Drawing on and expanding from Jim Geraghty’s summary:

• IA-03. D+1.  Leonard Boswell is the incumbent (first elected 1997); Cook currently does not list the district as in play (Likely Democratic).  Former wrestler Jim Gibbons (no campaign website yet) has just announced; he’ll be facing former National Guard chopper pilot Dave Funk in the primary.
• MN-01. R+1. Tim Walz is the incumbent (first elected in 2006); Cook currently does not list the district as in play (probably because the Congressman won handily in 2008).  Former state legislator (and lightning rod) Allen Quist has declared; he’ll be hammering Walz on the latter’s support of the ’stimulus,’ cap-and-trade, and health care rationing.
• CT-04. D+5.  Jim Hines is the incumbent (freshman); Cook currently lists the district as in play (Likely Democratic).  Rick Torres (no campaign website yet) joins Rob Russo, Dan Debicella, Rob Merkle, & Will Gregory as competing for the Republican nomination.

Yup, the 2010 campaign season’s started. Time to start paying attention to your own, local races…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

As the Senate Finance Committee takes its health care overhaul negotiations into the August recess, President Obama and key Senate negotiators are still struggling to find a way to afford the flagging health care overhaul proposal’s trillion dollar price tag. Their latest proposal, a new tax on so-called “gold-plated, Cadillac” health insurance policies, is receiving broad support from legislators and administration officials who see it as yet another opportunity to pay for an expansion of government by soaking the “rich” – a perception that is, thanks in large part to existing government policies, incredibly wrong.

The term “Cadillac” has been used for years to refer to health insurance policies that cover an inordinate number of unnecessary treatments and procedures. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee and the Republican most closely working with the Democratic majority to pass President Obama’s health overhaul, said negotiators are “taking an intense look at” the proposal as a way of raising revenues to offset the $1 trillion the Finance overhaul bill is expected to cost.

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME), also a Finance Committee member, called the idea a “practical option” for “creating disincentives for the most expensive [health insurance] policies,” and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said his proposal to tie the maximum permitted coverage to the average level of benefits provided federal employees, and to tax the health insurance of those whose policies cost or cover more, is “gaining support” in the Senate.

This is being shopped to the public as just another tax on the super-wealthy, with Obama administration officials pointing to the “$40,000-a-year health insurance policies” carried by a handful of top Wall Street executives as examples of such unnecessarily luxurious coverage. However, a tax on “Cadillac” health insurance policies would end up disproportionately affecting middle- and lower-income Americans across the board, as well as the entire insured populations of several states.
The reason for this is the profusion of mandatory minimum coverages state governments require to be included in health insurance policies sold within their states’ borders. This results in residents being forced into uniformly high-priced, coverage-heavy “Cadillac” insurance policies as a result of state law, not their own choice.

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See, this is how you do it.

Governor Pawlenty has been stuck with a Democratic-controlled legislature that in more or less stereotypical fashion has been ignoring the fact that we’re in the middle of a very nasty recession; they’ve been trying to boost both taxes and spending, and Pawlenty kept telling them ‘no.’ So, the state legislature attempted to, as Kimberly Strassell put it, ‘run out the clock’ and put the governor in a position where he’d have to call a special session to get a spending bill that he wouldn’t be able to veto.

Alas for the Democrats: live by legislative maneuverings, die by them.

Upon receiving the last spending bill, [Pawlenty] announced that he would exercise the power of “unallotment,” which has been on the books since 1939 and which has been used four times. Under it, the governor is allowed to “unallot” (take away) any state spending for which there is no money to pay. Panicked, the DFL passed tax legislation to cover its blowout spending bills, 10 minutes before the session’s end. Too late. The governor said he’d veto the bill and would not be calling back the legislature to do any more mischief.

Mr. Pawlenty is now free to strip $2.7 billion from state spending to balance the budget. Tax hikes are dead.

(See also Hot Air.)

The Democrats are making the usual fake-populist sounds about blaming the governor for any cuts in spending - which would be a lot more impressive a threat if it wasn’t as inevitable as the sunrise - and the governor is remarkably and pleasantly uninterested in worrying about whether the Other Side is whining about him. What’s more important from Pawlenty’s point of view is that he now has the ability to not only halt spending in Minnesota, but reverse it. And he’s apparently willing to let the voters in Minnesota decide whether doing so was the right call.

