More than a dozen Republicans introduced a bill in the Minnesota House Thursday aimed at authorizing the sale of “Choose Life” license plates in Minnesota, with sales revenue going to groups that oppose abortion. The bill is nearly identical to one passed in 2003 in Florida, one of 23 states that produces the plates. But as the Florida Independent found, tracking where funds raised through the license plate sales wasn’t an easy task.

The bill states that the plates “must include (1) a brightly colored, crayon-like image of children, and (2) the words ‘Choose Life.’” Funds from the sale of the plates will be distributed to counties that will then give the funds to nonprofit groups.

That money can only go to organizations that oppose abortion: “A county may not distribute funds to any agency that is directly or indirectly involved in or associated with abortion activities, including counseling for or referrals to abortion clinics, providing medical abortion-related procedures, or pro-abortion advertising.”

The attempt in Minnesota is part of a nationwide effort by Choose Life, Inc. and according to that group’s website, the plates are being pushed in Minnesota by Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life. Choose Life started the movement by getting the phrase added to specialty license plates in 1999.

So far, 23 states have implemented such a license plate program, although only nine restrict funds from going to organizations that provide women with the full range of reproductive options as the Minnesota bill would do.

Minnesota’s bill is strikingly similar to Florida’s law. In fact, the text of the bill is nearly identical to the one passed in Florida in 2003. The program in Florida has come under some scrutiny, as the funds have been difficult to track. The Florida Independent attempted to find out where the funding from the plates went in that state, but had little luck. That may get easier if Florida Republicans get their way: They’re hoping to change the law so that all of the funds raised by the plates go to Choose Life, Inc.

The bill has raised constitutional questions in several states where it has been proposed. New Jersey was wrapped up in a six-year lawsuit over the plates when the state finally relented. The Choose Life activists have sued state legislatures that failed to pass license plate legislation on the grounds that it violates their free speech rights.

Reproductive rights groups in Minnesota declined the Minnesota Independent’s request for comment on the bill, stating that they’d prefer to wait and see how far it advances.

The bill was introduced by Republican Reps. Larry Howes of Walker, Kurt Daudt of Crown, Mary Kiffmeyer of Big Lake, Bob Gunther of Fairmont, Steve Gottwalt of St. Cloud, Ron Shimanski of Silver Lake, Steve Drazkowski of Mazeppa, Bob Dettmer of Forest Lake, Bruce Anderson of Buffalo, David Hancock of Bemidji, Kelby Woodard of Belle Plaine, Dan Fabian of Roseau, Jim Abeler of Anoka, Mike Benson of Rochester, Bruce Vogel of Willmar.

Photo: Wikipedia

A bipartisan bill introduced in the Minnesota House on Monday could give the state’s agricultural sector a boost in the form of a new cash crop: medical marijuana. Gov. Tim Pawlenty last year vetoed an effort to legalize medical cannibis, but this measure has a different aim — to give farmers the OK to grow pot for export to states where its medicinal use is legal.

The Medical Marijuana Production and Export Act is sponsored by DFL Reps. Phyllis Kahn, Tom Rukavina, Al Juhnke, Tom Huntley and Frank Hornstein, joined by Republican Rep. Jim Abeler.

The Minnesota Independent’s requests for comment from the bill’s sponsors weren’t returned on Wednesday, but the bill spells out its aim:

The purpose of the Medical Marijuana Production and Export Act is to strengthen the state economy and its agricultural sectors by authorizing the development of a regulated medical marijuana production and export industry while maintaining strict control of marijuana.

Currently 14 states allow for the use of medical marijuana, although none are neighbors to Minnesota: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

Elsewhere in Minnesota headlines this morning …

STATEWIDE: 444,000 Minnesotans have no health insurance. We know this thanks to people who answered questions from the U.S. Census. [Associated Press]

RED WING: More nukes! Today is the last day for public comment on Xcel’s plan to expand at the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant. [Associated Press]

DOUGLAS COUNTY: Alexandria’s plans for law enforcement building beckon. It makes sense for county to join the project but some commissioners resist because “we are strapped.” [Alexandria Echo Press]

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Regents want state to pay for a “clean room.” It’s needed for nanotechnology research. [Associated Press]

ST. PAUL: Truck wrecks Tiger Jack’s shack. Store owner Lucky Rosenbloom, a candidate for school board, was away momentarily and unhurt. [St. Paul Pioneer Press]

WORTHINGTON: State’s top military man will speak at King Turkey Day. Major General Larry W. Shellito will stand and deliver, but he won’t have time to gobble at the mayor’s brunch. [Worthington Daily Globe]

Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Rep. Margaret Anderson Kelliher, Sen. Larry Pogemiller

The sky is not falling. That was the mantra from Gov. Tim Pawlenty one day after the legislative session ended with no resolution to a nearly $3 billion budget deficit. “The legislators are gone, and they’re not coming back,” he gleefully told reporters at the Capitol yesterday during a noon briefing.

