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Minnesota’s members of the House of Representatives are back in their home districts gauging how constituents feel about federal issues. That feedback will also include town hall meetings for a number of Congress members including Reps. Tim Walz, Collin Peterson and Michele Bachmann. Will Minnesota’s town halls get as rowdy as ones around the nation? Time will tell. Here’s what Minnesota’s Congressional delegation was up to this week.

Rep. Tim Walz toured the new Veterans Administration Community-Based Outpatient Clinic in Rochester on Monday. “This is one small part of paying back a debt that can never be paid to our veterans,” he said.

Walz hosted a kitchen-table listening session on Wednesday with constituents who have experienced severe hardships under the current health care system. “To kill health care reform is to condemn more people to the stories we just heard,” he told the media following the meeting.

Also on Wednesday, Walz joined Sen. Al Franken for a tour of St. Cloud’s VA Medical Center and held a private meeting with VA officials.

Walz has planned a two-hour town hall meeting for Thursday, Aug. 20, at Mankato East High School. Doors will open at 5:30 pm.

Rep. John Kline has been railing against No Child Left Behind in the wake of school performance numbers being released this week. “While its overall goal of ensuring children are not systematically left behind in our nation’s schools is right on target, the heavy-handed involvement of the federal government in administering the program has tied the hands of local schools and districts and prevented them from making the targeted decisions necessary to address their specific challenges,” said Kline.

Kline does not have a town hall meeting scheduled but has told the media that he is meeting with chambers of commerce and will host an education roundtable. He is also planning a telephone town hall meeting.

Rep. Erik Paulsen will be hosting a telephone town hall meeting and a get-together with various interest groups in the district.

Rep. Betty McCollum held a health care town hall in July. The Strib reports that she’s considering hosting another.

Rep. Keith Ellison, on a tour of Africa, is talking with leaders, activists and non-governmental organizations about genocide, HIV, malaria, poverty, violence against women and a host of other issues impacting the continent. On Twitter Thursday, he said he couldn’t wait to get home. “Niarobi: Mpls next. Praises! Not that I don’t love Africa. Khartoum, Darfur, Juba, Niarobi, Kisumu, Dadaab, but there’s no place like home.”

Rep. Michele Bachmann will hold a health care town hall meeting on the 27th, but details are still in the works.

Rep. Collin Peterson has scheduled a series of town hall meetings — three so far. On is on Friday in Willmar at 2 p.m. at the Kandiyohi County Health and Human Services Building. The other is Monday in Bemidji.

Rep. James Oberstar chastised states this week that have been slow in implementing their stimulus projects. “Unfortunately, a few states have fallen far behind in putting their Recovery Act highway formula funds to work. Florida has been the slowest state in utilizing its funding allocation, while Hawaii and South Carolina rank 50th and 49th respectively.”

Officials in Florida have shot back saying their projects are more complicated.

Oberstar will be touring transportation projects around the state funded by the stimulus package.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar was in New Hampshire on Monday to promote tourism. Klobuchar also addressed the growing problem of cell phones in prisons. “Inmates should not be allowed to continue to commit crimes once they are locked up. We need to stop prisoners from using smuggled cell phones to continue their illegal activities.”

Klobuchar has also been working on a 20-year-old murder case involving a Minnesota woman who was killed in New York.

Minnesota’s senior senator is renewing her fight for a passenger’s bill of rights following the Continental “nightmare flight” last Friday in Rochester, in which passengers were planebound for six hours. “I think it is long overdue. Time and time again we keep being told, ‘Oh, it’s going to be OK,  you don’t need any minimum standards for passengers,’ and then something like this happens,” Klobuchar said.

Klobuchar has no town halls scheduled but will tour more then 20 Minnesota counties in the next few weeks.

Sen. Al Franken was part of a dairy farmers forum on Wednesday. While the forum was open to the public, organizers noted that the meeting would stay on topic. Franken also toured the VA in St. Cloud with Rep. Tim Walz on Wednesday.

Franken toured the Natural Resources Research Institute in Duluth on Thursday to talk about Great Lakes restoration projects.

Franken spokeswoman Jess McIntosh told the Park Rapids Enterprise that Franken will be traveling the state in coming weeks. “He’s hosting a couple of roundtables to hear from key constituencies on the health care reform debate, meeting with leaders in the agriculture community, touring the Mayo Clinic and other Minnesota businesses and institutions, and, of course, the State Fair.”

