The National Republican Congressional Committee is weighing back into the hot 3rd Congressional District race (Erik Paulsen vs. Ashwin Madia) to replace the retiring Rep. Jim Ramstad.

A new NRCC ad attacking Madia went up today. Here it is.

I'm not sure how much money NRCC is putting behind the ad, but its appearance is significant because the committee had recently canceled two weeks' worth of TV time it had reserved for Paulsen. It looked like it might be abandoning him to shift money to endangered incumbents, including Minnesotan Michele Bachmann. This ad means they have not abandoned him completely.

The ad continues a theme of Paulsen's current ad, which is based on the very dubious claim that Madia favors allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire in their entirety. All of the numbers in the ad are based on that premise, which is false. Madia favors keeping the tax cuts for households with less than $250,000 in income.

Paulsen and the NRCC are relying on quotes taken out of context at three candidate forums in which Madia seemed to be talking about the entire Bush tax cut package. But the Madia campaign has produced video showing that in at least two of the three cases, Madia made clear at the very same event that he was talking about the tax cuts for the top 2 or 3 percent of earners.

Here's the longer excerpt from one of those events in November of 2007.

If you watch the whole clip, you'll find that Madia says, "We gotta let the Bush tax cuts expire," but says less than a minute later that "we can darn well have the top 1 percent sacrifice their tax cuts."

The full clip is seven minutes long, but the discussion of the tax cuts occurs in the first three minutes.