Which means the endgame is now in Pawlenty’s hands. He’s vowed not to call a special session or permit a government shutdown. Instead the governor intends to unilaterally slash $2.7 billion from the budget for the next two years through budget gimmickry and what’s known as “unallotment.”

Exactly where he plans to cut won’t be known until at least July 1 when the budget kicks in. But the Republican governor said at yesterday’s press conference that he expects to hold the line on cuts to K-12 education. Which means that local government aid, health and human services and higher education are almost certainly in for additional budget bloodletting. Pawlenty’s budgetary gambit also means that the political consequences for how the fiscal mess is ultimately resolved — for better or worse — will largely be his to bear.

DFL legislative leaders embarked on their on publicity tour yesterday, scheduling seven stops across the state to spin the legislative showdown. Their message: Pawlenty is behaving like a dictator and putting his own political ambitions ahead of the best interests of the public.

“I commend the legislators from both parties for their hard work throughout the session,” said DFL chairman Brian Melendez, in a statement. “Unfortunately, Gov. Pawlenty was unwilling to participate in the process. His national ambitions kept him away from the table.”

Rep. Laura Brod, who has emerged as one of the most prominent GOP voices in the House, counters that the Democrats simply refused to responsibly deal with the budget at a time of economic peril. “They can make whatever assertions they want, but to me it all boils down to how do we jump-start our economy,” says Brod, of New Prague. “It certainly wasn’t necessary to have the legislative session end this way. Everybody knew what would be acceptable to the governor and what would not be acceptable to the governor.”

A quick recap of the state’s current fiscal woes. The budget deficit was initially projected to reach $6.4 billion for the biennium that begins July 1. Disbursements from President Obama’s stimulus package, however, trimmed that figure down to $4.6 billion. The DFL-controlled legislature and Pawlenty then both signed off on additional cuts that cleaved the deficit by roughly another third. Finally Pawlenty used his line-item veto authority to eliminate the state’s General Assistance Medical Program, slicing another $381 million from the budget hole — and knocking more than 30,000 destitute single adults off the health-care rolls.

Pawlenty’s strong-arm tactics haven’t gone unnoticed by national political players. Americans for Tax Reform — arguably Washington’s most zealous anti-tax organization — recently named him a “hero of the taxapayer.”

“I think this was the signal that he’s not running for governor again,” says David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University. “He’s running for national office, or thinks he is.”

But how Pawlenty’s budgetary hardball will play at home is tough to say. The DFL has picked up numerous legislative seats in the last two election cycles and nearly swept the state’s constitutional offices in 2006, with the notable exception of the governorship. Pawlenty’s approval ratings recently have hovered on the wrong side of the 50 percent threshold, typically a sign of vulnerability for an incumbent. And by going it alone on budget cuts, he risks taking the entire blame if popular programs are cut.

“When he does unallotment he’s going to have to own the entirety of it, and I think finally people will hold him accountable,” says Rep. John Lesch (DFL-St. Paul). “This time, because he’s out there all alone acting like a monarch, he’s going to be surprised by the response.”

Schultz figures 50 percent of the blame for the budget meltdown can be pinned on Pawlenty’s national ambitions, but he argues that DFL ineptness is equally at fault. “When the Governor releases his budget what do the Democrats do first? They go away for three weeks and do a listening tour,” Schultz says derisively. “They essentially let the Governor set the agenda.”

Rep. Jim Abeler, a moderate Republican who has bucked his party in the past, also argues that Democrats failed to make the hard decisions necessary to deal with the budget. “At a time like this you have to make choices and set priorities,” says Abeler, of Anoka. “I don’t think the majority was able to do that.”

That could have consequences for the DFL leadership, particularly those that harbor grander political ambitions of their own. Three members of the legislature — Sens. Tom Bakk and John Marty, and Rep. Paul Thissen — are actively exploring gubernatorial bids for 2010. And at least two members of the DFL leadership, House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher and Senate Assistant Majority Leader Tarryl Clark, are on most political observers’ (not-so-short) lists of Democrats eying the Governor’s Residence.

