Hi Ho Hi Ho It's Off To Caucus For Al I Go...

Well it's finally arrived, Caucus Time! In about half an hour, my good friend and neighbor is hopefully going to come over so we can have a couple of beverages to fortify us for the work ahead tonite. My neighbor is an immigrant from East Africa who I greatly admire and it will be interesting to watch as he experiences his first caucus.

I am still undecided with respect to the presidential preference vote as my first choice and the candidate whom I have the most invested in, emotionally, John Edwards, dropped out the day after I attended his last rally in St. Paul.

The main reason I am attending tonite is to support my candidate for U.S. Senate, Al Franken. I have been hoping that Mr. Franken would run for office ever since hearing his speech against predatory lending to the National Press Corps way back in February of 2002, before it was on anyone's radar screen.

I then became a devoted listener to his Air America radio show, which contrary to the Republican propaganda machine, was not an angry, left-wing version of Rush Limbaugh! Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Franken's show was in fact a show for policy wonks or political geeks and rather than being angry, it was often gentle, always intellectual in nature and fact based with an incredible web page with footnotes to original sources on almost everything discussed. Franken had the most knowlegable guests, whether they agreed with him or not and graciously gave those who differed with him a soap box, such as his childhood friend and Limbaugh devotee who he gave weekly if not daily time to espouse the Limbaugh point of view. Now he did do satirical bits on Bill O'Reilly, but hey, with O'Reilly how could anyone resist!

I listened with interest to the debate on MPR today and although I am emotionally invested with Al, I do have great professional admiration for Mike Ciresi who is like Superman to us mere mortal trial lawyers. Surprisingly, the candidate who may have done the best in today's debate was Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer who was an unknown commodity to me before today. But taking everything into consideration, including which candidate is in the best position to beat Norm Coleman this fall, the only choice for Paul Wellstone's old seat is Al Franken. Period. Exclaimation Point!!!!!!