Allegedly fiscally conservative former congressman Rick Berg, a Fargo slumlord, was part of a relatively small group of legislators who gave bonuses to staff members of their record-low-job-approval congress.

A CNN analysis shows that as the federal government approached the fiscal cliff and sharp budget cuts last year, nearly 25 percent of House members gave their own staff members bonus checks (View the full expense reports). House members have complete and sole discretion over how their office budgets are spent and can choose to give their staffers bonuses.

CNN.com

In 2012, congressional job approval ratings approached the single digits and Berg's office's own approval couldn't have been doing all that well considering he lost an election in November of 2012.  Despite that, Berg gave tax-dollar-funded bonuses totalling $14,575.92 to staffers in his unpopular office.  Here's a breakdown of the bonuses Berg gave his staff, according to congressional records:  

I'd like to know when these bonuses were paid, too. Were they paid before Berg lost his bid for the U.S. Senate to Senator Heidi Heitkamp in November, or after?  My guess is that it was after. Did he hand them out as "Christmas bonuses"?  Or did he do it on his way out the door?  Or earlier?  I'd kinda like to know.

I'm also curious as to why the "part-time employee" got the same bonus as the "deputy state director." And why did the Chief of Staff get 9 times what just about everybody else got?  Is it because he did such a great job in helping Berg stay popular with his constituents in North Dakota?  Apparently not.

But the important thing here is that only 25% of the members of Congress handed out bonus checks in a year of budget cutting and deficits.  Were he a true fiscal conservative, dead-set on cutting the federal deficit, he wouldn't have needed to give all this free money to his staffers.  And, if any of his staffers were true fiscal conservatives, sincerely concerned about federal spending, they wouldn't have needed to accept the free money, either.

And by "free money" I mean "our tax dollars."

I can't help but grimace when I see how Republicans don't see what they are doing to themselves and to North Dakota.  It's like watching someone giving themselves a round-house punch to the face. They elect these corporate sell-outs who are destroying Western North Dakota, and then get mad that Western North Dakota is being destroyed.  In a tragic, sick and sad way, it's funny. It's unfortunate.  Let me draw  you a map.

The Mayor of Watford City is a fellow named Brent Sanford.  He's mad as hell and he's not going to take any more.  What's he mad about?  He's mad that the North Dakota Highway Department isn't doing anything to stop the slaughter of people on our Western North Dakota highways.  Here's a snippet from a Tribune story...

The mayor of Watford City was livid Wednesday after two local teenage boys were killed and another injured in an accident with a semi truck just outside the oil patch city.

Brent Sanford said it’s time for the state Department of Transportation to take some blame for dangerous two-lane highways with thousands of semi trucks.

“It makes me sick to think of children dying on our roads. It’s a nightmare,” Sanford said.

The accident occurred at about 1 p.m. Tuesday, when a westbound Subaru Forester driven by Fenton Matthew, 17, spun sideways in icy slush into the path of an oncoming semi and was split in half by the collision.

Bismarck Tribune

He's mad because our state's leadership has failed to build and maintain infrastructure that can handle the kind of industrial pressure being put on the entire western half of the state.  He's mad the state's leaders haven't prepared to handle what they've let loose on his town and county. At the same time, Mayor Sanford supports the Republicans who are doing this to us. Makes sense, right?

Here's Sanford, praising Dalrymple and "Bismarck" for all the help Watford City had seen from Bismarck:

And the state’s recognition of the need for improvements to Highway 85 didn’t go unnoticed by Brent Sanford, Watford City’s mayor.  “Sen. Hoeven and Gov. Dalrymple know of our plight out here,” stated Sanford. “The Governor really went to bat for us. It’s been wonderful to see the support from Bismarck. We didn’t have to beg. They saw our need and helped us.”

WatfordCityND.com (11/23/2011)

So which is it, Mayor Sanford?  The Highway Department buck stops at Jack Dalrymple's feet.  Did Dalrymple's Highway Department really go to bat for Watford City?  Or did they do something for which they deserve blame?  Let me take a shot at answering my own rhetorical question.  The answer is that Mayors feel like they need to suck up to the state's Republican leaders because, if they don't, they've seen the reign of horrors that can be wrought upon them. So -- like our state's cowardly newspaper editors -- they're afraid to point fingers and name names. They'll blame "the Highway Department" but they won't mention whose responsibility the Highway Department is.  It's easy to be mad at a building or a department, but there are people responsible for that department who should be held accountable. And the person who should be held accountable at the Highway Department is Jack Dalrymple.