(iStockPhoto)

A report released this week by the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that Minnesota ranked in the top fifteen states for mortgage fraud claims in 2008 and in the top ten on a couple of measure. Specifically, data from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network found Minneapolis FBI field offices ranked 9th in the number of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) related to mortgage fraud. And data from Fannie Mae’s reviews of mortgage loan “misrepresentations” put Minnesota at 7th in total fraud cases out of the 50 states.

A combination of aggregate data from eight different mortgage fraud tracking organizations put Minnesota at 13th overall for mortgage fraud. The top 15 states were California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, Texas, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, Rhode Island, the District of Columbia and Massachusetts.

The FBI report said that fraud cases increased in 2008 as mortgage lenders tried to maintain their “high standard of living” following the disastrous collapse of housing bubble.

Mortgage fraud trends in 2008 reflected the overall downturn in the US economy … the mortgage loan industry reported a spike in foreclosures and defaults; and financial markets continued to contract, diminishing credit to financial institutions, businesses, and homeowners. These combined factors uncovered and fueled a rampant mortgage fraud climate fraught with opportunistic participants desperate to maintain or increase their current standard of living. Industry employees sought to maintain the high standard of living they enjoyed during the boom years of the real estate market and overextended mortgage holders were often desperate to reduce or eliminate their bloated mortgage payments.

Chaska Athletic Park, Chaska
Palace Hotel, Crookston
Dassel Co-op Dairy Association Creamery Building, Dassel
St. Louis County Jail, Duluth
Rock Island Swing Bridge, Inver Grove Heights
Foley-Brower-Bohmer House, St. Cloud
Schmidt Brewery, St. Paul
Distressed urban neighborhoods, statewide
Historic wood windows, statewide

This is the first opportunity to name a new member to the nation’s high court for Obama, a Harvard University-trained lawyer himself who has taught constitutional law.

Given the schedules of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Minnesota Supreme Court — which is hearing oral arguments in the Norm Coleman-Al Franken Senate-election dispute on June 1 — Minnesota may finally have two U.S. Senators again by the time Obama’s nominee to replace Souter comes before the full Senate.

The state’s one sitting Senator, Amy Klobuchar, serves on the Judiciary Committee, which reviews nominees to the high court.

Obama is likely to pick a woman, many court-watchers believe. According to Daphne Eviatar at the Washington Independent (the Minnesota Independent’s sister site), a short list of potential nominees includes:

Elana Kagan, Obama’s Solicitor General

Sonia Sotomayor, a federal appeals court judge in New York who (like Souter) was nominated by the first President Bush

Diane Wood, a federal appeals court judge in Chicago nominated by President Clinton

(Wikipedia)

Minnesota’s top health officials are in close communication with the Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta about the new flu that has killed more than 100 people in Mexico. But they aren’t calling the flu by the same name. The CDC calls it “swine flu,” but Minnesota Health Commissioner Dr. Sanne Magnan says the official state term is “H1N1 novel influenza.”

“We’re trying to get away from the term ‘swine flu,’” Magnan said at a press conference today with Gov. Tim Pawlenty and State Epidemiologist Dr. Ruth Lynfield.

“’Swine flu’ gives a connotation that it shouldn’t have,” Magnan said. “People wonder about eating pork. … We really want to get away from it.”

A question from the Minnesota Independent prompted another visit to the topic later in the press conference. “Swine flu” can lead people to associate the disease with eating pork, officials said, making “H1N1 novel influenza” a better description – though “it’s a mouthful.”

Also, the flu spreads from person to person, so the word “swine” might confuse that message about transmission, officials said.

State officials expect the CDC may come around to Minnesota’s terminology in the next few days.

The World Health Organization has suggested another term: “North American flu.”

A possible reason for the name change: The “swine flu” label has the nation’s pork industry squealing, as hog prices plummet in apparent worry over public misperceptions that pork is unsafe to eat. The Des Moines Register reports that the price of hogs, once as high as $80 per hundredweight, dropped from $69 per hundredweight Friday to $66 per hundredweight Monday on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and price of futures contracts for lean hogs dropped five cents per pound, to 66 cents, in the past two days.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was emphatic:

I want to reiterate the same message to our trading partners — our pork and pork products are safe. The discovery of this virus in humans is not a basis for restricting imports of commercially produced U.S. pork and pork products.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano weighed in as well, using Minnesota’s preferred term:

You should also know that you cannot get H1N1 from eating pork. Pork products are perfectly safe.

The movement away from the term “swine flu” is moving fast in an attempt to outpace the growing list of countries banning American pork.

But it’s got a ways to go: the Minnesota Department of Health’s Web site, like the University of Minnesota’s, calls it swine flu. They’re in good company. The federal government’s main Web site for citizens to get information about the outbreak still goes by the address http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/.

