With his prospect of winning the 23rd Congressional District race now almost zero, Conservative Party candidate Douglas L. Hoffman suggested Wednesday in a letter that “ACORN, the unions and the Democratic Party” “tampered” with results to deny him victory.

Mr. Hoffman provided no evidence to support his claims, but asked fellow conservatives to send donations his way to “ensure every vote is counted.”

It seems that all votes in NY-23 were not completely reported on election night,leading Hoffman to concede. Now that the votes are being properly recanvassed, Hoffman is… still losing. There’s no actual evidence that ACORN has anything to do with this, but let’s be honest: Is it really possible that New York voters rejected Hoffman’s angry, fear-mongering politics? Of course not. It’s much more likely that this is yet another evil plot of ACORN’s.

It’s not just Hoffman, either. ACORN must have been involved in pretty much every election that a Republican has lost over the past few years. After all, we know that the voters love patriotic Republicans and hate communist, America-hating Democrats, so there’s only one explanation. ACORN was even responsible for stealing the 2008 election for Barack Obama:

The new national poll from Public Policy Polling (D) has an astonishing number about paranoia among the GOP base: Republicans do not think President Obama actually won the 2008 election — instead, ACORN stole it.

…only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% — an outright majority — saying that ACORN stole it, and 21% are undecided.

So there you have it. Sure, there’s no evidence, but it seems obvious. Any time something happens that you don’t like, ACORN is behind it. They used to be such a benign, uncontroversial group, too. It’s too bad they abandoned their primary focus of advocating affordable housing and turned to evil.

Former GOP state Rep. Ron Erhardt of Edina is exploring a run for his old House seat as a Democrat.

“I’m looking to run. I raised money earlier in the year,” said Erhardt today in a telephone interview with PIM…

…Erhardt said it appears his chances of winning are strongest by running as a Democrat.

“I’m exploring the possibility to run as a Democrat. If that doesn’t work I’ll run as an independent,” Erhardt said.

Sounds like Erhardt is pretty committed to running, he’s just trying to figure out which party label to run under. If he decides to run as a Democrat, however, he’ll have competition. 2008 DFL endorsed candidate Kevin Staunton is running again.

Looks like Edina is going to be a critical battleground once again in 2010.

The Pontiac Silverdome, site of countless amazing runs by Lions great Barry Sanders and MHSAA football championship games, has depreciated in value.

A lot.

An unidentified Toronto-based group submitted the winning bid for the property with a paltry offer of $583,000. It’s pretty minuscule when you consider that the Silverdome cost $55.7 million to build.

I have seen the future, and it is not pretty.

Minnesota Vikings owners Zygi and Mark Wilf today said the team is breaking off relations with the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission until the commission loosens the purse strings in its Metrodome lease and helps it build a new stadium in downtown Minneapolis.

In a blistering letter sent this afternoon to Paul Thatcher, chairman of the commission’s Finance Committee, the Wilfs said they were “shocked, exasperated and extremely disappointed” by the committee’s proposal Tuesday to encourage the team to extend its Metrodome lease by two years.

The resolution, which will be on the full commission’s agenda Thursday, proposes awarding the team all post-season stadium revenues if they agree to a lease extension.

If the team refuses, the resolution proposes to start collecting $4 million a year from the Vikings — rent that it has forgiven the team since 2002 in an effort to help it stay competitive with better-positioned NFL teams.

Memo to the Sports Facilities Commission: you can’t negotiate if you don’t have leverage and the Vikings are holding all the cards. They have the country’s second largest media market and a brand new stadium waiting for them in L.A. There is ZERO chance that they will renew their lease and everybody knows it. So why on Earth would you attempt a stupid stunt like this? All you are going to do is push them into Ed Roski’s arms.

If anyone at the MSFC really thought that threatening the Vikings would persuade them to renew their lease, they should find a new line of work.  I am honestly just astounded at the sheer stupidity of this move.

Full text of the email after the jump.

MnIndy summarizes:

“It’s usurping the power of the legislature… Right now he’s actually writing laws,” he said. “I don’t know where’s he getting this authority, and nobody’s really taking him on.”

“Right now any governor — whether the governor is Tom Rukavina or Tim Pawlenty — can basically sign every spending bill and then decide to unallot,” he said.

This was my favorite line:

Right now, he’s borrowing against our kids’ future so he can have a political future.

Watch the whole thing (about 3 minutes) below:

For 2 1/4 years now I have been saying that there is no chance of a repeat of the Great Depression or anything like it — that we know what to do and how to do it and will do it if things turn south.

I don’t think I can say that anymore. In my estimation the chances of another big downward shock to the U.S. economy — a shock that would carry us from the 1/3-of-a-Great-Depression we have now to 2/3 or more — are about 5%. And it now looks very much as if if such a shock hits the U.S. government will be unable to do a d —  — - thing about it.

Ugh.

Let this serve as a quick reminder that the stakes right now are incredibly high. We can certainly have debates over how our government can best stabilize the economy, but there can be no question that the government must still be actively engaged in making sure another “shock” to the economy doesn’t happen.

But the fact is that the uninsured have worse health outcomes, even in our emergency rooms. A new study in the Archives of Surgery shows that even when we look at trauma patients — in other words, cases which have little to do with a patient’s underlying health — uninsured patients at the emergency room are about twice as likely to die.

The fact is, even if the uninsured technically have some access to care via our emergency rooms, even that isn’t as effective for the uninsured as it is for the insured. In our system, if you don’t have health insurance, you don’t have access to quality care.

Conservative Doug Hoffman conceded the race in the 23rd Congressional District last week after receiving two pieces of grim news for his campaign: He was down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night…

Now a recanvassing in the 11-county district shows that Owens’ lead has narrowed to 3,026 votes over Hoffman, 66,698 to 63,672, according to the latest unofficial results from the state Board of Elections.

Outrageous! The fact that the numbers are moving in Hoffman’s favor during the standard process of recanvassing is clear evidence that the Republicans are stealing this election. Or, at least, that was the Republican party line during the Franken-Coleman recount a year ago. It’s funny that conservative partisans don’t seem to have a problem with the recanvassing process this time. In fact, they’re now encouraging Hoffman to “un-concede.” I guess it makes a big difference when the numbers are moving in the right direction.

The Obama administration, under fire for inflating job growth from the $787 billion stimulus plan, slashed over 60,000 jobs from its most recent report on the program because the reporting outlets had submitted “unrealistic data,” according to a document obtained by ABC News.

The Office of Management and Budget document shows that before an Oct. 30 progress report on the program the administration asked the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to remove information from 12 stimulus recipients that contained “unrealistic data,” including “unrealistic job data.”

Is the data perfect? Of course not, but the Obama is doing an admirable job trying to clear up inaccurate data. The sheer level of data being made available to the public is incredible, too — just take a look at the map which breaks down every single award, including a brief description of the project. While America has always had a relatively open government, we’ve never had this amount of data presented so openly for the American people to view.

It strikes me as incredible that groups like the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota are complaining about minor inaccuracies in the data. FFM’s complaint is that recovery.gov shows spending and job figures for non-existent congressional districts in Minnesota. And it’s true — 0.3 percent of the data from Minnesota appears to be improperly attributed to incorrect congressional districts. This is a tiny mistake, yet a mistake nonetheless, and one that I’m sure will eventually be cleaned up. The irony, though, is that FFM can only complain about the data in the first place because of the Obama administration’s unprecedented commitment to make it available to us in real time.