Let's be clear about one other thing here, too.  This is a horrific tragedy.  The residents of Watford City and McKenzie County would be completely justified in being "livid."  The State of North Dakota and its elected "leaders" have completely failed in planning for the life-and-death problems we're dealing with as a state. And those "leaders" are all Republicans here.  

But Mayor Sanford hasn't helped at all in making sure our state's elected officials aren't all a bunch of Republican corporate sell-outs.  If you take a look at political campaign contributions made by Mayor Sanford, where do you suppose he's put his money over the years?

(Source)

Listen: Maybe Mayor Sanford is a really nice guy. Maybe he's recognized the errors of his ways. He donated $1,000 to Ryan Taylor's campaign last year; and maybe that's an indication he now recognizes the error of his ways. But his earlier track record makes him look a little like the proverbial orphan who's killed his parents and, brought before the court, he complains that he's an orphan. Maybe he even feels bad about killing his parents now. But he supported Republicans as they gave away our state to out-of-state oil companies and didn't support Democrats who aren't around to make his breakfast in the morning. Only then does he seemingly express outrage because the state's been sold out to out-of-state oil companies and the governor's Highway Department hasn't done anything to protect the victims in North Dakota.

While I feel horrible for the families of these poor young men who have fallen victim to the North Dakota Republican party's selling off of North Dakota to Wayne Stenehjem's, Doug Goehring's, Jack Dalrymple's, Rick Berg's, and John Hoeven's buddies in big oil, I have a limited amount of sympathy for Mayor Sanford as he whines about the problem he helped the state's Republicans build.

[Cross-posted, with permission, from the Prairie Blog.]

When you take a nearly 12,000 mile driving trip, you get a lot of time to think. Lillian and I did that this winter, and we learned a lot about the country we live in. But we learned something else about ourselves: We’re both pretty comfortable in our own skin. And because of that, we were able to go long periods of time without talking. Without the radio playing. Without music. There were days when we drove for hours and the car was just quiet. Those were thinking hours.

We’re also both pretty intense observers of the world around us. We paid attention to the sides of the road, not just the center line. On the sides we saw, variously, woods, water and desert, as well as civilization in the form of cities, signs, and fellow travelers. In driving from Bismarck all the way to the Atlantic coast, then turning right and driving first along the seaboard, then the Gulf of Mexico, then the desert of Texas and New Mexico, and then the Rocky Mountains and the Black Hills as we kept turning right, the circle ending back in our driveway in Bismarck, we saw many things we had not seen before, or had seen but not paid much attention to. And we had time to talk about, and think about, what we were seeing.

Now I’m a pretty North Dakota-focused person, even though I’ve traveled through 49 of the 50 states—well, almost 49. I didn’t drive in Alaska. Yet. I only landed there in an airplane, walked across the tarmac a short distance to a hangar and back on a frigid Alaska winter day. But I have driven in every other state except New Hampshire, somehow missing that state on my several trips to New England. I’ve liked other states, but only as a casual visitor. Even though I enjoy the outdoors immensely, almost all of my participatory activities have been pretty much limited to North Dakota. I’ve never owned a non-resident hunting license, for example. I hunt 30 or 40 days a year, but always in North Dakota. I’m a fisherman, but my out of state fishing experience consists of one time in Montana and three or four times in Canada.

I’m a hiker, but I can count the number of states I’ve taken any substantial hikes in on my fingers, and the number of times I’ve hiked in any one state on one hand. I do like driving around the country and looking, but I really like doing most everything that can be done here, in North Dakota, right here at home, rather than somewhere else.

But my years as a journalist helped me develop a keen eye for observing what is happening in other places. And so I thought, on this trip that Lillian and I just completed, I’d really look for things that people in other states are doing that we could, or should, be doing in North Dakota. I mentioned a couple of them in an earlier blog post from the road—naming things after people, and logo signs on the highway–as examples.