“I think all the major leadership comes out of this looking damaged,” says Schultz. “This wasn’t a good session for them.”

As chairman of the influential Taxes Committee, Bakk is a powerful broker at the Capitol. He was one of the most vocal Democrats throughout the session in insisting that some tax increases would need to be part of any budget solution. The Senate passed legislation that included $2.2 billion in revenue increases, substantially more than the House ($1.5 billion) or the legislature as a whole ($1 billion).

“Maybe I could never get to be governor talking like that,” says Bakk, speaking by cell phone as he drove back to his hometown of Virginia. “If people aren’t quite ready for it then I guess I will lose and I will retire. We just can’t continue kicking the can down the road.”

When it became clear in the waning days of the session that Pawlenty and the DFL leadership were at an intractable stalemate, Bakk tried to negotiate a resolution on his own. On Friday he had breakfast with state finance commissioner Tom Hanson, and then the next evening he met face-to-face with Pawlenty. Bakk set forth a new proposal for closing the budget gap — which included a one-time, five-percent surcharge on state income taxes — but got no response from the governor.

“I guess I tried to do what I could do,” Bakk says. “I never heard back.”

The acrimonious end to the session, with substantial cuts to health and human services funding, ensures that such programs will be at the heart of the 2010 gubernatorial debate. Republicans repeatedly argued that increases in the human services budget, roughly 15 percent annually in recent years, aren’t sustainable and that the agency requires a systematic overhaul.

“There are just some realities that the legislature needs to come to grips with,” says Rep. Paul Kohls (R-Victoria), “the most significant being that the cost increases are not sustainable.”

Pawlenty took the most dramatic step by using his line-item veto authority to eliminate the General Assistance Medical Program, which provides insurance to single adults without children who earn less than $8,000 a year. In an emotional debate on the House floor on the next to last day of the session, Democrats excoriated the governor for balancing the budget on the backs of the state’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens.

“I think the outrage that Minnesotans are going to feel once the full impact of that comes into play will change the dynamic,” says Thissen, chairman of the Health Care and Human Services Policy and Oversight Committee. “What we saw play out this session is going to be what the next elections are going to be about.”

Photo by manyhighways via Flickr

The House debated the bill for five hours before passage. The rhetoric was often testy. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Delano) took issue with the way the bill was drafted. “My point is it was all done in a backroom,” he said. “The public was not given a chance to weigh in on it. And guess what? It was done in the middle of the night.”

Rep. Nora Slawik (DFL-Maplewood) countered that the Republicans had offered no credible alternative plan for closing the state’s $6.4 billion budget deficit. “The minority is offering nothing to the people of Minnesota,” Slawik said. “What we’re trying to do is get this session done.”

The measure will now be taken up by the DFL-controlled Senate, where it is expected to pass easily. Gov. Tim Pawlenty has vowed to veto the bill.

Democrats have hinted that they might be able to summon enough votes for an override. But today’s House debate suggested that Republicans are united on holding the line on taxes. Reps. Rod Hamilton and Jim Abeler — who broke with their party to override Pawlenty’s veto of the transportation funding bill during the last legislative session — both spoke out against the tax bill.

“Sign me up for your Tea Party, patriots,” she said in a video message. “God bless you and keep up the great work!”

While Bachmann lent her full support for the movement, Republican Reps. Erik Paulsen and John Kline remained silent on the tea parties.

Local organizers decided to forgo speeches by elected officials but didn’t shun words of endorsement.

“Although we had many requests, we did not want any elected officials to speak at this event,” Tea Party organizer Margaret Lee said in a press release.

When Gov. Tim Pawlenty gave the RNC Weekly Republican Response last weekend, he didn’t mention the Tea Party to be held right outside his office a few days later. Other speculative Republican presidential nominees ran with the Tea Party cause, however, including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who all showed up at their local gatherings.

Some elected officials were cautious about the Tea Party. “I’m just thinking what I should say because it can be used against me in a court of law,” Rep. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, joked to the Star Tribune.

While Minnesota’s organizers left Republican leaders out the mix from the get-go, their presence at other rallies left a bad impression, the Washington Independent reports. Jason Pye, a libertarian organizer in Atlanta, Ga., was not pleased when Newt Gingrich became involved.

“Newt Gingrich enabled George W. Bush,” Pye told the Washington Independent. “He enabled the big spending. He lobbied conservative Republicans to compromise their principles and support Medicare Part D. He supported the bailout.”

