Rep. John Kline is the only member of Minnesota’s congressional delegation to cosponsor Colorado Republican Doug Lamborn’s bill to ban federal funding for National Public Radio programming. Lamborn’s bill has gained traction among Republican House leaders just as a conservative media campaign waged against the public broadcaster has made news. Majority Leader Eric Cantor, looking to strike while the iron is hot, fast-tracked the bill, lining up a vote for today. The bill cuts no money from the federal budget.

“Taxpayers should not be on the hook for something that is widely available in the private market,” Lamborn said in a statement. “I wish only the best for NPR. Like many Americans, I enjoy much of their programming.”

Last year, Lamborn was less guarded about his motivations in writing the bill. He seized on the controversy over NPR’s firing of Juan Williams to rally conservatives who believe public broadcasting is liberal and biased. Lamborn appeared on the FOX network several times to make his case.

“You may have heard about the recent firing of NPR News Analyst Juan Williams and the $1.8 million donation by liberal activist George Soros to hire 100 NPR reporters,” Lamborn wrote to supporters at the time. “These two actions make it clear that public broadcasting is a friend and protector of liberal issues and political correctness, at the expense of free speech and balanced news reporting.”

Last week, top NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller resigned after conservative politics dirty trickster James O’Keefe released a hidden-camera video of Schiller making disparaging remarks about the Republican Party and the Tea Party. Like past O’Keefe product, the video was dubiously edited for effect. FOX News host Glenn Beck and others compared the video against raw footage and found it fundamentally altered and misleading.

The irony in the fact that conservative lawmakers like Lamborn are leaning on discredited overtly political media work produced by O’Keefe has thinned their case in all but the most conservative news outlets and in the right blogosphere. O’Keefe has been warned repeatedly by judges that his wiretapping activities have been illegal. He plead guilty to breaking into Democratic Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office last year to produce one of his hit-videos. His videos on ACORN, which conservative lawmakers seized upon to defund the low-income housing and voter registration organization, have been discredited. Judges ruled in cases across the states that ACORN did nothing illegal.

NPR fans and most Democrats in Congress support NPR tax-payer funding, calling the organization a valuable resource in the increasingly polarized and corporate media news environment.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Lamborn’s legislation “prohibits NPR and its local affiliates from using federal dollars to produce programming or purchase content from other member stations. Affiliate stations could only use taxpayer money for administrative costs, under the bill.” None of that cuts into federal spending.

NPR received $430 million in federal funding this year. Its stations receive roughly 10 percent of funding from tax dollars. Donations fund the rest of the NPR budget and those are hard to come by in large rural parts of the country.

Kline, who represents Minnesota’s Second Congressional District, is one of 21 cosponsors of Lamborn’s bill. Here in his home state, Minnesota Public Radio is part of 170 Million Americans for Public Broadcasting, a campaign by public TV and radio stations cross-country, which receives no public, mobilizing against the Republican defunding effort.

According to a Minnesota Public Radio/Humphrey Institute poll, 38 percent of likely voters support DFL gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton and 27 percent support Tom Emmer, the largest lead posted for Dayton so far in the race. Independence Party candidate Tom Horner got 13 percent, while 20 percent were undecided. A similar poll in August showed a dead heat between Dayton and Emmer at 34 percent.

Horner attracted more Republicans than Democrats, 22 percent to 10 percent. Emmer won the support of independents with 26 percent, while Horner got 21 percent and Dayton 16 percent. A large number of independents, 38 percent, are still undecided.

DFLers surged in party identification with 38 percent to the GOP’s 28 percent.

The poll was a landline-only survey of 750 likely voters with a margin of error of 5.1 percent.

The ad, which documents its research at the site missedvotes.com, states that Emmer missed 20 percent of votes, or “142 missed votes in 2010 alone. Votes on education, veterans’ affairs, and jobs.”

“The Alliance for a Better Minnesota gets its numbers right,” reports MPR’s Poligraph, later concluding that “most of those votes were indeed on significant issues facing the state, including education funding, taxes and the environment.”

But it offers this context:

This year’s session lasted a little over 14 weeks, and Emmer missed votes on 15 of those days. So, that’s roughly equivalent to one day for every week the legislature met. However, he was present for some votes on eight of those days. Furthermore, Emmer missed most of those votes on a few days clustered at the end of the session; he did not take one day off every week for the entire session as the ad implies. Emmer’s campaign manager Cullen Sheehan didn’t say where he was on those days, only that he takes his job “very seriously.”

KSTP’s Tom Hauser’s fact-check found the ad to be “attention grabbing and for the most part accurate. However, it’s also misleading.”

It’s true, says Hauser, that Emmer went from missing 4 percent of votes in 2009 to 23 percent of votes this year. But viewers should note, he adds, that other gubernatorial contenders, including Margaret Anderson Kelliher and Rep. Paul Thissen, missed a higher percentage of votes compare to the previous year. (Kelliher went from 4 percent in 2009 to 11 percent this year; Thissen went from 5 to 13 percent — both still well below Emmer’s House-leading missed-vote rate.)

Hauser also takes issue with the ad’s narrator, who asks, “What would happen if you missed one out of every five days of work for a year?”

That’s misleading, because it incorrectly equates one vote for one day of work; the Minnesota Legislature sometimes has multiple votes on a given day.

Over six years as a U.S. Senator, Hauser says in closing, Mark Dayton missed 3 percent of votes.

KSTP is owned by Hubbard Broadcasting, which donated $100,000 to MN Forward, the conservative PAC that has produced ads supporting Emmer (Hauser gave that ad a B+ grade).