At the same time as I was traveling and observing some of the really cool things other states were doing, I was following the North Dakota Legislature online, and one day this thought struck me: In North Dakota, right now, we are suffering from a lack of really big ideas. We’re just cruising along as a state, reacting to outside forces, the way we always have, minding our business, being generally taken advantage of, just like the days when the railroads and big grain companies dictated to us what we could produce, where we could sell it, and how much we could sell it for.  Not much has changed in that respect in the last 100 years, since the days when the Nonpartisan League led a revolt with some really big ideas. Really. Big. Ideas. Ideas like a state-owned bank, a state-owned mill, state-guaranteed hail insurance, and the passage of initiative and referendum laws which gave the citizens of our state a direct voice in their future when government failed to act on their behalf. The difference between 100 years ago and now is that now it is the mineral extraction industries dictating to us. Lackadaisical government leaders now, as then, do the bidding of those outside forces. Who are we, and who were we then, to fight progress, to not deliver our goods to a needy world at prices set elsewhere? It was our responsibility then to provide wheat for a food-hungry world. It is now our responsibility to provide oil (and gas and coal) to an energy-hungry world.

The big ideas the Nonpartisan League had back then did not completely stop the flow of dollars into big city banks, wheat into Minneapolis elevators and flour into America’s homes. They just made sure that we were treated fairly, that we could see a vision for success in our future, and that we’d be proud of what we contributed to our country. Today, we don’t need big ideas that stop the flow of oil and gas and coal out of North Dakota. We just need to insure we are treated fairly, and, as Art Link said, when the landscape is quiet again, we have a state we can still be proud of.

Right now, our state’s leaders, many of them deeply indebted to an industry that provided the funds to get them elected, are, at worst, just carrying out the wishes of that industry, and at best, nibbling around the edges of a course set forth by others, who don’t answer to us North Dakotans. Or much care about us.

It’s time to pause, step back, take a deep breath, and grab back the reins of leadership of North Dakota with some really big ideas.

I wish I could tell you what those big ideas should be. I wish I was smarter, and younger, and a little less tired, and that the ideas would just flow. While I was driving, I tried to make myself think of things that could happen that would make our grandchildren’s generation pause, 25 or 50 years from now, and say “No shit! They really did that? Wow!”

I tried to think if there are any of those kinds of things happening right now. I thought of a couple. As I walked through spectacular new Clinton Presidential Library, I thought about the fact that, around the end of this year we’re going to open the doors on a new $50 million or so State Heritage Center. That’s something. As I visited some dizzyingly large wildlife refuges and national parks, I thought of the proposal to put five per cent of the oil tax money we’re collecting right now into land and water conservation projects. At a concert in Greenville, NC, I thought of how proud the people of Fargo and Grand Forks must have been when they first saw the Fargodome and the Alerus Center. At almost every national park gate, I thought of Harold Schafer standing on a bluff overlooking a shabby little cattle town named Medora and saying “There is too much here to be lost—let’s save it.” As I stood on the banks of the Rio Grande—the “Big River”—I thought of the idea of first, the Southwest Pipeline Project, and now the Northwest Area Water Supply (NAWS) and the Western Area Water Supply Project (WAWSP) bringing fresh, pure Missouri River water to western North Dakota. As I looked out into the Gulf of Mexico at the drilling platforms, I realized what an amazingly big idea it took by Harold Hamm and others in the oil industry to figure out how to fracture our shale and bring what will be billions of barrels of oil out of the ground that was unreachable just five years ago. And I thought of the leadership of Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad, and the North Dakota Farmers Union, AFL-CIO, Education Association and Rural Electric Cooperatives, to go to the people and put a six and a half per cent extraction tax on that oil way back in 1980, thirty years before the Bakken boom, that will now guarantee us a source of funding for our schools, and roads, and our elderly and poor and yes, those water pipeline projects, far, far into the future. And as I drove past huge coalfield spoil piles in northeast Wyoming, I thought of Art Link’s insistence on reclamation laws to make the land, after the coal mines are done, better than it was before.

Big ideas, all.

And then I continued to read news reports of North Dakota getting richer and richer, day by day, and not a single new big idea being proposed by the leadership of our state to take advantage of our newfound wealth. Instead I saw stories about cutting the oil tax we fought so hard for 30 years ago, to put even more gold into the pockets of the oil barons, about granting property tax relief which never seems to find its way into our year-end tax bills, and about government creeping into people’s bedrooms and doctors’ offices. Where, oh where, is our vision?

I don’t even know if I have any big ideas, but I’m thinking, what if we could build more water pipelines heading east, and south, to bring fresh water to the door of every home and farm and business in North Dakota? Every one. We’re pumping water uphill when we take it west from Lake Sakakawea to Williston and Dickinson and Hettinger. But it’s downhill all the way from Garrison to Fargo. How hard could that be—pipelines bringing fresh water, for every North Dakotan, forever? Along the way, we might even return 50 or 60 miles of unused canals back into farmland.