Works for me.  Good job, Governor Pawlenty.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Edward Foley, a professor of election law at Moritz School of Law at Ohio State University, reviews Norm Coleman’s appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court in the Senate race there. One of the things that struck me about this recount is that the issues are so enormously complex. No one was able to describe the problems in a concise enough form to really wrap my brain around it. Foley’s analysis confirms my instinct, noting in particular all the complicated state issues, and notes that  this complexity raises broader legitimacy questions for whatever happens. Furthermore, these state problems mean that there is a good chance that the Minnesota Supreme Court could remand the case to a lower court before any of the federal courts are even considered.

Anyways, the problems:

These state law issues, regrettably, are not straightforward. Indeed, as I’ve mulled them over since Coleman filed his brief last Thursday, at times I’ve found them mind-numbingly complex, and I’m someone who specializes in election law and has followed this vote-counting dispute from the beginning (meaning since Election Day, last November 4). It worries me that legal questions concerning the resolution of disputed important elections can be so complicated, since I consider it an important value in a democracy that the rules for resolving these disputes be publicly accessible and understandable. But the situation is what it is, and thus all I can do as a specialist in this field is to lay out the issues as best as I can, clarifying or illuminating them when possible.

This complexity is particularly problematic in the context of Minnesota Secretary of State’s claim, “…recounts are for really the loser to understand and see and then believe that they in fact did not win the election and for their supporters to come to the same conclusion.”

After the jump, we talk through some of the sample problems that occur in counting absentee ballots.

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Does the law allow not counting one vote when others just like it were counted by other counties and cities? Should a person’s vote count depending solely on where he or she lives? Should a contest court disallow votes based on counting rules it adopts but which no Minnesota county or city used on Election Day? Is it right to disallow a vote because the Minnesota Secretary of State’s database wasn’t up-to-date about whether the absentee voter or their witness were really registered?

Is Minnesota a state that seeks to disenfranchise voters, or to count all the legal votes?

That’s why yesterday’s three-judge contest court ruling is so wrong, and why we will appeal.

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What do Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Joe Lieberman and Mark Pryor have in common?

They remain the last bastions of so-called moderate Democrats in the United States Senate.  

As Harry Reid, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Chuck Schumer and Patrick Leahy become more and more ascendant, it is obvious that the Age of Moderates within the Democratic Party are coming to an end.

And, the potential victory — ill-begotten as it may be — by Al Franken will spell the final end to the chapter of their moderate Democrats influence in the United States Senate.

While Franken will still only get Democrats to 59 votes — it is a critical 59th vote for the Harry Reid Agenda.  

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Harry Reid has caved. He had suggested the Senate would seat Al Franken provisionally. Reid has, as of yesterday, changed his tune.

He said he was under the impression that a ruling would come down in the next two weeks, at which point he would decide whether the former comedian should become the 59th Senate Democrat.

“We have to let the trial get over with, that should be over in two weeks,” Reid told reporters.

Of course, the real reason is that the Minnesota court’s decision to count additional ballots winds up helping Coleman — and everybody knows it.

Promoted from the diaries by Erick.

What you are about to read is how one of the attorneys working for the Franken campaign tried to eliminate a legally cast absentee ballot because it was a vote for Sen. Coleman. What you are about to read is a firsthand report from the man who witnessed this play out right in front of him. Sit down and read Chris Tiedeman’s account of an eventful episode in the recount process. Just be prepared to get very, very angry.

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Where is Al Franken? He claims to have won an election in Minnesota.

But that’s not what a local reporter says. Al has been spotted in Florida:

Make that since anyone in Minnesota has seen Franken. That was the day he proclaimed victory after the Canvassing Board certified his 225-vote win. He took no questions after his brief statement, only to disappear behind the façade of his downtown Minneapolis townhome. Since then we have been told he has been hanging out in Florida while the rest of us, pardon my French, have been freezing our butts off.

When pushed, the Franken campaign said that he came up to DC for an interview:

UPDATE: The Franken Campaign says Franken has been accessible, they say Franken sat down for interviews with both the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press in Washington D.C. a week and a half ago.