In fact, a number of signs at the St. Paul rally served to remind tea party attendees that Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, “was right” and that mainstream Republicans were late to the party.

Bachmann’s message to Tea Party-goers:

Rep. Jim Abeler; inset: a cellphone shot of his wooden nickel (courtesy of Jeff Skrenes)

A politician handing out wooden nickels in the midst of a historic economic recession is odd enough, but what state Rep. Jim Abeler suggests the worthless coins be used for — plugging gunshot wounds in one of Minneapolis’ higher crime neighborhoods — is even stranger.

On Feb. 16, residents of Minneapolis’ north side headed to St. Paul to lobby legislators on issues affecting them. The second annual “day on the hill” was spearheaded by the Northside Policy Action Coalition (NPAC), a group of organizations including the PEACE Foundation, Minneapolis Urban League, Northway Community Trust, KMOJ and others, and for many of the 70 mostly African-American youth who participated, it represented their first encounter with legislators.

Part of NPAC’s platform is to look at youth violence — a problem plaguing North Minneapolis — not just through the lens of the criminal justice system, but as a public health problem as well. And in anticipation of a bill now being drafted by  Sen. John Marty and Rep. Paul Thissen, both Democrats, the group of some 200 north-side residents came to the state Capitol to share their stories. PEACE Foundation President Sondra Samuels said homicide is the top killer of African-American males between the ages of 15 and 18. At the Capitol last Monday, when youth were asked if they personally knew anyone who’d been the victim of a gun crime, “almost every one of them raise their hands,” Samuels recalled. “One girl said, ‘I’m tired of seeing my friends get shot.’”

But a response by Anoka Republican Abeler struck some as shocking. When youth regrouped with NPAC leaders after talking to legislators, they reported that Abeler passed out wooden nickels, tokens made for his re-election campaign, and said something to the effect of, “If you get shot, use this to plug the bullet hole.”

When confronted about it, Abeler responded that he only said it to the men (although, according to NPAC members, girls were present as well, and one boy ended up with a coin in his pocket). Cheryl Morgan-Spencer, community relations manager for the Minneapolis Urban League, returned one of the tokens to Abeler, with “some words” about the nickel. “Overall, it was very disturbing,” she said.

Abeler has not responded to multiple requests from the Minnesota Independent to clarify his comments, but he did offer an apology in an e-mail to a neighborhood resident. “I am certainly sorry for what I said, thoughtlessly and, sad to say, ignorantly,” he wrote. “I don’t think I could have chosen a poorer analogy even. But I am even sorrier and sadder for what those young people have experienced, and that it took this for me to come to even begin to understand it.” (Read the full letter at the end of this post.)

“People say things about the north side privately — rough and critical things,” said John Hoff, who first wrote about the incident on his blog, Johnny Northside. “And one of those things maybe just came out of his mouth in the presence of the people from the north side.”

Hoff said he’s concerned that Abeler’s behavior perpetuates myths about his neighborhood — which is home to the city’s largest African-American population and has long wrestled with crime and home foreclosures (disclosure: It’s also where this reporter lives) — without acknowledging the advances community leaders and activists have made in recent years.

“Some people are under the impression that if they even drive up Lyndale [Avenue] North they’ll be caught up in something,” he said. “They seriously think if they drive by the 4th Street Saloon they’ll be caught up in gunfire. … We have our problems but we don’t have them every five minutes. We deal with them. To me, what he said is the cartoon version of the north side.”

But to north-side resident Jeff Skrenes, “the bigger issue is it furthers a stereotype about the world and the place of young people in it.” For youth who are visiting the Capitol for the first time, novelty coins and jokes can leave quite an impression.

“It devalues civic engagement,” said Skrenes. “Even when you don’t agree, you should at least respect the fact that regular citizens have taken time out of their day to talk about issues important to them.”

Further, he doesn’t buy Abeler’s response: “He said, ‘I only said it for the boys.’ As if somehow, magically, the girls didn’t hear it. Even if that’s true, how does that make that statement OK?”

But Samuels from the PEACE Foundation sees Abeler’s words as a “gift in disguise.”

“It’s unfortunate, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “But there are a number of unfortunate things that in hindsight change the life of an organization.” The experience can help  young people understand that “you do have a voice, you can set an agenda” and that they can move from “defending against to standing for.”

There’s another up-side. “We are not naïve enough to think we can get anything passed” — jobs programs for youth, “sensible gun laws,” re-entry training for ex-offenders, to name a few points on NPAC’s platform — “with just our north-side legislators,” Samuels said. “We need to have a coalition.”