SSP diarist Nathaniel90 has analyzed nearly half the states’ redistricting possibilities, but Minnesota is the first with politics complicated enough to warrant two possible maps — one if Republicans retain the governorship, another if the DFL party somehow breaks its jinx and gains that office in 2010.

Both scenarios assume Minnesota moves from eight to seven congressional districts, jumbling familiar boundaries and district numbers.

The first version, the imagined result of bipartisan redistricting, protects Bachmann’s seat. Instead it pits incumbent Democrat Rep.Tim Walz against incumbent Republican Rep. John Kline in a reconfigured First District in the state’s southeastern corner.

The second version, with Democrats controlling the state Legislature and the governor’s office, puts Kline up against fellow Republican Bachmann in a new district that wraps around the Twin Cities in a U shape. Nathaniel90 concedes, however, that Bachmann still could emerge the victor in a GOP primary battle.

For reference, here’s the current Congressional map. Note: District numbers don’t match because the maps above envision seven districts instead of the current eight.

Related:

Redistricting: What’s It Really About? (Part I)

Redistricting: Losing, Keeping Seat Too Close to Call

The court also set dates and deadlines for Norm Coleman’s appeal of an election-contest court decision that Al Franken won Coleman’s old U.S. Senate seat. Coleman’s appeal brief is due April 30. Franken’s reply is due May 11, to which Coleman must reply by May 15.

The order removes any doubt that the state’s high court would accept Coleman’s petition to appeal the special three-judge panel’s ruling that the former senator is still 312 votes short of the total votes amassed by the former comedian. Approximately 2.9 million Minnesotans cast ballots in the race. 

It also quashes hopes and predictions that Minnesota might have a second U.S. Senator seated by Memorial Day. One expert has speculated that the state Supreme Court justices might take two to three weeks to rule after hearing oral arguments. 

A minor order issued yesterday in the case was signed by only five of the court’s justices, signaling that as with earlier high-court decisions, only those who did not serve on the State Canvassing Board (which oversaw the statewide hand recount in the race) will deliberate on Coleman’s appeal.

Yesterday’s order also suggested that justices who made financial contributions to the candidates before joining the bench — even to Coleman’s 2008 campaign — won’t recuse themselves from considering the appeal.

Two leading players in the new-media stunt known as the ”Twitter War“ compared themselves to Minnesota’s Senate rivals. Kutcher tweeted “now I know how Al Franken must have felt” when the race looked tight on Thursday. After the actor bested the network today, CNN host Larry King said, “I’m not a sore loser. I’m not gonna pull a Norm Coleman and take this to the courts.” (h/t noahkunin)

King’s offhand sobriquet for the former Minnesota Senator comes only two-and-a-half weeks since a Media Matters critic took the nation’s press and commentariat to task for failing to call Coleman a “sore loser.” In the interim, however, a Minnesota court has ruled that Franken won by 312 votes, and Coleman vowed to appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court and perhaps the federal courts as well. 

Here’s a video clip of Kutcher on “Larry King Live” tonight (King’s “Norm Coleman” comment comes at the 5:00 mark):

KING: I’m not a sore loser. 

KUTCHER: No, you’re not. 

KING: I’m not gonna pull a Norm Coleman and take this to the courts. 

KUTCHER: You have been gracious, very gracious. 

And here’s the “Al Franken” Twitter message that Kutcher sent Thursday. 

As of the time of this post late Friday, Kutcher had 1,118,658 followers on Twitter while CNN still lagged with 1,046,927 — for a combined total of more than 2.1 million — still about 800,000 shy of the 2.9 million votes cast (and then recounted by hand)  in Minnesota’s 2008 U.S. Senate election.

“We will never know who won,” Norm Coleman said Wednesday. That’s after seven Minnesota judges — three on Monday and four in January — concluded that Al Franken won Minnesota’s 2008 election for U.S. Senate. His was a “close victory,” the Democrat conceded on Monday. But Coleman — now down by 312 votes — isn’t buying it. “Our system isn’t geared for this kind of closeness.”

Still, some precision is possible in politics, as Gawker.com suggested Wednesday with its two-word description of Gov. Tim Pawlenty: “Amiable prick.”

The first word describes Pawlenty’s friendly demeanor — as displayed, for example, during his appearances on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” where he unveiled his controversial intention to mull over a future state Supreme Court ruling on Coleman’s lawsuit before he signs an election certificate.  

