The ad’s sponsors are Americans United for Change, Alliance for a Better Minnesota and the Minnesota AFL-CIO.

When’s the last time you saw a TV ad asking an elected official to obey the law?

The ad, titled “What if delivery people ran the world?” shows workers, wearing uniforms and driving courier trucks for “GTF Express,” improbably deployed as the staff at a high school: teachers, hall monitor, truant officer, bus driver (the trucks serve as school buses).

The conceit is that the delivery people handle children like they are packages. In the course of the 30-second spot, they communicate via Blackberry phones to track down a truant and “re-route him straight to detention.”

It’s that kicker line, played for laughs, that particularly carries uncomfortable connotations after news that two Pennsylvania judges — in exchange for lucrative kickbacks — unjustly sent youths accused only of minor offenses to two privately run detention centers.

Judges Mark A. Ciavarella, Jr., and Michael T. Conahan pled guilty Thursday to wire fraud and conspiracy, and admitted they accepted $2.6 million to sentence children — as many as 5,000 children in Ciavarella’s case — to detention for infractions as minor as drawing a funny picture of a principal.

Here’s how the ad ends:

Teacher: “Drivers, I need a 20 on Callahan!”

A GTF Espress truck driver sights the student sipping a soda as he walks down the sidewalk, evidently skipping school: ”Got him!” reports the driver.

Teacher: “Re-route him straight to detention.”

And here’s the ad:

Granted, “detention” can mean punishment served at school as well as at an off-site jail. But the ad’s dehumanizing kids-as-packages theme and its reality-show, “Cops”-style manhunt for a student playing hooky seem a neat fit for Luzerne County, Pa. — where people are learning the answer to the question, “What if crooked judges ran the world?”

Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) had to resort to rumblings about “taking appropriate legal action” after two formal requests to state Rep. Erik Paulsen that he stop using video from TPT’s “Almanac” program in an ad attacking his 3rd Congressional District Democratic rival, Ashwin Madia, went unheeded. The ad is now absent from the Paulsen campaign Web site and its YouTube channel, and a YouTube message for the ad, titled “Disturbing,” explains it is indeed gone because it contained copywritten material from TPT. In a public statement cited by City Pages and mnblue, TPT said it never lets candidates or parties use its video, has always found campaigns willing to comply with cease-and-desist requests, and wants broadcasters to pull the ad. 

Soon after the 30-second “Disturbing” spot debuted two weeks ago it earned a “D” in a KSTP-TV “Truth Test” – in part because it pinned blame on Madia for an ad from the independent Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) that had received its own bad grade from KSTP in an earlier “Truth Test.” 

Paulsen’s filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for the past six months show that Upgrade Films of Washington, D.C., is the only commercial production firm to receive payments from the campaign: $25,000 on July 23, $9,000 on Sept. 5, and $18,000 on Oct. 7. Upgrade Films is the production company for (and a wholly owned subsidiary of) Dawson McCartney Nelson Media (DMNM) of Washington, D.C. — the same outfit that bought video from the Pawlenty for Governor campaign in 2002 for a state Republican Party TV ad. That bit of prohibited coordination resulted in a $100,000 fine for Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s campaign from the state Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board. DMNM founder Terry Nelson was U.S. Sen. John McCain’s first campaign manager for the current election.

EDITOR’S NOTE
The Democratic Senate [sic] Campaign Committee is running TV ads featuring a Star Tribune reporter questioning Sen. Norm Coleman about a lawsuit noted in this report. The video in the ad was filmed without the knowledge or consent of the Star Tribune.

The original video shows Strib reporter Paul McEnroe trying to ask Coleman about the first lawsuit filed in Texas this week as Coleman left a St. Cloud cafe Tuesday. See the original video here. See the DSCC’s ad – and the halting count of specially-moderated reader comments at startribune.com – after the jump.

Online, editors have tagged Strib stories on the Coleman-cash allegations with this unusual warning in red type:

Due to the sensitive nature of this story, comments will be reviewed before being published.

UPDATE: As of 11:15 a.m. today, 156 reader comments had survived the Strib’s special moderation — but that number hadn’t changed for at least two hours.

UPDATE: As of 12:35 p.m., reader comments – the most recent of which carries a timestamp of 4:42 p.m. yesterday, on a story last updated yesterady at 11:04 p.m. — have dropped by one, to 155. That suggests startribune.com does indeed have a moderator at work, but one who has so far focused his or her efforts on removing reader comments about this “sensitive” story rather than allowing any new comments to appear.

UPDATE: At 8:30 p.m., still stuck at 155. Apparently the Star Tribune will not permit further online reader comment about today’s article, just as the newspaper banned its columnists from commenting about the election. Strib editors will allow themselves to publish the editor’s note, but it’s not clear why they saw a need, since the DSCC ad below refers only to “reporters” and makes no mention of the Star Tribune.

This comes after state Republican officials held press conferences last month to highlight demographic differences between Indian-American Madia and residents of the 3rd Congressional District — in contrast to their own candidate, state Rep. Erik Paulsen, who is “one of them.” Video and more after the jump.
Here’s the KARE-TV news report:

Last spring during the Democratic primary battle, a television ad attacking U.S. Sen. Barack Obama employed a similar visual device that made Obama’s skin appear darker. The technique, which puts a dark halo around the perimeter of an image, while simultaneously darkening a face within the image, was put to use most famously in Time magazine’s cover on O.J. Simpson.

Vet Voice, a project of VoteVets.org, which has endorsed former Marine Madia, traces the ad’s lineage back to the “Willie Horton” ad Pres. George Bush used against Gov. Michael Dukakis in the 1998 presidential race.

Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi (shown), U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Minnesota House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher will kick off an apparently new Women for Madia campaign in Bloomington Monday morning. Photo: house.gov

Two indications that the tight 3rd Congressional District race remains in the nation’s crosshairs, even as U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s antics in the 6th District grab headlines.

First, the big guns keep coming: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., whose very name and title are enough to spur derisive jeers at Republican rallies, will campaign in person with DFL 3rd District candidate Ashwin Madia today. (Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner visited the state on Paulsen’s behalf last week.)

And the national media continue to turn attention to the Twin Cities’ western suburbs. (Today it’s a profile of the contest with focus on Madia in the Washington Post — whose Chris Cillizza, keeper of The Fix blog, on Friday abruptly and inexplicably left the 3rd District race off his list of the 25 races for U.S. House where parties are most likely to lose seats, to the consternation of commenters.)

But in a sign that the spectacle in the 6th is drawing focus and donation dollars, Madia released a statement this morning, saying, “Bachmann’s comments represent the very worst in American politics.”

‘Disturbing’ Paulsen ad
Over the weekend, Republican state Sen. Erik Paulsen released a new ad called “Disturbing” that stays warm and fuzzy for about two seconds before turning on the attack graphics and low-register voice-over delivering (disputed) warnings about who Madia will tax and how often he has lied about it:

Three-way debate
KSTP-TV hosted a debate with all three candidates Friday evening. Here is the full hourlong video:

Dillon speaks!
Earlier on Friday, Independence Party candidate David Dillon took his turn in the U of M Humphrey Institute’s series of noontime events with the 3rd District contenders. (Madia and Paulsen appeared earlier in the week.) Here is a liveblog of the Dillon event, courtesy of the Humphrey Institute’s Smart Politics blog, which also profiled the race over the weekend. And here is audio from Dillon’s appearance, courtesy of MPR’s Polinaut blog (if audio player doesn’t appear below, visit the Polinaut page:

Three things happened Tuesday in the race for Minnesota’s 3rd District congressional seat: News broke that the National Republican Congressional Committee had canceled ad buys for state Rep. Erik Paulsen’s campaign. The seat’s current occupant, U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad, a Republican, assailed Democrats for “gutter politics” in the race to succeed him. And Republican candidate Erik Paulsen released a new TV ad that says of his opponent, DFLer Ashwin Madia: “Madia lies a lot.”

See the video and read a full transcript after the jump.

Here’s the new ad from Paulsen’s campaign, called simply “Liar.” A full transcript is below.

Transcript of new Erik Paulsen ad:

PAULSEN: I’m Erik Paulsen and I approved this message.
NARRATOR: The negative campaign for Ashwin Madia. KSTP says false, outrageous, given an F for lying about Erik Paulsen.
REPORTER VOICE: Did you actually vote for Bush in 2000?
MADIA VOICE: No.
REPORTER VOICE: You didn’t. You voted for Al Gore?
MADIA VOICE: Yes.
NARRATOR: But Madia was lying. Madia now admits voting for Bush. He even got caught lying about taking campaign cash.
Ashwin Madia lies a lot. But he would …
MADIA VOICE (LOOPED RECORDING): Increase taxes, increase taxes, increase taxes.

UPDATE: Curtis Gilbert confirms in a Wednesday morning post on MPR’s Polinaut blog that his is the reporter’s voice in the ad eliciting Madia’s statement that he voted for Gore for president in 2000. The ad’s citations have MPR reporting six days later that Madia voted for Bush that year. Gilbert writes that an Eric Black MinnPost piece in which Madia said he voted for Bush had appeared in the interim; the Madia campaign’s explanation was that the candidate, distracted, had “flubbed” his answer to Gilbert.

A second charge in the ad arises from Madia’s claims to have refused campaign donations from corporate PACs. The ad shows a Federal Elections Commission filing that lists a gift from Sterns & Weinroth, a New Jersey law firm organized as a corporation. Calling the move “symbolic,” the Madia campaign returned that check in August after Republicans cried foul. Other Madia contributors identified by Republicans as corporate PACs appear to be law firms organized as partnerships, whose gifts Madia doesn’t disavow.

The source of the ad’s third charge that “Madia lied” are mailings from the Democratic Congression Campaign Committee linking Paulsen to a fundraiser at a Las Vegas strip club that was held by a PAC that also donated to his campaign. Madia has said that he condemns any inaccuracies in the ads but that federal law prohibits him from communicating that or any other message to outside groups like the DCCC. MPR’s Gilbert has pointed to a Madia campaign press release that made the same claim, but in a Tuesday interview posted at Polinaut, Madia said he wasn’t aware of it.

The DCCC’s ads on TV and in mailings have been savaged for their inaccuracies by KSTP-TV’s Tom Hauser, and the new Paulsen ad makes use of Hauser’s independent evaluations. But in sorting out the campaigns’ misstatements on Tuesday for his own report on the “Madia Lies” ad, Hauser made a (minor) flub of his own. Until late Tuesday, when it appears a corrected version was posted at KSTP’s Web page, the report matched this audio …

MADIA: Every ad that I put on TV that says I approved this message, I approved every word of it and I stand behind it. And all of those are positive messages.

HAUSER: That’s not exactly true. Some of Madia’s ads harshly criticize Paulsen.

… with an excerpt of an ad that does indeed attack Paulsen — but clearly states it was paid for by the DCCC, not Madia.

KSTP’s corrected version now shows the latest Madia ad, which does criticize Paulsen:

But everyone can make mistakes: The original headline for this post was “New Paulsen ad: ‘Madia loves lying.’” That’s because that’s what the spoken words “Madia was lying” sounded like to my ears in KSTP’s report, which appeared online before the full Paulsen ad was posted.