And she sees Abeler as a potential partner.  “Our mantra is: What’s good for the north side is good for the state,” she said.  To that end, NPAC is hoping to enlist advocates from outside the neighborhood — including Abeler — and organizations elsewhere in Minnesota, as they’ve done with lobbying day partners such as St. Paul’s Citizens for a Safer Minnesota and a Duluth woman who testified last Monday about losing a child to gun violence. She says Abeler has agreed to meet with north Minneapolis residents — this time, on their turf.

“Our whole goal for going to the Capitol was to touch hearts and change minds,”  Samuels said. “This was a nasty incident, but I don’t hold the incident against him. I’ve got to believe that a significant portion of our representatives have some Jim Abeler sentiment in them. That they just don’t get it.

“We have to assume that caring, decent people who are making the laws don’t know” first-hand what problems northsiders face, Samuels said.

“Just to be fair, if you’re not around it, if it’s not your world, how would you know?”

Abeler’s letter to a north Minneapolis resident:

Thank you for writing.

I have spent the last 36 hours or so getting educated in a few ways I didn’t expect. For starters and maybe most important to you, I am truly sorry for how the very nice visit from the northsiders and npac’ers finished up. Certainly in hindsight, I would do it different. Way different.

If you are interested in the context, the comment arose out of a discussion about how hard it was to bridge the gap on some matters, in this case gun laws. I thought the group should know just how hard of a project that they had tackled. Virtually impossible, I told them. I compared it to the controversies of the abortion debate. There was a man in the group who mentioned how hard it was to be in the middle, and I compared him to a soldier from the Civil War who wore a grey shirt and blue pants, who would have gotten shot by both sides. It may be helpful to you to know that the following comment was directed to that man, not one of the students. As they left, I suggested to him, the man, that the otherwise worthless wooden nickels could be used to patch up the bullet wounds he got in that fight.

I had little idea of what impact it would have had on the students there, and I can imagine how they might have taken it to be about something else. Bad choice of analogy, bad choice of words.

A few minutes later, a woman appeared in my doorway with two men, offering a very critical appraisal of the situation. I was a bit in shock.

The two male students who were there were out in my hallway a little later. I immediately apologized to them, and they went on their way with little comment.

Perhaps the students will be consoled to know that the several conversations I have had since then have made me aware of a whole different world than I am accustomed to, living in the northern suburbs. Guns in my town are used for hunting, are mostly locked in gun lockers, and rarely do we have any kind of trouble around that.

As I spoke with some colleagues and Heather again, they helped improve my understanding of how even the mention of guns or shooting brings on a whole complex of emotions, fear, and pain.

I am certainly sorry for what I said, thoughtlessly and, sad to say, ignorantly. I don’t think I could have chosen a poorer analogy even. But I am even sorrier and sadder for what those young people have experienced, and that it took this for me to come to even begin to understand it.

Perhaps you can convey to these young people that the world is full of people who mean well, but who mess it up through ignorance and lack of understanding. Please remind them that those people, like me, can learn and grow and that it is worth the effort.

Eleven years I have served, and I don’t recall any visits from a northside student group. Maybe it is good, after all, that they made the foray into my world.

I for one, am going to be a better servant of them, as well as my own district, for this experience.

I hope the practice they get in forgiving me will help them in the future as they go about forgiving others.

Respectfully,

Rep. Jim Abeler

What happened to the “override six” on election day? The half-dozen Republican legislators who crossed party lines to overturn Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of the transportation funding bill last February were immediately vilified within their own caucus. The Republican apostates were stripped of leadership positions and warned of vengeance at the ballot box.

Veteran GOP Reps. Kathy Tingelstad and Bud Heidgerken opted not to run again rather than face a messy battle for GOP support. On Tuesday, Tinglestad’s post in House District 49B was won by Democrat Jerry Newton by a comfortable 57-43 percent margin. Meanwhile Paul Anderson kept Heidgerken’s former seat in the GOP column, winning by a 16-point spread.

Two other member of the override six saw their political futures snuffed out at the ballot box. Rep. Neil Peterson, a two-term Republican moderate representing Bloomington, was denied endorsement by the party faithful as punishment for his vote on the transportation bill. He then lost a primary battle against the GOP-favored candidate, Jan Schneider. Republicans may now rue their decision to turn out Peterson, however. Schneider was defeated by Democrat Paul Rosenthal in Tuesday’s general election.