What if we reclaimed every single oil well site in 30 or 40 years, when the oil is gone, covered the scoria roads, planted native grasses and flowers, and turned the entire Bad Lands into America’s most spectacular National Park?

Why don’t we honor our citizens, past and present, like most states do, by naming roads and bridges and buildings, and even rivers and buttes, after them?

And yes (I’m never going to give up on this), what if we chose that wonderful Native American word for “friend”—Dakota—as the name of our state, giving up any extraneous directional adjectives?

We could do all those things, and many more, that you can think of, so our great-grandkids could indeed say “Wow! They really did that?”

In the next few weeks, I’m going to write about those things, to make the case for them, and hope our leaders will begin listening, and thinking. Write to me with your big ideas. I’ll be happy to post them here as well, if you’ll send them to me.

If we could build a skyscraper state capitol in the depths of the depression . . . If a man could make a fortune selling bubble bath . . . If we can drill an oil well sideways for two miles  . . . If we can build an international garden dedicated to peace . . . If a tall, skinny kid from Williston can become the best NBA basketball coach ever . . . Heck, if we can build the world’s largest concrete buffalo . . .

[UPDATED]

If you're a follower of the Washington Post's blog, "The Fix," you know they put together an annual list of the top state-based political blogs for all 50 states.  Well, The Fix's 2013 list is in, and -- thanks to you guys -- we're on it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know we've been light on the blogging here lately. We've been recovering from the 2012 election cycle, busy with home and work, etc., etc., etc. And I -- personally -- am avoiding the legislative session for reasons that may or may not be obvious to the smarter ones amongst you. Anyway... I have all the usual excuses and then a couple extra ones. I hope to get back at it some time soon. In the meantime, I post quick and short stuff pretty regularly on our Facebook page. So if you haven't "liked" the Facebook page yet, you should.

Let me add this, too:  I'm always looking for other people willing to submit content to NorthDecoder.com. We'll post it under a pseudonym if you're concerned about getting picked on at work, or wherever. The pay sucks but the glory is awesome. So if you've got a blog thing that's been bouncing around in your mind, and it's not filled with right-wing nonsense, bounce it off of us. We'll probably give you a forum. Just shoot me a note at northdecoder at gmail daught com and we'll get you set up.

The other thing is that -- in all sincerity -- there's not a lot of competition in North Dakota to be a "top state-based political blog." There is a right-wing nutcase blog for people who don't mind a lot of right-wing fiction and Fox News-like talking points mixed in with their blog non-news.  There's NorthDecoder.com.  There are a few others out there, I suppose. But... my point?  It's not that hard to be a big fish in North Dakota's small state-based political blog pond.  But we're more than happy to fill that role for y'all.

Thanks to the folks who nominated NorthDecoder to be on the Fix's list.  We've been on it pretty much every year for a few years now, I think.  We'll try to continue to live up to the support you give us.

[Funny side note pointed out to me by someone else: The other North Dakota blog listed on the Fix's list has a blog post today about how his blog is the "state's top blog" (or something; I haven't looked). Apparently, when asked why NorthDecoder is listed first on the Fix's list, someone from that other blog has apparently responded by noting that they're just in alphabetical order  ... which is interesting, considering some of the other state's lists on the Fix aren't in alphabetical order.  

Again, it's an honor to make the list, but it's really not the sort of thing I'm gonna put on my resume. I can see how it would be a bigger honor to be the top state-based political blog in -- for example -- Florida or California or Texas or New York, where there are lots of state-based political blogs.  But less so here.]

While you're busting your tail, working 50 or 60 hours a week to put food on your family, it's important to take time now and then to see what it's like to be in the good graces of America's wealthy oil barons and big ag.  Let's take a look at one of the things former North Dakota Governor Ed Schafer, who also served as Secretary of Agriculture under George W. Bush, has been doing lately.

According to various online sources, Schafer became a "consultant" for a company called "Bio Nitrogen Corporation" ("Bion") in September of 2009 and continued as a consultant until December of 2010.  According to disclosures from Bion, Schafer had "joined" Bion in August of 2010 as Executive Vice Chairman. In early 2011, Schafer became a member of Bion's senior management team, "with direct management responsibility for Bion's [ ] state and federal government interfaces" (i.e. "lobbying") and working with the ag industry and the company's interests in Asia and the Middle East.  (Source)  I looked around all the various online resources about Schafer's hiring at at Bion (see, for example, this) and did not see anything advising Bion investors of Schafer's track-record as a serial plagiarist or inventor of toaster bombs.

