen: David Schultz on the Democratic convention and the surging Franken campaign (13:03)

In the run-up to the 1996 re-election campaign, when Clinton took one of his many fund-raising trips to California, I teasingly asked his press secretary, Mike McCurry, whether the president intended to go jogging with Eleanor Mondale, the daughter of the former vice president-as he had on a previous trip-after he was spotted with her (and Barbra Streisand) in the wee hours of the morning. The next day, as we boarded the plane at Andrews Air Force Base en route to Los Angeles, McCurry, whose effectiveness as Clinton’s spokesman was aided by the fact that he never fell in love with him, sidled up to me and told me that he had passed my question on to the president, and that Clinton had responded, in vivid terms he knew I could not print, that I should not confuse exercise with extracurricular activity.

Only much later would the world learn that no less an informed observer than Monica Lewinsky, whose judgment, in hindsight, has often seemed sounder than the president’s, had taken note of Mondale’s presence at his side. According to Andrew Morton’s authorized account Monica’s Story, Lewinsky flew into a swivet when she was once stopped at the White House gate on her way to a hoped-for meeting to deliver Christmas gifts to the president. While waiting, she learned that Mondale was with him in the White House.

“Do you think I would be stupid enough to go running with someone I was foolin’ with?,” Clinton later asked Lewinsky. Without missing a beat, she replied, “Do you want me to answer that?”

The lengthy piece–oddly timed for the seeming end of his wife’s campaign–raises questions about Clinton’s post-presidential financial and personal entanglements.