Rep. Ron Erhardt (pictured above), a nine-term Republican from Edina, suffered a more complicated downfall. After also being denied endorsement by party stalwarts, Erhardt opted to run as an independent. He faced strong opposition, however, from both Republican and Democratic challengers. Ultimately the GOP-endorsed candidate, Keith Downey, prevailed in a tight three-way contest.

Downey says he was motivated to run by more than just the incumbent’s support for the transportation-funding bill. “People who are in this district know that this was a long time coming,” he says. “There was a strong interest in having a new voice.”

But Erhardt believes the outcome doesn’t reflect the district’s political composition, which tends to be fiscally conservative but socially moderate. “We had two candidates that split the moderate vote and one that got all the nutcases,” he argues. “This guy wasn’t running on transportation funding. He was running as a Christian conservative.”

While Downey kept the seat in the GOP column this year, he will undoubtedly face spirited opposition in the next election cycle. “We’re definitely going to be looking at that race a lot in 2010,” says Adam Duininck, political director for the International Union of Operating Engineers, which supported Erhardt. Duininck argues that it was tough to get their message across to voters in a year when there was a presidential contest and two high-profile Congressional races. “It gets lost in the clutter,” he says. “Maybe 2010 will be a better chance.”

Erhardt isn’t certain if he’ll run again two years from now. But he pointedly isn’t throwing away his lawn signs either.

The final two members of the override six will be returning to the Capitol in January. Jim Abeler, who represents Anoka and Ramsey, was also denied endorsement by the party. But the local GOP activists narrowly voted not to officially back his primary challenger either. Abeler handily defeated his Republican opponent in September and went on to collect 65 percent of the vote in the general election.

“It helped me that nobody got endorsed, so the party didn’t feel the need to make an example out of me,” Abeler says. He notes that the GOP has lost 34 state House seats in the last two election cycles and argues that it’s time for the party to become less ideologically rigid. “That should have a softening affect, but I don’t think it’s having a softening affect,” he says. “I think our caucus would do well to listen to some people who have been able to draw from across the aisle.”

Rep. Rod Hamilton suffered the least political consequences for his support of the gas tax. The local Republican party endorsed him unanimously and he romped to a 60-40 victory on Tuesday. Hamilton attributes this lack of repercussions to discussions he had with constituents in southwestern Minnesota prior to the vote. “I asked them what they wanted me to do,” he recalls. “They said fight like heck for Highway 60 and vote for the bill.”

More than half a year after the fateful transportation vote, only two of the override six remain state legislators. Republicans continue to hold four of the seats, but Democrats picked up two posts.

Al Franken will comfortably advance from today’s primary election to take on Norm Coleman in the U. S. Senate race. With more than 80 percent of the results in, Franken is carrying 67 percent of the vote in the seven-candidate field. His most credible challenger, attorney Priscilla Lord Faris, is currently garnering support from 29 percent of voters.

Dean Barkley will be joining Franken and Coleman on the ballot as the Independence Party candidate. The former Senator, having served briefly after the death of Paul Wellstone, is routing the seven-candidate field with more than 60 percent of the vote.

In House races, only Reps. Michele Bachmann and Keith Ellison faced primary opposition. Both incumbents are earning support from more than 80 percent of voters in results so far reported by the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office.

A pair of House districts featured primary battles to determine who will take on the incumbent. In the most intriguing showdown, GOP-endorsed challenger Brian Davis currently leads state Sen. Dick Day by a 62-38 margin in the First Congressional District and will advance easily. Less interesting is the contest in the Seventh Congressional District, where Glen Menze and Alan Roebke are battling to see who will run against nine-term incumbent Collin Peterson.

There were a handful of intriguing state-legislative contests taking place today. It appears to be a split decision for the override six. Two-term incumbent Neil Peterson is paying the price for his vote to override Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of the transportation bill earlier this year, losing to GOP-endorsed challenger Jan Schneider by a 57-43 margin. Rep. Jim Abeler, however, is headed to the general election, carrying 64 percent of the vote.

Minneapolis Rep. Willie Dominguez is finished serving at the Capitol after just one term. He was trounced by challenger Bobby Joe Champion, who garnered the DFL endorsement. Meanwhile veteran Reps. Phyllis Kahn and Joe Mullery have handily beaten back intra-party challengers.

Finally it looks unlikely that Rep. Mark Olson — who was kicked out of the Republican caucus and denied endorsement after being arrested for domestic assault — will be headed to the state senate. He’s currently trailing Alison Krueger in a contest to see who will represent the GOP in the general election.

(Photo courtesy of cursedthing)