According to documents filed by Bion with the Securities Exchange Commission, Schafer was paid salary and stock options worth roughly $686,000 in 2011. Not bad for part-time work, eh?  Keep in mind, Schafer also got around $760,000 in compensation for his part-time gig sitting on the board of directors for Continental Resources, the company owned by "The Man Who Bought North Dakota," Harold Hamm. 

Any time you decide to contemplate "wealth inequality in America," keep folks like Schafer in mind.  It's almost as if it doesn't matter any more how hard you work in America; wealth has much more to do with who (or whom) you know. It shouldn't surprise us at all when Schafer shows up in North Dakota every now and then, looking to try to line his owners' pockets by influencing our state's policies.  That's what he's paid to do.

Bion is a "penny stock" trading, at the time of this posting, right around $0.21 per share.  Two pieces of good news are (1) Bion's shares have little more value than Schafer's failed fish farm, and (2) there is hope for serial plagiarists to make a lot of money if they go to work as a part-time consultant for big ag and shilling for the oil industry. The bad news is... well... the same as the good news, I guess.

I'm sick of it. I'm completely burned out on reading these laudatory gush-fests on Facebook wherein my progressive friends tell me and the rest of the world how awesome Ken Rogers is for writing an editorial that's critical of the radical right wingers who dominate North Dakota's Republican Party. Haven't seen his editorial? Sample some of his watery sewage:

The West used to be known for rugged individualism.

Instead, at least in North Dakota, the Legislature feels compelled to guide the state’s citizens -- publicly and privately.

There are legislators who are all-knowing. There’s no bounds, no limits, to the scope of their knowledge. They know when new life quickens. They know the poor are, in essence, drug users and freeloaders. They know the homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle. There are lawmakers who  know about your marriage, and whether you should get a divorce and how you should figure out your budget to pay child support. They know what’s best for you, and you, and you.

It’s not that this Legislature is particularly conservative, which it is, but that among its number there are those who feel compelled to modify the social, religious and cultural behavior of others.

Bismarck Tribune (please go read the whole thing)

So, in his editorial he goes on to call out somebody -- and he never tells who -- for being part of the radical right. He's critical of voters for voting for these people. It's their fault, he tells us, that we've got these nut jobs in the capitol. Here's Rogers pointing the finger at you and me, the voters:  

"When you get right down to it, the problem doesn’t reside in the Legislature. No, it’s the voters. We did elect a number of intolerant, all-knowing people to the North Dakota Legislature. We did it because maybe we didn’t do our homework about the candidates."

So what's the problem?

HE NEVER TELLS US WHO HE'S TALKING ABOUT!!!  

Who in the Sam Hell is Ken Rogers talking about?  Is it Voldemort?  Are we not supposed utter his or her name?

How are we supposed to vote against these people if the cowards in the media will not even tell us who they are?  How are we supposed to "do our homework"? You'd think you could read a frickin' newspaper editorial and know who the editor is criticizing; but you can't.  Because Rogers is too much of a coward to name names. 

To my progressive, democratic and/or liberal friends: Ken Rogers is not a hero for writing this editorial; he is part of the problem.

Geez!

Check out the awesome investigative journalism in the Fargo Forum today:

FARGO - Call it the curious case of the retouched photo. An eagle-eyed Forum employee recently noticed something strange about a background photo used during weather segments of KVLY-TV/KXJB-TV Valley News Live.

In the image depicting downtown Fargo, the white sign atop The Forum’s five-story building appears blank.

This is odd, because The Forum’s sign – a 60-foot beacon that’s been a landmark in Fargo for nearly 90 years – has black letters on all sides spelling out the newspaper’s name. F-O-R-U-M. All five of them. At night, they light up.

Yet in the image used by Valley News Live, there is a fuzzy, letter-free rectangle jutting into the sky above the newspaper’s building.

Fargo Forum

So... of course the Forum sent its top investigative reporter out to drill down deep into this scandal and uncover the sort of hard news story Forum reporters love to dig their teeth into.  

