It turns out that bizarre wiretapping arrest in Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's office has a Minnesota angle. This was the one featuring the same guy who torched ACORN in his undercover videos with himself playing a pimp. This time though, among the four young gentlemen facing ... federal felony charges ... is one Joseph Basel, 24, a founder of The Counterweight, a monthly conservative magazine at the U of M-Morris. City Pages jumped on this story. Kevin Hoffman, quoting from the FBI affidavit, writes, "Basel entered the Hale Boggs building with his associate, Robert Flanagan, dressed up as telephone repairmen with hard hats and tool belts. They went to Senator Landrieu's 10th floor office, where they found O'Keefe waiting. Basel asked for access to the phone, manipulated it, tried to call it from a cell phone and said he couldn't get through. Basel and Flanagan said they'd have to fix it. They were directed to the main office, where their credentials were requested. They claimed they 'had left their credentials in their vehicle.' According to the New York Times, they are claiming it was some kind of media stunt gone wrong rather than a genuine attempt to wiretap a senator." Well, I'm guessing their various lawyers will have plenty of court time to explain what they were really up to.

There's a scent of skullduggery in a mailing that a lot — maybe every — DFL voter received yesterday, ripping R.T. Rybak for a complex pension issue that long ago went to court. But it's the list ... a very big list, apparently ... that has fingers being pointed. Jason Hoppin's PiPress story says, "Such a list is fairly hard to come by, and one possible source is the DFL's Voter Activation Network, or VAN. It tracks caucus attendees, and is helpful for candidates trying to drum up support heading into next week's caucuses. But access to the list is tightly controlled, available in complete form only to gubernatorial candidates, who must sign a license restricting its use." And that, "The tightly controlled list fueled speculation that it had to come from one of Rybak's many rivals for the governor's office this year."

Prior to next week's caucuses, the Minnesota Progressive Project conducted an online poll asking its readers, presumably progressive types, who they are supporting for the DFL gubernatorial endorsement. What strikes us as more interesting than R.T. Rybak and Matt Entenza in a tie for the lead, is largely unheralded Paul Thissen coming in a close third. Today the site is asking "Who you think will win," which is an entirely different animal.

Viewers of KSTP-TV's news have been seeing a lot of robins this winter ... and asking the station, "What's up with that?" Chikage Windler files a report that ... uh ... robins sometimes go and sometimes stay ... and aren't really the harbinger of spring Grandpa used to say they were. OK, so next question: What's up with all the potholes?

John Welbes has a story in the PiPress about the umpteenth mortgage fraud indictment since the real estate bubble burst. "[The two men] helped out the people doing the actual purchasing by temporarily depositing money into investors' bank accounts, making them look flush and credit worthy for the mortgages they were taking on. After each closing, [one of them] purportedly received a portion of the loan proceeds as 'management fees.' The fees ranged from $18,000 to $228,000 per property, and totaled more than $5 million for the 70 properties mentioned in the indictment."

It would be an understatement to say that blogger Drew Emmer at Wright County Republican is thrilled and delighted with Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's somewhat belated entry into health care legislation. He got in on a conference call with Ms. Bachmann tuesrday, and ... "Michele put enough meat on the bones of her forthcoming announcement to have me grinning form ear to ear. This is true leadership in health care reform coming from one of the most authentic leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives." Really? "Authentic," you say?

Minnesota has slipped to fifth nationally in electrical generation from wind power. This in a piece filed by MPR's Mark Stiel. He says, "[O]ne of the factors limiting Minnesota's wind energy growth was a lack of power lines to carry the electricity to market. 'Sometimes the transmission capacity can be congested and it's difficult to get those projects the capacity that they need to get built,' [said a spokeswoman for the American Wind Energy association]. There are plans to build new power lines in the states, the most important being the CapX2020 project. Eleven utility companies have joined forces to build almost 700 miles of new lines, but the start of construction is still two years off." Washington state has moved past us in wind power generation. To paraphrase Gen. Buck Turgidson, "We must not allow ... a wind power gap!"

Republican Mike Parry, who raised eyebrows and ire with some "hot talk"-style blog postings, won the Tuesday's election to fill Dick Day's state senate seat in the Owatonna area. The AP story says, "With about 85 percent of the unofficial vote counted, Parry had about 43 percent of the vote to Democrat Jason Engbrecht's nearly 35 percent. Independent Roy Srp trailed with about 22 percent." Chris Steller at the Minnesota Independent applies a bit of context to his election night story, with links to Parry's rhetorical excesses.

But Smart Politics, i.e. Eric Ostermeier, has the most thorough instant breakdown of patterns in the reliably Republican district. He notes that, "Although the 26th District is not divided equally in the tri-county region, each of the three candidates carried a county Tuesday." The Faribault area went for the Democrat.

Frankly, the cost of burying indigents had kind of fallen off my radar. But Kevin Duchschere at the Strib reports that the city of Minneapolis alone is spending $1.2 million a year on the solemn duty and costs are increasing.  "The county had handled 781 burials and cremations for indigent people through November" 2009.

No one has hit more home runs against the Twins than Jim Thome — and that includes the one that knocked the Twins out of the 2008 playoffs — but now he's on our side. The Twins signed the veteran slugger with hopes that he'll provide some danger as a pinch-hitter. He played very little for the Dodgers last year after leaving Chicago.  MLB.com's Kelly Thesier anticipated the move Tuesrday, writing, "The Twins' current bench appears to be a little weak and the addition of Thome would go a long way into giving the club more of a threat in late-inning situations."

The Strib's Joe Christensen bet wrong on the Thome move, but he quotes an AP story about Joe Mauer in New York to pick up his MVP award, "During his routine, comedian and writer Bill Scheft told Mauer, who will be a free agent after the 2010 season, that all New York airports were closed and that he'll have to stay until 2015. Mauer's dad, Jake, who bought his first tuxedo for the event, said his family wasn't going to push Joe to stay in Minnesota. 'Wherever he's happy, we're happy,' Jake Mauer said." What!?