Photo: Andy Birkey

While the majority of Minnesotans don’t have an opinion on the Tea Party movement, more are opposed than support it, according to a poll by Minnesota Public Radio and the Humphrey Institute. Twenty percent of Minnesotans say they support the tea party movement, while 26 percent say they oppose it.

A quarter (24 percent) of Minnesotans say they are less likely to vote for a tea party candidate, while just 11 percent say they are more likely to vote for such a candidate. Fifty-four percent say it makes no difference to them.

And 50 percent of Minnesotans say the tea party movement does not reflect the views of Americans compared to 29 percent who say it does.

The poll’s respondents were 42 percent Republican, 42 percent DFLer and 15 percent independent.

MPR’s News Cut quotes Lookout Services CEO Elaine Morley promising to include the news organization in legal complaint. What the complaint is about is unclear, beyond a statement on the firm’s website (pdf) alleging unauthorized access by both state government and MPR:

[L]imited portions of the company’s proprietary software may have been illegally compromised by The State of Minnesota and Minnesota Public Radio. … “We have contacted the FBI and other law enforcement officials and we are fully cooperating with their investigation into this matter,” said Elaine Morley, CEO of Lookout Services. Lookout Services Inc., filed suit against The State of Minnesota on December 10,
2009.

The re-election/recount campaign of former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman made similar statements after local technology experts called attention to campaign donors’ private financial data being left unprotected on the campaign’s website early this year.

At that time, Coleman’s spokesmen said a U.S. Secret Service investigation would get to the bottom of the breach, with legal repercussions for alleged hackers — but no such consequences for Wikileaks or those who raised the alarm have come to light.

And when the Minnesota Independent last checked, nothing had come of charges that Coleman violated state law by failing to notify donors about the breach.

Pawlenty finally came clean late last month about the presidential ambitions behind his Johnny Appleseed-like nation-traipsing.

MPR vows to keep the map updated and, even with its crack news team monitoring T-Paw’s every move, asks for help with any gubernatorial sojourns they might have missed.

Here’s the current MPR map (green for official travel on state business, red for personal travel):

Pawlenty introduced a question about what the United States should do about Iran with his view that “it’s inevitable that that situation is going to come to a head.” Powell said recent political turmoil has revealed “fissures,” as people press their desire for “liberalized government.”

Regarding Iran’s nuclear program, Powell said the United States had two choices: Take out nukes militarily, or warn them, Cold War style, that any nuclear aggression on their part would bring greater retribution against them.

One area of shared interest wasn’t touched on in Pawlenty’s talk with Powell: the future of the Republican Party.

Also left unmentioned: Powell’s views on the recent arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, and President Obama’s nationally-televised response in which he referenced racial profiling.

Only last week, the NAACP centenary brought Powell together with Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, whose “nation of cowards” speech in February marked the Administration’s other rhetorical milestone on race.

(Idle question: Would Minnesota DFL Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller have broached that timely issue of race with Powell, given the equal time from WCCO that he has asked for?)

Here’s the video of Pawlenty on Fox on Thursday, responding to Obama on health care:

[Via Political Animal]

What’s in the Q?

Kupchella to tackle healthcare reform: Rick Kupchella has two new projects in the works after leaving KARE 11 two weeks ago. One’s a new-media project, but details haven’t been revealed yet. This is the other: the i.e. network, a PR effort targeting healthcare reform. According to the network’s site, they’re partnering with Target and “some of America’s most progressive corporate entities” to create The ALLIANCE for a Healthy Twin Cities to promote lower cost, higher quality healthcare through a focus on wellness. But it might not be as “progressive” as you’d think: partnering with Kupchella is Tom Mason, formerly chief of staff for Norm Coleman, senior communications adviser to Tim Pawlenty and communications director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Once dubbed a “rising star” of the GOP, he also published Twin Cities Business Monthly for five years.

Saberi’s plea: As Fargo-born journalist Roxana Saberi calls for the release of her former cellmate in Iran, Iranian aid worker Silva Harotonian, protesters for democracy in that country are reportedly dealing with the government’s news blackout by making an underground newspaper. Here’s the translation of one.

LATimes gives props to local Twitterer: The Los Angeles Times included a local — Secrets of the City‘s Max Sparber — in its list of funny tweets in response to South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s news conference yesterday, in which he revealed he’d been unfaithful to his wife. “None of us are in a position to judge Sanford until we too have had sex with a woman in Argentina,” Sparber wrote. “Now who is up for a road trip?”

Hubbard honored: Hubbard Broadcasting, owner of KSTP radio and TV as well as other broadcast stations, is receiving the Historic Site in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists tomorrow. The family-owned company has been in business since 1942.

SaveWCAL asserts that St. Olaf College’s $10.5 million sale of the former WCAL-FM wasn’t legal. The argument: For more than 80 years, the station was a charitable trust, meaning the college needed approval from its listener-members and a court to close such a deal. 

Northfield’s dirty laundry got aired this way in the WSJ: 

“St. Olaf has looted the assets they were charged with protecting,” St. Olaf alumna Ruth Sylte, the president of SaveWCAL, says. “Donors everywhere should be worried.”

Steven Blodgett, a St. Olaf administrator, says opponents are “harassing the college” with their court fight. “Everybody wants to just move on,” he says.

Like Coleman, SaveWCAL filed a notice of appeal at the beginning of the week. Unlike Coleman, the group took the next step today, filing its actual appeal brief at the state Court of Appeals. St. Olaf and MPR have 30 days to file their responses.

“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.

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