See, there isn't anything going on in the Capitol Building right now worth looking into. There aren't elected officials writing on their Facebook walls about secret, illegal meetings going on in the Capitol Building. Because, surely, if there were, that would not be news. And there aren't elected officials lining up to cut state tax dollar checks to out-of-state oil companies.  And there aren't efforts to make it harder to hold elected officials who do illegal stuff accountable.  

If those things were happening, the Forum wouldn't have the resources to send their best jounalists out to cover controversial news stories like the great KVLY sign scandal.

Have you noticed how much we've been blogging lately, especially about what's going on in the Capitol Building?

Yeah. Me either.

And, by the way; it is two-for-ones -- or BOGO -- on Crazy this week in the Capitol. Just print out a copy of this blog post and bring it with you.

Also, I'd urge you to keep reading two other North Dakota blogs:  NDFreePress.com and dogWAGGER.com.

And... Speaking of capitols... Here's a photo I took of a statue in the old U.S. House chambers in the capitol building in D.C. a couple weeks ago, just moments before serendipitously bumping into my brother-in-law.

One week ago right now I was at the United States Capitol Building in Washington D.C., watching the lead-up to the re-swearing in of President Barack Obama.  I'd heard all the horror stories about people getting locked out of D.C. or trapped in a tunnel, and I wanted to make sure I got to where I needed to be, so I woke up that morning at around 4:30, showered, put on lots of layers (too many) and drove in around 5:30 a.m.

I got to Capitol Hill around 6:00 a.m.  Here's what the Capitol looked like at 6:00 a.m.

I stopped at the apartment where my inauguration date was staying and we headed towards our entrance around 7:15 a.m., stopping at a little corner market to pick up "breakfast."  (A dry-ish tuna salad sandwich for me.)  We probably got to our seats around 7:30 or 7:45 a.m., settled in and started to scope out our surroundings.

We had pretty good seats, thanks to Senator Heitkamp's office. We were on the North "blue" seated section. We weren't sitting with the senators, but we also weren't sitting behind the Washington Monument.  Here's a photo I took from my seat, for perspective.

You can only see the corner of it in the photo, but there's a jumbo-tron behind the person standing in front of me.  As it turns out, we pretty much watched the whole thing on the jumbo-tron. It was a lot like watching it on TV at home, only colder, and with a lot more people.  Oh, and awesome.

At some point my date headed to the ladies room and I was standing next to our seats, in the aisle, trying to stay warm. As I stood there, I couldn't help but overhear the woman behind me talking on the phone.  I wasn't paying attention to what she was saying, but eventually I heard her say the words "South Dakota," "law school" and "Tessa," all in about a two minute window. When she got off the phone, I turned to her and said, "I don't mean to be an eavesdropper, but I couldn't help but overhear you say two things: 'south dakota' and 'tessa'. Any chance that's [Heidi Heitkamp's campaign manager and Chief-of-Staff] Tessa Gould?" She said it was, and a whole conversation ensued.

At some point while we were talking she said Tessa had introduced her to someone at the Dakota Territory party the night before, and wondered if I might know who it was. She dug out her phone, showed me the picture. 

******

Side note, for context.

Some of you probably need some background here.  Jon Stewart did a bit on "The Daily Show" where he compared the homogenous attendees at the Republican national convention last year to the diverse crowd at the Democratic convention in Charlotte.  In his bit, he rattled off a variety of different types of people in Charlotte:

"You had Black people, Asians, Sikhs, Jews, Muslims, hippies, veterans, babies, 1940s boxing reporters, 1840s sheriff, Na'vi Americans, gay service droids, muppet Americans, and, of course, Newman."  

(See this video clip, especially at about 1:30 on the ticker)

Here's the photo Stewart showed with the "1840s Sheriff" guy.

******

I looked at the photo. It was of the woman I was talking to, and two other men. I pointed at one of them and said, "Oh, that's 1850's Sheriff guy."  [I was off by one decade.]

She said, "No, not him. That's my husband. I'm talking about the other guy."

<awkward>"Oh."</awkward>

I looked again and said, "Oh!  That's Earl Pomeroy."  

Anyway, we had a good laugh. She said her husband gets that all the time. People will approach him and want to have their picture taken with him. She works for South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson.  Her name was Sharon, and she was great company.  I saw her husband, Larry, at the DNC meeting the next day and went over to introduce myself.  They're both good people.  Turns out they're both friends with Tessa.  

Small world.