The second captures the other side of T-Paw’s essence, on exhibit most recently during his appearance Monday on Minnesota Public Radio’s “Midday” program. He fairly spit out the word “welfare” before offering this grousing aside: ”By the way, Minnesota’s in danger, I believe, of becoming one big social service agency.”

More imminent is the danger that Minnesota will become one big election-contest courtroom, as Coleman takes his complaints about the election to the state’s high court.

Coleman made his “we will never know” statement to the St. Paul Pioneer Press editorial board, writes reporter Rachel Stassen-Berger (in an article that runs separately from the newspaper’s editorial, which also appears this morning).  

Coleman also told the PiPress board that the question for his legal team is not whether to file a petition for an appeal to the state Supreme Court. Rather, he said, it’s “the scope of the appeal. Do we file on every point or do we appeal on some points?”

On that point Coleman will almost certainly get sage advice from lawyer Ben Ginsberg (a veteran of the 2000 Bush v. Gore case), who asserts that a winner is impossible to determine unless the state accedes to Coleman’s Constitutional argument that its election system failed to treat voters in different counties equally.

“You cannot know who won this election without coming to grips with the equal protection issue,” Ginsberg warned.

RELATED:
Coleman: Media ‘could have waited’ until after Nov. 4 to ask about money-funneling
Times to Coleman: Drop Dead
Klobuchar was off by all of 42 minutes in forecasting a new Minnesota Senator
Dissing ‘judicial fast food,’ Coleman slights the hand that feeds him
Poll: 63 percent of Minnesota voters want Coleman to concede
Coleman recount committee took in nearly $1 million in first quarter of 2009
Coleman legal bills pile up
Recusals in Coleman case could whittle state high court below quorum
The morning after: Coleman’s legal prospects look grim
Franken: ‘I will be certified’
Coleman: ‘I’m a winner’

Fast forward to this week. On Monday, April 13, at exactly 6 p.m., the three-judge panel in the Norm Coleman-Al Franken election-contest trial released its decision that Franken had indeed won election to the U.S. Senate.

Now the spooky part: Precisely 42 minutes after the judges made their decision public, came the official declaration of ice-out on Lake Minnetonka.

Here’s what Klobuchar said two months ago:

My prediction, Rachel, is that we will have a new senator by the time the ice melts on Lake Minnetonka, which that is predicted to be April 11.

She was wrong about April 11 — or rather, whoever’s prediction she cited was wrong. But ice-out day on Lake Minnetonka is hard to predict. Records show it has come as early as March 11 (in 1878) and as late as May 8 (1856).

Now Klobuchar has taken some heat for some unforeseen consequences of a law she authored banning lead in toys. But allowing for a broad interpretation of the phrase “have a new senator,” Klobuchar proved herself spectacularly accurate – off by less than an hour – about the timing of what history likely will show was the moment when Minnesota knew who its next Senator would be.

Much more accurate anyway than any of the predictions by the person in perhpas the best position to make something happen: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose latest failed prognostication about filling Minnesota’s seat passed without incident on April Fool’s Day.

Here’s the video clip from Maddow’s Feb. 16 program. Klobuchar’s prediction comes at the 3:45 mark.

 And here’s Maddow again on April 17, with a segment based on this post (starts at about the 3:00 mark):

And here’s a video clip of Klobuchar on CNN’s “State of the Union with John King” on April 19, (prediction talk starts at the 12:00 mark, transcript excerpt below):

KING: So, Senator Klobuchar, when will this be over? And I assume you’ve told Al Franken that even if he wins in the end, you will still be Minnesota’s funniest senator?

(LAUGHTER)

KLOBUCHAR: Well, all right, first of all, I would say this, and that is that Norm Coleman has a right to pursue his appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court. But Minnesota also has a right to two senators. This has been going on for months now. Since December, our staff, I’m so proud of them, they’ve had double the case work. Everything from veterans benefits cases to people who have lost their Social Security checks to people who are trying to adopt babies in Guatemala that are stalled out.

Minnesota has that right to two senators. I’m hopeful the Minnesota Supreme Court is going to move very quickly on this. The law actually says in Minnesota that they have to set aside their other work.

Now, I had predicted this would be resolved when the ice melted on Lake Minnetonka, John. And the three-judge ruling came out, 42 minutes, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources declared the ice had melted.

Now I predict this will be done when Minnesotans are allowed to swim in our lakes, which is Memorial weekend.

KING: I will have you back in five or six weeks, Memorial Day weekend. I think my math is about right on that. It might be a little more. Amy Klobuchar, John Ensign, senators both, thank you very much for being here today.

(hat tip: MPR’s Polinaut)