Netlets for Wednesday, Sept. 17

Democrats want Franken What the so-called experts missed about Al Franken's win in the U.S. Senate primary ("And now the main event," Sept. 10) is that most votes for Patricia Lord Faris, Franken's principal challenger, came from Republican partisans bent on damaging Franken's momentum.

How to tell? The number of contested Minnesota State House races was evenly split across the state, half Democrat, half Republican. Sixty percent of all U.S. Congress primary votes cast were in Republican races. So plenty of Republicans voted.

Yet Democrats, including Franken and Faris, received 64 percent of the combined total of Democratic and Republican votes for U.S. Senate. This could not have happened without significant crossover, particularly in districts without Republican primaries. Subtract enough probable Republican votes from Farris to split the vote between the parties, and her total dwindles to a meager 8 percent of actual Democratic votes.

An attempt was indeed made to impact this election, but actual Democratic voters polled overwhelmingly for Al Franken for U.S. Senate.

PETER HILL, MINNETONKA

Voters' priorities as shown in Minnesota Poll The Sept. 14 Star Tribune Campaign 2008 Minnesota Poll article failed to highlight some important results within the "Most Important Issue" category. More Republican respondents picked abortion, guns and same-sex marriage as an "issue" of higher importance than terrorism and national security, taxes and spending, energy and gas prices, health care, and the Iraq war.

Whereas a majority of Democrats and a large fraction of Independents think jobs and the economy are a top issue, only one in five Republicans agree. The fact that such a large fraction of Republicans put their cultural beliefs over the struggles of the middle class and the threats we face as a nation is astonishing and troubling. Their previous choice, Bush-Cheney, put ideological beliefs first, and far behind came jobs for the middle class, the war in Afghanistan, New Orleans and the Justice Department -- that was not good for America.

SURYA IYER, EDINA

Democratic hot air will help opposition E.J. Dionne's Sept. 14 column reached a new low for bias, innuendo and inaccuracies regarding this year's campaign for the presidency. He portrays Barack Obama as the pure and righteous Dudley Do-Right and John McCain and Sarah Palin as the evil Boris and Natasha.

"Obama would guarantee everyone access to health care." No candidate is in a position to guarantee such a thing; the cost for such a program would dwarf the cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

At least one statement in the article is true: "it's clear that Obama has lost control of this campaign." Palin is the reason for this. Obama could have chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate (a person who had garnished 18 million votes in the primary) and skated to victory in November. Instead, he foolishly chose Joe Biden (a candidate who had gotten only 1 percent of the vote in the Iowa primary) and now finds himself trailing in the polls. Dionne writes "Obama has economic proposals with a lot of promise.." That's nice. More hot air, more blah, blah, blah. The American people still remember 2004 when the hot air was "John Kerry has a plan." In this election, as in 2004, the American people will vote accordingly in November.

JOHN HEILI, LAKE ELMO

CHUCK CHARNSTROM, WATERTOWN

Palin represents more of the same Sarah Palin reminds me of wonderful women I've met since I moved to northern Minnesota: strong, articulate, and funny, and as comfortable hunting and roughing it as she is giving a speech. But there are aspects of her record that do not reflect Minnesota values, and they should give us all pause. Throughout her two mayoral terms and nearly two years as governor, Sarah Palin has appointed personal friends to positions they had no expertise in; fired long-term, experienced employees for being insufficiently loyal; and sought to hide governance processes from public scrutiny. She is currently under an ethics investigation for abuse of power.

These are not the actions of a person who shares my values of accountability, participatory decisionmaking, fairness and due process. Here is just one other example: Instead of meeting with elected legislative leaders to negotiate final changes to the state budget, Palin sat down with her budget director and her husband, who is neither an elected official nor a government employee, and made cuts without input from any other representative of the public.

What most of us want to fix in Washington is a culture of cronyism, the corrupting influence of money and the politicization of government agencies. Sarah Palin, in the second most powerful position in the most powerful nation in the world, would just change the cronies.