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by Tony Petrangelo
Nov 24, 2012, 3:00 PM

The Week in Comments 11-24

The inaugural edition of the Week in Comments!

♠ In response to Taxing Harry and Louise, in which Steve Timmer broke down how much the tax increase that Mark Dayton has proposed would impact higher income earners, Neil says:

If these people leave MN over a tax increase I think we should have a going away party for them…after they leave.

♠ In response to an item in The Weekly Wrap 11-16 about Republican operatives bemoaning the endorsement process, the aforementioned Steve Timmer commented that Ben

Golnik performed the extremely rare “double double.” He worked on two unsuccessful recount campaigns (Coleman and Emmer) and two unsuccessful Congressional campaigns in a single cycle (Parry and Cravaack).

♠ In response to the post On Comments, in which I introduced the new LeftMN commenting system and predicted that this exact post would happen (top that Nate Silver!), a few people had similar thoughts.

Dan:

Yeah, I still detest trolling. Even after all these years it pisses me off.

Dave:

Yea! No trolls for your readers!

♠ In response to the post Mary Franson – Bob Cunniff outcome even less certain now, Ole writes:

Franson undoubtedly received a slew of extra votes from the more conservative-leaning Ward1 Precinct1 district that should not have been cast. The precinct voted very heavily GOP in the 12 and 12B races. “Correcting” this by randomly taking votes from the overall W1P2 that Bob Cunniff won only exacerbates this error, it does not fix it. We need a revote of W1P2 to correct this egregious error.

I addressed this a little bit in the Weekly Wrap this week, and I’ll go into even less detail here, but certainly there is no “good” solution to this problem. There are only bad solutions.

Holding an entirely new election in that one precinct or even all the affected precincts presents it’s own set of problems of course, not to mention the cost involved to the county. And if you think turnout in special legislative elections is light, imagine what turnout would be like in a re-vote? And when would the re-vote even take place?

In the end the amount of ballots in question are minuscule even in the context of a state house race. It just so happens that this race was a virtual tie and as such it was within the margin of error of the election itself.

♠ In response to We have them right where we want them!, in which Steve Timmer goes after his favorite scratching post, the Star Tribune’s own Katherine Kersten, Sherry writes:

I am no fan of of Kersten. Jon Stewart said it best, the biblical model of marriage is polygamy. If she wants to go sit in a red tent with her sister wives once a month, go ahead. Just leave the rest of us alone. I do not understand why the Republicans want to manipulate our personal lives if their concept is small government and individual freedom. I guess that’s not their true goal. (Surprise!)

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